The meritocracy of MTV, Reagan president, Soviet beginning to collapse and uncensored artists. We need new artists that haven't sold their souls. Social engineering experiments that last decades are just as bad as intentionally releasing a virus that killed millions.
Bryan Adams, Rick Springfield, R.E.M., Tom Petty, Huey Lewis, The Cars, Hoodoo Gurus, Dire Straits, Violent Femmes, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, U2, etc…… LOTS of good tunes from the 80s. High school & college for me.
Remember word by word. Has to be some truth in it, rangers like that, back in those days, that would ride into town and sort things out.
This is a very US-centric thread. Since I was a mobile DJ in the late 80s (1987-1991), the best music was mainly from the UK and the 2nd British Music Invasion aka Synth Pop. The Holy Trinity of Synth Pop was Depeche Mode, New Order & the Pet Shop Boys. I don't think I did any DJ set without all three of these acts and add in Erasure & Yazoo, both quasi offshoots of Depeche Mode. There were some good US Synth Pop bands but not many. Book Of Love was probably the best of the lot. There was a lot of good Hip Hop in the 1980s but it seems the ET members aren't really much into rap/hiphop music. Grandmaster Flash, Kool Moe Dee, LL Cool J, Run DMC, Public Enemy, Prince, etc. Probably the most influential form a rap perspective was Melle Mel from Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5. I was more into dance music and not necessarily rap itself so for dance music the most influential was Erik B & Rakim and their famous song Paid In Full. This song was sampled in Pump Up The Volume by M/A/R/R/S & AR Kane which is probably the most famous dance song in the mid 1980s. In the early 1980s in the aftermath of the end of Disco's popularity at least here in the US, there was still a movement in Gay Disco and there was a song from that movement that was very influential in future dance music. It was called Hip-Hop Be Bop (Don't Stop) by the gay disco artist Man Parrish. It wasn't really disco at all, it was really one of the first Techno songs that came out of the US. Techno was really a term given to the synthesizer & TR 808 driven instrumentals which would become popular in the late 1980s known as Detroit House. There was also another good genre of dance music in the 1980s called Italodisco which was mainly driven by Italian, Spanish & Belgian artists for the most part.