As the deluge of 40th anniversary album reviews starts to pile up on music platforms, Substacks, and newsletters hitting your inbox with increased rhythm, it’s important to ask: Why?
1984 is the inflection point where pop music listening modernized.
Here are some facts.
Many, no numerous, albums from that year, and the years surrounding it, just refuse to go away, even in 2024. You’ve heard and seen the tweet “old music is killing new music”.
Its from this album are ever-present in Ozempic-slanging commercials, ringtones, movie trailers (slowed down so they are real creepy, or sped up for TikTik dances that seem to be under the influence of controlled substances). Earworms from ’84 with the wild-haired lead singer, cool synthy vibe, and wildly unmatching clothes? They are working, 24-7. In 2024.
That bankable, every town in America has one, “classic rock” station didn’t exist in ’84. It was only after shoegaze, New Wave, post-punk, indie, grunge, Nu-Metal, and so many other subgenres got introduced that the classic rock industrial complex was born, weaponized, and monetized. Did you know that Spotify acknowledges over 6000 genres?
That’s hyper-specific. But the seedlings of those genres reside in 1984’s fertile soil: the end product of so many random things colliding at once.
The biggest year in pop music started to assemble itself earlier in the decade. On October 27, 1982, 1999 was released, and “Little Red Corvette,” a horned-up call for backseat casual sex from the album, would make Prince a capital S star, giving the the Minneapolis artist his first US top 10 hit. It was a trial balloon sent out over the airwaves by rock stations who generally only kept white artists in their rotation, but now were desperately trying to play catch up to the youthful upstart network called MTV.
It was the first time in a while that radio got bullied around by something other than cash. But make no mistake, that success ensured Prince’s next album, Purple Rain, would have no problem getting airplay on any terrestrial radio station.
Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, released on November 30, 1982, hit number one on the Billboard charts on February 26, 1983, and stayed there for a non-consecutive 37 weeks until April 14, 1984. That’s longer than the Spanish-American War of 1898 which lasted a little over four months.
Madonna’s self-titled debut album was released on July 27, 1983, but the first two singles “Everybody” and “Burning Up,” New York City club hits aimed directly at Larry Levan’s dance floor, dropped in October of ’82, way before the dance-pop post-disco album was completed. “Holiday,” “Lucky Star,” and “Borderline,” mainstays on dance music stations, became international hits.
Then came the infamous moment in 1984, when she rolled around the Radio City Music Hall stage at the MTV Music Awards in a panty-flashing wedding gown. Millions of viewers around the world got a first glimpse of this boho character that will teach mainstream America how to move on the dance floor. (Even Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., had the super-extended dance version of “Dancing In The Dark,” produced by Arthur Baker. Yeah buddy. They had The Boss out there, in some tight ass jeans, shakin it.)
As the very first performer for that youthful version of the Grammys, her cultural stock shot through the ceiling along with “Lucky Star,” her first top-five hit, from that same ’83 self-titled album. Like a Virgin the album was released in November and every young femme mall rat wanted to dress up in black half-tops, black knee-length tights, Madonna’s BOY TOY belt, clunk jewelry (chains and crucifixes), clunk bracelets, and the infamous rubber bracelets. Those are arguably the big three of ’84, but there are so many other factors.
Right around the time of the Material Girls ascension, the term house music and the electro-derived sounds of Detroit techno started to insert themselves into the dance music lexicon, forever providing the parameters for what we now call electronic music.
A second British Music Invasion swept the states, including Boy George and Annie Lennox, updating David Bowie’s ’70s fascination with androgyny. Bands from overseas such as Wham!, Human League, Nena, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, just to name a few, had electrifying music videos ready to go along with their singles Most of their hits charted overseas before 1984; they slowly broke in the US in and around that year. Most more traditional Album Oriented Rock acts—AOR bands—from the States didn’t prepare music videos, leaving a gaping hole for these UK artists to sweep in and dominate. Videos were driving record sales, not just DJs.
A little genre called hip-hop, with RUN-DMC leading the way, started to elbow its way through the mainstream with the help of a New York City program called “Video Music Box,” created in 1983 by Ralph McDaniels. He knew it was important for the burgeoning genre to be fully seen—with its fashion sense and local history—akin to album liner notes. The New York City cable show was the formal precursor to “Yo! MTV Raps,” which came along later in the decade.
Several legacy acts such as Tina Turner, David Bowie, and The Rolling Stones found their music resonating with a younger generation amid a Pepsi vs Coke advertising war, funding (ahem) them. Van Halen, the rockers from Pasadena, coming off Eddie Van Halen’s groundbreaking solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” named their album 1984 and put sizzling guitar solos next to new synth textures making “Jump” their only number one song.
Disco, once thought to be killed off, returned with new components, slick melodies, and numerous genre titles. Some for the radio, others for the clubs. One listen to Shannon’s “Give Me Tonite,” the Pointer Sisters’ “Automatic,” MJ’s “Baby Be Mine,” or Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots,” folks knew, disco—despite a violent, racist backlash—would never die.
It just had to change clothes and move to a different part of town. And that’s just for starters.
With newspapers, magazines, and terrestrial radio doing the service that the internet provides now, scenes and trends looked different across the globe. It took months for a certain style of music or fashion trend to reach other parts of the country or the world for that matter.
Visuals delivered immediacy. Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, and Footloose served up soundtracks that sold millions of records and cassettes. Purple Rain fully benefited from the trifecta of film, album, and tour… but we’ll get into that later.
Two documentaries streaming right now: Kings from Queens: The Run DMC Story on Peacock and The Greatest Night in Pop, currently streaming on Netflix, about “We Are the World,” go candidly behind the scenes of what music looked and acted like in 1984. Including wild hair, rolodexes being tossed in suitcases to travel across the country, and the essence of a period where performers dressed and looked vastly different from one another, but were unafraid to reach across the aisle to connect.
But hey, this deluge of 40th anniversary albums has already begun. Think Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Sade, RUN DMC, Madonna, and MJ. All blockbusters like Ghostbusters. Those upcoming Bruce and MJ feature films in the next couple of years prove that this fascination with 1984 is not dissipating anytime soon.
The year was also a mass of commercial agglomeration, as it only had five number-one albums, the fewest in chart history. Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which spent 22 weeks in 1983 at number one, stayed an additional 15 weeks at the top in 1984 and was the best-selling album of the year.
Footloose, the original soundtrack of the Paramount motion picture, which included number one hits “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins and “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” by Deniece Williams, spent 10 weeks at number one, sold over seven million copies, and received a Grammy nomination. Huey Lewis and the News, from Mill Valley, released their third album Sports in 1983. Despite the low expectations from their record company and the blockbuster competition, Sports managed to top the chart for one week and sold six million copies, reaching the second position of the year-end chart of 1984.
That same year, singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen released his seventh studio album Born in the U.S.A. and embraced a synthesis of modern arrangements for rock that included synthesizers while flagging the American rock & roll from the early 1960s. The album, the complete polar opposite of MJ’s Thriller, performed in a similar fashion. It stayed four weeks at number one, had seven top ten singles and sold more than seven and a half million copies.
Purple Rain was Prince’s first album to be recorded with and credited to his backing group The Revolution. Complete with all the synthesizer production accents from previous records, he worked pop savvy inbetween the rock and New Wave qualities—with a band that visually reminded America of Sly & The Family Stone’s colorful diversity. The album topped the chart for the last 22 weeks of the year, sold more than nine million copies, won the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture and received a nomination for Album of the Year. Prince would spend the rest of his career distancing himself from that type of superstardom.
But let’s get knee deep in these three albums that changed Pop.
MICHAEL JACKSON, THRILLER (EPIC)
Pop music follows the outline of MJ’s 1982 album Thriller, when he and producer Quincy Jones wanted “every song to be a killer” on the Billboard charts. It lasted 37 non-consecutive weeks at number one, from February 26, 1983, to April 14, 1984. Seven singles were released: “The Girl Is Mine,” “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Human Nature,” “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),” and “Thriller.” They all reached the top 10 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, setting a record for the most top 10 singles from an album, with “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” reaching number one.
And I can’t go further without saying this.
On March 10, 1983, “Billie Jean” became the first video by a Black artist to be aired in heavy rotation on MTV. The channel initially refused to air the video, so Walter Yetnikoff, the president of CBS Records, threatened to pull all their music videos from MTV unless they played Michael. He told MTV he was going to go public with the “fact that you don’t want to play music by a Black guy.” After the video was aired in heavy rotation, Thriller went on to sell an additional 10 million copies.
But it’s bigger than MJ: It can also be assumed that more artists of color received entryway into MTV airways, which made 1984 such a beneficial year in terms of platforming so many styles of music: Hip-hop, synth-pop, New romantic, boogie, reggae, new-wave, electro… You get the point. Did MTV resemble a Black mecca of programming?
Oh hell no. But it changed significantly enough that artists of color felt they had a slice of a better shot.
Understand this. Herbie Hancock’s hip-hop-infused track “Rockit,” produced by Bill Laswell, has only one brief frame of Herbie’s image in the video, and that’s on purpose. One of the greatest jazz musicians on the planet practically removes himself from his music video.
What are we doing MTV?
Diversity can only be attained when it’s actually in the room: MJ played a part in making ’84 a watershed moment that included queer-led UK New Wave and southern bands B-52’s and REM, Talking Heads cashing in their downtown NYC cool eclecticism for national fame, and RUN DMC making sneaker culture go global, before Jordan.
Listen. Thriller is available for $1.50 in a secondhand store on Thursday, June 25, 2009. By Friday, June 26, 2009, one day after Michael Jackson died at the age of 50, you couldn’t even find his Bad album, which was titled Bad by the way, at Tower Records. According to Billboard, MJ Inc. made at least $1 billion in income in the year following his death.
Hands down, Thriller is the pinnacle of that discography in terms of total cultural effect. It was curated to break records and establish Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones as the finest producer-artist partnership since Sir George Martin and The Beatles. Connect the dots on that one. Jackson and Q intended to make an album where every song was undeniable, so they mixed pop, post-disco aka boogie, rock, funk, and R&B. Paul McCartney makes his first acknowledged performance on a Michael Jackson album with “The Girl Is Mine.” MJ’s eye is already focused on another catalog.
Rod Temperton, formerly of the UK band Heatwave, contributed his golden writing touch on the crooning ”The Lady In My Life” (probably a clapback to The Purple One’s “Do Me Baby”—the two were constantly in competition). Q was a superb mechanic in those horn and string arrangements with his decades in jazz, notably in the cross-generational smash “Billie Jean.” Thriller captivated the globe in the 1980s and every decade since, thanks to MJ’s star power, coming off the moonwalking moment on “Motown 25.”
PRINCE, PURPLE RAIN(WARNER BROTHERS) 1984
Initially, industry types laughed at Prince’s idea for the cinematic version of Purple Rain. But the film alone grossed more than $70 million, not to mention earning the artist an Academy Award for best song score. The soundtrack stayed at number one for 12 weeks, yielded five top 10 singles, and sold nine million copies in the United States by 1985.
Patrice Rushen relates in a Bandcamp Daily interview how Prince invited her to join him at a hotel restaurant where they both happened to be staying and told her about his new movie Purple Rain.
“He said, ‘I may have bitten off more than I can chew on this! I’m nervous about it.'” Rushen remembers. She asked him, “Did you do the best that you could?” And he said, “yeah.” And she told him, “You have to let it go and see what happens.”
The public confirmed Purple Rain as a classic, but after Prince conquered its trifecta of (semi-)autographical film, album, and subsequent sold-out tour, Warner Brothers had high expectations of him for a repeat. Purple Rain‘s impact became a financial imposition that presided over Prince’s creative choices.
Since the ’70s, Prince had been instructing top brass executives not to promote him as a Black artist—meaning, he’d studied how major record companies at the time unloaded budgets to promote rock (white) artists and then used whatever funds were left over to promote urban (Black) artists. His choices—from Controversy to 1999, the whole lingerie thing—were promotion shock tactics. They worked too well.
Purple Rain shot him into superstardom, possibly preventing him from being seen differently for a decade. Which is our loss, especially with an untimely death in 2016.
When he lights up a crowd at Coachella in 2008 with his version of “Creep” that’d make Tom Yorke consider selling insurance, the world finally sees beyond that purple aura glow.
MADONNA, MADONNA (SIRE)
The self-titled album had those 12-inch-ready singles that ignited a career. Like a Virgin from 1984 doesn’t happen without ’em, and madonna herself doesn’t happen without Black radio.
Those first few Madonna 12-inches were pressed without a photo because label boss Seymore Stein was trying to pass her off as a Black vocalist to all of NYC’s hot Black radio stations at the time—92 KTU, a proponent of Latin freestyle, 98.7 Kiss FM, and 107.5 WBLS.
In the early 1980s, Black radio in New York produced national hits. Period. Records would play, sink in for a year nonstop throughout the city, and then travel across the country. New York was always three to six months ahead of everybody. Sire records knew that.
My first introduction to Madonna was listening to a boombox playing “Physical Attraction.” Fab Five Freddy called it “city” music at the time. In retrospect, it’s just pop of the highest regard. “Physical Attraction” features production credit from John “Jellybean” Benitez, a DJ at the landmark Funhouse club at the time. He contributed to its street cred and sound. It perfects a template, and prototype for every synthetic-disco diva, female pop phenom, to follow.
All of that Linn drum machine, Moog bass, and Oberheim OB-X synthesizer working telepathically, forging that smacking cathode ray of everlasting groove, was designed for the streets. Not the mall-buying youths who would be the next demographic for Madge’s Like a Virgin from 1984 as the decade continued on.
