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The decade of 1980's saw the reinvention of Michael Jackson and the emergence of Madonna, which arguably were the most powerful musicians during the time. Their videos became a permanent fixture on MTV and gained a worldwide mass audience. By 1980, the disco production of the 1970s, largely dependent on orchestras, is replaced by a lighter synthpop production. In the second half of the 1980s teen pop has its first wave. Bands and artists include New Kids on the Block, Debbie Gibson, Tiffany, Tommy Page, New Edition, Stacey Q, The Bangles, Madonna and others. Urban pop acts of the 1980s include Tina Turner, Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Deniece Williams. Artists such as Madonna, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Prince, The Pet Shop Boys, Janet Jackson and Duran Duran ruled the charts throughout the decade and achieved tremendous success worldwide. Their fame and commercial success lasts up to date. Michael Jackson releases Thriller in 1982, which becomes the best selling album of all time.
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Early American alternative bands such as R.E.M., The Feelies, and Violent Femmes combined punk influences with folk music and mainstream music influences. R.E.M. was the most immediately successful; its debut album, Murmur (1983), entered the Top 40 and spawned a number of jangle pop followers. American indie record labels SST Records, Twin/Tone Records, Touch and Go Records, and Dischord Records presided over the shift from the hardcore punk that then dominated the American underground scene to the more diverse styles of alternative rock that were emerging. Minnesota bands Hüsker Dü and The Replacements were indicative of this shift. Both started out as punk rock bands, but soon diversified their sounds and became more melodic. By the late 1980s, the American alternative scene was dominated by styles ranging from quirky alternative pop (They Might Be Giants and Camper Van Beethoven), to noise rock (Sonic Youth, Big Black) to industrial rock (Ministry, Nine Inch Nails). These sounds were in turn followed by the advent of Boston's the Pixies and Los Angeles' Jane's Addiction. The top mainstream American Alternative Rock bands of 1980s included Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, R.E.M. and Sonic Youth which were popular long before the Grunge movement of the early 1990s.
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In the summer of 1977 both Time and Newsweek magazines wrote favorable lead stories on the "punk/new wave" movement. Rock critics had mixed opinions. Acts associated with the movement received little or no radio airplay or music industry support. Small scenes developed in major cities. Continuing into the next year, public support remained limited to select elements of the artistic, bohemian and intellectual population as arena rock and disco dominated the charts. Deborah Harry from the band Blondie, performing at Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, in 1977. Starting in late 1978 and continuing into 1979, acts associated with punk and acts that mixed punk with other genres began to make chart appearances and receive airplay on rock stations. Blondie, Talking Heads, and The Cars would chart during this period. My Sharona, a single from The Knack, was Billboard magazine's number one single of 1979. The success of "My Sharona" caused record companies to rush out and sign New Wave groups. New Wave music scenes developed in Ohio and Athens, Georgia. 1980 saw brief forays into New Wave-styled music by non new wave artists Billy Joel and Linda Ronstadt. The release during this period of Gary Numan's album The Pleasure Principle would be the pop chart breakthrough for gender-bending synthpop acts with a cool, detached stage presence. In 1980 hostility existed among those who determined radio play lists. Early in the year highly influential radio consultant Lee Abrams wrote a memo saying with a few exceptions "we're not going to be seeing many of the New Wave circuit acts happening very big over here (in America). As a movement, we don't expect it to have much influence." Lee Ferguson consultant to KWST interviewed at the time, said Los Angeles radio stations were banning disc jockeys from using the term and noted that "Most of the people who call music New Wave are the are the ones looking for a way not to play it". Second albums by artists who had successful debut albums, along with the newly signed artists, both failed to sell and radio did pull New Wave programming. The arrival of MTV in 1981 would usher in New Wave's most successful era. British artists, unlike many of their American counterparts, had learned how to use the music video early on. Several British acts signed to independent labels were able to outmarket and outsell American artists that were signed with major labels. Journalists labeled this phenomenon a "Second British Invasion". MTV continued its heavy rotation of videos by New Wave-oriented acts until 1987, when it changed to a Heavy Metal and rock dominated format. 14% of teenagers answering a December 1982 Gallup Poll rated New Wave music as their favorite genre, making it the third most popular genre. New Wave had its greatest popularity on the West Coast. Unlike other genres, race was not a factor in the popularity of New Wave music. Urban Contemporary radio stations were the first to play New Wave music. By this period the definition of New Wave music in the United States had changed from the less rebellious, more commercial version of punk that it had been described as a few years earlier. For most of the remainder of the 1980s the term "New Wave" was used in America to describe nearly every new pop or pop rock artist that largely used synthesizers. New Wave is still used today to describe these acts, as well as late 1970s and 1980s post punk and alternative acts. Fans, music journalists, and artists would rebel against this catch-all definition by inventing dozens of genre names. Synthpop, which filled a void left by disco, was a broad subgenre that included groups such as The Human League, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, a-ha, New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Ultravox and the Pet Shop Boys. New Wave soundtracks were used in mainstream "Brat Pack" films such as Valley Girl, Sixteen Candles, Pretty In Pink, and The Breakfast Club Critics would describe the MTV acts as shallow or vapid, but the danceable quality of the music and quirky fashion sense associated with New Wave artists appealed to audiences. The use of synthesizers by New Wave acts influenced the development of House music in Chicago and Techno in Detroit. New Wave’s indie spirit would be crucial to the development of college rock and grunge/alternative rock in the latter half of the 1980s and beyond. New Wave is considered part of Alternative Rock today.
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Beginning in 1983 and peaking in success in 1986-1989, the decade saw the resurgence of hard rock music and the emergence of its pop metal subgenre. Bands such as Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Quiet Riot, Ratt, Twisted Sister, Poison, Whitesnake, and Cinderella were among the most popular acts of the decade. The 1980s saw the emergence of wildly popular hard rock band Guns N' Roses and the successful comebacks of Aerosmith and Alice Cooper in the late 1980s. The success of hard rock act Van Halen spanned throughout the entire decade, first with singer David Lee Roth and later with Sammy Hagar. Queen, which had expanded its music to experimental and crossover genres in the early 1980s, returned to guitar-driven hard rock with The Miracle in 1989. Additionally, a few women managed to achieve stardom in the 1980s' hard rock scene: Pat Benatar, which had been around since the late 1970s, is a prime exemple of female success in hard rock, and so are both ex-Runaways Joan Jett and Lita Ford. The Arena rock trend of the 1970s continued in the 1980s with bands like Styx, Rush, Journey, REO Speedwagon, ZZ Top, and Aerosmith which were popular into the early 1980s, with hair metal taking their place later.
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Hip-hop music or rap music is an admired and famous style or genre of music in the USA. This well-known music genre is made up of two components, rapping and record scratching. Rapping is also known as MCing and DJing, which comprises of audio mixing. These two main components combined with graffiti and break dancing form the four core elements of hip-hop. Hip-hop was initiated as a cultural movement by inner-city youth, mostly Latinos, Hispanics, and African Americans in New York City, in the early seventies. The word "rap" was derived in the sixties, from a slang word that meant conversation. Hip-hop has two main historical eras, the old school hip-hop era from 1970-1985 and the golden age hip-hop era from 1985-1993. The golden age of hip-hop began only when it entered the mainstream of music and it consolidated the sounds of the West Coast and the East Coast. The origin of hip-hop music is from African American and West African music. Contributions of griots like The Last Poets, Jalal Mansur Nurriddin, and Gil Scott-Heron were significant in a big way for the advent of hip-hop in the 1960s. Hip-hop had originally begun in the Bronx. Funk and soul music were played a lot in block parties. In the beginning, the DJs at these parties began separating the percussion breaks from hit songs. They started realizing that these breaks were more entertaining and groovy. This technique had become widespread in Jamaica and had spread considerably in the New York community via the Jamaican immigrants. Kool DJ Herc and Grandmaster Flash were the pioneers in the hip-hop industry and other DJs had extended the short percussion interludes of funk records and created a more danceable sound. As a result, remixes had become popular with the advent of mixing and scratching techniques. Many styles of hip-hop had developed in the golden age of hip-hop.
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Information Society, Exposé, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Shannon, La India, TKA, Marc Anthony, Corina, Nocera, Company B, The Cover Girls, Stevie B, Korell, Noel, Sa-Fire, Johnny O, Pajama Party, Shana, Will to Power, Sweet Sensation, Seduction, Judy Torres, Linear, George Lamond, Lil' Suzy, Lisette Melendez, Coro, and Collage are some notable performers of the genre. It continues to be produced today and enjoys some degree of popularity, especially in the urban Hispanic-American communities, as it did when it first came on to the scene.[1] Another popular modern dance music genre, Florida breaks, evolved from this sound. The music first developed primarily in the Latino communities of New York City and then Miami in the early 1980s. Initially, it was a fusion of the vocal styles found in 1970s disco music with the syncopated, synthetic instrumentation of 1980s electro, as favored by fans of breakdancing. It was also influenced by sampling, as found in hip hop music. Specifically, Freestyle's true roots are traced back to Soul Sonic Force's "Planet Rock" (1982) and Shannon's "Let the Music Play", which debuted in 1983. Silent Morning, composed by Noel, boosted Freestyle's popularity and brought it to the forefront of the international scene in 1987, expanding its potential. Before Freestyle could make a permanent impact, however, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, house music, a reincarnation of 1970's disco, challenged the original, upbeat 1980s Freestyle. In the late 1980s and on through the 1990s, the electro and Latin hip hop influences of Freestyle were supplanted by house music, which marked Freestyle's downfall. Freestyle reached its peak in the early 1990s before it began to fall in popularity and was slowly replaced by burgeoning house music.
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