Why is 80s music so popular

Then came the MTV in , and it would forever change the way we consumed music. The bands and the artists soon learned the new way to present themselves in the new visual medium.

The economy under President Reagen was booming, and the middle class was resurging. The middle-class men could also afford the music tech now. And so the beauty of music was cherished by everyone. With the surge in the global economy, music gained new recognition.

The music was no longer limited to geographical or language barriers. The record labels were trying everything that they could do to regulate the taste of the fans. For the first time, one could easily afford a sampling keyboard with an onboard drum machine to track their first hit. Also, the tech has significantly reduced the recording expenses, and now artists with a moderate budget could record their tracks. But when it came to singing, the artists were on their own. The auto-tune was still not introduced, and the singers needed to re-record their tracks until they got a perfect one.

Every record label wanted to sell as many albums as possible. They wanted to find great talents who would have massive careers and could change the music game. There are some practical reasons as well as some theories that may explain it.

What we see on our screens and hear through our earbuds is dictated in large part by what inspired the creators and individuals who support their visions, many of whom are in their 30s, 40s, and early 50s and may have a particular affinity for this time period. The time-traveling powers of the digital era — which, thanks to YouTube and other internet rabbit holes, have given pop-culture nostalgia even more room to run rampant — disrupted the everyyears cycle that used to be the standard.

Perhaps modern nostalgia now happens in two waves. Shows like The Americans or Halt and Catch Fire certainly have their carefully chosen, adrenaline shots of nostalgia. Super Mario Bros.! But they are much more interested in reexamining the era for its political paranoia and the first steps taken toward a technological revolution that transformed the way we live.

It became a part of us. Those guys exude confidence and those are the guys that I grew up watching. Again, digital advancements have made it possible for us to show our kids anything we loved back in the third grade in an instant, with a quick click or mere finger swipe. When these Gen X—influenced or, if you prefer, brainwashed kids, grow up and start making TV shows and movies or writing songs, what do you think some of their formative touchstones will be?

A transitional period Even among the greats there was some self-abasement going on in an effort to keep up with the Joneses… the Howard Joneses. Not that it was a completely ignoble goal.

It was a transitional period full of huge, nationally shared moments but also tiny, secret scenes. Purple Rain -era Prince was culturally ubiquitous in a way that even the top seller of , Drake , could never hope to achieve in our more splintered landscape.

There were songs, albums and performances that seemed to instantly impact all of America, with Bruce Springsteen and U2 proving you could go for stadium-act success without sacrificing artistic prowess. The Twin Cities gave us twin punk and funk movements. In New York, the Studio 54 era gave way to headier days that had club-goers vibing to everything from Afrika Bambaataa to Kraftwerk remixes and Grace Jones.

With the IRS label suddenly blurring the gap between indie and mainstream, the South was primed to rise again, in the form of an invasion by R. Building bridges Bridges were being built, as if pop music was suddenly flush with tax dollars for infrastructure. Which, in a way it was, with all that CD-format conversion money suddenly flowing in.

And the story of the racial bridge in American music is woefully incomplete without the watershed moment of MTV giving in on programming Michael Jackson in the early 80s — though whether through outside boycott pressure or internal wisdom will always be up for debate. That white people liked black music had been no secret in the Motown and disco eras, but a cultural sea change had started to occur when MTV shifted from black-tolerant to African-American-dominated — a move that culminated in hip-hop becoming the pop music of today.

In the eternally white world of country music, remarkable changes were also afoot. The smooth countrypolitan flavor was nearing its end, leading to the so-called hard country resurgence that let George Strait , Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam in the door. Reba McEntire, not yet uni-monikered, represented an aw-shucks brand of fresh Nashville feminism — a folksy but fierce bridge between the variety-show era and the sisters-doing-it-for-themselves age.

Which finally brings us — as all discussions of 80s music must — to synth-pop. The kids who grew up with the 80s as their wonder years have been conditioned to think of their entire upbringing as a guilty pleasure at best. But survivors of the post-Me Decade carry a lot of it.