1986 in Music

Hillbilly gibberish at Magic Ventures Run-DMC had been rapping over the guitar intro to a 1975 rock song at live shows for months, looping the riff and freestyling on top. Their producer suggested they record the whole thing, with the original band's vocalist and guitarist. The rappers resisted, calling the lyrics hillbilly gibberish. The session cost $8,000 for a single day at a New York studio. The resulting single climbed to number four on the pop chart, the first hip-hop record in the top five, and the first hip-hop video to get heavy MTV rotation. It proved that rap and rock could share a stage, a groove, and an audience.

Three thrash albums in seven months Between March and October, three bands released albums that defined the ceiling of thrash metal. The first was recorded over three nocturnal months in Copenhagen, the band working exclusively from dusk to dawn, never seeing daylight. The second runs twenty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds, so extreme in speed and subject matter that its distributor refused to handle it and another label had to step in. The third arrived from a guitarist who had been fired from the first band three years earlier, and it bristled with the furious precision of someone determined to outplay his former collaborators. Nothing in heavy music has matched the concentrated force of those seven months.

A cassette from Soweto In 1984, a songwriter in a creative slump received a bootleg cassette of South African township jive. He flew to Johannesburg and recorded extended jams with local musicians over two weeks, paying them $200 an hour when the local rate was $15. He violated a United Nations cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa. Fellow musicians condemned him. The resulting album sold fourteen million copies, won Album of the Year, and introduced accordion-driven mbaqanga and isicathamiya vocal harmonies to a global audience that had never heard either word before.

The class of 1986 rewrites Nashville Three debut country albums arrived within months of each other, and all three rejected the slick, synth-padded crossover sound that had dominated Nashville since the early 1980s. One leaned into the Bakersfield shuffle of the 1960s. One was raw, twangy, and blue-collar enough to get compared to rock acts from New Jersey. The third came from a singer who had been turned down by every major label in town, signed only because his manager refused to stop calling. Together they sold millions and launched what critics called the new traditionalist movement.

Forty dollars at a Chicago pawnshop Three musicians in Chicago bought a used bass synthesizer from a pawnshop for forty dollars. One of them started manually twisting the pitch and filter knobs while a sequence played, and the bass notes mutated into serrated tones that wiggled and screamed like laser fire. They recorded the result and began playing it in Chicago clubs throughout 1986. When the track was finally pressed in 1987, it became a sensation in British clubs and gave a name to a new genre: acid house. The forty-dollar instrument reshaped dance music worldwide.

Control in Minneapolis A twenty-year-old singer arrived at a Minneapolis studio having just annulled her marriage and fired her father as her manager. The two producers she chose built tracks around programmed drums, synthesized bass, and a new kind of triplet swing that blurred the line between funk and electronic pop. Five singles charted. One week the album sold 250,000 copies, a record for a female artist. The record severed her from her family's musical dynasty and made her a solo star on her own terms.

A bus on black ice On September 27, a tour bus carrying a thrash metal band hit a patch of black ice on a Swedish highway two miles north of Ljungby. The bus flipped. The bassist, twenty-four years old, was thrown through a window and crushed when the bus landed on top of him. His final performance had been the previous night at an arena in Stockholm. The album he had recorded nine months earlier in Copenhagen is still widely considered the greatest thrash metal record ever made. His death closed the most triumphant and devastating year the genre has ever known.

Sub Pop, side A A fanzine editor in Seattle scraped together enough money to release a compilation LP featuring bands from the American underground. He had been writing about regional scenes for years in a column called Sub Pop U.S.A. A local band recorded an EP for him that summer, but he could not afford to press it until the following year. When he finally did, the promotional copy described the music as ultra-loose grunge that destroyed the morals of a generation, one of the earliest uses of that word in a music marketing context. The label he founded would sign three of the biggest bands of the early 1990s.

The first rap album at number one A trio of former punk kids from New York, two of them barely old enough to drink, released a debut album on a hip-hop label distributed by a major. It entered the Billboard 200 and climbed to the top, the first rap album ever to reach number one. Before the album came out, the group had opened for a pop superstar's arena tour and toured with every major name in hip-hop on a package tour that drew violence and national headlines. The album was the best-selling rap record of the decade.

Sixteen names at the Waldorf The first Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony took place at a hotel ballroom in New York City on January 23. Sixteen musicians were inducted, spanning the music's first three decades: the founders of rock and roll, the first wave of rhythm and blues, the original hillbilly cats. One inductee had died in a plane crash at twenty-two. Another had stopped performing years earlier, retreated from public life entirely. The after-party jam session brought all the living inductees together on one stage for the only time.

Programmed drums, African vocals, and a trumpet in the dark A sixty-year-old jazz trumpeter released an album built almost entirely on programmed synthesizers, sampling, and drum loops, composed and arranged by a multi-instrumentalist thirty years his junior. It was named for a South African archbishop and anti-apartheid activist. The trumpeter's embrace of studio technology infuriated jazz traditionalists, one of whom walked uninvited onto his stage at a Vancouver festival that same year and was told to leave in no uncertain terms. The confrontation crystallized a generational war over what jazz was allowed to become.