Beat it Just Beat it

In december 1980 Mark Chapman shot and killed John Lennon. In January 1981 Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president. There's a start for a decade. Additionally, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died, and the group that invented heavy metal broke up. On the positive side, New York City's coke-fueled club Studio 54 closed its doors. There were several musical revolutions going on in the late Seventies that would lead to the rock of the Eighties.

At the same time Barry Manilow took his bows in a tux for the 1978 Grammy awards, English punk rockers played in local pubs. In New York, at Max's Kansas City and downtown at CBGB, punk bands were trying to burn down the rich, glittery house that rock had become. And ghetto rappers in the already burned-out South Bronx were dragging their equipment to DJ house parties and uptown discos, and creating something new—rap and hip-hop.

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The Sex Pistols weren't exactly the first punkers, but they were certainly the most self-destructively colorful. They were barely musicians but were really pissed off, which has always been a plus in rock and roll. The Pistols sang about how things looked to people in the cheap seats in such songs as their ironic 1977 single God Save the Queen, which was banned from airplay in the U.K. While they were definitely antisocial, they weren't exactly the working-class heroes they pretended to be. The Sex Pistols were the creation of Malcolm McLaren, an art school graduate who had a concept. When McLaren noticed the band in 1975, the original lineup had been playing as the Swankers. Coming back to England after spending six months managing the New York Dolls (arguably the first punk band in the U.S.), McLaren mutated the Swankers into the Sex Pistols, adding John Lydon as lead singer and renaming him Johnny Rotten. Despite the group's popularity in the U.K., it never made it big in the U.S. The Pistols rose and burned out fast. Feuding with McLaren, the band injudiciously decided that its 1978 U.S. tour would avoid New York and Los Angeles, preferring to play before baffled crowds in Atlanta, Memphis, Tulsa and Baton Rouge. But Sid Vicious reached a new low in bad judgment after the group broke up in 1978. Sid, whose real name was John Simon Ritchie, was busted for drugs, then knifed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street in New York. He overdosed on heroin a few months later. It was enough to give punk a bad name.

But during their brief, notorious time, the Sex Pistols inspired a new generation of rockers on both sides of the Atlantic. On the British side, there were the likes of the Damned, the Clash and the Buzz-cocks. The punks sang angrily of a post-OPEC world of diminished expectations and alienation. Their brutal three-minute songs—taut, unadorned and noisy—heralded the failure of the welfare state. The Clash was formed after Paul Simonon, another art schooler with no previous musical experience, saw a Sex Pistols gig in London. He hooked up with Joe Strummer, whose father was a diplomat. Scrounging up three additional members, they opened for the Sex Pistols for several gigs in 1976. But they outlasted the Pistols and were the better band. As their entry in The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll puts it: "Where the Sex Pistols were nihilists, the Clash were protesters, with songs about racism, police brutality and disenfran-chisement. The Clash mixed rock with reggae, the music of Britain's oppressed Jamaicans. One of their early singles was a cover of Junior Murvin's Police and Thieves."

And on 1980's triple album Sandinista!, the Clash offered a wonderful putdown of consumerism: "I'm all lost in the supermarket, I can no longer shop happily."

In the States the punk movement was centered in New York around Max's Kansas City on Park Avenue South and a Bowery club called CBGB. Max's had been a hangout since the days of Andy Warhol's Factory. It was the place for the musical avant garde: The Velvet Underground, the Heart-breakers and the Stooges played there. More than they welcomed anything else, though, the club's jaded patrons welcomed outrageous music.

Skinny poet Patti Smith began playing CBGB in 1975, accompanied on guitar by Lenny Kaye. She had one modest hit, 1978's Because the Night, which was co-written by Bruce Springsteen, but her furious version of Gloria from her first album remains a classic, as does Rock & Roll Nigger. In 1979 she married a former member of MC5 (were they the first punk rockers?) and settled down in Detroit to raise children.

But Patti Smith helped start something. An entire generation of groups emerged in New York in the late Seventies and early Eighties: the Ramones, Blondie, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Dictators, Suicide and others.

On the heels of punk came New Wave, pop music with lean arrangements and alienated lyrics. New Wave became a catchphrase that encompassed the cooler, mechanical sounds of Devo, Spandau Ballet, Ultravox and Gary Numan as well as the more aggressive music of the Police, the Cars and Duran Duran. Ultimately the term came to mean anything left of center. How else to explain the likes of Pere Ubu, Grace Jones or Split Enz? The group that proved to be the most successful—and the most innovative—was the Talking Heads. The band would enjoy its greatest success in the Eighties, but its original members—David Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz—came together under various group names while students at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early Seventies. Their first notable hit was 1977's Psycho Killer. Always experimental, the Talking Heads' music began to change in 1978 when the band hooked up with Brian Eno, who produced its next four albums. Like Byrne, Eno was interested in electronic experimentation and non-Western music, particularly that of Africa. The combination produced some of the most interesting music of the Eighties, even though certain tracks didn't sound much like what usually passed for rock.

In the early Eighties, it should be remembered, pop music in the U.S. was about as racially divided as it would ever be. The album-oriented rock radio stations that developed during the Seventies almost exclusively played music by white artists. The new, immediately popular MTV at first showed almost no videos featuring black artists. The blend of black and white music and performers that seemed to be growing in the Sixties had separated into oil and water by 1980. The list of 13 major-debut rock artists for 1980 in Norm N. Nite's Rock On Almanac contains only a couple of black performers. And unlike in the Sixties, blacks in the Eighties weren't playing or listening to much rock—they were far more into funk and newly evolved rap, which first caught national notice in 1979 with Rapper's Delight by the Sugarhill Gang.

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While punk was critically influential, its unrepentant nihilism prevented it from gaining broad commercial success. Punk had pretty much played itself out by the time Sid Vicious OD'd in 1979. The resulting counterreformation saw the return of arena rock and its grandiose stage shows, self-indulgent guitarists and corporate marketing profiles. One prominent group that arrived in the Eighties was U2. An Irish band whose members had first gotten together as school chums in 1978, it combined left-leaning lyrics, Bono's distinctive vocals and the Edge's tasty guitar. With the release of U2's first album, Boy, in 1980, the band toured the U.S. The 1981 follow-up October was generally considered a disappointment. They spent the rest of the year producing the far superior War, which got them another U.S. hit single, New Year's Day.

U2's political commitment was similar to that of another Irish band, Bob Geldof's Boomtown Rats. Geldof's chief importance in the Eighties came from his increasing commitment to Third World issues. He virtually single-handedly orchestrated Band Aid in 1984, bringing together dozens of well-known musicians to make the single Do They Know It's Christmas?, which became the biggest seller ever in England, with all the money going toward relieving starvation in Africa. And the Live Aid concerts in 1985, televised all over the world, brought in more than $60 million.

Geldof began a much-needed trend in pop music toward performers having more-visible social consciences. Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp borrowed the idea to stage a series of Farm Aid benefits that raised money and made people aware of the plight of American farmers.

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Several major changes in the Eighties were technological. Today they're so common it's hard to imagine life without them. But in the early Eighties the introduction of the Sony Walkman changed the world. Isolationist, maybe, but it was a way to get into your own musical head even on the subway. It was also a way to sell cassette tapes along with LPs. At the opposite extreme came boom boxes and low-rider auto sound systems that were serious enough to shake the shock absorbers. All three contributed to the boom in cassettes and the decline of vinyl. Soon prerecorded cassettes rivaled the sale of LPs. Then along came CDs, and vinyl was out.

Next came MTV. Months after it started in 1981, it was the hit new cable network. By 1987 MTV was available in many European countries and elsewhere around the world. It was a great promotional device for the record companies and the performers, who initially provided the videos free. It also launched the careers of hundreds of young directors who—rightly or wrongly—couldn't get jobs in Hollywood.

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Back to music. And money. If the punkers and New Wavers and post-punkers represented the cutting edge of rock and roll, they didn't sell the most records by any means.

When it comes to records sold, Michael Jackson owned the Eighties. He was followed in teen popularity by Madonna and Prince.

All three, of course, remain steadfastly popular today.

Michael Jackson was a kid star from Gary, Indiana with his family group, the Jackson Five. He'd been doing solo singles and albums since 1971—when he was 13—but the true moment of separation came on an otherwise lackluster TV show commemorating the 25th anniversary of Motown Records. He had cut the soon-to-be-humongous Thriller, and on the night of the show, Michael Jackson moonwalked in public for the first time. Thriller was released in December 1982 and broke all previous sales records, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Thriller has since sold 24 million copies and still is counting. It generated seven top-ten singles, something no LP had done before, and sat at number one on the album charts for 37 weeks, another record. Certain cuts had a world-pop feel—especially the opener, Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'. And as a bit of rock-and-roll baton-passing, The Girl Is Mine was a collaboration with Paul McCartney—if unfortunately one of the dullest tracks on the album. Michael Jackson sang Billie Jean on the Motown show. It was a landmark synthesis of soul, hard rock and social comment. Billie Jean was Thriller's first hit single.

It's hard to understand Michael Jackson, but his music has been major news. His recent compilation, HIStory, is a summary of his brand of rock. It has real soul and sometimes kick-ass rock directly descended from the Sixties Motown sound, with smart, layered productions often engineered by Jackson himself. The quality of his music gets lost in the National Enquirer and MTV video shuffle.

Madonna is an indefatigable exhibitionist. At its best her voice has a pleasingly resonant authority. And her concerts are often contrived carnivals. But her most significant contribution to the music industry was her taking control of her own career. During the Eighties she became a new type of female pop symbol, foreshadowing a new brand of lipstick feminism.

While still cultivating her role as an object of lust for men, Madonna became a sexily rebellious role model for young women—both in her radically aggressive attitude toward sex, and in her cheerfully unconventional and well-publicized behavior. Of considerably less tabloid interest was her gutsy Papa Don't Preach video, about a pregnant, unwed teenager who wants to keep her baby.

Constantly reinventing herself, she brought humor to her well-managed business of being a sex symbol. And the Material Girl never seems to run out of material.

Prince may be the most musically intriguing of these three Eighties superstars. He was born in Minnesota in 1958 as Prince Rogers Nelson. He was perhaps destined to be a musician, since his father and mother were in a jazz band. Additionally, he was named after his father's stage name. His upbringing grew stormy as his parents broke up and remarried. But his musical precocity wasn't derailed. By the time he was 14 he could play piano, sax, guitar and drums. While he was in junior high school he put together his first band, Grand Central. At 17 he'd made a demo on which he played all the instruments and had a manager who shopped him around to the major labels. Prince insisted on producing his debut album even though he was still an unproved teenager. That turned off most record execs, but Lenny Waronker at Warner's took a chance.

There's a certain narcissistic zaniness to his songs, along with a definite eroticism and X-rated lyrics, but his guitar playing is rightly compared to Jimi Hendrix'. He's been as restless as his upbringing: He made the semiautobio-graphical movie Purple Rain in 1984, wrote the soundtrack for Batman, retired from the music business, unretired a few months later and changed his name to a glyph. Prince created (continued on page 98) Jazz & Rock (continued from page 92) something new: His fusion of funk, hard rock, psychedelia and adventurous (if sometimes unpleasant) subject matter is sui generis.

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With a few notable exceptions, the Eighties weren't an innovative rock decade. Much of the older audience tuned out and started going to movies.

Heavy metal, for instance, epitomized in the Seventies by Led Zeppelin, didn't evolve much during the Eighties. But it did maintain an enormous popularity with its traditional audience—teenage guys to whom roaring guitars and deafening decibel levels were a sonic analogy to their raging hormones. The June 27, 1987 issue of Billboard showed metal bands occupying three of the top five album slots: Whitesnake, Motley Crue and Bon Jovi. Some of the biggest metal acts of the Eighties were actually loud and proud survivors from the Seventies—AC/DC, Judas Priest and Van Halen among them. And then there were the thrash metal bands—Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica—that appealed to an even younger crowd.

The most revolutionary—and controversial—rock of the Eighties was rap. The kids had managed to do it again: come up with something their parents hated.

Even adults who were raised on tolerant Sixties rock, and thought themselves hip, despised rap. To them it seemed monotonous, unmelodic, too angry, obscene. Exactly what parents in the Fifties thought about rock and roll.

But love it or hate it, rap further democratized music. It recalled the difference between bebop and early rock. Not everybody can be Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis, but it's easy to pick up a guitar, learn three or four chords and play some rock and roll. Rap didn't need musicians, except possibly a drummer. A good mix-master with a drum machine and a couple of turntables could sample riffs from soul dusties. A rapper needed some bravura, a good sense of rhythm and verbal acuity. No need to learn the three or four chords.

Rap is populist—music by the people for the people, which is how it began in the Bronx in the late Seventies. It became the most radical sound of the Eighties. But as Paul Winley, whose record company, Paul Winley Records, was one of the earliest rap labels, put it in David Toop's history Rap Attack 2:

Rap is nothing new. Rap's forebears stretch back through disco, street funk, radio disc jockeys, Bo Diddley, the bebop singers, Cab Calloway, Pigmeat Markham, the tap dancers and comics, the Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Muhammad Ali, a cappella and doo-wop groups, ring games, skip-rope rhymes, prison and Army songs, toasts, signifying and the dozens, all the way back to the griots of Nigeria and Gambia.

One legendary originator of rap was Kool DJ Herc, who grew up in Jamaica but landed in the Bronx in 1967. From Jamaica came rap—as had reggae, the most exciting new music of the Seventies—with toasts. The various competing sound systems for outdoor parties and toasts—imitations of the bop-talking DJs Herc heard on megawatt radio stations from New Orleans or Miami—had to be loud. So in the early Seventies he put together a monster sound system and began dragging it around to parties.

Herc is credited with coming up with the idea of break, or scratch, music. Instead of playing the whole record, he'd play the breaks—the hot parts, usually featuring drums, that really got the dancers going. With two turntables and two copies of the same record, a disc jockey could play the same break again and again until it drove the dancers wild. Herc soon began adding pieces of other records and sounds (influenced by the visionary Jamaican disc jockey U. Roy) and occasional rhymes—the beginning of the collage sound that became a standard part of rap and hip-hop.

The two terms are often used interchangeably, but Toop uses "hip-hop" to describe the culture that grew around the rap scene—including break-dancing and elaborate graffiti art.

Afrika Bambaataa was another important early DJ. He'd been a gang member, and began putting on playground shows in the early Seventies to divert kids from gang violence. He added considerably to the sampling of the hot pieces of songs, and even threw in some white rock. He enjoyed saying to people, "Hey, you just danced to the Monkees."

In addition to sampling, DJs invented scratching. As DJ Grandmaster Flash defined it, "A scratch is nothing but the back-cueing that you hear in your ear before you push it out to the crowd. All you have to know is mathematically how many times to scratch it and when to let it go—when certain things will enhance the record you're listening to. For instance, if you're playing a record with drums, horns would sound nice to enhance it, so you get a record with horns and slip it in at certain times."

In 1979 the first hit rap single, Rapper's Delight, was put out by Sugar Hill Records, a small independent label in New Jersey. The label was owned by Sylvia Robinson, of Mickey & Sylvia fame, and her husband, Joe. At the time, rap music circulated through tapes made of shows, and Robinson heard a few of her kid's and decided to give a record a try.

By 1984 rap was a full-fledged commercial phenomenon in American cities. But it also, surprisingly, was quite popular in American suburbia, as well as in Europe and Asia. A main player in the mass-market acceptance of rap was Russell Simmons. His management company, Def Jam, took care of clients including Run-DMC, L.L. Cool J and the Beastie Boys.

Run-DMC were arguably the first crossover hip-hoppers. They were the first consistently to rap over rock and roll. They frequently scratched Aerosmith's Walk This Way, and later did it as a duet with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. They came on like ghetto rappers, but they were from Hollis, Queens—by no means a ghetto.

L.L. Cool J turned up the volume on bragging and dissing. He's also from Queens. Talking with an interviewer, he discounted his nonghetto upbringing. The media, he said, "hipped on that ghetto, from-the-streets shit. I ain't from the ghetto. I'm from Queens. The beat is from the street. The hard-coreness. I'm not from the ghetto. I live with my grandmother."

Then there were the Beastie Boys—also from New York, and white and Jewish to boot. Their raps were about as violent and sexist as rap got, but were ironic and a form of black humor.

All three acts were on the Def Jam label, and went on tour together. Various citizens' groups had been up in arms about the violent content of rap, and the criticism became heavier after a gang conflict broke out at one of Def Jam's concerts in Long Beach, California. As Toop argues in his book, the music didn't create the ugly conditions and attitudes being rapped about; it was merely the soundtrack for them. "Music may be powerful and (continued on page 152) Jazz & Rock (continued from page 98) influential," Toop says, "but no music is strong enough to create this kind of social decay."

Public Enemy, another Def Jam group, took things a little further, both in terms of unsettling sound collages and in gritty subject matter.

But the West Coast was the home of gangsta rap, even harder-edged and more antisocial than its East Coast counterpart. The West Coast artists came from South Central Los Angeles or Compton, and so their concerns were different from the New York rappers'.

Probably the quintessential West Coast rap song is NWA's Fuck tha Police. NWA stands for Niggaz Wit Attitude. All the members came from Compton. Ice Cube, one of NWA's original members, went solo and produced chilling sounds that are slashed-up slices of black life in the ghetto. NWA alums (and rivals) Dr. Dre and Eazy-E enjoyed great success as solo acts, but became even more influential as producers. Other West Coast rappers working similar mean streets are Ice-T and Snoop Doggy Dogg.

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In the late Eighties and early Nineties grunge put Seattle on the rock map. Cameron Crowe's movie Singles was shot there and helped get the word out.

Grunge, of course, is a meeting of punk and hard rock, with guitar-dominated songs about alienation. The father of grunge, no doubt, is Neil Young, whose uncompromising music both stylistically and spiritually engendered a slew of bands in plaid flannel shirts. Grunge bands pay open homage to many of the late Seventies bands already mentioned—plus heavy rockers Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper and Kiss. There's even a strong influence from Captain Beefheart and the ur-punk MC5.

Grunge is also marked by a fondness for nihilistic and morbid lyrics—a characteristic many Seattle musicians sometimes blame on the wet and monochromatic weather.

Why Seattle? Erik Flannigan and Grant Alden give their reasons in 1996's Rolling Stone's Alt-Rock-a-Rama: "The rent used to be cheap. There was no place to play. Major rock tours skipped the market. But the beer was cheap and brewed locally. The pot was good. There were lots of jobs as bike messengers and espresso pullers. Thrift stores had plenty of Pendletons. Rehearsing was an easy choice with the bad weather."

Grunge became part of a new subcategory: alternative rock. Using small independent labels as farm teams, the major labels established the new music as a sort of side option. They were ultimately surprised by the public's response.

Mudhoney, led by Mark Arm, was probably the first grunge group. Its 1988 single Touch Me I'm Sick was on a small independent label called Sub Pop Records, which was important in the early Seattle grunge scene.

Mike Watt of the seminal California punk group the Minutemen told Michael Norman last year in Cleveland's Plain Dealer:

The rock and rollers hated the punk rockers back then. They didn't like our music. They owned all the stores. They owned the studios. They owned the labels, the pressing plants, the magazines. We wanted revenge, so we took everything into our own hands. For us, it really wasn't a style of music so much as a way of doing things. It wasn't just gigs. It was also about making your own records, making your own tours, finding college radio, making your own fliers. It was an empowerment thing for people.

The history of rock sang another chorus: Small indies started putting out records by bands disdained by the majors and literally created a new sound for an audience that was sick of arena rock.

Seattle, of course, wasn't the only place where such regional rock flourished. Other cities have had thriving alternate rock scenes, including Aberdeen, Washington (the Melvins, Nirvana); Chicago (Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair); and Missoula, Montana (Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam had a band there that eventually landed in Seattle).

In Athens, Georgia, Michael Stipe was listening to British New Wave and having his own ideas about a band that would be ironic but still capable of a certain Sixties top-forty lilt (as came to pass on the 1981 song Radio Free Europe, which had an original pressing of only 1000 copies). R.E.M.'s single attracted the interest of college radio stations around the country, and The Village Voice named it one of the best singles of the year. In 1983 R.E.M. rerecorded it and had its first U.S. hit.

The two most successful bands to come out of Seattle's grunge scene have been Nirvana and Pearl Jam. In 1990 Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder was working in a San Diego gas station and in a band called Bad Radio. He got a call from Seattle bassist Jeff Ament, who wanted some lyrics for demos he had made. Ament was knocked out by the lyrics and by Vedder's voice. Soon Vedder was in Seattle. By 1993 he was on the cover of Time. Pearl Jam's first major-label album, the moody Ten, had sold more than 5 million copies.

It's the old rock paradox. You start off poor and pissed off, feeling misunderstood and disenfranchised—the essential content of grunge—and then suddenly you're a millionaire on the cover of Time. How to maintain your credibility with your audience?

Vedder grew up in Chicago listening to the Jackson Five. When he learned from his mother that the man who'd raised him, and with whom he never got along, wasn't his biological father, he split for San Diego. His real father died before Eddie could find him.

But that's nothing compared with the tragedy Nirvana's Kurt Cobain dragged around with him. Born in 1967 and raised in the gritty logging town of Aberdeen, Cobain didn't fit in. His father tried to turn him into a he-man jock, but young Cobain resisted mightily. He was often beat up by other kids because he was so unlike them. At an early age, he was diagnosed as hyperactive and given Ritalin and sedatives. His parents divorced when he was eight. He was haunted by feelings of being unworthy. His mother won custody but after a year decided she didn't want him, so he went to his father, whose new wife didn't want him either. He took to spray-painting slogans such as Abort Christ and God is gay. He turned down two art school scholarships and instead took a part-time job as a janitor at his old high school.

What turned him around, he later said, was hearing Damaged by Black Flag. Not too long afterward he was in Seattle and had formed Nirvana. Too much success came all too quickly for him. The band's first hit single, 1991's Smells Like Teen Spirit from Nevermind, coincided with the first major media hype about Seattle's grunge scene, and the album sold millions. The fame and attention—especially that which came from the same loggers who used to beat him up when they were kids—just made Cobain more miserable. His drug problems worsened and he repeatedly threatened to retire from music. The first lines on In Utero, the band's last studio album, are: "Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I'm bored and old."

In a tempestuous marriage to Courtney Love, there were some good moments—the best being the birth of their daughter, Frances Bean. Cobain was by most accounts a good, loving father. But he couldn't get rid of his demons and kept shooting more heroin. He tried suicide in Rome with champagne and pills. Love cut off his credit cards to keep him from scoring and had the cops come to confiscate his gun collection. With his close friends urging him to quit, Cobain agreed to go to a rehab clinic in California, but he jumped the wall and escaped, heading back to Seattle. There he talked a friend into buying him a 12-gauge, and managed to score. On April 5, 1994 he sat in the garage apartment of his million-dollar house and shot himself.

Partly because of his death, but more because of the increasing commercialization of grunge—which, after all, was mainly about outsider alienation—the scene experienced a meltdown. The music softened a bit, taking itself less seriously, and assimilated itself into the rest of alternative rock. Groups such as Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day and White Zombie simply aren't as angst-literate as Nirvana and Mudhoney.

And in the meantime, younger groups and performers have begun going back to old-fashioned rock and roll. And at this moment, some teenagers are out in a garage irritating the neighbors, trying to do just that. The Einstein Garage Band. The James Joyce Brothers. Time for a revolution, one more time.

This ain't no party, this ain't no dico, this ain't no foolin' around.... —Talking heads

Teenage angst has paid off well./now I'm bored and old./self-appointed judges judge/more than they have sold. —Nirvana

Afrika Bambaataa enjoyed saying to people, "Hey, you just danced to the Monkees."

Hits of the decade

1980

Black Uhuru, SinsemiUa The Clash, Sandinista! Devo, Freedom of Choice Joy Division, Closer John Lennon, Double Fantasy Bob Marley & the Waiters, Uprising Psychedelic Furs, Psychedelic Furs Talking Heads, Remain in Light Tom Waits, Hearlattack and Vine X, Los Angeles

1981

Black Flag, Damaged Rolling Stones, Tattoo You Split Enz, Waiata

1982

Afrika Bambaataa, Planet Rock John Cougar, American Fool Marvin Gaye, Midnight Love Grandmaster Flash, The Message Michael Jackson, Thriller Roxy Music, Avalon Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska

1983

David Bowie, Let's Dance Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard, Poncho and Lefty Sonic Youth, Confusion Is Sex The The, Soul Mining

1984

Los Lobos, How Will the Wolf Survive? Madonna, Like a Virgin Prince, Purple Rain Run-D.M.C., Run-D.M.C. The Smiths, Hatful of Hollow Bruce Springsteen, Bom in the U.S.A.

1985

Aretha Franklin, Who's Zoomin' Who? Al Green, He Is the Light Hüsker Dü, New Day Rising L.L. Cool J., Radio

1986

Beastie Boys, Licensed to Ill Sonic Youth, Evol

1987

Eric B. & Rakim, Paid in Full U2, The Joshua Tree

1988

John Hiatt, Slow Turning Mission of Burma, Mission of Burma Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation Sugarcubes, Life's Too Good Was (Not Was), What Up, Dog?

1989

Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique Neville Brothers, Yellow Moon Nirvana, Bleach NWA, Straight Outta Compton Pixies, Doolittle Neil Young, Freedom