1980 in Music

It’s not controversial to say that the 1980s was an utterly transformative decade in music. Over the next how-ever-long it takes me I want to chronicle some of the music, year by year, that means something to me from a truly iconic decade. Below is a playlist I’ve made spanning the whole year:

Hip Hop

One of the earliest notable trends in the 80s is the emergence of hip hop; a culture that spawned out of the Bronx in New York giving voice to a disenfranchised black youth through graffiti, breakdancing and music. While some of the earliest notable hiphop records date back to the mid-to-late ’70s, it’s really in the early part of the 80s the genre establishes itself.

The hallmarks of hip hop was plundering soul, funk and disco records, which means much of the early sound can be easily conflated the genres it was sampling from. Master Jay’s We Are People Too (below) interpolates Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust, released the same year. Interestingly the Discogs entry of this categorises it as “disco”.

This technique might now be called turntablism or beat juggling, but this was just how DJs extended the portion of the record they wanted to sample for dancers and rappers. This was one of the earliest significant forms of sampling. The everyman’s MPC, S900 or SP1200 had not yet been invented, and the Fairlights and Synclaviers were not available to mass market, only owned by affluent musicians in their ivory tower recording studios.

MCing, or rapping is another cornerstone of the genre. The advent of this is often attributed to Kool Herc, who introduced some elements of toasting from Jamaica’s sound clash culture to New York when he emigrated there in 1967. However, it’s clear to me rapping was foreshadowed by the gospel-like shouting of James Brown (who KRS-One dubbed “the first MC”) or the spoken word poetics of Gil Scott-Heron and many other influential black artists.

In-fact some early hip hop rapping more closely echoes playground jump-rope chants or clapping games [there has been some research into this by Kyra D. Gaunt in her book The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop].

Disco to Post-Disco, Funk and Boogie

The sound of 70s disco was that of tight, close mic’d drums, big string sections, guitars, bass and pianos, backing big falsetto diva vocals.

Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards had turned their attention to producing for other artists, such as Sister Sledge and Diana Ross, and later in the decade, INXS, Madonna, Debbie Harry, Bowie, Peter Gabriel… the list goes on. It wouldn’t be an outrageous statement to say they were two of the most influential producers of the decade, maybe even ever. At the same time, Chic failed to replicate their late 70s successes. They never again had a top 5 US album (after having two in the 70s) and didn’t break the top 50 with their singles. This isn’t to say disco was waning, more that it was modulating into something else.

Two of the most significant inventions of 1980 both came in the form of drum machines, the Linn LM-1 and the Oberheim DMX. Both has lofi digital PCM samples of one shot drum hits loaded in with a stable clock that could be synchronised with analog synthesisers and programmable drum sequencers. Unlike the home-organ-esq CR-78 which came before it, the DMX and Linn allowed the user to create their own unique drum patterns.

One of the most famous LM-1 users was Prince, although his 1980 album Dirty Mind is mostly comprised of live drums courtesy of Bobby Z., part of his touring band for Rick James.

Some more general Linn Drum tracks, not all from 1980.

A playlist of Oberheim DMX tracks, not all from 1980.

Next to the sampler it could be said the drum machine was the most defining bit of kit in the 80s. Synthesisers had already made their mark in the 1970s, and while some huge moves forward were made during the 80s (saving patches to RAM, the relative cheapness of polyphony etc), drum machines defined the heartbeat of the 80s.

Dub, Dancehall and Reggae

Per capita, Jamaica is by arguably the most influential country on the planet. Aside from being responsible for one of the most prominent recording artists of all time in Bob Marley, dancehall and ragga had a huge impact on UK bass music emanating from inside the M25 during the 90s and of course there’s Kool Herc’s indellibable impact on hip hop culture in the 70s. And then there’s dub.

Dub, the trippy, experimental, spiritual Jamaican music, crawled out of reggae in the early 1970s, courtesy of Lee Scratch Perry and King Tubby. Dub was concerned with sonics over lyrics, space and atmosphere over dancing, mixing-board-wizardry over playing skill. Dub was heavy music – it could seem paranoid and full of dread or near-psychedelic religious epiphanies and it sounds particularly good while stoned.
Dub’s studio-based delay-maze was an important evolution in reggae and in music in general, but arguably it coaxed reggae fans away from the fun and frivolity of the dancehall sound systems, shutting listeners up in their own consciousness-expanding heads.
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Dub evolved out of studio exploration when creating b sides for reggae records. By the 1980s the genre has begun to heavily influence the production techniques of producers around the world. Artist from UB40 to Grace Jones to The Police, the sound of spring reverb saturated snare drums, chewey phased hi-hats and crunchy tape delay could be heard all over the records from the decade.

Larry Levan, DJ and pioneer of the post-disco sound, spent the early part of the decade producing and editing records to play at his Paradise Garage residency. Post disco owed a lot to the technology that was becoming available. The aforementioned drum machines along with tape splicing and manipulation coupled with access to multitrack recordings and drawing heavy influence from the spatial effects and live rearranging techniques seen in dub reggae allowed producers like Levan to extend radio-friendly disco records in extended 12″ mixes perfect the club.

The influence of dub on Larry is evident in his mixing technique, swamping vocals in cascading asynchronous self oscillating delays, or muting and soloing different combinations of tracks on the desk, reconfiguring the instrumentation of his edits on-the-fly. Dub is really the first example where the producer became the artist, and shaped the sound of disco in the 80s liberating mix engineers into remixers.

Many tracks in the 1980 playlist as well as many others in the following years have been taken from Larry’s legendary Paradise Garage sets excellently collated here by Adrian Hoenicke.