MUSIC LOG for GROUP 8

Late 1970s-1980s

1. “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” 1979; Charlie Daniels Band.

Burly North Carolina fiddler Charlie Daniels was a long-standing figure in rock, beginning with rockabilly in 1959 and later recording with Bob Dylan, the Allman Brothers, and Lynard Skynard. With this monumentally successful song, he won over country audiences by employing a familiar Southern rock sound to quote old-time fiddle tunes. “The Devil” was an unalloyed stroke of Americana genius in pop history, akin to “El Paso”’s use of a Western-Mexican sound in 1960. It also posed a new problem for radio: some stations played the “son of a bitch” line and some bleeped it out until Daniels replaced the offensive lyric with a version that used “son of a gun.”

2. “Ziggy Stardust,” 1972; David Bowie.

David Jones was first inspired to rock ‘n roll after listening to his dad’s Little Richard 45s. In the footsteps of the self-aggrandizing avatar, Jones (who changed his name to Bowie to avoid being mistaken for Davy Jones of the Monkees) would bring theatrics and self-invention to the fore in rock. Also, oddly reminiscent of Richard’s early stints in transvestite bar circuits, Bowie would carry gender-bending to the mainstream. On album covers in drag, rouge, and mascara professing his bisexuality, Bowie would become the paragon of the costumed cross-gender play that characterized the 70s and 80s. Taken from his third album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, this song explores the autoerotic megalomania of Ziggy the outerspace androgyne — what would become the prototype for alter-ego stage personas in rock. By this time Bowie had already established himself as multi-talented and irrepressible: collaborating with contemporaries from Yes, The Moody Blues, and The Velvet Underground, producing albums for early American punk rockers like Iggy Pop, writing songs for art-pop groups like Mott the Hoople, directing early videos, acting onstage, and organizing music festivals. For decades he remained a driving force in pop culture before his death in 2016.

3. “Staying Alive,” 1978; the Bee Gees.

The last few decades have seen zeitgist  music movies with a potent theme song: for the 50s, it was Blackboard Jungle and “Rock Around the Clock”; for the 60s, it was Hard Days Night and its title cut; for the 70s, it was Saturday Night Fever and “Staying Alive.” By the end of the decade, it was apparent that disco was more than a simple pop fad: it was a cultural trend toward the metropolitan aesthetic of urban nightlife, particularly dancing to strobe lights while high on cocaine. In fact, of the top ten Billboard hits for the entire decade, Bee Gees disco songs occupy four slots, including this song as #1. Movie director Quentin Tarantino resurrected the vacuous movie’s star, John Travolta, with his role in Pulp Fiction. And although recent movies like Boogie Nights and Studio 54 have enshrined the disco era, its pulsing amphetamine rhythm, symphonic swell, and nasally whining Australian falsetto remain, for the most part, frozen in the peculiar taste of the day.

4. “I Will Survive,” 1979; Gloria Gaynor.

This song has become an anthem on many different levels. Gaynor was a Black woman singing about liberation and survival at a time when “Black consciousness” ebbed and the Women’s Rights movement waxed (culminating in the National Organization of Women’s failed push for an Equal Rights Amendment). Though both disco selections deal with themes of enduring (it was a dark time for the American economy), Gaynor’s song itself has better endured the test of time. Indeed, “I Will Survive” has proven to be self-fulfilling prophesy, successfully wedding what was best about disco — its pulsing energy — with a timeless affirmation of personhood and independence. Perhaps this is how songs endure inevitable changes in taste and style: take a moderate amount of what’s best about the sound of the day, put very catchy or very important lyrics to it, and it has a better-than-average chance of successfully declaring, like Gaynor: “I will survive!”

5. “Rapper’s Delight,” 1979; Sugarhill Gang

Properly understood, this is the champagne bottle that launched the titanic cruise ship of rap onto the high seas of commerce.  Issued as an almost quarter-hour epic 12” on Sugarhill Records, with the B-side this six-minute version (which did receive substantial airplay on R&B as well as pop stations), “Rapper’s Delight” sold nationwide at unprecedented levels for such a small independent label.  Although the art of rap had existed in the R&B repertoire since James Brown sung “Brother Rap” in the 60s, this was the first dedicatedly rap song to reach a wide audience. It was performed with a live session band and five rappers taking the mic relay style, in turn boasting and bragging about their prowess and finesse. Over the previous decade, rap had developed as the practiced, rhymed banter of DJs as they mixed songs on houseparty stereos in the Bronx. By the turn of the decade, it had developed a life separate enough from its origins to be considered a phenomenon unto itself. The rest, as they say, is history.

6. “September,” 1979; Earth, Wind, and Fire

From the album I Am, this song shows why the group had won four Grammys already, including one for vocal arrangement. Chicago brothers Maurice and Verdine White formed the backbone of this lush studio-soul outfit that blended mythic Egyptian imagery with science fiction drama in their unique stage shows. The band was also known for its developed musical virtuosity, as well as its lavish costumes and synchronized choreography. In short, E W & F not only cranked out hits (by this time, they already had a half dozen top ten hits) and won Grammys, they were a fantastic spectacle of performance that was characteristic of large concert bands of the decade. They were unique in that their sound hit big on both R&B and pop charts. In a few years, they had come to represent a vast crossover potential for Black artists that would be realized in the next decade. It never happened for E W & F, however; vocalist and percussionist Philip Bailey railed against the barriers the group was unable to break through: “If you’re black, you’re labeled R&B. But if you’re white and play R&B, you’re pop. It’s not what your music says at all. Before, black and white people’s backgrounds were totally different. But now kids grow up listening to all kinds of stuff. The musicians coming up now have many different kinds of expression, but they’re still labeled and marketed based on the color of their skin.”

THE 1980s

7. “Billie Jean,” 1983; Michael Jackson.

The 80s was the decade when African American artists came into their own as pop entertainers, epitomized by Jackson declaring himself the “King of Pop” and purchasing the rights to all the Beatles’ songs. The stellar pop success of Jackson’s Thriller, produced by r&b mastermind Quincy Jones, made it clear that African Americans would no longer be consigned to the market sidelines. It was true that there had been many great, potential cross-over r&b artists in the past. But Jackson was a pioneer for a reason: “Billie Jean” was the first Black video shown on MTV. In its first few years, MTV was a notoriously all-white venue and a powerful new marketing tool for record companies to reach white suburbia’s teenage consumer. The cable station at first resisted showing a Black artist, but eventually buckled under CBS’s threat that it would pull its entire artist roster from the station unless it showed Jackson’s film. The result was that the fancy-dancing, moon-walking, glove-wearing progeny of Motown’s Jackson 5 found a home in middle America. Of course, it didn’t hurt that never before had better music been more slickly produced and craftfully packaged than it was with Thriller.

8. “When Doves Cry,” 1984; Prince and The Revolution.

Defying explanation or categorization, the meteoric rise to fame of Prince Roger Nelson’s music and personal style was, in the words of a later album title, a sign of the times. With Jackson, he was in the small vanguard of African Americans who mined the gold of expanded music territory by mixing styles and sounds while exploiting media. In Prince’s case, he convinced Warner Brothers to bankroll his direction of the autobiographical movie Purple Rain, a conventionally self-aggrandized, romantic portrait of the loner-rocker. It was a box office smash and his record sales went through the roof, particularly for this single — making it both the decade’s definitive music movie and song. Like fellow Minnesotan Dylan, he is diminutive and musically brilliant with a long, tortuous career that attests to it; but unlike Dylan, he alternately donned purple g-strings and high heels, played phallus-shaped guitars, and insisted on being referred to by a glyph while all the while obsessively, mellifluously shrieking about private parts and God.

9. “Sweet Dreams,” 1983; The Eurythmics.

In what could be called the third British Invasion (at least for the purposes of this log), The Eurythmics, along with their contemporary band Culture Club, represented a radical new sound and style in American pop. Both Annie Lennox and Boy George (of Culture Club) were on the forefront of what would become a decade-long trend of ambiguous sexuality in pop music, notably with guys dressing up like girls, from fellow Brits Duran Duran to American pop metalists Poison. This was not new to pop-rock (its roots could be traced to Little Richard’s homage to cross-dressing, “Good Golly Miss Molly,” through the gaudy foppishness of Mr. Stardust himself, David Bowie) but it was the mainstreaming of sexual ambiguity. For instance, Boy George appeared on prime-time TV (before the age of cable) as a pop sensation of the day, decked out in mascara and pastel extensions, announcing to 20/20’s Barbara Walters (and to Reagan’s “moral majority” as well) that he went both ways. There was nothing about either group, however, that consigned them to the dismissible freak sideshow of the rock circus. “Sweet Dreams” offers one glimpse of the quality and variety of “new wave” pop, influenced by late-70s forces, from punk and reggae to artsy electronica.

10. “Fall on Me,” 1986; by R.E.M.

Since the advent of punk in the late 1970s, a subculture of experimental rock music had brewed on college campuses around the country. Nowhere was that more evident than in nearby Athens of the early 80s, where students decided to go to U of GA just to dig the small club music scene promoted by a prominent independent label, I.R.S., and their most successful act, R.E.M.  While tirelessly touring clubs and high school auditoriums for six years, R.E.M. recorded four albums in relative obscurity. Nevertheless, they garnered consistent critical acclaim and a ferociously loyal, burgeoning fan base before they made it to mainstream radio play with this abstruse protest against acid rain. Although their complete stamp of approval from the industry would have to wait until they received a Grammy for Out of Time in the 90s, their inroad with “Fall on Me” foreshadowed a groundswell of “alternative” bands, from 10,000 Maniacs to Jane’s Addiction, who made it into the pop mainstream during the late 80s.

11. “Jackie Brown,” 1989; John Cougar Mellencamp.

Continuing the 80s trend of sounds that defy easy categorization, Mellencamp’s story song caps a decade of his Midwestern rebel rock (during which he added “Mellencamp” back to his stage name) with socially conscious protest characteristic of the era. Mellencamp’s concern was domestic, particularly the plight of farmers in light of Reagan-era subsidy cutbacks. (In fact, Mellencamp was so impassioned that, by the end of the decade, when a reporter on a news show asked him about the federal budget’s dedication of billions to renovate monuments, Mellencamp angrily seethed: “F— the Statue of Liberty!”) He organized Farm Aid, one of many benefit concerts and recording sessions of the late 80s. Others included We Are the World (for famine relief in Africa), Live Aid (for Amnesty International’s crusade to free political prisoners across the globe), and Sun City (to support economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa).

12. “Hard Times,” 1984; Run D.M.C.

The Sugarhill Gang recorded the first rap 12-inch, “Rapper’s Delight,” in 1979. For several years, hard-working rappers like Kurtis Blow and Melle Mel refined the new form, but it was not until Run D.M.C. recorded their beat box-and-DJ debut on Russell Simmons’s Profile label that rap really took off. Songs like “Hard Times” were the keys to Run D.M.C.’s success: with simple driving beats, record scratching, synchronized pass-the-mike style, and streetwise lyrics, they captured (and communicated to a larger white audience) the frustrations and aesthetics of the inner city like no other music could.  A further catalyst for record sales was Run D.M.C.’s first-ever rap video, “Rock Box,” which aired on MTV in 1985. With a rock-friendly electric guitar soaring over stripped-down urban beats, the video shows the two rappers decked in all black, making their way through a seemingly endless throng of fans, among which a young Anglo suburbanite, in a foretelling of an audience to come, admiringly gawks at their cocky eloquence.

13.“La Di Da Di,” 1984; Slick Rick & Doug E. Fresh.

This is one of the most influential, quoted, and covered tunes in all of hip-hop. The song quickly became a rapper’s rap because of its relative obscurity and its radical departure from conventions of the day. Never a radio hit because of its obscenity, “La Di Da Di” was only available to hip-hop devotees on 12” vinyl and never included — in its original full version — on any album (in fact, this is a truncated cut on a compilation). It was also a triumph of style that elevated the art and technique of rapping above the beat, the dance groove, or the message. Fresh takes the early-80s “beat box” chic to a new level — blending innovative body sounds, shifting meter and tempo effortlessly, adding novel breaks, and synchronizing tandem lyrics with Rick. For his part, Slick Rick innovates a laid-back West Coast delivery that Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg (with The Chronic and Doggystyle, respectively) would capitalize on a decade later, setting the groundwork for what would become “gangsta” rap. Though the leading man of humor and story rap has suffered his ups and downs (including jail time), Slick Rick maintained hip-hop clout, witnessed by his continual touring in the US and UK.  (He’ll visit Mableton, GA this summer.)

[BIBLIOGRAPHY AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.]

[THIS MUSIC LOG WAS COMPOSED BY BRANDON W. LAIRD.]