The continued cultural importance of the 1980s doesn’t completely make sense. I know that as my generation grows older, the nostalgia for our youth gains strength. But the continued fascination with “The Breakfast Club” and The Go-Go’s has to survive on more than memories.

I understood this phenomena a little better after reading Rob Sheffield’s memoir/80’s homage “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran.” Sheffield, a long-time Rolling Stone writer, takes you through the decade that won’t die via his experiences with each chapter built around a song.

Given that the author and I seem to have tread lots of similar territory (and one of my first instincts was to create a playlist from the songs which inspired each chapter), I had no choice but to love this book. I have connections to many of the songs. It doesn’t matter that I don’t drift towards all of them because the angst and confusion and exploration that went with the time rang completely true to me. I just connect some of those feelings with “Stone Cold Yesterday” by The Connells instead of “Hangin’ Tough” by New Kids on the Block.

However, every generation can overstate the importance of their youth. I can’t wait until 30 years from now when kids roll their eyes as their parents go on and on about how life changed thanks to a Taylor Swift song or iCarly episode. I really hope I live that long just so I can laugh.

But the 80s really did mean something. In the chapter dedicated to the Psychedelic Furs song “Pretty in Pink,” he examines why the movies of John Hughes and other 80s directors continue to resonate today. This has to be a real things since academic books have developed from this idea.

It’s a sign of how 1980s teen culture keeps on resonating – even people who were born in the ’90s can O.D. on borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’80s. Maybe that’s because it was an era when teen trash was the only corner of pop culture that wasn’t a high-gloss fraud. Movies for adults sucked in the 1980s and music for adults sucked even worse ….

Now that’s a gross over-generalization, but the movies nominated for Best Picture from 1984 (the year “16 Candles” was released) were Amadeus, The Killing Fields, A Passage to India, Places in the Heart and A Soldier’s Story. And don’t even get me started on the Grammy’s.

But the notion that art aimed at teens drove pop culture in the 1980s is almost undeniable. Sheffield does a wonderful job at capturing how that reality helped define individual personalities and change American culture.