Michaelangelo Matos - Cant Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pops Blockbuster Year

A BOUT TWO-THIRDS OF THE WAY THROUGH WRITING THIS BOOK, I WAS taking a car home while listening to a Jack station, the drivers choice. Shortly after Phil Collinss In the Air Tonight (with the last thirty seconds cut offboo) gave way to the Bangles Walk Like an Egyptian, the driver said, Im from the eighties. Me too, I saidbig-time.

One of my cherished early memories of being a pop fanan afternoon Ive long recalled as having sealed my fate as onewas in the summer of 1984, when I was nine. I was being forced to clean my room, a task I took to with great indolence. I wasnt allowed out until it was done. I turned on the radio, toggling between two Top 40 stations, skipping past commercials, and for about three or four hours, I waited until one of them played a song I disliked. It had to happenthe radio always played songs I disliked. But it didnt. After a couple of hours I realized, I should be recording this, and took out a cheap C-60. The first song on after I hit RECORD was Patty Smyth and Scandals The Warrior, with its bang-bang chorus. I had a busted air rifle I tried to bang-bang along to the song with, but it wouldnt load twice in time, alas.

Growing up in the Twin Cities at the height of Purple Rain maniaand being a Prince fan and a pop fan since memorymade 1984 an acutely exciting period. A few years later, as I began seriously investigating rock and pop history, reading books and old magazines and newspapers, it came to light that I wasnt alonea number of rock critics and historians considered it a peak year then and afterward. In particular, Dave Marshs The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, in 1989, championed 84 as the year of an American explosion the greatest group of American pop singles of the decade. Id been right that day in my room.

Then the nineties happened, and for many young rock fans coming of age, it seemed urgent to discard anything that had the mark of the eighties upon it. Gated drums, brassy synthesizers, canted keyboardbass linesthe coked-up sonic hallmarks of the Reagan decade were suddenly, desperately uncool. I once met someone at a party who insisted that Prince had never made rock music because, and I quote, It doesnt sound like the Pixies.

But it wasnt just that music had changed. So had the business of it. Part of what made 1984 seem so future-forward was the fresh background of the business nearly having sunk five years before. Its hard not to hear that newfound confidence in the music itself. It was the most jam-packed pop radio year since the mid-sixties, and just as fertile underground: hip-hop and dance music, punk and new wave, artists from Africa and Jamaica, reissues and box sets, all flourished in 1984. The mode as well as the music changed. It was the year cassettes outsold vinyl LPs for the first time, and the year the Compact Disc (always capitalizedit was a trademarked brand name, remember) began making serious commercial inroads, not to mention the year the first CD was manufactured in America.

Every city in the world has something happening every week called Eighties Night. Michael Jackson and Prince, particularly in the wake of their passing, have acquired the mythical resonance of Elvis, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan. Madonna is still a major pop idol, one of the acknowledged forebears of modern music.

Yet the pop of 1984 was nowhere near as anodyne as people appear to think. Pop culture was a moral battleground during the Stranger Things years. Prince and Madonnaeven the publicly squeaky-clean Michael Jacksonwere seen as sexual deviants to a populace far closer to pre-sixties innocence than we see today.

The eras collective tale seems to exist only in pieces. For a musical period whose popularity has never wanedparticularly with a younger generation that venerates the decades pop in much the way kids in the eighties themselves often looked to the sixties with longingtheres been surprisingly little written about eighties pop, per se. Apparently, everyone who loved music but hated the radio in the eighties was so worked up over it that they all wrote books. The titles on indie rock, hip-hop, postpunk, acid house, Goth, new wave, and a nonstop torrent of punk micro-histories have created a lopsided effect: we now know far more about eighties music outside the mainstream than anything in that mainstreamunless we read a raft of individual artist bios.

This brings us to methodology. Whereas my previous book, The Underground Is Massive, was built on more than three hundred interviews, Cant Slow Down is drawn primarily from archival material. Its strange how under-covered this period of pop has been, considering the sheer overload of frankly amazing source material on it. I read a lot of books and magazines (physical and digital), raided the shelves of a number of public and personal libraries, combed through oral history transcripts from two major music museums, and spent a lot of time googling things.

One of my favorite stories from the research came from that August, when a San Diego rock station, XHZ-FM (Z90.3), suddenly had its plug pulledthe stations Mexican owner, Victor Diaz, revoked his contract with his American operators over low ratings. He enlisted his teenage sons, instead, to select the new playlist. The stations program director complained to Billboard that Diaz had sent us a letter last week informing us that he was going to take over the programming. The next day, his wife walked into the studio with a box of singles and told our announcers to insert these recordsmainly American Top 40 hits that didnt fit in at all with our programmingevery fifteen minutes.

Pop music is easier to create, record, and disseminate than ever. But in 1984, it felt like the brass ring. There are a lot of chart placements mentioned in this book. My intention is to demonstrate why a heavily commercial era in pop music mattered; gauging its popularity serves a necessary contextual purpose.