The 1980s

Switch on the radio today and you hear the 1980s everywhere. The deep bass drum of a Roland TR-808 sits under almost every trap track. In 2019 The Weeknd had a worldwide hit with Blinding Lights, which sounds as if it was recorded in 1984. TV series and films use hits from that decade as soundtracks, and on TikTok songs forty years old become popular again.

The decade itself was a time of contradictions. There was more money than ever in the music industry, and at the same time fear of a nuclear war. New machines made it possible to make a complete record with just a few devices, and a new television channel decided which artists became famous. Punk grew into new wave, disco grew into house and techno, and hip hop emerged in New York. The same question keeps returning: why does today's pop music still sound like the 1980s?

The best-known synthesizer riff of the 1980s existed before the band that became famous with it. Around 1980 Pål Waaktaar and Magne Furuholmen played in the Norwegian band Bridges. One of their songs, Miss Eerie, already contains the short, bouncy motif. The band thought it sounded like an advert for Juicy Fruit chewing gum: cheerful, light and without much direction.

Waaktaar and Furuholmen went on with the singer Morten Harket, and that is how a-ha came about. In the autumn of 1982 they recorded a demo titled Lesson One. The lyrics are different, the title is different, but the riff is the same. In that version Harket already sings the high notes that later became his trademark. The song was then retitled Take On Me, at first still as a demo. The title was settled, but many choices about the arrangement remained to be made.

The first official single, produced by Tony Mansfield, came out in 1984. That version flopped. In Norway it reached number 3, in the rest of the world nothing happened. The record company still gave the song a second chance. In 1985 it was recorded again with the producer Alan Tarney. If you listen to the 1984 and 1985 versions one after the other, you hear the differences in tempo, in the sound of the drums and the synthesizers, and in the way the vocals sit in the mix. The 1985 version is tighter and clearer, with more room around the voice.

The most important difference, however, was not in the music but in the image. Director Steve Barron made a video in which a girl in a café reads a comic and is pulled into the drawn world by the singer. For this he used rotoscoping: drawing over filmed footage, frame by frame. It took months of work. The video was played heavily on MTV, and in October 1985 Take On Me was number 1 in the United States.

The story of this one song shows what changed in the 1980s. A good song was no longer enough. The production had to be right, and without a video a track had little chance. The question of what makes a hit, the song, the production or the video, keeps returning in the rest of this chapter.

In 1979 Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of the United Kingdom, and in 1981 Ronald Reagan became president of the United States. Both believed in a small government and a free market. Companies were privatised, taxes for the rich went down and trade unions lost power. Those who succeeded were allowed to show it. In the film Wall Street (1987) the stockbroker Gordon Gekko says that greed is good. He was meant to be a villain, but many viewers saw him as a role model.

The word yuppie (young urban professional) became the symbol of the age: young people with a well-paid job in the city, an expensive car and clothes from well-known brands. Status and materialism were no longer something to be ashamed of. You can see that in pop music too: glossy productions, expensive videos and stars who presented themselves as a brand.

At the same time the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was very much present again in the first half of the decade. Both superpowers placed new nuclear missiles in Europe, and many people were afraid of a nuclear war. That fear echoes through dozens of pop songs, as you will see on side D. At the end of the decade everything changed: in November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. The United States remained as the only superpower, and American culture, from films to fast food and pop music, could be found all over the world.

The fifth image of the decade is darker. In the early 1980s AIDS was described for the first time. The disease mainly hit gay men, and it led to fear, stigma and also to activism. The music world was hit hard. The singer Klaus Nomi died in 1983 of the consequences of AIDS, Freddie Mercury of Queen in 1991. Pop music also became a place where the experience of gay young people could be heard, for example in Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat (1984) and It's a Sin by the Pet Shop Boys (1987). Both groups return on side C.

No decade in pop history was shaped so strongly by new machines as the 1980s. Many of those machines suddenly became affordable for ordinary musicians, and that changed the way music was made.

It starts with the rhythm. In 1980 Roland released the TR-808, a drum machine that sounded like no real drum kit. Two years later came the LinnDrum, which used recordings of real drums. The LinnDrum can be heard on countless hits from those years, from Prince to Michael Jackson. Drum machines did not make a drummer redundant, but they did change what a pop track was: a rhythm that never speeds up or slows down.

In 1983 the Yamaha DX7 came on the market. It was the first digital synthesizer to be sold on a large scale. The DX7 worked with FM synthesis and sounded brighter and harder than the analogue synthesizers before it. Many musicians simply used the sounds that were already in it when it was delivered. Two of those factory sounds, E.PIANO 1 and BASS 1, can be heard on hundreds of hits. Once you know how they sound, you recognise them everywhere. In addition, the Roland Juno-106 became a popular, affordable analogue synthesizer.

MIDI was also introduced in 1983: a standard that lets synthesizers, drum machines and computers communicate with each other. One keyboard could now control several devices at once, and a computer could remember and play back a whole arrangement. Personal computers became ordinary devices in the same years: the IBM PC arrived in 1981, the Apple Macintosh in 1984. The studio slowly became a computer.

The fourth element was sampling. With a sampler you can record a sound and then play it back at any pitch from a keyboard. The Fairlight CMI from Australia was expensive and was used mainly by rich producers and stars. The E-mu Emulator was smaller and cheaper. A blast from a whole orchestra, a barking dog or a single shout could now become an instrument. You can read more about these machines in Mixtape 8 (Electronic music) and Mixtape 9 (The instrument).

The way people listened changed too. With the Sony Walkman (1979) you took your music out on the street, wearing headphones. In 1982 came the CD, which had no hiss and no scratches. And then there was cable television: instead of a few channels, viewers got dozens. One of them would change pop music fundamentally.

On 1 August 1981 Music Television, MTV for short, started in the United States. It was a cable channel that broadcast music videos all day, introduced by a VJ, a video jockey. The first video was Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles from 1979. That choice was a statement: the song is about a new medium pushing out the old one.

Music videos existed before 1981, but there was no channel that showed them all day. MTV changed that, and with it what a pop star had to be able to do. From now on an artist also had to look good and be able to present themselves in front of the camera. British bands with striking clothes and expensive videos, such as Duran Duran, benefited from this. The channel advertised with the slogan "I want my MTV". Dire Straits used that line in 1985 in the song Money for Nothing, sung by Sting.

In its first years MTV had a clear problem: the channel played almost only white rock music. Black artists had to fight to get on the channel. The breakthrough came in 1983, when MTV started playing the videos of Michael Jackson, first Billie Jean and then Beat It and Thriller. The success of those videos made clear that the channel could not ignore Black music. You can also read the story of Black music and the way the industry dealt with it in Mixtape 6 (Fear of a Black Planet).

In the 1980s sales became the measure of everything. Gold and platinum records, awards for a certain number of copies sold, became a way to measure and show success. Record companies became large businesses operating worldwide, and music had to be sellable in as many countries as possible at the same time. That globalisation also influenced the music itself: English-language pop with a strong image worked everywhere.

Music also became marketing. Film soundtracks sold millions of records, and a hit from a film was an advert for the film and the other way round. Music videos, commercials, fashion and sponsored tours were part of the same package. The album Thriller by Michael Jackson (1982) became the best-selling album of all time. Seven of its nine tracks were released as singles.

How far this went is shown by a Pepsi commercial from 1984. In it Michael Jackson sang an adapted version of Billie Jean. During filming something went wrong with the fireworks, and his hair caught fire. The incident made world news, but the message of the film was clear: the pop star had become a brand, and that brand could be used to sell soft drinks.

The same system of stars, television and worldwide sales could also be used for a good cause. In 1984 the Irish musician Bob Geldof saw images of the famine in Ethiopia on television. Together with Midge Ure of Ultravox he wrote Do They Know It's Christmas?, which was recorded by a group of British and Irish stars under the name Band Aid. It became the best-selling single of the 1980s in the United Kingdom.

Half a year later came Live Aid. On 13 July 1985 concerts were given at the same time at Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, which could be seen on television worldwide. According to the organisers, 1.5 billion people watched. Queen's performance at Wembley is regarded as one of the best live performances in rock history.

There was criticism too. Band Aid consisted mainly of white British and Irish stars singing about Africa, and the lyrics assume that Ethiopians have no idea that it is Christmas. In reality a large part of the Ethiopian population is Christian. Who is speaking here for whom? That question is still asked about charity projects in pop music.

Music was also used against apartheid in South Africa. The Special AKA released Free Nelson Mandela in 1984, when Mandela had already been in prison for more than twenty years. Led by the guitarist Steven Van Zandt, dozens of artists recorded the song Sun City in 1985 as Artists United Against Apartheid. In it they promise not to perform at the South African resort Sun City as long as apartheid existed. In 1988 a big concert followed at Wembley for Mandela's seventieth birthday. Two years later he was released. There were also musical protests against nuclear weapons. That story follows on side D.

Three artists grew into stars of unprecedented size in the 1980s: Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince. All three became a brand, far beyond the music, and all three used MTV better than anyone.

Michael Jackson had been on stage since childhood, with the Jackson 5. With the producer Quincy Jones he made Thriller (1982). The album combines funk, disco, pop and rock: on Beat It the hard rock guitarist Eddie Van Halen plays the solo. Jackson treated the music video as a short film. The video for Thriller lasts almost fourteen minutes and was directed by the film director John Landis. In 1983, during a television show for Motown's 25th anniversary, Jackson did the moonwalk for the first time. His way of dancing, singing and presenting himself was imitated by a whole generation.

Madonna came from Michigan and moved to New York in the late 1970s, where she made her first hits on the club scene. What set her apart was the control she kept over her own image. She kept changing her look and used provocation as a strategy: with religious imagery, with sexuality, with clothing that had previously counted as underwear. Like a Virgin (1984) was produced by Nile Rodgers of Chic: a Motown-style bass line under a layer of synthesizers.

Prince came from Minneapolis. He was a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and producer all at once, and on his first albums he played almost all the instruments himself. He combined funk, rock, new wave and soul into what was called the Minneapolis sound: a tight, electronic sound with a drum machine and synthesizers where funk used to have horns. With the film and the album Purple Rain (1984) he became world famous. On I Would Die 4 U you hear a Linn drum machine and layers of synthesizers; the guitar sits far in the background. When Doves Cry from the same album also, remarkably, has no bass line.

The three had a lot in common. They co-wrote and co-produced their own music, they thought in images, and they showed that a pop star in the 1980s was more than a singer. In the case of Jackson and Prince in particular, these were also Black artists who pushed aside the boundaries of the industry. Today's pop stars, from Beyoncé to Lady Gaga, still work according to the model these three set up.

In 1976 and 1977 punk had overturned everything in London and New York that had made 1970s rock big: long solos, virtuosity, expensive concerts. What remained was the attitude that anyone could start a band. From that space new wave emerged. The name is a collective term for musicians who wanted to go further after punk, with more attention to atmosphere, melody and sound. The roots lie mainly in punk, but also in disco and in the German krautrock of bands such as Kraftwerk and Neu!.

New wave is often dark, gloomy and dreamy. The synthesizer plays an ever larger role. In 1979 Gary Numan and his band Tubeway Army were number 1 in England with Are "Friends" Electric?, played on a Minimoog and a Polymoog. It was one of the first number 1 hits in the United Kingdom in which the synthesizer played the leading role. Numan himself stood there cool and distant, like a machine.

Still, by no means all new wave bands are synth bands. The Cure began with dry, fast guitar pop, such as Boys Don't Cry (1979), with a melancholy lyric about a boy who does not dare to show his feelings. The Police combined punk energy with reggae. In Every Breath You Take (1983) the guitarist Andy Summers plays a figure of broken add9 chords. The song is often played at weddings as a love song, but it is about someone who keeps constant watch over another person. The Smiths from Manchester put the guitar back at the centre. In Panic (1986) Morrissey sings "Hang the DJ": criticism of the radio and the music it plays all day, while the rhythm itself is borrowed from a glam rock song, Metal Guru by T. Rex.

At the other end of the spectrum are bands that combined the dark side of new wave with electronics. Tears for Fears built the chorus of Mad World (1982) on two chords that keep going back and forth without ever resolving. New Order, formed from Joy Division after the death of singer Ian Curtis in 1980, built a bridge between new wave and the dance floor with Blue Monday (1983). The rhythm comes from an Oberheim DMX drum machine, with a stuttering bass drum. Blue Monday became the best-selling 12-inch single ever. Depeche Mode, finally, began as a cheerful synthpop band and became darker and darker. On Never Let Me Down Again (1987) samples and synthesizers sound together like an orchestra. Talk Talk had a hit with It's My Life in 1984, but later made albums that sound almost acoustic and ambient, such as Spirit of Eden. That is how broad new wave is: from guitar band to synth band, from pop single to experiment.

In the late 1970s a group of young people gathered in London at the Blitz, a club in the Covent Garden district. At the club nights run by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan you only got in if you looked striking. Men and women wore make-up, historical costumes, ruffles and cut-up clothes. People danced to Bowie, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk and electronic dance music. From that scene, and from a similar club in Birmingham, the New Romantic movement emerged.

New Romantic is a current within new wave that leans heavily on the glam rock of the 1970s. David Bowie and Roxy Music had shown that a rock star could play with his appearance. The New Romantics went further: androgynous, made up, with gender bending as a deliberate choice. Steve Strange formed the group Visage with Rusty Egan and musicians from Ultravox and Magazine. On Fade to Grey (1980) a woman's voice whispers French sentences over a pulsing sequencer bass.

Duran Duran from Birmingham became the biggest band of the movement. On Planet Earth (1981) you hear John Taylor's funky bass and a guitar with a chorus effect. Duran Duran made expensive videos in exotic locations, and the band became big in the United States. They stood at the start of the Second British Invasion: like the Beatles in 1964 (see Mixtape 3), British bands conquered the American charts, now through MTV. Spandau Ballet, ABC and Culture Club were part of it too.

The Human League and ABC came from Sheffield. Don't You Want Me (1981) by The Human League is a duet between a man and a woman who each tell their side of a broken relationship, like a small film. The song is almost entirely electronic. ABC showed a different sound with The Look of Love (1982): the producer Trevor Horn put strings and orchestral stabs under it. Finally, Culture Club had a worldwide hit in 1983 with Karma Chameleon. With his make-up, braids and hats, singer Boy George was the face of the gender bending of New Romantic. The song features a harmonica, an element from country music, in a pop song.

Synthpop is officially a current within new wave, but much more poppy. The line runs from Kraftwerk to Gary Numan and bands such as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), and later the Pet Shop Boys. One characteristic is the line-up: often a duo, with a singer and someone behind the synthesizers. Synthpop has a high proportion of one-hit wonders, but many of the bands still exist.

Soft Cell, the duo of singer Marc Almond and Dave Ball, recorded Tainted Love in 1981. The original is a soul song by Gloria Jones from 1964, popular in the northern soul clubs in the north of England. Soft Cell made a cold, electronic version of it, and it became a worldwide hit. With Vienna (1981) Ultravox showed that synthpop could also be ambitious: slow, with piano and a viola solo. With Maid of Orleans (1982) OMD wrote a waltz in three-four time about Joan of Arc, with a Mellotron choir.

Eurythmics, the duo of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, recorded Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (1983) with a drum machine and a single synthesizer line in a minor key, in a studio in an attic. It proves what the new machines made possible: a worldwide hit without an expensive studio. In the video Lennox wears a man's suit and short-cropped orange hair.

Synthpop also became a place for gay artists to sing openly about their lives. Bronski Beat released Smalltown Boy in 1984. Singer Jimmy Somerville sings in a high falsetto about a boy who is rejected by his family and leaves his village. In a time of AIDS and prejudice, that was a clear statement. The Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, made West End Girls (1985), a song with a spoken verse that is almost rap: an influence from the hip hop that was emerging in New York at the time. Erasure, the duo of Vince Clarke and Andy Bell, showed with Sometimes (1986) that an acoustic guitar goes perfectly well with synthesizers. Clarke had earlier been a member of Depeche Mode and Yazoo.

Behind much of the sound of the 1980s stood a producer. Trevor Horn was singer and bassist of The Buggles, the duo that supplied the first video on MTV with Video Killed the Radio Star. He then became a superproducer: a producer whose sound matters more than that of the artist. Anyone who hears a Trevor Horn record recognises him at once by the enormous, glossy production.

Horn was one of the first producers to make full use of the Fairlight CMI. With the sampler he made orchestra hits, short samples of a whole orchestra playing a single chord, and sampled drums that sounded harder and tighter than a drummer in a studio. On Owner of a Lonely Heart (1983) by the prog rock band Yes that orchestra hit can be heard clearly. It became the biggest hit in the history of Yes, a band that was known in the 1970s for long, complex tracks.

In 1983 Horn started the label ZTT, together with his wife Jill Sinclair and the music journalist Paul Morley. At ZTT the production was the leading player. That became clearest with Frankie Goes to Hollywood from Liverpool. On their debut single Relax (1983) the band themselves barely played. Horn recorded almost everything with session musicians and machines. In January 1984 the song was banned by the BBC because of its sexual lyrics. After that it went to number 1. The follow-up Two Tribes (1984) is about the Cold War. In the video two actors who look like Reagan and the Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko fight in a wrestling ring.

For Grace Jones, Horn made Slave to the Rhythm in 1985, an album consisting of ever different treatments of one song. The idea that a song has no fixed form, but is material a producer can keep working on, points ahead to the remix culture of dance music. Horn remained active after the 1980s, for Seal among others and for the Russian duo t.A.T.u. You can read how producers and studios came to determine pop music in Mixtape 12 (The hit factory).

While new wave and synthpop set the tone in England, Italy developed its own kind of electronic dance music: Italo disco. It is a mixture of synthpop and Eurodisco, the European variant of disco. The great forerunner was an Italian who worked in Munich: Giorgio Moroder. His I Feel Love with Donna Summer (1977) showed that dance music could be made entirely with synthesizers and a sequencer. You can read more about that song in Mixtape 8 (Electronic music).

Italo disco was often made by producers who released a solo project under a fantasy name. Who sang or appeared on the sleeve mattered less. The lyrics were in English, with a clear Italian accent, and the music revolved around arpeggiators, which automatically break chords up into single notes, and vocoders. The genre had an even higher proportion of one-hit wonders than synthpop, and many tracks became summer hits all over Europe.

Dolce Vita by Ryan Paris (1983) is a textbook example. Under the whole song runs a bass in eighth notes from an arpeggiator, like a motor that never stops. Vamos a la Playa by Righeira (1983) sounds like an innocent summer hit, but the lyrics are about a beach after an atomic explosion. Here too the fear of the bomb is hidden in cheerful dance music. With Baltimora, known for Tarzan Boy (1985), there was a singer on stage of whom it was later claimed that he mimed: the voice on the record was said to be that of the producer Maurizio Bassi. Boys (Summertime Love) by Sabrina (1987) is late Italo, already almost Hi-NRG: fast, hard dance music from the clubs. The same sound formed the basis for a British hit factory in those years.

In West Germany, around 1979, a wave of German-language rock and pop emerged from punk and new wave. In 1979 the journalist Alfred Hilsberg gave it a name in the music magazine Sounds: Neue Deutsche Welle, the German translation of new wave. It was new that young German bands sang in their own language. Until then German-language pop music had mainly been schlager.

The Neue Deutsche Welle began in the avant-garde. DAF (Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft) made hard electronic music with sequencers, and Einstürzende Neubauten from West Berlin played on metal, power drills and other material from the building site. Within a few years the genre had landed in the hit parade. The Spider Murphy Gang sang Skandal im Sperrbezirk (1981), rock 'n' roll from Munich about the red-light district of the city. Trio had an international hit in 1982 with the minimalist Da Da Da. With Major Tom (völlig losgelöst) (1983) Peter Schilling wrote a sequel to Space Oddity by David Bowie.

The best-known song became 99 Luftballons by Nena (1983). The song tells how 99 released balloons are mistaken by the army for enemy objects, which leads to a war. It is a protest song against the Cold War, and in its German version it reached number 2 in the United States. There is also an English version, 99 Red Balloons. Falco came from Austria. On Der Kommissar (1981) he raps half in German: one of the first European rap tracks. With Rock Me Amadeus, about Mozart, he reached number 1 in the United States in 1986.

Because of the large number of one-hit wonders and cheap imitators, the Neue Deutsche Welle quickly got a bad name. Around 1985 the genre had disappeared. Its influence remained: German bands kept singing in their own language afterwards, and the idea that pop music does not have to be in English found followers in the Netherlands too.

In the Netherlands too, bands that sang in their own language broke through in the early 1980s. This Dutch-language rock and pop is the Dutch counterpart of the Neue Deutsche Welle. The lyrics were often socially critical and dealt with drugs, unemployment and the Cold War.

Doe Maar was the band that opened the door. The group played ska and reggae with Dutch lyrics, as in Sinds 1 dag of 2 (32 jaar) (1981). The radio DJ Frits Spits contributed a lot to the breakthrough. In 1982 and 1983 Doe Maar was so popular that concerts ended in scenes of screaming fans, as with the Beatles twenty years earlier. After Doe Maar other Dutch-language bands got a chance. Klein Orkest made kleinkunst (cabaret song) with a pop band, in which the lyrics are central. Het Goede Doel combined synthpop with Dutch lyrics in België (Is er leven op Pluto…?) (1982). In Zwart wit (1984) the Frank Boeijen Groep sang about the murder of the fifteen-year-old Kerwin Duinmeijer, who was stabbed to death by a skinhead on the Dam in Amsterdam in 1983. Toontje Lager was part of this wave as well.

The story of Dutch pop music, from the Indorock of the 1950s to the present, is told at length in Mixtape 11 (Nederpop). What matters most here is to see that it was a European movement: in Germany, the Netherlands and other countries, young bands suddenly sang in their own language about their own country.

In the mid-1980s a new pop sound emerged in England from Italo disco and Hi-NRG: British Eurobeat. It was determined almost entirely by one team: the producer trio Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman, Stock Aitken Waterman or SAW for short. From their studio PWL in London they wrote and produced more than a hundred Top 40 hits.

SAW worked like a factory. The same studio, the same musicians, the same sound: only the singers changed. Their first number 1 was You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) by Dead or Alive (1984), with a Hi-NRG bass in eighth notes. Bananarama scored with Venus (1986), a cover of the song by the Dutch band Shocking Blue (see Mixtape 4). In Respectable (1987) Mel & Kim used samples of their own voice as a rhythm instrument.

SAW's best-known product is Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley (1987). The song was number 1 in England in 1987 and became a worldwide hit. Since 2007 it has mainly been known as an internet prank: in rickrolling someone clicks on a link and unexpectedly gets the video. Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan were actors from the Australian soap Neighbours. Their duet Especially for You (1988) shows how SAW treated pop music as a television product: familiar faces, a simple love song, a tight production.

Critics found SAW's music monotonous and commercial, but the system worked. The idea of a team making hits at high speed for different artists came back later with Swedish producers such as Max Martin and with K-pop. Mixtape 12 (The hit factory) is about that.

In the early 1980s the tension between East and West rose again. The Soviet Union had aimed new missiles at Western Europe, and NATO decided in response to place American cruise missiles in, among other countries, the Netherlands, West Germany and England. The fear of a nuclear war was great. All over Europe people took action. In the Netherlands in 1983, 550,000 people demonstrated in The Hague against the cruise missiles, the biggest demonstration in Dutch history.

That fear echoes in the music, often in a surprisingly cheerful way. In De bom (1982) by Doe Maar, Ernst Jansz sings about what you do when the bomb falls, over a lively ska rhythm. In Over de muur (1983) Klein Orkest compared life in East and West Berlin, and showed that both sides had their own form of unfreedom. Nena's 99 Luftballons and Righeira's Vamos a la Playa belong in this list too.

Big English-language artists also wrote about the Cold War. Sting, the former singer of The Police, built Russians (1985) on a melody from the suite Lieutenant Kijé by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. The song asks whether Russians love their children as much as Westerners do. In Nikita (1985) Elton John sang about a love on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Billy Joel wrote Leningrad (1989) about a Russian clown he met on his tour of the Soviet Union. And in the video for Two Tribes (1984) Frankie Goes to Hollywood had the leaders of both superpowers wrestle each other.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, this subject disappeared from pop music fairly quickly. The songs have remained as a document of a decade in which many young people really thought the world could end.

Rock was bigger than ever in the 1980s, although it sounded different from the 1970s. Three currents were important. Glam metal combined hard rock with hairspray, make-up and tight trousers; bands such as Mötley Crüe and Poison were the example. AOR, album-oriented rock, was smooth, melodic rock for the radio. And stadium rock was rock for the biggest halls and stadiums, with choruses that tens of thousands of people could sing along to.

Electronics joined in with rock too. Drums were sampled or recorded with a lot of reverb, and synthesizers got a place next to the guitar. Van Halen, the band of the guitarist Eddie Van Halen, scored their biggest hit with Jump (1984), in which not the guitar but an Oberheim OB-Xa synthesizer plays the main motif. The Swedish band Europe opened The Final Countdown (1986) with a synthesizer riff that sounds like a fanfare. Some musicians played a keytar, a synthesizer that you hang around your neck like a guitar.

With Born in the U.S.A. (1984) Bruce Springsteen became one of the biggest stadium artists. With its big drums and singalong chorus the title track sounds like an anthem, but the verses tell of a Vietnam veteran who cannot find work after coming home and is abandoned by his country. In 1984 Ronald Reagan named Springsteen in a campaign speech as an example of American hope, and the campaign asked for his support. Springsteen refused. It is a good example of a song whose sound conveys a different message from its lyrics.

Bon Jovi linked rock with pop. In Livin' on a Prayer (1986) the guitar goes through a talk box, a small tube with which the guitarist shapes the guitar sound with his mouth. In the last chorus the song goes up three semitones, from E minor to G minor: a truckers gear change. Guns N' Roses brought back the rawness. Their album Appetite for Destruction (1987) sounded dirtier and more dangerous than glam metal. The riff of Sweet Child O' Mine began as a finger exercise by the guitarist Slash.

Meanwhile an influential underground was growing beneath the surface. Industrial combined machines, distortion and anger. Nine Inch Nails, the project of Trent Reznor, showed this in Head Like a Hole (1989). Alternative rock bands played on university radio and in small clubs, and at the end of the decade grunge emerged in Seattle. In the 1990s that current would make glam metal look old-fashioned in one stroke.

In the 1970s the South Bronx in New York was one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the United States. There was a lot of unemployment, buildings stood empty or burned down, and the residents, mainly Black and Latino young people, faced racism and poverty. Hip hop emerged in that environment.

The beginning is usually placed with DJ Kool Herc, a DJ originally from Jamaica. On 11 August 1973 he played at a party in an apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue. Herc noticed that the dancers got wildest during the break: the short instrumental section of a funk record in which only the drums and the bass play. He used two turntables with two copies of the same record to play the break again and again and so extend it. Over those endless breaks MCs began to talk and rhyme, and dancers developed breakdancing.

Hip hop is more than music. Four elements are distinguished: deejaying, with techniques such as scratching; MC-ing, the rapping; breakdancing; and graffiti. To that comes beatboxing, making rhythms with your mouth. The Rock Steady Crew was a group of breakdancers who even had a hit of their own in 1983.

The first rap hit came in 1979: Rapper's Delight by The Sugarhill Gang. The song uses the bass line of Good Times by Chic, but it was not sampled: a studio band replayed it. Samplers hardly existed then. In 1982 Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five released The Message, the first big rap about the social reality of the neighbourhood. Instead of partying and bragging, it was about poverty, crime and stress. From that moment hip hop also let people hear what life in the Bronx looked like.

The real breakthrough to a large white audience came in 1986. Run-DMC recorded, together with the rock band Aerosmith, a new version of Aerosmith's Walk This Way from 1975. In the video the singer Steven Tyler literally breaks through the wall between the rehearsal rooms of the rockers and the rappers. The song became a big hit and was played a lot on MTV. You can read how hip hop then developed into one of the biggest currents in pop music, and what it says about Black identity in America, in Mixtape 6 (Fear of a Black Planet).

The third sound that would determine the future came from the clubs. House has become a collective name for several currents: house from Chicago, techno from Detroit, garage from New York and acid house from England. The name comes from The Warehouse, a club in Chicago where DJ Frankie Knuckles played from 1977. In New York the Paradise Garage with DJ Larry Levan played a similar role, and that is where the name garage comes from.

At its core house is disco with a mechanical beat. Roland's drum machines, the TR-808 and the TR-909, supply the bass drum on every beat, and the TB-303 a squealing, twisting bass line. An important difference from the pop music before it is the division of roles: producers make the music, DJs play it. The music is made to be mixed, not to sound on the radio. Still, some tracks became hits. Love Can't Turn Around by Farley "Jackmaster" Funk (1986) was one of the first house hits in Europe. Kevin Saunderson from Detroit scored with Inner City and the singer Paris Grey in 1988 with Big Fun: techno with a pop singer.

In England house became a mass youth culture in 1987 and 1988, with acid house and the first raves. British producers made their own variant of it, often built from samples. Pump Up the Volume by M|A|R|R|S (1987), a collaboration between members of the bands Colourbox and A.R. Kane, consists of dozens of samples of other records. It became a number 1 in England and led to one of the first court cases about sampling. The plaintiffs were Stock Aitken Waterman, who felt that a fragment from their song Roadblock had been used without permission. Theme from S'Express (1988) by Mark Moore, under the name S'Express, was British acid house based on samples. The further story of house, techno and rave is in Mixtape 8 (Electronic music).

That gives a large part of the answer to the question this chapter began with. Today's pop music sounds like the 1980s because today's tools came into being in that decade. The drum machine, the digital synthesizer, MIDI and the sampler are still the basis of almost every pop production, only now they sit in a laptop. The 808 is the foundation of trap and hip hop. The reverberating snare drum, the DX7 piano and the arpeggios of Italo disco keep turning up, from synthwave to the hits of The Weeknd. Today's system, too, was built in the 1980s: the pop star as a brand, the music video as a calling card and the producer as the real maker of the sound. And because so much music from that decade has been preserved, it keeps coming back, through films, series and TikTok. That is how Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush from 1985 became a worldwide hit again in 2022, after it was heard in the series Stranger Things.