Post a controversial music opinion

scott seward I would happily listen to your proposed supergroup

I don't consider Rhythm Nation 1814 new jack at all.

It 100% is and it’s wildly revisionist to say it isn’t

the song or the album? the song definitely is, though as mentioned it's held up way better than most of the New Jack Swing of the era. the album itself not so much if I remember

OK, I'll clarify. The album's NJ-adjacent but it's moving too fast and too densely arranged for Guy, Keith Sweat, etc. DJP, you and I on previous threads have said RN and, say, Meat Beat Manifesto have more in common. Let's say it's NJ-adjacent industrial.

that's definitely something that someone could type on the computer if they wanted to

The Rhythm Nation album was New Jack Swing refracted through the Minneapolis Sound. My comparisons to industrial are more about the sonic similarities of the outputs than attempting to give them a common lineage, basically my lifelong crusade to identify the through lines in the music that I like from varying disparate sources.

Giving rise to ever-more-novel hyphenates.

There's a technological reason too, I think. The eighties got the flood of affordable digital gadgets, and it took a while to sort out how to use them most effectively. And 70s records are the zenith of electrical analog recording, a culmination of engineering starting forty years before, with multitrack recording finally accessible down the food chain. So the 80s are kinda like the 20/30s, you give the recordings a bit of leeway sometimes, and the tone can sound comical to those who haven't acclimatized.

― Terrycoth Baphomet (bendy), Wednesday, July 26, 2023 12:37 PM (yesterday)

Could it be that recording/computer tech allows greater emphasis on items like a balanced sound pyramid (bass at a level where it's felt as well as heard as a distinctive melodic and harmonic entity), as well as crisp hi-hats/percussion and mid-range guitars/synths with warmth and heft instead of 'clock-radio' tinniness; meaning that the biggest thing limiting '80s sounds from a revival is the how any appeal gets it's legs chopped off by the era's production capabilities? The only 2 '80s-style sounds I hear regularly are the gated drums and the cha-ching!-guitar accents from Scritti's Cupid & Psyche '85 (I hear those all over indie pop records), or when Hip-Hop or pop-punk tracks have a measure of '80s production as a part of a build-up to the more contempo-sounding verse or chorus.

I was listening to the most up-to-date remaster of Yes' 90125 - an album with a sound as state-of-the-art as it got in '83 - and as forward-looking and massive as the chorus of "City Of Love" sounds, the keybs in the intro for "Our Song" are still so cartoonishly chintzy, you'd swear they were from a different album/producer.

I always thought the keyboard on "Our Song" was a deliberate throwback to baseball-park organ sounds, since it's apparently a song about playing shows in the US.

cartoonishly chintzy

Funny you should say that, i always thought "Chintzy" would be a good name for, like, a Pokemon. Or even more so, the gibberish-spouting Sidekick Creature Nuisance to the main group of teenagers in an 80's adventure cartoon. "Cut it out, Chintz!"

I just thought you should know that's what i think of whenever someone uses the word "chintzy"

i feel like i'm the only person i know who loves Big Generator. i don't know why. it always sounds cool to me.

my buddy swears by "Love Will Find a Way."

There's a technological reason too, I think. The eighties got the flood of affordable digital gadgets, and it took a while to sort out how to use them most effectively. And 70s records are the zenith of electrical analog recording, a culmination of engineering starting forty years before, with multitrack recording finally accessible down the food chain. So the 80s are kinda like the 20/30s, you give the recordings a bit of leeway sometimes, and the tone can sound comical to those who haven't acclimatized.

― Terrycoth Baphomet (bendy), Wednesday, July 26, 2023 12:37 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is a great post. i hadn't really thought about it like this before

That would actually be awesome if Our Song's intro sounded more of that ballpark/cathedral hugeness, rather than the "oh shit, I accidentally kicked a toy that plays a loud song, hopefully there's only 15 seconds left" sound

this is on deck at my store right now and the 80s called and they want their 80s back because soooo 80ssssssss.............

https://i.discogs.com/OsyvbfYLql2v-K9d3qJCSGBcWDjMqOumP8sg2rKKqeY/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:597/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTM5ODkx/NzQtMTY3NTYyMTI1/MC00NTgzLmpwZWc.jpeg

Prefecture, your post is nicely detailed. But I love all those sounds that I first heard on a clock radio in 1980, and I have zero regrets.

I mean, "Shock the Monkey" and "We Belong" and "Rock the Casbah" and "Union of the Snake" and "Everyday I Write the Book" were right there next to everything from Thriller and Juice Newton. To me it was a magical time.

Cooper & Ross! A CBS sitcom after Simon & Simon in '81!

musically, i was just so in love with everything in the 80s. literally everything. i adored hardcore punk and metal and synth-pop. i blasted judas priest and bronski beat and blue nile and flux of pink indians and mantronix and they all lived together in my heart. i was fucking miserable and wanted to die but the music kept me going. for real! thanks, music! thanks, sinead!

i totally watched simon & simon every week...

My mom, who would've left my dad for Tom Selleck, watched Magnum P.I. and S&S back to back. It was the ritual. If you were a housewife, you drooled over Magnum, then cooled off with S&S.

i watched both too! kinda like how i watched love boat into fantasy island every week.

that cooper & ross record is really drippy and i'm trying to figure out why its a 30 dollar record because it was always a dollar record. what hepcat found something hip in it? i guess it has a couple of smooth moves. but that doing 60s covers in an 80s way was never a favorite thing of mine. they do "it's gonna take a miracle" and "anyone who had a heart" and "only the lonely". burt bacharach got love in the 80s.

(i did like Sybil's "Don't Make me Over".)

^^ first single released on cassingle without a 7-inch equivalent

new jackin' it in San Diego

There's a technological reason too, I think. The eighties got the flood of affordable digital gadgets, and it took a while to sort out how to use them most effectively. And 70s records are the zenith of electrical analog recording, a culmination of engineering starting forty years before, with multitrack recording finally accessible down the food chain. So the 80s are kinda like the 20/30s, you give the recordings a bit of leeway sometimes, and the tone can sound comical to those who haven't acclimatized.

― Terrycoth Baphomet (bendy), Wednesday, July 26, 2023 12:37 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is a great post. i hadn't really thought about it like this before

There are TONNES of (great) albums from the 80s that sound dated to me, either because they were recorded in suboptimal digital conditions (newly acquired DA-88s with not-great digital converters, see Siberry “No Borders Here” or Rickie Lee Jones “The Magazine”), or utilizing new digital synthesis in ways that would soon sound “bad” (Carlos “Beauty In The Beast”, Siberry “The Walking”, a run of Jarre albums); again, I love these albums but they are unmistakeably from a particular time

It is amazing in retrospect that Mike Post, relying on cheap General MIDI sound banks for so many of his classic TV themes, was able to achieve timelessness

i mean i'm assuming the DAC you'd find in a used blu ray player on craiglist would blow a state of the art studio DAC from the 80s out of the water

Precisely

Part of the reason musicians/labels were like “this 80s album got a new PURE ANALOG MIX AND MASTER line up line up” was to ‘fix’ a lot of the weird sonics

Just listen to any track on Siberry’s “No Borders Here” and you’ll hear what I mean— especially “Waitress” and “Extra Executives”.

I'm listening to Meli'sa Morgan's 1987 album Good Love. high gloss 80s soul. i love it! it sounds wonderful to me. but someone younger hearing these drums now, i don't know what they would think. She was in the group High Fashion. If you can find their two albums on Capitol you are lucky. They are tough to find in 2023. really good stuff. she sang on some Kleeer albums too i think.

Her Prince cover!

Also: she had a lovely cameo in a Cosby Show episode. Whatever else that monster did, he courted Black talent.

also wanna point out that format + setup seems to matter a lot with some of that 80s stuff, like for example the Emerson, Lake, and Powell album always sounded kinda shitty on headphones or in the car, but I recently got a vinyl copy which I played on the big stereo and I can finally hear what they were going for. dare I say it even sounds massive in certain spots.

sounds like someone's ready for some...Asia.

Prefecture, your post is nicely detailed. But I love all those sounds that I first heard on a clock radio in 1980, and I have zero regrets.

I mean, "Shock the Monkey" and "We Belong" and "Rock the Casbah" and "Union of the Snake" and "Everyday I Write the Book" were right there next to everything from Thriller and Juice Newton. To me it was a magical time.

― Some people call me Maurice Chevalier (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, July 27, 2023 1:02 PM

Yeah, those songs will always be great, sometimes I wish I wasn't pyramid-pilled so I could revisit them and hear them as I did when I was 8 or 9.

Also, I wonder if producers were mixing songs directly for maximum clock-radio presence? Chicago 16 and 17 pop waaay more on the kitchen's General Electric than the 6-speaker Alpine; whereas The Joshua Tree felt like a first stab at reversing that idea (the bass on "With or Without You" especially sounded alien and otherworldly)

xpost That first Asia album still sounds great. Much warmer than 90125 if you're going for that proper yooooj Prog sound.

I think that proper/correct use of reverbs was key in '80s production, especially when the newfangled digital reverbs popped up sounding *very* different from "classic" analog 'verbs. Trevor Horn and his engineers were masters at creating space using a variety of reverbs (cf. the Dollar singles/90125/ABC/etc). Arif Mardin as well. And then there were the rest.

Terrible use of 80s reverb on a guitar record: "Radioactive".

god yes, The Lexicon of Love still sounds insane, it's got one of the best bass sounds ever

man, someone should make a new record that sounds as good as the one and only modern rocketry album that i'm playing right now. so big and bright and wonderful. #restinpowerkenkessie

(they can go from textbook american italo into flashdance epic territory in a heartbeat. they just showing off now!)
(its a toss up for me whether i like their cover of steppin' stone more than i like paul parker's pushin too hard...)

https://i.discogs.com/o83FADncK8NrnmPP0w4knxzVU8IbvccB2GHdfKCcXT4/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:367/w:354/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9BLTYyMjYx/LTE0ODE5MTQ2Mjkt/ODM1NS5qcGVn.jpeg

Yes, Captain Jay Vee otm, feels like 80s reverb was a reaction to dry close mic’d 70s Fleetwood Mac, an attempt to revert to a prior form of naturalism but mixed with 80s futurism, like a cyberpunk interpretation of a rockabilly haircut or something… for some reason I also think of bob dylan interviews where he complains how things in the 70s rarely came out how he wanted because of some inherent qualities of recording methods etc

Every instrument and vocal on "Lexicon..." exists in its own discrete sonic space yet all those elements, when mixed, interlock perfectly. A remarkable sounding record.

Trevor Horn's waving at you.

Hiya, Trev!

for some reason I also think of bob dylan interviews where he complains how things in the 70s rarely came out how he wanted because of some inherent qualities of recording methods etc

This is what Springsteen ran into with Darkness, spending untold hours trying to get a non-flumpfy drum sound…but all major studios (and most minor ones) at the time were built around flumpf, and flumpf sold millions of records. Rumours wouldn’t have worked without shag carpet on the walls of the studio, but it also meant that every studio tried to emulate that approach. If you didn’t want that sound, too bad.

Terrible use of 80s reverb on a guitar record: "Radioactive".

So many bands were trying and failing miserably at either replicating or attempting their own version of the “When The Levee Breaks” drum sound. I think this is why hair metal sounded so awful (apart from it sounding so awful) — everyone just kept ladling on the digital reverb and limiting, thinking they were “updating” the Zep drum sound.

like a cyberpunk interpretation of a rockabilly haircut or something

love this analogy

like a cyberpunk interpretation of a rockabilly haircut or something

isn't this exactly what Sputnik actually achieved ?

for sure!!

i've been playing how to be a zillionaire like crazy lately. original 1985 CD. sounds great! has the 4 remixes at the end. which is great cuz i just want to hear those songs a million times in any version.