The 80S

Product Information

People say we're obviously a message band," Reid adds. "But we're just trying to chronicle a certain thing that was happening with us. That thing about messages — well, really, the record was about the way we feel."

80s Compilation Albums [2023] - 80s and 90s music 10 Best 80s Compilation Albums [2023] - 80s and 90s music

The arrangements throughout the album have a cinematic quality (Newman worked on movie scores to The Natural and Ragtime). "His songs are quite visual," says Lenny Waronker, who coproduced the album with Russ Titelman. "His songs are like little movies. It's like scoring eleven films." It seems amazing to think about it now, but Guns N’ Roses released the 1987 album Appetite For Destructionalmost without notice. It wasn’t until a year later that the album became popular after the band had gone on tour. At that time, the songs Welcome To The Jungle, Sweet Child O’ Mine, and Paradise Citybecame more widely known. Subsequently, Appetite For Destructionpeaked at No. 1 on the charts. It remains one of the band’s most famous albums.

Neil Young, ‘Freedom’

Literally worlds away from the artful simplicity of his hits with the Police and even his jazz-fusion tangents on The Dream of the Blue Turtles, his first solo excursion, … Nothing Like the Sun is as much a vivid reflection of the mushrooming exploratory fervor among many of Sting's middle-aged pop peers, such as Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads and Paul Simon, as it is an expression of Sting's disgust with the state of pop. Ironically, the eleven original songs on the album were the product not of extensive musical field trips but of five months' concentrated writing in New York City in the winter and early spring of 1987. We started out as rank amateurs with a belief that you could use technology to make up for the fact that you hadn’t acquired any skill, that you could use computers to make up for the fact that you hadn’t any keyboard players, that you could use sequencers to do rhythms rather than employ a drummer,” Human League vocalist and songwriter Phil Oakey told Musician magazine in 1982. Born In The USA had come along right on the heels of a dark period in both Springsteen’s own life and for Americans in general. Springsteen, who was susceptible to his own depressions, had for his part sunk into an existential crisis following the tour to promote his fifth album, The River. He articulated as much on his next record, 1982’s Nebraska, a stark, solemn collection of songs that sounded like whispered moans in the dead of night.

Rolling Stone Best 1980s Albums - Rolling Stone

About three cds worth of songs here are the usual 'appears on way too many compilations', but not in the configuration presented here.

In the early Sixties, several township styles — jazz, penny-whistle music and marabi (honky-tonk music) — coalesced into a dance musïc that became known as township jive. With a steady beat adorned by droning acoustic guitars, tinkling electrics and rich vocal harmonies that are joyous, gritty and real, mbaqanga became party music played in shebeens (illegal bars ignored by the government), at workers' parties, on the street and in the recording studio, where groups often united for one-shot recordings. Herman theorizes that the strong beat came from American groups such as the Supremes. "Also, a lot of players were listening to the Beatles," he says. "Not so much the music but the instrumentation." The title of the album neatly reflects its own paradox — that of commenting on entertainment and being it. The title comes from the song "5:45," in which a man watching the evening news comes to the realization that "guerrilla war struggle is a new entertainment!" It isn't all straight sociopolitics; songs like "Damaged Goods" and "Contract" are about romance, demystified and reduced to a transaction —"a contract in our mutual interest.""Anthrax" contains two separate sets of lyrics sung simultaneously: one a song comparing love to a cattle disease, the other a brief essay about why pop music is so fixated on love. It's the longest album I've ever done," says Young. "It's a real mouthful. When I listen to it, it's almost like listening to the radio — it keeps changing and going from one thing to another."