Most 80s records I have gotton sound thin and gross like they are digitally mixed....... Thats not what I call a good ANALOG record........ Even in the late 70s I have heard this....... (The digital era started in 1975) Its really quite sad.......
The first digitally-recorded pop or rock record to be released was Ry Cooder's "Bop Til You Drop" in 1979.
Synthesisers were around long before the 1980s. Moog: A History in Recordings—The First Moog Synthesizer Recordings - The Bob Moog Foundation For me, the archetypical 80's sound is the gated snare drum. Just a horrible, horrible sound.
I dunno...you have to give it up to a decade that produced runaway hits like this https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
I personally love synthesizers. One of my favourite genres is synth-pop. For me the 80's were pretty good production-wise although it wasn't as good as the 70's. I could care less about drum machines though.
I think the ''80s hate'' was a trendy thing in itself. Of course the synthetic drums and the ever-present Yamaha DX7 were terrible sounds, but there weren't these glam-pop falsetto voices or the Rock God decadence of the '70s. I think the '80s (on the whole) were a decade with better, more original music than the '70s. Forget the syndrums, listen to Talk Talk, Japan, Prefab Sprout, Squeeze, Madness, The Police, etc.!
I absolutely hate the 80's production sounds. Everything about it. I hated it then I hate it now. I also hated disco when it happened & still hate it now. Many older artists lost their way chasing the 80's sound just as many lost their way chasing the disco sound. Yet I have a long list of artists & albums that I love from that period. Very few have been mentioned so far on this thread. None apart from REM are mainstream, only a few are considered to be metal, most would be considered to rock. Many are still touring &/or releasing albums today. There has been & still is great music released every year in every decade. All you have to do is search for what you like. It is out there. No need to worry about the stuff you hate, embrace the stuff you love.
The recent 80s-inspired albums by Steven Wilson (To The Bone) and Beck (Colors) has given me a slightly better appreciate for the decade.
But they were being digitally mixed earlier...... Journeys 1979 album EVOLUTION sounds like thin crap (Like all thier 80s albums do) Thier last GOOD analogue sounding record was INFINITY (1978)
On this forum I expect the bias toward 60/70s rock to dominate any thread, so I'm not surprised for people to hate synths and drum machines full stop. But there has never been a time since music was recorded that did not contain both amazing music and abysmal music. Yes, a lot of that can be attributed to taste, but the truth is no one likes or hates everything (feel free to quote this and negate it with a sarcastic reply immediately). My take on the 80s, a decade a childhood for me, was of groundbreaking music and musical technology, that was very clearly un-nostalgic by nature. Look at the music of Prince, who is generally regarded as one of the greatest of all time. Had he been 10 years older, I don't think he would have found as much success, but the marriage of technology and ideas made his music unique in a decade filled with otherwise still great music. The worst offenders of the 80s are just like those of every other decade, the copycats. Those who grabbed their DX7s and used wholesale those presets which were present on the already established hit songs. Yet, those who dug deeper, and found new sounds and new ideas rose above the clatter.
Are we going off of Top 40 stuff? Is that really how a decade should be judged? Let's face it, every decade has trends for better or worse, but most of the great bands out there worked outside those trends. Like others have stated, there are plenty of 80s records that are great. You might have to look outside of the top 40 stuff...listen to what Depeche Mode did or Peter Gabriel. Trent Reznor put out Pretty Hate Machine, which was something different all together, and set a bar for production. Then you have the whole electronica movement taking off, which created the opportunity to create countless subgenres of music. If you peel off the the top layer of mainstream cheese, you might find that the 80s was one of the most fertile area of musical creativity.
Every decade in music has its own warts and dislikes. Like the 40's 50's, 60's and 70's the 80's had its share of fertile creativity. Yes the 90's too.
I maintain my point that 80s mainstream (at least in the first half) is much more interesting than 70s mainstream...
Love the "80's" pop sound up until ~1987 or so. Once the DX7's and clunky digital snares took over, I tuned out.
This my first post and I hate to be negative but most of the stuff recorded during the 80's deserves it. Triggered drums were terrible, bass players wacking their strings with their thumbs with all the bottom off and treble all the way up (terrible sound), synthesizers etc. I'm not knocking all the 80's stuff neither am I knocking all synthesizers just that the general production methods were really bad, there was a lot of great music recorded during that decade which is generally unlistenable at least to me today. I'm a geezer and have always loved The Everly Brothers for ex, they had a comeback during the mid 80's and their comeback album was all full of synthesizers and about as inorganic sounding as could be. Production back then sounded artificial and as far from a real band as is possible. That decade is when I went back to the 50's and discovered what a great decade of blues, jazz and rock n roll it was, all of it done in complete takes, the stuff from back then is as real as it gets, the 80's is the opposite.
Something which may be unique to me as a listener but which I've come to appreciate since starting this thread (I'm alarmed to say it was just over two years ago now...) is how futuristic a lot of music in the '80s sounded and still sounds. I listen to the soundtrack to, say, Blade Runner or Labyrinth and the sounds used conjure up visions of the future or of fantastic realms. They sound like nothing of the present or of this Earth. By comparison, even music made in the idiom of the '80s sounds very much of the present moment. It may just be a subjective reception, but I can't shake the feeling that there's some magic in that era of music.
The more I look back 30+ years ago I still say the 80's music was very creative. Music styles genres very plentiful indeed. No shortage of pop rock stars.
All those mega million selling 80's albums. Physical media sold, amazing, no internet, download didn't exist. Mind boggling when I think about it.
I'd also Halloween III's soundtrack to that list. It's really atmospheric and kinda different from the music in the rest of the series.
Some consider me a geezer and I appreciate the production aesthetics of all eras, as long as I don't have to hear one all day. I've been going through the hits of the 90s, and i've realized just how many R&B ballads there was. It is mind-boggling! But, it didn't bother me back then because I heard such a variety of music, the majority of whas played on MTV, and that I spent a lot of time and money buying up 60s and 70s comps and reissues. The 60s, 70s, and 80s had much more variety than any other decades I can think of. What changed after the 80s? The implementation of Soundscan. It gave a much more accurate picture of what we were really buying, and it wasn't usually rock.
