No Scene Magazine Primer for the 1980s (December 2020 Special Issue)
1980:
Mount Fuji (David Bowie)
Bowie's tragic death lent his swan song mythos and importance. It is wholly deserved - Mount Fuji carried forward the experiments of his Berlin trilogy, but added the influence of Japanese S-Kei music to create something new.
1981:
Beketema Mishitochi (Walias Band)
The fall of the Derg regime opened up Ethiopian music to the world, and Hailu Mergia stepped out, his innovative jazz-funk appealing to westerners from the most mainstream to the furthest out-there. The Easy Eighties, the Experimental Eighties - Beketema Mishitochi is written into its very DNA.
1982:
Artemis (Artemis)
The new power of teens in the 1980s was matched only by the onward march of feminism as a popular genre. Girl groups like the Go-Go's and the Runaways had been significant before, but Artemis' self-titled album brought Chrissie Hynde, Susanna Hoffs, and Micki Steele together to create something else - a band that had ambitions beyond power-pop without pretending to be too cool for it.
1983:
American (Tom Waits)
Nobody expected the sound of the Long Seventies - in particular, the slow collapse of the Connally administration - to be gravelly cynicism. But Tom Waits made that material into something more - between all the odes to urban decay and the dispossessed, American is a love song to the America that was, to a world of dignity and gravity and earthiness that would become unrecognizable in just a few short years.
1984:
Babylon Burning (Lee "Scratch" Perry)
People thought the death of Bob Marley and the Jamaican Emergency killed reggae, or at least made it too controversial for Anglo audiences. They were wrong, and Babylon Burning - at once a celebration of the Jamaica that overcame the bloodshed of the early '80s and an attempt to grapple with the tragedies that now seemed over. Perry's experiments with electronica and punk influences mixed with his desire to write stories as well as songs to create one of the Republic of Jamaica's unofficial national epics.
1985:
New Day (Marvin Gaye)
What's Going On was the soundtrack of Tom Bradley's 1984 campaign - New Day became the sound of his presidency. Marvin Gaye's post-Motown career allowed him the opportunity to move outside the boxes he was put into - a 'soul singer', a 'Black musician' for Black and 'conscious' Anglo audiences - and do new things. His low-key experimentation with Brian Eno-esque ambient music built on his past to create the future.
1986:
Trouble in Paradise (Nova)
If America was facing a new dawn of progressivism, the United Kingdom was experiencing an eclipse; T. Dan Smith's polarizing legacy had both brought in Tony Barber's corporate conservatism and deeply fragmented his opposition. Into this mess came Malcolm Eden, Tim Gane, Lætitia Sadler, and Martyn Ware, to form a supergroup that combined smooth electronica with deeply Left politics, a marriage of punk and new wave that would cast a deep shadow over British music...
1987:
Candlestick Park (The Beatles)
We can't talk about '80s music - talk about the '80s at all - and not talk about The Beatles' reunion. Candlestick Park has been evaluated and re-evaluated a million times - a sad attempt to revive a rightly-dead ghost, a brilliant return to form for the Beatles, a participant in the new musical trends of the 1980s, an atavistic response to those same trends, an argument that The Beatles still matter, an argument that they never did. Whatever it is, Candlestick Park is, at the very least, still worth debating.
1988:
Photobooth / フォトブース (eXile)
What happens when the music industry kicks the flower of Anglo-American DIY techno out, and Japan invites them in? When the scattered remains of a dozen scenes and hundreds of bands reunite in the nightclubs of Akihabara and Nagoya, meet up with their Japanese counterparts, and start making records to appeal to audiences who can't speak each others' languages, in large part using illegal tape distribution networks and underground recording studios? You get eXile and Photobooth.
1989:
The Legend of Nat Turner (NWO Productions)
White America decided that the election and re-election of Tom Bradley meant that American racism was a closed book. Native Soul (OTL Q-Tip), Silver (OTL Scott La Rock), and Krishna-Rock (OTL KRS-One) thought differently, and they wanted to prove it - to the ghettos, the new Black middle class, and White America alike. Did Nat Turner or President Bradley define the Black experience of the New World Order? It tells you something that that's even on the table.