1983 in Music

A five-pin cable between two strangers At a trade show in Anaheim in January, a synthesizer made in California is connected to a synthesizer made in Japan by a single cable with a five-pin DIN plug. They play the same notes. It is the first public demonstration of a communication protocol that will let any electronic instrument talk to any other, regardless of manufacturer. By August, every major synthesizer company in the world has adopted the standard. The cable costs a few dollars. It rewrites the economics of recording studios.

Seventeen days and a blues guitarist from Texas A producer known for disco and funk records flies to New York to work with a rock star who wants a hit. The sessions at a midtown studio take seventeen days. Four songs a day. The band is recruited from the producer's own group. The lead guitarist on the record is a twenty-eight-year-old blues player from Austin who has never heard the singer's music before walking into the studio. The resulting album sells ten million copies and gives the singer his biggest single. The guitarist is fired before the tour starts and releases his own debut the following month.

Fifty million people watch one glove A television special celebrating a record label's twenty-fifth anniversary is taped at a civic auditorium in Pasadena. One performer, the only artist on the bill not singing a song from the label's catalog, walks onstage in a sequined jacket and a single rhinestoned glove. Midway through the song, he slides backward across the stage in a move he learned from street dancers. Fifty million viewers watch the broadcast in May. The next day, the phone lines at the label's office do not stop ringing.

The sleeve cost more than the sale price A Manchester band releases a twelve-inch single built on a drum machine, a sequenced synthesizer bassline, and a sampled choir. Rather than playing the kick drum sound directly, they run it through a monitor speaker and re-record it with a microphone, capturing the room's reverb and giving the machine-made beat a physical weight. The record becomes the best-selling twelve-inch single of all time. The designer creates a die-cut floppy-disc sleeve so expensive to manufacture that the label loses money on every copy sold.

A drum machine, two microphones, and nothing else Two rappers from Hollis, Queens, walk into a studio with a drum machine and strip hip-hop down to its frame. No live band, no replayed funk breakbeats, no strings, no horns. Just a programmed beat and two voices trading lines. The B-side of their debut single becomes the blueprint for a new school of rap: harder, leaner, built for the street rather than the dance floor. For three years, nearly every hip-hop record that matters will follow this template.

A ten-minute scratch session from the Bronx A jazz pianist who once played with Miles Davis is recording an electro-funk album in a Brooklyn studio. The producer brings in a twenty-year-old DJ from the Bronx, who arrives with two friends and a stack of records. The DJ scratches a single track back and forth for about ten minutes and is handed 350 dollars. The resulting song becomes the most-played music video of the following year, wins five MTV awards, and introduces turntablism to living rooms around the world.

The label said no to the video A cable music channel has been on the air for two years, but its playlist is almost exclusively white rock acts. The president of a major record label threatens to pull every one of his artists' videos unless the channel airs a clip by a Black pop singer. The channel relents in March. The video goes into heavy rotation. Album sales jump by ten million copies. By year's end, the channel has expanded to New York and Los Angeles, and its power to break an artist is absolute.

375,000 for Metal Day A tech billionaire bankrolls a three-day festival in San Bernardino, California, at a cost of twelve and a half million dollars. The Saturday is designated Heavy Metal Day. Three hundred and seventy-five thousand people show up, more than half the festival's entire attendance. A metal album tops the Billboard album chart for the first time in November, replacing the year's biggest rock record. The genre is splitting: one branch heading toward arenas and MTV, the other toward basements and speed.

Kill 'em for fifteen thousand A thrash band from Los Angeles scrapes together a fifteen-thousand-dollar budget to record their debut at a studio in Rochester, New York. The lead guitarist has been in the band for barely a month, having replaced the original player who was fired for drinking. He learns the songs on the flight from San Francisco. The band sleeps in strangers' houses because they cannot afford a hotel. The album, released on an independent label run out of a flea-market record stall in New Jersey, will eventually sell three million copies.

The producer wanted forty takes, so they fired him A four-piece band from Athens, Georgia, is paired with a producer in Boston who demands multiple takes of every song and adds keyboard parts without permission. The band revolts and demands to record with two local engineers in Charlotte, North Carolina. The sessions run seven weeks. The singer's vocals are mixed low, half-buried in reverberating guitar arpeggios, and the lyrics are largely unintelligible. A music magazine names the resulting debut the best album of the year, ahead of the biggest-selling album in history.

Every song written by a teenager A trio from Milwaukee finances their debut with a ten-thousand-dollar loan from the drummer's father and records it at a studio in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Every song on the record was written by the guitarist between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. The album never appears on the Billboard chart during its original release. It sells slowly and steadily for years, eventually going gold, then platinum, almost entirely by word of mouth and college radio play.

A cassette tape and a bus stop A guitarist in Manchester knocks on a singer's door with a handful of songs and an idea for a band. They record their debut single in a single day at a studio in Stockport for 250 pounds, funded by a local businessman. The guitarist walks into an independent label's office and hands the receptionist a cassette, saying it is not just another tape. The label owner calls back on Monday and offers to release it. The band will not put out their debut album until the following year, but the single, built on ringing open chords and a voice that sounds like it has given up on being loved, announces something new.