Category: The Real Eighties

Years ago, I was working in an “oldies” station.  Still being in the middle of a radio career, and trying to keep my options open (I’d always wanted to do news and talk, and was chafing with life as a disc jockey – but “when in Rome…”, as they say), I asked the station’s program…

This week in “The Real Eighties” is dedicated to the impact of new technology on popular music. Earlier this week, we talked about how the tumbling price of synthesizers – almost invariabely keyboard instruments – affected the entry point to creating some form of music. It wasn’t just keyboards.  In a sense, the eighties was…

This week’s episodes in my “Real Eighties” series are about the influence of technology on the decade – and by “decade” I mean “from about 1980 to 1986 or so”. The biggest influence?  Traditionally, becoming a working, performing, record-selling musician was the culmination of a process that took as long as becoming a doctor; a…

All this month as we go through eighties music, I’ve been trying to establish that the one great stereotype of eighties music – that synth-pop was the dominant genre of the decade – is, at thirty years remove, overrated. Still, it is a fact that the ubuiquity of inexpensive new technology took a genre that…

One of the great stereotypes of eighties music, at almost thirty years’ remove, is that of the band with big mutant chemical hair playing synthesizers. One of the goals of this series is to show that there was a lot more to the era than that. But the fact remains that the decade did have…

In this – the “American” week of my “The Real Eighties” series – I’m focusing on American bands. Of course, the first day was the return to roots-y music (and yes, I missed a slew of bands), which meant a lot of references to sixties R&B-based rock and roll.  Yesterday, of course, was Latin day,…

As I noted (briefly) yesterday, once you get past the hairdos and the synth-pop and the hair-metal, the eighties were a time when American rock and roll went way way back to its roots. And hardly anyone dug into those roots harder and further than four Latinos and a Jewish writer from Los Angeles who’d…

This week in “The Real Eighties”, we’re going to look at American music. The post-punk era had very different effects on both sides of the pond – if you go by stereotype at least.  Still – the stereotype was that British post-punk pop was largely technological, while in American it went back to the future.…

Punk was one of those things that made music critics tingly.  And it made people wanted to be music critics tinglier.  And among whiny adolescents and post-adolescents – like I was, in 1982 or thereabouts – that accounted for a lot of us. At the roots of Brit punk were… manic energy, and… …an exaggeraged,…

I used to think that the world was an awful place for music in the seventies – and Britain was worse than most. Thirty-odd years later, I realize that statement was at least party something that came from the myopia that comes from being a kid and a bit of a zealot. Still – the…

Some of my audience can take rap or leave it. Some of you just plain detest hip-hop (and some others just don’t care for pop music in general). I’d say “this isn’t the post for you”.  But what fun would that be? ———- In the seventies, “black” and “white” music, at least in the mainstream,…

I’m going to kick off this month of writing about the music of the eighties by getting the biggest-selling artist of the decade – maybe of all time – out of the way right away. And I’m doing it to kick off the “theme” of this, the first week of my observance of eighties music;…