1982 in Music

Thirty songs, nine survive A singer and a producer begin work on a pop album in April at a studio in Los Angeles. They record thirty songs over seven months, cutting entire arrangements and then discarding them. The producer insists on a duet as the first single, over the singer's objections. The singer wants a longer bass introduction on another track; the producer wants to cut it. They compromise at twenty-nine seconds. The album ships on the last day of November and sells a million copies in its first month. Within two years it has sold more copies than any album in history.

A drum machine from a classified ad A DJ in the Bronx wants to fuse German electronic music with funk and hip-hop. His producer finds a musician with the right drum machine through a classified ad in a weekly newspaper: twenty dollars a session. They program the machine to replicate the rhythmic patterns from two tracks by a German electronic group, layer synthesizers and rapping on top, and press it as a twelve-inch single. It invents electro. Within months, teenagers in Detroit, Miami, and London are building entire genres on the same combination of machine rhythm and synthesized bass.

Broken lines from a broken city A session musician and in-house producer at a Harlem label writes a song about life in the South Bronx: poverty, drugs, broken glass everywhere. The group whose name is on the label does not want to record it. Management pressures them into the studio. The lead rapper delivers lines that sound less like a party record and more like a dispatch from a war zone. It becomes the first hip-hop recording added to the Library of Congress, and it moves the genre's center of gravity from the turntable to the microphone.

A cassette tape from New Jersey A rock singer records fifteen songs alone in his bedroom on a four-track cassette machine, using two microphones, an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and not much else. He brings the tape to his band, intending to re-record everything with a full group. The full-band versions sound wrong. The label releases the bedroom cassette as the album. It is stark, haunted, and almost silent compared to everything else on the radio. It proves that a major-label record can be made for the price of a blank tape.

Alone in a house in Minnesota A twenty-four-year-old records his fifth album mostly alone, in a home studio in a split-level house. A programmable drum machine serves as his only consistent collaborator, its 8-bit sampled sounds providing the rhythmic backbone of every track. He generates so much material that it becomes his first double album. One song, driven by a synth riff and layered vocals, gives him his first top-ten pop hit and establishes him as the most unpredictable figure in American music.

Exile in Belgium A soul singer, living in self-imposed exile outside Brussels and struggling with addiction, receives a drum machine and a synthesizer from his new label. He programs a slow, insistent rhythm, sings over it, and produces one of the most intimate records of his career. The single wins two Grammy Awards and marks the first time a major R&B hit is built almost entirely around a drum machine's analog pulse rather than a live rhythm section.

Kitchen glasses on a concrete block A singer-songwriter takes full production control for the first time, spending two years in and out of London studios. She uses a digital sampling instrument to build textures no one has heard before: a looped didgeridoo preset, clusters of breaking glass created by throwing kitchen tumblers onto concrete and sampling the shards note by note. The album baffles her audience and underperforms commercially. It will take decades for listeners to catch up with it.

A voice from the next room A British art-rock group is finishing its final album at a studio complex in the Bahamas. The singer hears a Haitian vocalist in an adjacent room and invites her to contribute. Her wordless, floating melody on the title track transforms it into something luminous and otherworldly. The album becomes the group's biggest seller and one of the defining records of sophisticated pop, all atmosphere and restraint where their earlier work had been jagged and confrontational.

Vocals in a wet kitchen A heavy metal band records its third album in five weeks at a London studio. Their new singer, recruited from a smaller band, records most of his vocals in a dilapidated kitchen with wet plaster on the walls. The engineer is involved in a car accident and presented with a repair bill for exactly 666 pounds. The album's title track attracts protests from religious groups. None of it slows the record down. It reaches number one in the UK and defines the commercial peak of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.

The last song at the Brighton Centre In October, the frontman of Britain's biggest mod-revival band announces they will disband at the end of the year. His bandmates are blindsided: they are simultaneously at number one on the singles and albums charts. The farewell single enters the chart at number one. The final concert takes place in December, thirty months after the band's commercial peak. The frontman walks away to form a jazz-pop group. The audience never quite forgives him.

A laser reads a record for the first time On October 1, a consumer electronics company releases the first compact disc player in Japan. It costs 168,000 yen. The first commercially available disc is a 1978 pop-rock album by an American pianist and singer. The format stores music as a digital signal read by a laser beam, producing no surface noise, no pops, no crackle. It will take six years for the new format to outsell vinyl, but the trajectory is clear from the first day: the analog era has an expiration date.