Post a controversial music opinion

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.

SCOOBYDOPABBADOOBOPWOP

Few albums sound so awesomely 1985 than ...Zillilonaire.

if you look carefully there is a lot of on-u sound involvement on that album.
and yeah, it still sounds insanely fantastic.

Mark White gets the credit for all of it.

"Radioactive"'s drum sound doesn't bother me as much as the overcompressed farty fretless bass.

ok now that we're on the topic of ONE THING THAT I WOULD CHANGE ABOUT 80S RECORDINGS BY POST-LEDZEP D00DZ:

RBlunt's nasally compressed/chorused strat tone *almost* ruins The Principle of Nothing for me. I know it was considered to be an arch move to sound like that in 1982 but a fuller tone (LP/SG & esp using more than just bridge p/u) with spring (rather than hall) reverb would have made his contribution far more palatable to my ears. Should mention that PCollins' drums sound great (not dated at all) on this record btw...

Collins sounds solid here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7pKkR8ZipI

Collins' drums sounded great on just about every 80s record he guested on. Especially the ones he also produced. Such as
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTBSFmwLeLc

Prefecture, sorry to go on and on but the very same radio stations were playing "How Will I Know," "Hungry Like the Wolf," "She's Strange," "Valley Girl," "Lucky Star," and "Pass the Dutchie." Plus "Whip It."

As I said, a magical time.

CJV: PC's drumming on (*cringe*) the Band Aid sessions in 84 is really great in terms of performance and engineering:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeZnZfxGKvg

i'm looking at that ABC cd and its in great shape. case, disc, everything. it's almost 40 years old! which seems crazy.

i have a really nice rotel cd player now with a good dac and that thru the marantz into the old klipschs can be eye-opening. and one of my fave things to do now is find old CDs that sound amazing. you never know which one its going to be. that $100 audiophile disc of Avalon? yeah, it sounds good. but holy shit this semi-legit cd with two Lime albums on it? sounds awesome! you just never know. its fun.
you definitely get some stinkers but its fun to find the unlikely gems sound-wise.

I miss my CDs. More than my vinyl.

also wanna give Roy Thomas Baker a shout, another revelation I had recently is Oh, No! It's Devo which sounds fat as hell on a good system

he also produced a Starcastle album I really like, granted it's from the 70s but it does have a really cool drum sound to it

Every time I watch that clip of Phil all I can think is, “Sit up straight! You’ll ruin your back!”

LIME

fuck yeah