70's/80's Pop: General Discussion

[Charmander]

All of these artist specific threads limit conversation.

There are dozens of 70's and 80's acts whom we think about from time to time but could not maintain a first5pages status.

My 70's/80's recent activity:

- After a half dozen or so listens, ABBA the Visitors has for the most part 'connected' with me
- The Eurythmics Sweet Dreams album is amazing, Love is a Stranger is my Song Of The Week
- Prince's Batman is wholly good, but not as good as Purple Rain or the first 2/3rds of 1999

[3Xs]

I'm here for this. Someone start posting the old school gems. I want to learn.

*waits*

[mump boy]

My favourite 80's song can change from day to day but it always comes back to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...Yg8R2g0OI#t=2s

King had a couple of other decent songs and disappeared, Paul King presented VH1 for most of the 90's

[22nathancarlos]

Prince is one of my favourite artists, I'm always discovering new music from him. I always used to think 'Oh Sheila' was by Prince but it's actually by... I wanna say... Ready For The World!?

[Eric Generic]

The US Hot 100 was full of Prince-a-likes in the mid-80s...some directly connected to him, some just aping the sound I guess. For me he peaked with Purple Rain through to Sign O The Times, the weirder the better in some cases (who else could have made Parade, let alone made it work!). A few less-celebrated Prince gems from this period:

Mountains
She's Always In My Hair
The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker
the opening medley from Parade: Christopher Tracy's Parade / New Position / I Wonder U
The Cross
17 Days
Housequake

...plus his work with Sheila E (A Love Bizarre, The Belle Of St Mark, Dear Michaelangelo) and The Family (their self-titled 1985 set).

[Eric Generic]

I've been having a major revisitation of mid-80s AOR "legends" (ahem) Mr. Mister; their breakthrough album - the one with the consecutive US #1s Broken Wings and Kyrie - has always been a CD I dig out on a regular basis...great, muscular, tuneful soft rock...a bit like The Police if they'd been American and formed a few years later. But until recently, I didn't have the flop follow-up - "Go On...." - on CD, just the tracks which were included on their various Best Ofs. Kind of a shame it bombed, they lost all the momentum seemingly overnight when the first single Something Real tanked. It actually has more in common with Rush albums of the time; that very clean, compressed but spacious rock vibe...deep lyrics, expert muscianship, etc. A bit light on the killer tunes though, but Something Real should have been a hit.

[Charmander]

The US Hot 100 was full of Prince-a-likes in the mid-80s...some directly connected to him, some just aping the sound I guess. For me he peaked with Purple Rain through to Sign O The Times, the weirder the better in some cases (who else could have made Parade, let alone made it work!). A few less-celebrated Prince gems from this period:

Mountains
She's Always In My Hair
The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker
the opening medley from Parade: Christopher Tracy's Parade / New Position / I Wonder U
The Cross
17 Days
Housequake

...plus his work with Sheila E (A Love Bizarre, The Belle Of St Mark, Dear Michaelangelo) and The Family (their self-titled 1985 set).

Sign O the times is the next album on my Prince list, I really dislike him as a person but his music is undeniable.


I never really considered Donna Summer much of an album artist simply for having not listened to many of her albums but today I gave Once Upon a Time(One of the top 100 gayest albums) a shot and it is wonderful, she is wonderful. How I miss the concept album.

If you've got a breezy, shimmering 70 minutes, I wholly recommend this body of work.
Title track: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1IDgVNyMOg&hd=1

[Eric Generic]

Y'know I don't even think of Prince in terms of being a person...obviously he is, haha, but I only bother about the work he does. He created such an intoxicating, self-contained little universe in the 80s, that was all I needed to enjoy what he was doing. How strange, or not, he might have been in the real world didn't really come into it. His infamous appearance at the BRITs in 1985 proved that....Prince was best just existing through the music and the videos.

[Eric Generic]

A really underrated 80s act are Imagination; huge between 1981 and 1983 in Britain, and then they went down the dumper with indecent haste. 1984's State Of Love is a favourite single of mine from that year. I was staggered when it tanked at #67!

They actually invented House music with 1982's Burning Up (a fact which has been acknowledged by those who were around when that genre really started to break out in the mid-80s), and some of their hits are beyond sumptuous - the chord sequence in Music & Lights' chorus is so sublime...that song was the height of sophistication to a 10 year old, haha. What a world it conjured up.

Body Talk and Just An Illusion pretty much speak for themselves, they are recognised classics, but almost everything up to and including 1984 has the same qualities of bubbling, smooth rhythms, layered harmonies, sultry tunes and that essentially-80s line in funky vibes.

[Charmander]

Depeche Mode: Black Celebration is really good, I had always figured Violator must be their most listenable album and until last week hadn't bothered to listen to any of their other records. Question of Lust/World Full of Nothing/Dressed in Black/New Dress, all amazing.

[Eric Generic]

Oh, Black Celebration is completely where it's at for me with Depeche Mode. The "new" tracks in 1985 hadn't prepared me for how gloriously dark it would be, but the fact that Fly On The Windscreen was included was a hint at the direction they'd taken. The opening "medley" of the title song, Fly, and Lust annoyed the OCD side of my C90-compiling, but what a start to the album. Then side 2 kicks off with the double whammy of A Question of Time and the mighty, mighty Stripped. New Dress is also one of my favourite tracks; the critics scoffed at the Princess Di line, but musically it's awesome.

[sometimesxtc]

Agreed. By comparison, Music for the Masses borders on unlistenable (singles aside). Stripped is the very definition of effortless.

[Eric Generic]

MFTM was such a letdown for me; by that point - after Black Celebration and then the double whammy of Strangelove and Never Let Me Down Again - Depeche Mode were almost Gods to me, musically. And then we got a half-arsed album that had a crap remix of Strangelove, a needlessly segued version of NLMDA, a couple of reasonable 2nd-division Mode stompers (Nothing and Behind The Wheel) and not a lot else. It wasn't until the remastered, CD+DVD deluxe edition that I started to like it more.