1980 in Music

Concrete cells and fishing spears After losing their vocalist to alcohol poisoning in February, a hard rock band flies a replacement singer to a studio in Nassau to record what becomes the biggest-selling hard rock album of all time. The studio is a collection of small concrete rooms on a Caribbean island. The new vocalist later recalls being handed six-foot fishing spears by the woman who ran the place, protection against nighttime intruders. Seven weeks of sessions produce an album that will sell fifty million copies worldwide. The all-black cover carries no image, just the band name and title embossed in dark relief, a funeral notice that doubles as a fresh start.

The drum sound that ate the decade A producer bans cymbals from the drum kit for an entire album. The restriction forces the drummer, already known for his powerful playing, to hit harder and more creatively. During the sessions, the engineer notices a talkback microphone compressor creating a massive, explosive snare sound that decays and cuts off abruptly. The track that showcases this sound, a slow, menacing song about breaking into someone's home, becomes the first prominent recording to use gated reverb. Within two years, nearly every pop and rock record in the world will chase that drum sound.

Afrobeat meets downtown Manhattan in the Bahamas A four-piece art-rock band and a producer obsessed with West African polyrhythm book time at the same Caribbean studio where the hard rock record was made months earlier. They abandon conventional songwriting. Each track is built as a series of looping grooves, instruments entering one at a time in layered patterns inspired by a 1973 Afrobeat record. Session musicians add guitar solos and trumpet over the locked-in rhythms. The result is a record where rock, funk, and African music are genuinely indistinguishable, not because anyone is borrowing but because the musicians are building from the same rhythmic foundation.

A basement in Minnesota A twenty-two-year-old records most of an album alone in a makeshift sixteen-track studio in the basement of a house on a lake, twenty miles west of Minneapolis. He plays nearly every instrument himself, engineering the sessions under a fake name. The lyrics are explicit enough that his label worries it will never get radio play. He insists. The album, released the same day as the Afrobeat-rock record, fuses funk, new wave, and R&B into something that sounds like none of them. The cover photograph shows him in bikini briefs and a trench coat.

He bet it wouldn't reach number one A country singer in terrible physical shape walks into a Nashville studio to record a song about a man who dies still loving the woman who left him. The producer has been revising the lyrics for years, filling a notebook an inch thick with rewrites. The singer keeps accidentally singing the melody of a different song. The spoken recitation in the middle has to be spliced in eighteen months after the original vocal session. When the singer finally hears the finished version, he tells the producer nobody will buy that morbid song. He loses the bet. It wins the Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal and is still called the greatest country song ever recorded.

Typewriter nails A country singer on the set of a Hollywood comedy needs to write a song for the film's soundtrack. She uses her long acrylic fingernails to simulate the sound of a typewriter, clicking them together to find the rhythm. The song she writes becomes one of the biggest country-pop crossover hits of the year, earns an Oscar nomination, and wins two Grammys. The clicking-nails percussion trick captures something about the character she plays in the film: a working woman keeping time with whatever she has.

Tear gas at a new nation's stadium A reggae singer is invited to perform at the independence celebration for a southern African nation, the first time the country's flag will fly. Forty thousand people fill the stadium, including foreign dignitaries. Police fire tear gas into the crowd. The singer stays on stage and keeps playing. He performs again the next night for an estimated hundred thousand. He has paid tens of thousands of dollars out of his own pocket to fly his band and equipment to the event. The song that serves as the unofficial anthem had been written a year earlier, before anyone was certain independence would come.

35,000 people and a racetrack On August 16, a racetrack in the East Midlands of England hosts the first festival dedicated entirely to heavy metal and hard rock. The lineup features seven bands, some already on their second or third album, others about to release their first. Thirty-five thousand people attend. The promoters lose money. They do it again the following year anyway. The festival will run for decades and become the annual pilgrimage for an entire genre.

Each drum hit recorded alone A producer in a London studio convinces his drummer to play each drum separately, hitting the required drum on the required beat while ghosting the other strokes on his knees and thighs. This lets the producer process each drum sound individually through digital delay units, adding millisecond-level timing shifts imperceptible to the ear but transformative to the feel. The resulting album, released two months after the vocalist's death, sounds like no other record: cavernous, precise, and emotionally devastating, every instrument suspended in its own pocket of processed air.

First gold rap record A rapper becomes the first hip-hop artist signed to a major label and releases a single that sells 840,000 copies, the first certified gold rap record. The year before, another group's twelve-inch single built on a disco bass line had cracked the pop Top 40, proving there was an audience beyond the block parties. Now a downtown new wave singer records a track with a rap section name-checking two Bronx DJs in the lyrics. The song will reach number one the following spring, the first record with a rap verse to top the pop chart. Hip-hop is leaving the parks.

Forty-two musicians and a fifty-second fade Two perfectionists spend over two years making an album at a New York studio, cycling through at least forty-two session musicians. Players describe forty-take sessions and grueling, joyless hours of repetition. A visiting guitarist from a British rock band calls the experience long and grueling. Fifty-five attempts are made to mix the fifty-second fade-out of the opening track alone. The label, the band's former label, and a third party end up in a legal fight over who owns the finished master. The album, when it finally arrives, sounds immaculate and utterly exhausted.

The first album to sample glass A singer who has been writing songs since she was a teenager gets her hands on a new Australian-made digital sampling instrument, one of the first in Britain. She records the sound of breaking glass and processes it through the machine, punctuating the end of a song about an ageing seductress. The resulting album becomes the first by a solo British woman to enter the UK chart at number one. The sampler, a room-sized computer with a light pen and a tiny green screen, will reshape pop production for the next decade.