1984 in Music

He pulled the bass out of the mix The biggest pop single of 1984 was recorded in a single day by one person playing every instrument. The original arrangement had a bass guitar part. After listening back, the artist decided the song was too conventional with the low end in place, told the engineer to mute the bass track, and left a hole in the frequency spectrum that nobody had heard on a dance record before. The single spent five weeks at number one. No bass, no precedent.

A comeback measured in weeks, not years A singer who had not charted in America since 1975 recorded a full album in two weeks across six London studios, each track assigned to a different producer. She had been cleaning houses for a living. The album sold twelve million copies worldwide, produced a number-one single, and won four Grammys. The gap between obscurity and global fame was fourteen days of studio time.

Sleeping in the studio, recording through the night A thrash metal band flew to Copenhagen to record their second album at a studio chosen because it was cheap. They could not afford a hotel, so they slept in the live room during the day while other bands used the studio and recorded at night when the rooms were free. The bassist had been teaching the others basic music theory in the van. The resulting album introduced acoustic passages, extended instrumentals, and harmonic complexity to a genre that had none of it a year earlier.

Eighty verses and five years for one song A singer-songwriter had been working on a single composition for five years, filling notebooks with over eighty draft verses before settling on four. The finished song was built on a simple arpeggiated keyboard pattern and a vocal that shifted between prayer and seduction. His label refused to release the album in the United States. The song went unnoticed for nearly a decade before two different cover versions turned it into one of the most recorded compositions in popular music.

Forty-five tracks for eleven hundred dollars A trio from San Pedro, California recorded a double album of forty-five songs at a studio in Venice for eleven hundred dollars. Most tracks were mixed on a single eight-track. The songs averaged about ninety seconds each, blending punk, funk, folk, and jazz into structures that obeyed no genre rules. Released the same month as another double album from Minneapolis that cost thirty-two hundred dollars, the two records between them proved that ambition and budget had nothing to do with each other.

A fourteen-year-old answers back A group released a single about a woman who would not return their attention. After they failed to appear at a concert, the promoter brought a fourteen-year-old from the Queensbridge projects into the studio. She recorded a response track in a single session. One hundred copies were pressed and distributed by hand in New York. The record sold a quarter of a million copies in the metro area alone and generated over thirty answer records. Hip-hop had its first recorded feud and its first female star.

A wedding dress on a seventeen-foot cake The first MTV Video Music Awards ceremony was held at Radio City Music Hall in September. A pop singer performed her new single while emerging from a seventeen-foot wedding cake in a white dress and a belt buckle that read BOY TOY. The performance was messy: she lost a shoe, crawled across the stage, and writhed on the floor. MTV executives were horrified. The audience was transfixed. The single went to number one in December. The performance made her the most talked-about artist in America overnight.

The first disc off the line In September, a factory in Terre Haute, Indiana pressed the first compact disc manufactured on American soil. The disc was a rock album already three months old, chosen because it was the biggest release on the label. CDs had been available only as expensive imports from Japan and West Germany. The new plant could produce millions of discs a year. The same year, cassette tapes outsold vinyl records for the first time in history. The format that had defined recorded music for over three decades was losing ground on both sides.

Cables through the castle An Irish rock band moved into a castle in County Meath for a month to write and record with two producers known for ambient, textured work. They set up a control room in the drawing room and ran cables into the adjoining ballroom. The sessions replaced the sharp, aggressive sound of their previous records with something wider and more impressionistic. The resulting album and its lead single became the foundation of the band's arena-filling decade.

A dorm room on University Place A twenty-one-year-old film student and a twenty-seven-year-old concert promoter started a record label in a dormitory room at a university in downtown Manhattan. Their first release was a single by a teenage rapper from Queens. The label would sign its artists to one-page contracts and record them with minimal production: a drum machine, a turntable, and a microphone. Within two years it became the most important hip-hop label in the world.

Thirty-seven artists, one Sunday After a television news report about famine in East Africa, a singer and a songwriter gathered thirty-seven pop and rock musicians into a London studio on a Sunday in late November. They wrote the song together, assigned vocal lines on the spot, and had the record pressed within a week. It reached number one in Britain and raised twenty million dollars. The session led directly to the stadium benefit concerts the following summer.