80s News Today

I have come here not to bury Kilroy, but to praise him. Or, more accurately, it. Kilroy Was Here is the brilliant concept album released by Styx on February 22, 1983. It's also the album that supposedly destroyed the band, and has been lambasted and mocked by many a music critic and fair-weather Styx fan who possess an irrational hatred of Dennis DeYoung. And by members of Styx who possess an equally-irrational hatred of Dennis DeYoung. Woe unto them who cannot realize that without Dennis DeYoung, most of the band's fanbase and record buyers would never have heard of Styx. Rock critics already had their sharp snark out for the band once it gained megasuccess in the late 70s, and, look, how many times do we look back at a biting critique of an album in Rolling Stone that reads as positively moronic thirty years later? A lot. Critics hate art that is understood and embraced by a circle wider than themselves. But the turncoats among Styx fans cannot be excused so easily. As far ...

February 20, 1984. The year George Orwell warned us about has already arrived, only instead of Big Brother it’s Maggie in her power-blue suit and the dole queue snaking around the Arndale Centre like some great socialist python digesting yesterday’s dreams. It's Ronnie in an arms race, Dodge Caravans in suburban driveways, and corporate megamergers. The kids are wearing anoraks the color of wet concrete, the radios are pumping Duran Duran and Culture Club and all that glossy, shoulder-padded, pastel-synth nonsense about Rio and karma chameleons, and the newspapers are full of gold medal winners, nuclear nightmares, and Princess Di’s latest hat.  And then—wham—Rough Trade Records, that scruffy little indie bunker in London that smelled of damp cardboard and revolutionary zeal, ships out the vinyl. The Smiths . Self-titled. Ten tracks of pure, unadulterated Northern English misery wrapped in the most glorious jangle you ever heard. The cover: some poor doomed American actor from a 19...

The year was 1989, and the Eighties, that decade-long fiesta of excess and ambition, was drawing its final, magnificent breaths. It was a time when the hemlines went up and the interest rates went down, when shoulder pads were architectural and cocaine was a business accessory. And into this glittering, grunting, acquisitive tableau, on the seventh day of February, dropped an album that would become not merely a record, but a cultural battlefield: 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be . It landed like a dirty bomb on the immaculate, manicured lawns of polite society. Nasty was not just "explicit"—it was a seismic event, a sonic middle finger, a raw, unvarnished, unapologetic eruption of what was, at the time, considered the absolute outer limits of indecency. This was not the coy suggestion of Madonna, nor the rebellious snarl of Guns N' Roses. No, this was Luther Campbell, a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, and his crew, bellowing about sex, about bodies, about acts—in excruciati...

The wind outside isn’t just cold; it’s the kind of cold that feels like a razor blade with an aftersplash of rubbing alcohol. It’s February 2, 1981, a Monday that feels like a Tuesday, and in the record stores, a certain vinyl disc is sliding out of its sleeve. It’s called Killers . And let me tell you, the name isn't just hyperbole. The cover art gives you the first jolt. There’s Eddie. You remember Eddie, don’t you? That skeletal, grinning mascot with the hair like a dry hayfield and eyes that have seen the inside of a furnace. This time, he’s standing under a streetlamp that casts shadows long enough to hide a dozen sins. He’s clutching a hatchet—dripping, of course—and his victim is reaching up, fingers clawing at Eddie’s shirt in a final, useless plea. It’s a nasty bit of business. It looks the way a scream sounds. The first rock band apparel I ever bought? A black Iron Maiden jacket with this album cover emblazoned on the back. It doesn't get any better than that. But wh...

On February 1, 1983, Journey did two things rock bands virtually never do, and one they rarely do. Every successful rock band promises their follow-up to their breakthrough hit album will be rawer and heavier. Journey actually did it, cranking up the guitar crunch and drum hits, and Steve Perry taking a more aggressive approach vocally. Every successful rock band promises to take a new direction stylistically on their next record. Journey actually did it, with no song on Frontiers resembling their 1981 megahit "Don't Stop Believin.'" And rock bands who have success on the level Journey did with previous platter Escape rarely can sustain that level of sales and popularity on their follow-up disc. Yet Journey was among the few to stay at least as hot on Frontiers. Lead single "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" arguably became as iconic of an 80s cut as "Don't Stop Believin.'" Despite having an easy blueprint for repeat success, Journey took a ...

Ah, the late '80s, that glittering, gaudy vortex of excess! Los Angeles, the Sunset Strip – a neon-lit jungle where dreams clawed their way up from the gutters, enveloped in hairspray and leather pants, electric guitars screaming like banshees in the night! And into this maelstrom, on January 31, 1989, bursts Warrant , those Hollywood hustlers, unleashing their debut album Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich upon an unsuspecting world hungry for hooks, for heartaches wrapped in power chords, for anthems that could make the stadiums shake and the groupies swoon. Pow! There it was, certified platinum, storming the charts with its sleazy swagger, peaking at number 10 on the Billboard 200, spawning hits that blasted through car radios and MTV screens like fireworks in a fireworks factory explosion! The title alone encapsulating the 80s zeitgeist! But while Warrant visually resembled the glam bands that were a dime a dozen in the wake of Poison and Theatre of Pain -era Motley Crüe, the b...

BOOM! It wasn't just a sound; it was the crack of a decade, the rupture in the fabric of the Eighties, a singular, searing moment in the supernova life of the greatest pop star the world had ever known. We were talking Michael Jackson , folks, and the stage was set, not for another moonwalk, but for a blaze that would forever scar the King of Pop and, in a strange, twisted way, brand the very soul of an era.  The date? January 27, 1984. The locale? That venerable temple of tinsel, the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, where the air shimmered with ambition and the scent of hairspray. This wasn’t just another gig; this was Pepsi, the other cola, the upstart, the challenger to that venerable brown baron, Coca-Cola. And Michael? He wasn't just endorsing; he was embodying the brand. He was the bolt of lightning in a bottle, the pure, uncut sugar rush that Pepsi needed to go toe-to-toe with the behemoth. Remember the "Choice of a New Generation"? Nonsense! It was the Choice...

BOOM! It wasn't just a record. It wasn't merely another vinyl frisbee spinning on the hi-fi, destined for the back of the closet, forgotten between a Macramé owl and a stack of Star Wars trading cards. No, sir. On January 20th, 1983, as the Winter of Our Discontent clung to the eaves of America, when the grey pallor of the everyday threatened to smother the last flickering ember of Rock 'n' Roll, something happened. Something resplendent. Something that screamed from the rooftops, from the darkest corners of the suburban garage, from the very core of the American teenager's soul, that the future, my friends, was not just here—it was LOUD. And it was called PYROMANIA . It burst forth from the grimy, smoke-filled crucible of Sheffield, England, hurled across the Atlantic like a shimmering, chrome-plated projectile. Def Leppard , those five lads, barely out of their school blazers, had done it. They had bottled the lightning. They had captured the very essence of zeitg...

We’re about to take a brief, mildly absurd, and entirely necessary jaunt back to January 18, 1980. Picture it: the world, still collectively nursing a hangover from the 70s (which, frankly, was less a decade and more a protracted bout of psychedelic indigestion), was blinking into a new era. An era that, unbeknownst to most, would soon inflict us with erasable ink pens, excessive use of synthesizers, and the concept of "power dressing." But amidst this nascent chaos, on that very Friday, something rather monumental, and perhaps even a trifle depressing, achieved the dizzying heights of the American musical landscape. Pink Floyd’s The Wall ascended to the coveted #1 spot on the Billboard album chart. Now, one might reasonably ask, "Was the world truly ready for a double concept album about alienation, mental breakdown, and the crippling effects of an overprotective mother and a brutally conformist education system?" The answer, rather unsettlingly, was a resounding,...

Let's peel back the layers of that singular day, January 16, 1981, when the tectonic plates of American rock 'n' roll shifted with the release of two behemoths: Styx's Paradise Theatre and Toto's Turn Back . Picture it, if you will, through the lens of a chrome-plated, mirror-sunglasses-wearing, cocaine-fueled zeitgeist – a world where shoulder pads were beginning their ascent, the economy was a roller coaster of terrifying peaks and valleys, and the electric guitar remained, for a precious few years more, the undisputed king of teenage dreams. Two eagerly anticipated albums following records with massive hit singles, with similar fan bases...on the same day? What were the label honchos thinking? Needless to say, the rarefied air in the record stores—those glorious, fluorescent-lit cathedrals of commerce, heavy with the scent of vinyl and old carpet—was thick with anticipation. Not for some punk-rock snarl, mind you, nor for the burgeoning New Wave synth-pop that w...

It is January 9, 1981—though, in the neon-flicker of our collective memory, it feels more like Year Zero. A divorced, balding Englishman sits in a cold studio, nursing a heartbreak that would have sent a lesser mortal to the bottom of a gin bottle. But not Phil. No, Phil Collins has a drum machine and a grudge that could power the National Grid. For more than three-and-a-half minutes, the world is a vacuum. It is a minimalist’s nightmare. Tick-thwack. Tick-thwack. A ghostly, gated-reverb pulse. Collins whispers—he doesn't sing, he hisses—about a drowning man and the "long time coming." The tension is unbearable. It is the sonic equivalent of staring at a closed door, knowing something terrible is breathing on the other side. Picture it: the airwaves crackling, radios dialed in across the fog-shrouded isles of Britain first, then rippling out like shockwaves from a detonated dream. Collins, that Everyman with the voice of a wounded angel, had been pounding skins for years...

A rather ordinary, yet profoundly significant, thing happened on the fourth day of January, in the year of nineteen hundred and eighty.  A record was released. Now, a record, for those of you born after the advent of digital downloads and the subsequent existential dread of owning nothing tangible, was a round, flat, black disc made of vinyl. It spun. It made noises. Sometimes, if you were lucky, those noises coalesced into something approaching "music." For several years prior, the musical landscape had been dominated by Progressive Rock (songs so long they required their own zip codes) and Disco (a genre based entirely on the belief that white polyester could solve human suffering).  The Romantics looked at this situation, adjusted their incredibly narrow neckties, and decided to do something quite radical: they played songs that were three minutes long, contained three chords, and possessed a level of energy usually reserved for toddlers who have discovered a six-pack of ...

Pull up a seat by the crackling fire, because we're gonna talk about a scream in the dark of winter. A rumble of thunder from a place where the shadows stretch long and the old gods still hold sway. December. Nineteen-eighty. A time when the world was shivering on the cusp of a new, louder, more demonic sound. Somewhere in that gloom, a band called Angel Witch unleashed their eponymous debut, a slab of vinyl with a cover that looked like a fever dream from a Sunday School teacher’s worst nightmare. This was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and Angel Witch, well, they were like the strange, pale kid in class who drew demons in his notebook – unsettling, fascinating, and utterly unforgettable. They had a raw, occult energy that made Black Sabbath look like a church choir and Iron Maiden look like they were still practicing their scales. From the moment the needle dropped, or the tape started to hiss, you knew this wasn't going to be a walk in the park. A horned demon leering...

The world is a stage for the exceptional, a battleground where the strong thrive and the weak wallow in their self-imposed mediocrity. On December 12, 1981, a new clarion call echoed for those with the ears to hear, a raw, unpolished testament to carnal instinct and aggressive self-preservation: Welcome to Hell by the triumvirate known as Venom . Cronos, Mantas, and Abaddon—three northern English barbarians who looked as though they had clawed their way out of a Hieronymus Bosch canvas—did not “dabble” in Satanism. They WERE Satanism made flesh, leather, and decibels. And their audio recruitment office was opening on turntables and boomboxes worldwide. “Welcome to hell,” Cronos snarls across the title track, and one does not merely hear the words; one is dragged by the hair through the gates. The production is gloriously primitive—drums like gunshots in a sewer, guitars like chainsaws carving pentagrams into cathedral doors, bass an Inner Earth pile-driver throbbing 3,959 miles down. ...

A decade of neon and pastel got off to a much darker start when America failed to get out of its first year without the shocking loss of John Lennon . The creative giant and political activist was gunned down outside his New York City apartment building on the evening of December 8, 1980, in an assassination that had all the hallmarks of a government conspiracy, complete with an unconvincing patsy pulling the trigger. Lennon had been hounded by the FBI, and illegally by the CIA, since moving to the United States. The powers-that-be feared his potential influence on elections, particularly among younger voters. Gunman Mark David Chapman remains in prison, serving a 20-years-to-life sentence at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Beekman, New York. He has been denied parole all fourteen times he has been eligible for it. His explanation for killing Lennon, who was only 40 at the time, doesn't add up. He claimed on the one hand that he was obsessed with what he thought was Lennon...

When we survey the sparkling snowscape of Christmas music, it's almost exclusively a nostalgia exercise. Like your great grandma's pink aluminum Christmas tree, most of these tracks haven't been released since the 1970s. There's been no shortage of Christmas records foisted on the public since then, and we can objectively say they all suck. But there are three exceptions - all singles - that are worthy of standing alongside the greats of Christmas Past: "All I Want for Christmas is You" by Mariah Carey, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" by Band Aid, and the one released on December 3, 1984, "Last Christmas" by Wham! Now, before we consider "Last Christmas," we should establish the objective criteria for what makes a great Christmas song. First and foremost, the songwriting has to be superlative. Unlike many shovelware b-side-quality Christmas songs phoned in by artists, "All I Want for Christmas" would have been a hit e...

November 29, 1982 – It was a Monday, the sort of gray, post-Thanksgiving Monday when Manhattan secretaries were still picking turkey from their teeth and Wall Street was nursing its first hangover of the new fiscal quarter, and then, at precisely that moment when the cosmos likes to remind us who’s boss, Epic Records slid a slab of vinyl into the bloodstream of America and the heart stopped, got zapped with a defibrillator, then began beating to an entirely new rhythm. Thriller . Michael Jackson's Off the Wall album had been a smash hit, but the industry, the critics, and radio still wanted to box him in as an R&B artist. He didn't achieve the crossover success he had imagined, nor the respect of his peers on the awards circuit, at the level Off the Wall objectively demanded. Michael was angry. He turned that anger into motivation. The next record wouldn't demand respect. It would COMMAND respect. He spent a year in a Westlake studio with Quincy Jones searching for th...

It was November 25th, 1985. The air was already biting, the kind that promised a long, hard winter, like a whisper from a tomb that still had plenty of residents. Most folks were probably still bloated from Thanksgiving turkey, watching football or trying to figure out if that Cabbage Patch Doll they'd promised little Timmy actually existed, or if it was just a fever dream spun by Madison Avenue. The world, as it often does, was clanking along, oblivious. But in the dim, hallowed halls where true sound resided, something had just crawled out of the dark. Something beautiful and unsettling. I'm talking about Dead Can Dance's Spleen and Ideal . Now, if you were a kid at the time, scraping by on whatever hair metal or synth-pop dribbled out of the radio, this record probably wasn't on your radar. It wasn't designed for radars. It was designed for mausoleums. For ancient, crumbling cathedrals where the stained glass was long gone, letting in only a bruised, purple light...

Pull up a chair by the fire, because we're not talking about some gentle strumming of a folksy tune today. Oh no. We're diving headfirst into something that snarled and howled its way out of the darkness, a beast unleashed on November 15, 1983. The album Bark at the Moon , by Ozzy Osbourne. And I'm not afraid to make the controversial statement that this record featured the strongest songwriting from start to finish of any of the Black Sabbath frontman's solo efforts. It's hard to comprehend the pressure Ozzy was under in the creation of his third studio album. He and his fans were still shaken by the senseless death of guitarist Randy Rhoads, whose monster riffs and melodic leads had been a major driver in establishing Ozzy as a solo act, quickly banishing the clouds of the Sabbath legacy from overshadowing his fresh new sonic direction.  The loss of Rhoads changed Ozzy forever in ways that were very obvious. He seemed to age a decade or more overnight, his gait on...

Los Angeles - November 14, 1983: Twenty-three hand-picked souls have been summoned to the Crest Theater on Westwood Boulevard, a modest little palace usually reserved for sneak previews of pictures nobody will remember by breakfast. Tonight, though, the marquee is dark. No title. No stars. Just a velvet rope, two security men built like Michelin Men in Brioni, and the low throb of anticipation that feels like the bass line to something unholy. Inside, the chosen glide down the aisle in a hush that is almost ecclesiastical: Fred Astaire in a navy blazer sharp enough to shave with, looking like a man who has seen the future and is mildly amused; Jane Fonda, fresh from a workout that cost more than most people’s rent, her cheekbones still humming from the Nautilus; Diana Ross in silver lamé that catches the projector beam and throws it back like a disco ball in heaven; Eddie Murphy, twenty-two years old and already owning the room simply by refusing to sit still; Marlon Brando, mountainou...