1981 in Music

Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll At 12:01 a.m. on August 1, a new cable channel launches to a few thousand households in northern New Jersey. The first video played is a two-year-old single by a British duo about technology making the old world obsolete. Five VJs introduce clips in rotation, and the format is simple: music, all day, every day, with no DJ patter between songs. Within two years, the channel will determine which artists sell records and which disappear. The immediate effect is subtler: bands start thinking about how they look before they think about how they sound.

A drum fill that erased ten years of studio technique The producer and engineer are working on a solo debut at a studio in Bath. The talkback microphone, designed so the control room can speak to the live room, is wired through the mixing desk's compressors and noise gates. When the drummer plays a fill, the talkback catches it: enormous, compressed, and cut dead by the gate. The resulting sound, a snare that seems to explode in a vast room and then simply stop, goes straight onto the record. Within months, every rock and pop producer in the world is chasing the same effect.

A silly song with three Temptations in the background A funk singer at a studio in Sausalito wants one more track to round out his fifth album. He writes what he calls a silly little lick, aiming for something with new wave texture, and brings in three members of the label's most famous vocal group to sing background harmonies. The song is tossed off as an afterthought. It reaches number three on the pop chart, becomes one of the most recognized basslines in American music, and nine years later forms the backbone of one of the biggest-selling hip-hop singles of all time.

Three turntables in a single take A DJ walks into a Harlem studio with three turntables, a mixer, and a stack of records. In one unedited take, he crossfades, scratches, backspins, and cuts between disco, funk, rock, and a novelty children's record. The resulting seven-minute track is the first time turntable manipulation has been captured as a composition, not a party trick. It sounds like someone remixing the entire history of popular music in real time, and it gives hip-hop its first virtuoso instrumentalist.

Half a million people on the Great Lawn A folk-pop duo that broke up acrimoniously a decade earlier reunites for one night on a free stage in Central Park. The concert is announced just a week in advance, via newspaper ads. Five hundred thousand people show up, turning the Great Lawn into the largest audience for a concert in the city's history. The setlist is a twenty-one-song survey of a songbook that defined the 1960s, performed by two people who can barely stand to be in the same room.

Outtakes from three different decades A band's new album is assembled almost entirely from leftover studio recordings, some nearly a decade old. New vocal tracks are layered over rhythm sections from abandoned sessions in the mid-1970s. The lead single started life as a reggae jam in 1975, was reworked in 1978, and finally gets sharpened with new guitar overdubs at a studio in Manhattan. Nobody can tell. The single reaches number two, the album goes to number one worldwide, and the subsequent fifty-date stadium tour grosses more money than any rock tour in history to that point.

He hated the single, so he buried it on side two A synth-pop group's frontman thinks the poppiest track on the album is an embarrassment. He relegates it to the last position on side two, as far from the needle drop as possible. The producer fights for it. The label releases it as a single in late November. It becomes the best-selling UK single of the year, a Christmas number one, and eventually moves over 1.5 million copies in Britain alone. The album it comes from spends sixty-nine weeks on the chart.

A day and a half in Advision Two musicians from Leeds walk into a London studio with a producer and record a cover of a 1964 Northern soul single. The vocalist nails it on the first take. The whole session lasts about a day and a half. The original was a flop; this version, rebuilt with stark synthesizers and a drum machine, reaches number one in seventeen countries and sets a record for the longest consecutive run on the American pop chart: forty-three weeks without dropping off.

MCA says no A major label's distribution arm refuses to handle a punk album. The president objects to the lyrical content and pulls the deal. The band's own label, run out of a church in Long Beach, scrambles to press and ship the record independently. It arrives in stores with almost no promotion. It is largely ignored. Over the next decade it becomes one of the foundational documents of American hardcore, the record that proved a band could reach an audience without the industry's permission.

A classified ad in a Los Angeles newspaper A teenage Danish drummer places an ad in a free classified newspaper: drummer looking for other metal musicians to jam. A singer-guitarist from Downey answers. Their first meeting in May goes nowhere. They reconnect in October. The drummer's friend is choosing between two names for a fanzine, and the drummer talks him into the other one so he can keep the better name for his band. The band that results will spend the next four decades as the biggest-selling metal act on the planet.

An eight-and-a-half-minute art piece at number two A performance artist releases a single that runs eight and a half minutes. It is mostly spoken word over a looping electronic drone, with a vocoder processing her voice into something between a human and a machine. A BBC DJ plays it repeatedly. It climbs to number two on the UK singles chart, one of the most improbable chart placements in pop history. She is offered a major label deal on the strength of a record that sounds like nothing else on the radio.

Computer music as a sacred text in Detroit A German electronic group releases an album themed around the rise of computer technology. In Detroit, an FM DJ treats it like a revelation, playing entire sides for his audience night after night. The teenagers listening, mostly young Black men on the west side, absorb its rhythms and start building their own music from drum machines and synthesizers. Within five years, they will have invented an entire genre. The album's counting sequences and melodic patterns also reach a DJ in the Bronx, who will sample them directly into the first electro-funk record.