In a first-rate essay making the case that pop music became at its zenith in 1984, Julie Kelly writes that the generation represented a patriotic swoon. She may also have mentioned that the same year, Lee Greenwood launched “God Bless the USAA.,” the most patriotic music of the 12 months even though it changed into no longer, strictly speaking, a pop tune.
The 12 months 1984 may additionally have been the excessive factor of pop and rock. However, that isn’t always pronouncing an awful lot. The complete decade is more excellent for the musical malaise it created. As a music director for radio stations at some stage in that decade, I ought to recognize. Through the ’80s, radio stations commenced tightening their playlists, all to the satisfied applause of corporate track pros. The rapid creation of the Nineteen Seventies radio stations died to get replaced by way of preplanned and survey-examined radio codecs. The most enormous of these were the songs stations acquired from the radio syndication corporation Drake-Chenault.
No longers were application and music administrators left to their know-how and intestine as to what made a success. They deferred to the “experts.” It was a disaster. The same songs have been performed and replayed to the factor of monotony. Music after which radio commenced to lose its target audience, and the music that changed into created for just this motive suffered. Amazingly, it all started to sound equal.
The Eighties represented the creeping destruction of musical creativity. The few shining moments in this decade had been performed by using the one’s acts allowed by using their corporate producers to check the limits of desirable on-air material—Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” falls into this category.
Most of the track in the Eighties, but, to position it colloquially, sucked.
It is first-rate that the track pros and radio gods are determined to clamp down on creativity. In the meanwhile, they did. It became handiest ten years earlier, in 1974, that a small band signed with approximately as independent a record label (London) as one should get at the time and packed Austin stadium with eighty 000 of their closest pals. Try doing that without essential label backing. ZZ Top did it, though, and they had been trendy even before their hit tune “Tush” and their signing with Warner Brothers. But in the seventies, the marketplace craved something authentic if it changed into soon not target audience tested and accepted. It worked.
