Music in the 1980s

I worked in radio for about half of the 1980s. I saw so many changes in pop music during that period and got an interesting perspective on the direction the scene was moving as things got closer to the 1990s.

One of the things that I think marked the 1980s was that it was the last decade in which most major and upcoming artists tried to come out with a new album every year. It's interesting to note that during the mid-1960s, it wasn't uncommon for artists like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys to come out with a new album about every four months. However, after getting a few albums under their belts, they would slow down their output, eventually putting about one album every year. This would continue to be the trend in the 1970s for most recording artists as music production got more complex and they spent more time in the studios trying to perfect their songs. Elton John was one of the few in the early part of the decade to try to match his predecessors' frenzied approach to album production with the recording techniques available at the time. Eventually, he slowed down to produce about one album a year by 1977.

In the 1980s, many new artists were lucky enough to land deals to release multiple albums. Back then, the record labels were committed to developing emerging talent, knowing that bands that toured frequently to promote their albums would build a solid fan base that would help them get to an eventual stage of profitability. Bands like U2 and REM were able to issue about one new album a year five years in a row. Now that they had a decent back catalogue with more than two hours' worth of music, they could take time to put more work into their material. Keep in mind that they had to perform a bizarre balancing act by making their music more accessible to mainstrean audiences while keeping their fans from protesting they they had "sold out." They didn't always succeed.

It drove me nuts in the 1980s when I would get all into a new band early in their career, only to wait 18 months between their first and second releases. (Channeling Veruca Salt here:) NO! I want new material NOW! I wanted to experience my new favorite band in the moment much like fans were able to in the 1960s and 1970s. And it wasn't uncommon for that long wait to not be worth it, as they went too far from their roots in an effort to be mainstream or released an album that was crap and was going to end their career.

The 1990s proved to even more frustrating than the 1980s. Many artists who hit it big with their debuts didn't see anything wrong with waiting four or five years between releases, but they didn't have a problem spending all that time touring and playing the same songs over and over.

Nowadays, if you like a certain group when you're a freshman in high school, you might have to wait until you graduate from college before you get a new release from them. And the stupid thing is that it's a strategy that often works. They've managed to build up so much anticipation and come out with a marketing blast so big that everyone forgets the long empty space in between. That's kind of why it's hard for me to get too excited about new groups. I always feel like they're just going to let me down, so why did I bother in the first place?

Another interesting aspect of music in the 1980s is that almost everything from the 1970s disappeared from airwaves after about 1984. This had to irritate a lot of fans from that era because most of their music library was on vinyl and 8-track tape, which were rapidly disappearing as viable formats. All of a sudden, they couldn't listen to the songs they grew up on or had invested in after their equipment broke or they forget to get the stereo out of the car before trading it in.

This is why there were so many people who seemed to completely embrace the music of the 1980s. If you've seen the film "Boogie Nights," the character played by Alfred Molina is really into the song "Sister Christian" by Night Ranger. People tended to immerse themselves in the music because they saw what happened to all the material from the 1970s. If this was going to go away in the 1990s (which it never did), they were going to make sure they got as much out of it as possible.

So, what did this lead to? The Classic Rock radio format. While there were several Oldies stations in major markets that mostly played music from 1955 - 1965, there weren't any that played much in later years, which means the 1970s got left out again. In the late 1980s, several stations capitalized on this and changed their formats. Most just stuck to material between 1964 and 1979. Others would also play more recent material from Classic Rock artists, regardless of whether or not it hit the Top 40. However, this format turned out to be a novelty, most noticably in medium-sized markets. I remember one Classic Rock station in Lubbock around this time. They got a lot of listeners when they debuted because so many people missed hearing that music so much. But when listeners decided they didn't need to always live in the past, they started turning back to stations that played current music. Classic Rock stations responded by cutting their massive playlists down to what they thought were the "safest" songs. But let's face it, you can only take hearing "Stairway to Heaven" around the same time every day for so long. 18 months after it debuted, I tuned into that station and heard "Everything She Wants" by Wham! My first thought was, "Well, I guess this might be considered Classic Rock, but that's stretching it." Right after the song, I noticed they had changed the name of their station.

This wouldn't be an article about music of the 1980s without mentioning the impact of MTV. There have been millions of words written about it over the last 34 years, but one of the things that I rarely see about what MTV did for pop and rock music was to get Top 40 radio to almost completely stop playing Country/Western music. After 1984, it took about eight years for Country artists to become mainstream again. I find it interesting that the comeback happened pretty close to the beginning of the whole Grunge era.

This one change in music probably impacted us at KZZO-FM in Clovis more than we would have liked. Many people in our part of the USA have a preference for County/Western music, but enjoy some of the pop and rock that was out at the time. Without playing country songs in our mix on a regular basis, we probably lost a large number of listeners. This was another reason why I didn't like our change to a Top 40 format from the original Adult Contemporary that we played when the station was K108FM. The top Country artists were a big part of the playlist.

Toward the end of my employment with KZZO as the Music Director, it was Rap and Hip-Hop music that was starting to work into the mainstream. I was very much out of my element when these artists started to become popular. I honestly couldn't tell what was good and what was bad. I only knew what I liked and what I didn't like. But I guess I wasn't the only one with this problem. When I moved to Denver, I listened to Y108, the Top 40 station there. They played the biggest hits, but they did not play any rap, not even if it hit #1 on the Billboard Pop Chart. I guess they figured that if someone wanted to listen to rap, they would easily be able to find it on another station in town. But even in this day and with the increasing popularity of Rap and Hip-Hop, there are still some pop stations that still will not play rap. I recall hearing one station play "Lady Marmalade" that cut Lil' Kim's rap section completely out.

I guess I got out of the Music Director business at about the right time. I would have hated to still be at KZZO in Clovis in 1992. Around the time, there would have been Pop, Rock, Rap, Grunge and Country all being played on the airwaves in the same mix. That was definitely the end of the 1980s, musically.