Skip to main content

Eddie Rockerz’ 80s Fixation

Forty-five records from 1980 — the year disco was officially over and its entire rhythmic vocabulary quietly took over the radio.

1980: the year the eighties started

The received story is that disco died in 1979 and something else replaced it. What this playlist demonstrates is that nothing was replaced; the label was simply dropped. The records in this set are built from the same components as the ones released eighteen months earlier, but the bass is synthesised, the drums are harder, and nobody is calling it disco any more.

That transition is the most interesting thing about 1980, and hearing forty-five of its records in sequence makes the continuity impossible to miss.

What to listen for

Zapp's "More Bounce to the Ounce" is the future arriving. Roger Troutman's talkbox and that bassline became the foundation of West Coast hip-hop a decade later, and the record still sounds like it was made in a different year to everything around it.

The Whispers' "And the Beat Goes On" and Shalamar's "The Second Time Around" are the SOLAR sound at full strength, and The Brothers Johnson's "Stomp!" is Quincy Jones doing the same thing with a bigger budget.

Diana Ross's "Upside Down" and "I'm Coming Out" are Chic's production work, which is how disco's architects survived the backlash — by producing other people.

Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" is the most telling inclusion of all: a rock band's biggest American single, built on a bassline John Deacon wrote after listening to "Good Times".

Stephanie Mills' "Never Knew Love Like This Before" and Change's "A Lovers Holiday" are the Italo-American disco holdouts, the latter in two different mixes.

Tom Browne's "Funkin' for Jamaica" and The S.O.S. Band's "Take Your Time" are where the jazz-funk and the new R&B meet.

Prince's "Why You Wanna Treat Me so Bad?" is the early sighting of the man who would spend the decade dismantling all these categories.

Go deeper

Zapp's debut album and Patrice Rushen's Posh are the two records from this year that most repay full listening.

Then play 1979 and 1980 back to back. The changes are real but they are gradual, and the story of a sudden death does not survive the evidence.

Listening note: track the bass across the set and you can date each record within a year. Real bass guitar means it was conceived before the shift; a synthesised bassline means the studio had already moved on. Several tracks here have both, recorded during the eighteen months when nobody was sure which way it would go.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more