The 80S

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One of the most fervent and forceful political statements to emerge from Eighties pop music, Sun City didn't achieve the sales or wide radio airplay of other "cause" records like We Are the World. Nevertheless, the single and the accompanying album managed to achieve their primary goals: to draw attention to South Africa's racist policy of apartheid and to support a cultural boycott of the country. Critics loved the album, and it sold well. Crenshaw's single of "Someday, Someway" briefly hit the Top Forty, peaking at Number Thirty-six. At that pivotal juncture, Bush decamped to a farmhouse in the country—not to fade into obscurity, but to make hits without compromising her idiosyncrasies. The result was Hounds of Love, which remains both the best Kate Bush album and the most Kate Bush album. A paean to love of all kinds—and, most of all, to love of life—it reeled in listeners with an opening half stuffed with buoyant singles like “The Big Sky” and “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” which dreamed of empathy across lines of identity and circumstance. She also found room to explore her literary obsessions amid the ringing choruses: “Cloudbusting” draws on a memoir by the son of Freud acolyte Wilhelm Reich, wrapping its allusions around pliant vocals that soar like birdsong and curl in on themselves with feline grace. And she ran with the freedom those frontloaded hits gave her: Side B is a suite about a sailor that revels in the uncoolness of Irish jigs and the campy call-and-responses of musical theater. But even this highly conceptual sprawl is grounded by arresting images: “There’s a ghost in our home just watching you without me,” she breathes on “Watching You Without Me.” With Hounds of Love, Kate Bush ascended from oddball genius to master alchemist, transmuting her most outré impulses into something irresistible. –Judy Berman

80s (Top 1980s Albums) - Music Grotto 51 Best Albums Of The 80s (Top 1980s Albums) - Music Grotto

It's real obvious to me," says producer Ted Templeman when asked why 1984 won Van Halen a broader and larger audience. "Eddie Van Halen discovered the synthesizer." We wanted to have a Number One record — like the Beatles,” Oakey said. With “Don’t You Want Me,” the Human League achieved its goal. On Empty Glass, his second solo album, Pete Townshend chronicled the personal tumult he was experiencing and initiated an adult style of songwriting that helped reenergize the singer-songwriter tradition in the Eighties. Listening to Laurie Anderson’s first album is like sitting down with a strange form of life that has been studying us for a long time. Sometimes, like on the plane-crash scenario of “From the Air,” it seems to know what it’s doing. Other times, like on the meditative “O Superman,” it’s on the verge of collapse. Its language is patched together from TV shows and public-service announcements, things it thinks actual people say. The less it knows, the more authoritatively it speaks, something Anderson, a woman in a world dominated by men, understands well.

Marshall Crenshaw, ‘Marshall Crenshaw’

Lou Reed's 1982 album The Blue Mask was "the end of something," as Reed put it in a 1986 Rolling Stone interview, "the absolute end of everything from the Velvet Underground on. The Blue Mask was the final ending and Legendary Hearts [the 1983 follow-up] like a coda." In the early Sixties, several township styles — jazz, penny-whistle music and marabi (honky-tonk music) — coalesced into a dance musïc that became known as township jive. With a steady beat adorned by droning acoustic guitars, tinkling electrics and rich vocal harmonies that are joyous, gritty and real, mbaqanga became party music played in shebeens (illegal bars ignored by the government), at workers' parties, on the street and in the recording studio, where groups often united for one-shot recordings. Herman theorizes that the strong beat came from American groups such as the Supremes. "Also, a lot of players were listening to the Beatles," he says. "Not so much the music but the instrumentation." At the time, Eddie was in the process of building his own studio with Don Landee, the band's longtime engineer (and now its producer). While boards and tape machines were being installed, the guitarist began fiddling around on synthesizers to pass the time. "There were no presets," says Templeman. "He would just twist off until it sounded right." After the New York City disco rush of the 1970s died, a hustling Madonna pushed her demos around downtown hangouts until she heard the word “yes.” A dancer and Dunkin Donuts employee with her eyes set on global domination, she got a deal with Sire Records and wasn’t going to let anyone tell her what to do. What on earth was she wearing? Why did she sound like Minnie Mouse? And wasn’t dancing over? Never mind: If Madonna said it, Madonna got it. It wasn't until the release of her second album that Suzanne Vega achieved fame, scoring an unlikely Top Forty hit with "Luka," a song about child abuse. But the singer's 1985 debut album, Suzanne Vega, had already awakened listeners to a fresh new voice, reviving the folk-music genre after nearly two decades of dormancy. For Vega, who was then twenty-five years old, the album was cause for uncertainty and isolation as much as triumph. "I felt a little bit like a novelty act," she says of her auspicious introduction.

80s (The Ultimate Collection) (2020, CD) - Discogs

When it came time to cut Scarecrow, the band members employed the lessons they learned from their Sixties studies. The idea, according to producer Don Gehman, was "to learn all these devices from the past and then use them in a new way with John's arrangements." Mellencamp would make comments like "I want this to be like an Animals record…. And I want the overall record to have this kind of a tone, like maybe it was a modern-day Dylan record." Indeed, Dylan himself hadn't been that bitingly topical in years. "You've gotta stand for somethin'/Or you're gonna fall for anything," Mellencamp sings, and on Scarecrow, he dug in and made a stand. Second Edition also features three instrumentals, including the beautiful "Radio 4." But according to Levene, dropping vocals wasn't a conceptual statement. "Nobody was around," he says, "and I had to do something with the bloody studio time." The band's second LP, Colour by Numbers, was released in the fall of 1983 while a second British Invasion was dominating the American pop charts. But George insists the album's surprisingly mature pop polish wasn't motivated by competition with his peers. The group chose material ranging from the well known (Jimmy Cliff's classic "Many Rivers to Cross") to the unknown (Winston Groovey's "Please Don't Make Me Cry"). UB40's lilting rhythms, uncluttered arrangements and sweet, soulful vocals proved irresistible, and Labour of Love helped break UB40, which had been famous in Europe since 1980, in the U.S.We gave Mutt songwriting credits because this time he actually helped us structure the songs," singer Joe Elliott said in 1985. "They weren't written songs that he changed. He sat down with us as a sixth member of the band and participated in the whole thing." If I see someone cute," Aretha Franklin told producer Narada Michael Walden during an initial telephone conversation to discuss working together on an album the singer was planning, "I may wink. Then he may wink, and it's like 'Who's zoomin' who?'" Lange and the Leppards worked for months on riffs and choruses, trying different combinations and then sewing them up when they made melodic and commercial sense. But the writing wasn't all so academic. "Photograph" was a song with a good chorus, a hot bridge but a flabby verse riff until guitarist Steve Clark started noodling around on his guitar one night while the rest of the band was watching World Cup soccer. LL Cool J stands for "Ladies Love Cool James"; he became one of rap's first heartthrobs, partly because of his dimpled good looks and macho swagger, but also because Radio includes two of the earliest rap ballads, the cuddly "I Want You" and "I Can Give You More." She had to get reacquainted with being in the studio," Walden says, "and she'd get winded." But it didn't take long for the singer to regain her form. "She'll sing a song down in the lower range maybe four or five times," he says. "Then she'll sing it up in her range and do two or three takes."