HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

4.      The 1980s  
Technological advances led to a revival of the music industry during the 1980s. The market for popular music expanded with new media formats, including music video, introduced by the Music Television (MTV) network in 1981, and the digitally-recorded compact disc, introduced in 1983. In 1982 entertainer Michael Jackson released Thriller, which became the biggest-selling album in history, and established a trend in which record companies relied upon a few massive hits to generate profits. Jackson's success contributed greatly to proving the promotional value of music videos. It thereafter became very difficult for record companies to achieve hit records without having the music receive intensive airplay on music-video networks.

Other mainstream rock hits of the 1980s came from a group of charismatic artists, each of whom attracted mass-audience followings extending across traditional social boundaries. Singer Bruce Springsteen appealed to many as a working-class hero. Other superstars followed Jackson's lead by integrating dance and video presentations into their work, including the artist formerly known as Prince (), whose 1984 single “When Doves Cry” was the first song in more than 20 years to top both the pop and R&B charts in Billboard magazine; and Madonna, who came to symbolize female sexual liberation through her controversial videos and lyrics. Also during the 1980s the audience for heavy metal expanded from its original white-male, working-class core to include more middle-class fans, both male and female. By the end of the decade, heavy-metal bands, such as Van Halen, AC/DC, and Metallica, accounted for as much as 40 percent of all sound recordings sold in the United States.

Anticipated by reggae in the 1970s, worldbeat music (also called ethnopop) began to emerge during the early 1980s, with the success of the album Juju Music (1982) by Nigerian musician King Sunny Ade. Ade's music, which blended traditional African drums with electric guitars and synthesizers, helped to stimulate an interest in non-Western music in the United States and the United Kingdom, and opened the way for artists such as Youssou N'Dour, from Senegal; Papa Wemba, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire); Ladysmith Black Mambazo, from South Africa; Ofra Haza, from Israel; Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, from Pakistan; and the Gipsy Kings, from France. Rock superstars, such as Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and Paul Simon, whose 1985 album Graceland featured musicians from Africa and Latin America, played an important role in exposing worldbeat musicians to audiences in the United States and Europe, and reaffirmed the worldwide appeal of rock music.

Perhaps the most significant rock-music development of the 1980s was the rise of rap, a genre in which vocalists perform rhythmic speech, usually accompanied by music snippets, or samples, from prerecorded material or from music created by synthesizers. Rap originated in the mid-1970s in the South Bronx community of New York City and was initially associated with a cultural movement called hip-hop, which included acrobatic dancing (known as break dancing) and graffiti art. DJs such as Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa experimented with innovative turntable techniques, including switching between multiple discs; back-spinning, or rotating the disc by hand in order to repeat particular phrases; and scratching, moving the phonograph needle across vinyl record grooves to create rhythmic sound effects.

The first rap records were made in 1979 by small, independent record companies. Although artists such as the Sugarhill Gang had national hits during the early 1980s, rap music did not enter the popular music mainstream until 1986, when rappers Run-D.M.C. and the hard-rock band Aerosmith collaborated on a version of the song “Walk This Way,” creating a new audience for rap among white, suburban, middle-class rock fans. By the end of the 1980s, MTV had established a program dedicated solely to rap, and artists such as M. C. Hammer and the Beastie Boys had achieved multi-platinum record sales to broad interracial audiences.