I Want My . . . '80s

Since I graduated from high school in 1980 and played in cover bands for the next four years, I was intimately involved in the music of the early part of the decade, and this is primarily the music that I wanted to write about. Of course there was a lot of music I enjoyed from the later half of the eighties, and I'll be writing about that as well, but for the most part it wasn't the music that was played on the radio. As a result, my eighties music blog won't represent the Hot 100 charts as closely as my seventies music blog. As in that blog, this is a personal journey, and it won't necessarily represent the experience of those who were younger than me, still in high school later in the decade.

In the eighties music went through a strange transition, but then that could be said about all of the decades. The reality in pop music is that, at least for the second half of the twentieth century, trends in rock 'n' roll usually began and ended in the middle of the decade. The first two years of the eighties were essentially holdovers from the late seventies. It wasn't until 1882 that we began to see a real shift in the music that corresponded with the popularity of MTV. By 1985, however, that influence began to wane and things began to splinter in the music industry in a way they hadn't previously. Still, there were artists from the seventies who were making the charts at the same time that a sea change was happening toward over-produced studio monstrosities that couldn't be duplicated onstage, and pop stars who didn't write their own music, harkening back to the days of the later Elvis Presley.

But that was just part of what made the decade so strange musically; the other part was format. At the beginning of the decade pop music was still a vinyl-based industry. Artists released LPs, and 45 rpm singles were pulled from the album. Midway through the decade the digital revolution began to take hold and record stores began converting to CDs housed in a long cardboard boxes that fit in the record bins. And with the death of vinyl came the death of the 45. Companies attempted to produce CD singles, but it was a little ridiculous to have an entire CD with only two songs on it. This was followed by the truly bizarre cassette single, with the same two songs on each side of a tape. Other strange hybrids like digital audio tape and laserdiscs also came and went. I don't believe I bought a single during the entire decade, choosing instead to purchase albums and CDs exclusively. It wouldn't be until the early 90s, with the advent of the MP3, that music would once again become a singles-driven industry.

Unlike the seventies, many of my associations with the songs also have to do with seeing the videos on MTV and so that will naturally be a part of what makes the songs significant for me, but ultimately that isn't the emphasis of my writing. As always, it is the music itself that is paramount. One of the pleasant surprises that I've undergone in writing about my experience with music, is realizing how diverse that experience actually was. Hopefully, in reading about music that you enjoyed, you'll find songs and albums you missed at the time and can discover a lot of great music that wasn't on the radio.