1985 in Music

Check your ego at the door Forty-five artists arrive at a Hollywood studio on a January night to sing a single chorus together. The backing track was cut days earlier at a different studio, rhythm section knocking it out in a few hours. The lead vocal was recorded alone at 8 PM before anyone else showed up. A sign on the studio door sets the tone. The resulting single sells over four million copies in the United States, raises tens of millions for famine relief, and wins four Grammy Awards. It also establishes a template: pop music can mobilize on a global scale, and the biggest names will show up if you ask.

Three thousand frames drawn by hand A Norwegian trio's single has already flopped once when the label commissions a new video. Two animators spend sixteen weeks rotoscoping roughly three thousand frames, tracing live-action footage into pencil-sketch animation. The concept comes from one animator's student film about a man on a train. The finished clip costs about 100,000 pounds. When the new version of the single ships with the video, it climbs to number one in the United States and wins six awards at the MTV ceremony the following year. The song had been sitting on a shelf for months. Nobody wanted it until they could see it.

A barn behind the family house A songwriter builds a 48-track studio in a converted barn on the family property and spends two years assembling an album there. The process starts with a drum machine and a sampler laying down rhythmic beds, then layers piano, traditional Irish instruments, and multitracked vocals into dense arrangements. The finished album splits into two halves: one side of pop songs, one side of a continuous conceptual suite about a woman drowning. The pop side produces a single that reaches number three. The suite side produces some of the most ambitious electronic composition of the decade. No outside studio, no producer's clock ticking.

The first album that sold a million CDs A band records its fifth album on a digital tape machine at a Caribbean studio, transfers overdubs to a Manhattan facility after a defective tape wipes some early takes, and releases the result in a fully digital format. For the first time, a major album sells more copies on compact disc than on vinyl. The album spends nine weeks at number one and eventually moves thirty million copies worldwide. Its lead single also premieres one of the first music videos to use computer-generated imagery: blocky animated figures playing instruments inside a television screen, rendered over three and a half weeks on hardware that fills an entire room.

Reduced by Rick Rubin A seventeen-year-old rapper from Queens records his debut album in a Chinatown studio. The producer, a twenty-one-year-old NYU student, strips everything back: drum machine, scratching, occasional samples, and a voice that fills whatever space the beat leaves open. The production credit reads Reduced by Rick Rubin, a joke about minimalism that doubles as a manifesto. The label behind the release has only existed for a year. By the end of 1985 it has a distribution deal with a major and a roster that will reshape American music within two years.

The beatbox and the storyteller A Harlem beatboxer and a nineteen-year-old British-Jamaican rapper from the Bronx cut a twelve-inch single with no instruments at all. The A-side is built entirely on the human voice mimicking a drum machine. The B-side is a narrative about getting ready for a night out, funny and vivid and seemingly tossed off. The A-side goes gold. The B-side becomes one of the most sampled recordings in hip-hop history, its vocal melody and cadence turning up in hundreds of songs over the following decades.

Feedback as a pop song Two Scottish brothers record their debut album in six weeks for 17,000 pounds. The formula is deceptively simple: bury classic pop melodies under walls of guitar feedback and distortion, so thick you have to listen through the noise to find the tune. The result sounds like a fifties girl-group record played through a broken amplifier at maximum volume. It only reaches number thirty-one on the UK chart, but it becomes a blueprint. Within four years, an entire genre of bands will build their sound on this exact collision of sweetness and noise.

Wham! play Beijing A British pop duo becomes the first Western pop act to perform in the People's Republic of China. The first show takes place at a 12,000-seat gymnasium in Beijing, where tickets cost less than two dollars each and every buyer receives a free cassette of the duo's album. The lead singer performs bare-chested to an audience that has no cultural context for what they are watching. A documentary crew captures the entire trip. The concerts are equal parts diplomatic stunt, pop spectacle, and genuine confusion on both sides of the stage.

Senators versus songwriters A group of Washington political spouses, alarmed by what their children are hearing on records, compiles a list of fifteen objectionable songs and pushes for government hearings. In September, three musicians testify before a Senate committee. One is a satirist who dismantles the proposal's logic. One is a heavy metal frontman who arrives in a sleeveless denim vest and quotes the First Amendment. One is a folk singer who agrees with the committee and surprises everyone. Two months later, the recording industry agrees to place advisory stickers on albums with explicit content. The stickers become a badge of honor.

Sixteen hours across two continents On a Saturday in July, a sixteen-hour concert is broadcast from two stadiums simultaneously, one in London and one in Philadelphia. The satellite link reaches an estimated 1.9 billion viewers. The London set includes a performance so commanding it revives a band's entire career overnight. One performer plays both venues on the same day, crossing the Atlantic by supersonic jet between sets. A folk singer's offhand remark about American farmers from the Philadelphia stage inspires a country legend to organize an entirely separate benefit concert two months later.

Forty songs on a cassette, a producer's invitation A songwriter from the northeast of England hands a producer forty or fifty demos on a cassette tape. The producer, who discovered the band through a BBC radio show, picks his favorites and reconstructs the chord sequences note by note, editing the pianist's fingering to make the voicings cleaner. The resulting album becomes a defining record of sophisticated pop: literate, jazz-inflected, melodically rich, and almost impossible to categorize. It sells modestly and develops a cult following that never goes away.

Paul Simon flies to Johannesburg In February, a songwriter and his engineer fly secretly to South Africa and spend two weeks recording with local musicians at a studio in Johannesburg. No material is written in advance. The sessions are spontaneous, built on rhythms and melodies that emerge in the room. South Africa is under an international cultural boycott because of apartheid, and the trip will generate years of controversy. The album that comes from these sessions, released the following year, sells sixteen million copies, wins Album of the Year at the Grammys, and permanently changes the relationship between Western pop and African music.