Investigating the Wikipedia claims made by Chris Dalla Riva in his forthcoming book, "Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves."
This is an interesting theory. There might be something to the idea that the quality of music was declining over the decade. (It definitely hit its nadir in the 90's with grunge), but I haven't ever looked at how Wikipedia covers it.
My class graduated high school in 1989, and for our 20th reunion back in 2009 I made a slideshow set to music from that era. Every reunion since I update it with an additional a song or two and more pictures. I've tried to focus on using songs from just the second half of the decade and specifically from '89, but I have found it a challenge. There are a lot of songs from the first half of the 80's that feel more... significant I guess.
That said, I'm not sure Michael Jackson to Richard Marx is a fair comparison. No disrespect to Marx intended (I ended up married to a Valerie), but Jackson was called the King of Pop for a reason. I'm not sure what the best comparison would be though. I'll have to give that some thought.
I’m born in the late 80s, so I didn’t experience this era personally.
In his book, Chris has a detailed chart comparing many artists from the 80s, so it’s much more in-depth than just comparing Michael Jackson and Richard Marx. I just picked those two because they were one of the strongest examples of the Wikipedia difference (page views and size).
One of the places I look to get a sense of the musical landmarks for a year are the "Allmusic loves YYYY" posts, in which writers look back and select their favorite albums and singles. For example, 1988: https://www.allmusic.com/blog/post/allmusic-loves-1988
The thing that's striking is (1) many of the selections weren't hits at the time and (2) there's no dominant genre with Fugazi, Public Enemy, Leonard Cohen, Cowboy Junkies, and They Might Be Giants all making multiple lists.
Those are true for most years, but it seems more pronounced in the late 80s. There isn't an obvious artist who was both a chart-topper at the time and defining figure in retrospect.
I hadn’t heard of Allmusic before, so thanks for sharing. Just for fun I looked up 2009 when I graduated college and was reminded of Mika, Weezer, Neko Case, and Phoenix.
"A quarter-century ago, the All Music Guide must have seemed like an absurd idea to the outsider, one with an unrealistic scope—think of the sheer number of man-hours that go into listening to all of those songs! But AllMusic persisted because, ultimately, we needed something like it.
Databases are our collective memory—with a lot more finality than a tweet, and more flexibility than a book or encyclopedia. In a hundred years, AllMusic is going to tell the story of music far better than it has any right to be told, with far more depth and nuance than a single Rolling Stone article could ever sum up.
And honestly, that’s a pretty great cultural spot to hold."
The 1980s were my formative music years, from adolescent to young adult. I look forward to Chris's conclusions, as well as others' opinions. I have a few of my own.
1979 was such a pivotal year. The Police. Blondie. The Knack. The Cars. Talking Heads. Elvis Costello. Joe Jackson. The Clash. Gary Numan. The Specials. Even Supertramp, Michael Jackson, and Tom Petty on the more mainstream stations. This was right before the emergence of MTV on 1 Aug 1981. Here are the first two hours, which speak volumes https://youtu.be/PJtiPRDIqtI . Live Aid on 13 Jul 1985 was likely the finale rack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Aid . I remember that time so vividly; I grew up and went to college around Philadelphia, and the radio absolutely crackled.
I remember distinctly that by the late 1980s, music was feeling, for lack of a better word, "tired". Lots of hair bands in acid-washed jeans and repackaged "old" acts. This is going to sound really snooty, but music started to split along class lines, with college kids gravitating toward New Wave/Music (often reflecting transatlantic family travel budgets), leaving their old high school classmates back home to listen to Mötley Crüe and Ratt, whereas beforehand Americans kids all listened to pretty much the identical FM rock radio. MTV was part of this, as the first markets were large metropolitan catchements with wealthy suburbs hooked up to cable TV; one arrived at college from the countryside in 1983 and discovered that one's FM-driven musical taste had become, well, "hickish".
1985 was the year Jefferson Starship (neé Airplane) became just "Starship", and released what is now widely accepted to be the worst song ever written https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Built_This_City . I remember riding in a car, hearing that song come on, and being so disgusted that I turned the radio off, something that'd never once happened in the preceding five years.
Also, CDs had just emerged, which whilst it sounded better, suddenly made music more expensive. Vinyl and casette albums were always around $7-8 ($23 in today's money), whereas CDs were $14 ($43! ... often to access just one or two hits!). I have an memory that when students, whose budgets were often already stretched from buying a CD player, not wanting to throw good money after bad on cheaper legacy formats, would thus concentrate on upgrading their *already* beloved music before taking a flyer on new stuff. You'd definitely buy the CD verson of "Synchronicity" long before "Slippery When Wet" ... and in fact, you were probably still backfilling "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Dire Straits". In fact, Dire Straits' 1985 "Brothers in Arms" was often the first CD people bought, especially as it was DDD. Donald Fagan's "The Nightfly" as well.
I think that wave of cheesy 1985-1990 music broke in late 1991. I'll never forget I was standing at a bar across the street from Yankee Stadium and hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" played loudly for the first time, and feeling it was like a thunderstorm clearing out the muggy weather and leaving the whiff of fresh ozone in the air.
The more I think about it, the CD transition may prove an even more important factor than anything else!
I was born in ‘87 so don’t have personal experience living through these changes, but appreciate you contextualizing it here.
It makes sense to me that (expensive) CDs would change the form of music at that time. I worry now that TikTok is shaping music by incentivizing artists to only think about catchy hooks and make the track as short as possible, even if that’s not authentic to the spirit of the song. Ted Gioia has written about this.
One of my favorite English teachers in high school said there was a “holdover” before the ‘90s became the ‘90s. Maybe “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the leitmotif signaling that a new, grungy era had arrived.
Thank you for sharing this, Stephen!
This is an interesting theory. There might be something to the idea that the quality of music was declining over the decade. (It definitely hit its nadir in the 90's with grunge), but I haven't ever looked at how Wikipedia covers it.
My class graduated high school in 1989, and for our 20th reunion back in 2009 I made a slideshow set to music from that era. Every reunion since I update it with an additional a song or two and more pictures. I've tried to focus on using songs from just the second half of the decade and specifically from '89, but I have found it a challenge. There are a lot of songs from the first half of the 80's that feel more... significant I guess.
That said, I'm not sure Michael Jackson to Richard Marx is a fair comparison. No disrespect to Marx intended (I ended up married to a Valerie), but Jackson was called the King of Pop for a reason. I'm not sure what the best comparison would be though. I'll have to give that some thought.
I’m born in the late 80s, so I didn’t experience this era personally.
In his book, Chris has a detailed chart comparing many artists from the 80s, so it’s much more in-depth than just comparing Michael Jackson and Richard Marx. I just picked those two because they were one of the strongest examples of the Wikipedia difference (page views and size).
One of the places I look to get a sense of the musical landmarks for a year are the "Allmusic loves YYYY" posts, in which writers look back and select their favorite albums and singles. For example, 1988: https://www.allmusic.com/blog/post/allmusic-loves-1988
The thing that's striking is (1) many of the selections weren't hits at the time and (2) there's no dominant genre with Fugazi, Public Enemy, Leonard Cohen, Cowboy Junkies, and They Might Be Giants all making multiple lists.
Those are true for most years, but it seems more pronounced in the late 80s. There isn't an obvious artist who was both a chart-topper at the time and defining figure in retrospect.
I hadn’t heard of Allmusic before, so thanks for sharing. Just for fun I looked up 2009 when I graduated college and was reminded of Mika, Weezer, Neko Case, and Phoenix.
Thanks. It's a valuable resource and an old-school website that's still around.
I remember using it extensively to look up reviews in the late 90s/early 2000s so, for example, it's almost 10 years older than wikipedia.
Looking up this date I found this interesting article (from 2016) about the history of the site: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-story-of-allmusic-the-internets-largest-most-influential-music-database/
"A quarter-century ago, the All Music Guide must have seemed like an absurd idea to the outsider, one with an unrealistic scope—think of the sheer number of man-hours that go into listening to all of those songs! But AllMusic persisted because, ultimately, we needed something like it.
Databases are our collective memory—with a lot more finality than a tweet, and more flexibility than a book or encyclopedia. In a hundred years, AllMusic is going to tell the story of music far better than it has any right to be told, with far more depth and nuance than a single Rolling Stone article could ever sum up.
And honestly, that’s a pretty great cultural spot to hold."
The 1980s were my formative music years, from adolescent to young adult. I look forward to Chris's conclusions, as well as others' opinions. I have a few of my own.
1979 was such a pivotal year. The Police. Blondie. The Knack. The Cars. Talking Heads. Elvis Costello. Joe Jackson. The Clash. Gary Numan. The Specials. Even Supertramp, Michael Jackson, and Tom Petty on the more mainstream stations. This was right before the emergence of MTV on 1 Aug 1981. Here are the first two hours, which speak volumes https://youtu.be/PJtiPRDIqtI . Live Aid on 13 Jul 1985 was likely the finale rack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Aid . I remember that time so vividly; I grew up and went to college around Philadelphia, and the radio absolutely crackled.
I remember distinctly that by the late 1980s, music was feeling, for lack of a better word, "tired". Lots of hair bands in acid-washed jeans and repackaged "old" acts. This is going to sound really snooty, but music started to split along class lines, with college kids gravitating toward New Wave/Music (often reflecting transatlantic family travel budgets), leaving their old high school classmates back home to listen to Mötley Crüe and Ratt, whereas beforehand Americans kids all listened to pretty much the identical FM rock radio. MTV was part of this, as the first markets were large metropolitan catchements with wealthy suburbs hooked up to cable TV; one arrived at college from the countryside in 1983 and discovered that one's FM-driven musical taste had become, well, "hickish".
1985 was the year Jefferson Starship (neé Airplane) became just "Starship", and released what is now widely accepted to be the worst song ever written https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Built_This_City . I remember riding in a car, hearing that song come on, and being so disgusted that I turned the radio off, something that'd never once happened in the preceding five years.
Also, CDs had just emerged, which whilst it sounded better, suddenly made music more expensive. Vinyl and casette albums were always around $7-8 ($23 in today's money), whereas CDs were $14 ($43! ... often to access just one or two hits!). I have an memory that when students, whose budgets were often already stretched from buying a CD player, not wanting to throw good money after bad on cheaper legacy formats, would thus concentrate on upgrading their *already* beloved music before taking a flyer on new stuff. You'd definitely buy the CD verson of "Synchronicity" long before "Slippery When Wet" ... and in fact, you were probably still backfilling "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Dire Straits". In fact, Dire Straits' 1985 "Brothers in Arms" was often the first CD people bought, especially as it was DDD. Donald Fagan's "The Nightfly" as well.
I think that wave of cheesy 1985-1990 music broke in late 1991. I'll never forget I was standing at a bar across the street from Yankee Stadium and hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" played loudly for the first time, and feeling it was like a thunderstorm clearing out the muggy weather and leaving the whiff of fresh ozone in the air.
The more I think about it, the CD transition may prove an even more important factor than anything else!
I was born in ‘87 so don’t have personal experience living through these changes, but appreciate you contextualizing it here.
It makes sense to me that (expensive) CDs would change the form of music at that time. I worry now that TikTok is shaping music by incentivizing artists to only think about catchy hooks and make the track as short as possible, even if that’s not authentic to the spirit of the song. Ted Gioia has written about this.
One of my favorite English teachers in high school said there was a “holdover” before the ‘90s became the ‘90s. Maybe “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the leitmotif signaling that a new, grungy era had arrived.