If you are of a certain age (and if you’re reading this, you probably are!) you know how easy it is to slip into nostalgia for the 1980s. Some of my fondest memories are of that time: sleepovers spent watching Purple Rain or videos by The Cure, scooping up a replica of Madonna’s Desperately Seeking Susan boots, seeing INXS at a tiny venue before they hit the big time. I could easily think of a hundred more examples. Back then we couldn’t have imagined that years later YouTube would make it simple to revisit these pop cultural touchstones and indulge in seemingly endless nostalgia. Whether so much looking backward is healthy is certainly debatable, but judging from comments on some of the ’80s videos it’s at least safe to say that many people’s views of the decade are clouded by rose-colored glasses.

On some innocuous pop music video I came across recently, a viewer commented about how wonderful the ’80s were — marked by a strong economy, no wars, and light-hearted, fun music. Maybe we were living on different planets, but I don’t remember it quite that way. Off the top of my head I could list several serious issues of the ’80s, including trickle-down economics; the nuclear arms race; apartheid; a still very much intact Berlin Wall; fighting in places like Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, and the Falklands; and the beginnings of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. After more reflection and reading I could add to the list the shootings of Ronald Reagan and John Lennon; the PMRC’s censorship fight; an air traffic control strike; the beginnings of bank deregulation that led to the savings and loan crisis; conflicts between Israel and Palestine; the famine in Ethiopia; a coal workers’ strike in the UK; an IRA hunger strike; the 1986 bombing of Libya; the invasion of Granada; the Challenger explosion; and devastating cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, the EPA, and education. Good times, indeed.

What seems oddest to me about the recasting of the 1980s in an idealized light is that the decade’s problems were inextricably woven into much of its music. Among U2’s many political anthems was “New Year’s Day,” released in 1983, about the imposition of martial law in Poland as the communist government attempted to crush the trade union Solidarity. In 1980, Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” paid tribute to the anti-apartheid activist who died while in police custody in South Africa. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was criticized in songs like the English Beat’s “Stand Down Margaret” (1980) and Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine” (1988). Even superstar artists took on political themes: Prince addressed his anti-Cold War plea directly to the U.S. president in “Ronnie Talk to Russia” (1981), while Sting’s “Russians” (1985) took on a more pensive tone. And we can’t forget that while Band Aid, USA for Africa, Northern Lights, Live Aid, and Artists United Against Apartheid were inspiring examples of artists cooperating for the common good, they came about as reactions to international crises.

So forgive me if I don’t think of the 1980s as “the good old days” even if a lot of those days were, in fact, very good. In my mind, an apt symbol of that complicated decade would be the graphic used on the cover of Public Image Limited’s 1986 release, Album (also titled Cassette or Compact Disc depending on the format you purchased). A plain blue-on-white label featuring nothing more than the title and the band’s logo, it was a send-up of the generic-brand products prevalent at the time (also a running gag in Alex Cox’s 1984 cult film Repo Man). With that graphic, PiL, like many other artists in the ’80s, met the worst aspects of the times head on and turned them into art — creating some of our fondest memories of the ’80s in the process.