If you generally don't like 80s music, what's your favourite 80s music?

Not intended as an 80s-bashing thread, but it is the decade most people love to hate, and I'm no exception.

Two categories of answers:
(A) Artists who hit it big in the 80s, whether they recorded earlier or not
(B) Artists who were huge before the 80s

Not necessarily my choices, but just for illustration:
Prince goes in (A) despite having two albums in the 70s. It's hard to argue he wasn't primarily an 80s artist.
Queen is a good example of (B).

No hard rules here. The Cars are close to the borderline, but I'd put them in (A). They also had two LPs in the 70s, but unlike Prince, they were huge. You decide where to put Genesis if you want to name them.

Name artists, albums or songs. This thread is for fun.

Who will be the first to say this thread makes no sense?

 

Ozzy Osbourne - Blizzard of Ozz
What doesn't make sense is the categorization. Why does it matter?

 

The Smiths and some of the synth pop stuff I used to hate back in the day

 

Waterboys
REM
Kate Bush

 

Talking Heads.

 

REM's best music was recorded during the 80's. The IRS years. They're definitely in category A. Besides them, and specifically this era, there's not a lot of 80's music I love.

 

I love 80s music, still you're very right on R.E.M.

Document, Fables of the Reconstruction... classic albums. With Out Of Time, it's over for me.

 

I hated everything about the 1980s.

The only two things I like are David Lynch and Tom Waits's amazing Frank trilogy.

And what do David Lynch and Tom Waits have in common? FRANK!

 

60's music....

 

My two favorite albums from the 80 s remain London Calling and Pretenders. Both not affected by “80s” production.
That said, Joshua Tree isn’t either but Pete’s White City and Of course Hysteria certainly are. THE band of that era was REM also not using that sound just their own weird sound.

 

Non of the stuff that was being pushed by the industry and MTV.

I was exploring all kinds of music for the first time. New Grass, jazz/rock fusion, Zappa, Richard Thompson, Pat Metheny, Telarc classical, Leo Kottke, Michael Hedges, Stanley Jordan, etc. .

 

There is not enough thread space for how much I love the 80s. A more interesting thread for me would be 80s artists I disliked for at least a
Decade.... They were all great in their moment.

 

That's me as well love R.E.M. but not the 80's in general. I like R.E.M. through New Adventures, actually ... for the rest of the 80's it's hit or miss for me. Genesis - Abacab, Yes - 90125, King Crimson - Discipline and Beat ... I like all of those but not my favorites for any of the groups. Paul Simon - Graceland and Peter Gabriel - So were good and important to my early relationship with my wife. Otherwise, I was not much into synthpop and other things going on in the decade.

 

Most of my favorite albums come from the 80's but those are all metal. Everything else is pretty bad. Even my favorite artists like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Lou Reed made some mediocre to really bad albums that decade. Iron Maiden, Metallica and Slayer alone made up for everything else for me.

My top ten because lists are fun and seem to annoy a lot of people.

Slayer- Reign In Blood
Guns N Roses - Appetite For Destruction
Metallica - Ride The Lightning
Metallica - Master Of Puppets
Iron Maiden - Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son
Iron Maiden - Somewhere In Time
Slayer - South Of Heaven
Motley Crue - Shout At The Devil
Metallica - Kill Em All
Motley Crue - Too Fast For Love

 

Bands who had great 80s albums:
Smiths
Def Leppard
Dire Straits
INXS

'82 was perhaps the best 'singles' year in a long while....

..but for the fashions, the New Romantic movement, 80s drum sounds, 'Poodle'-rock...... Nah man, leave it well alone. Take me back to the 70s - PLEASE.

 

There is only ONE album worth owning from the eighties.......



The `CARS` are mentioned above, may have been huge in rest of world, but in UK it was.....Meh!

 

Fun question. It would be a cop-out to mention early hip hop or the plentiful indie rock. If we're talking about pop music, definitely the eerie, gloomy, melancholic synth sound wrapped in catchiness.

Paul Young - Come Back And Stay
David Sylvian & Ryuichi Sakamoto - Forbidden Colours
Billy Idol - Eyes Without A Face

Maybe obvious choices, but stuff like that. I wasn't born until after the 80's, and when I was young I imagined the 80's as always dark and rainy .

 

In Indiana it was.

 

What?!? No Macca?!?

 

While I disliked much of the pop culture of the 1980s, including a good deal of the music, the 80s were a golden age for Australian rock. Goanna, Icehouse, and Midnight Oil, to name just three.

 

I was a teenager in the 80s, and I do love a lot of 80s music, but I went through a looooong period of "backlash" against that decade. I've since come out of that phase.

For me it's more a matter of bands I hated or "didn't get" back then but I do now. Depeche Mode and The Cure are probably the 2 biggest examples of that.

 

Solid Rock.. No Promises...The Dead Heart... just to name three.

I looked for a LONG time for that Goanna album. Was very surprised to find out that Trevor Lucas produced it!

 

Selected 1980s rock playlist:
The Pretty Things - Cross Talk (1980)
Bob Trimble - Iron Curtain Innocence (1980)
The Sir Douglas Quintet - Border Wave (1981)
Roky Erickson & The Aliens - The Evil One (1981)
The Dream Syndicate - The Days Of Wine & Roses (1982)
Bob Trimble - Harvest Of Dreams (1982)
The Rain Parade - Emergency Third Rail Power Trip (1983)
The Long Ryders - Native Sons (1984)
Talk Talk - The Colour Of Spring (1986)
True Believers - s/t (1986)
Redd Kross - Neurotica (1987)
Talk Talk - Spirit Of Eden (1988)
Pixies - Surfer Rosa (1988)
Pixies - Doolittle (1989)

Please note that all of these albums sound like the 1960s,
1970s (or 1990s)...with none of that cloying '80s after-taste'.

 

No idea where you read that or what made you think it.

My experience of foruming tells me that by and large the nineties is generally the laughing stock whereas the eighties is largely revered.

 

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers started in the 70s but maintained artistic credibility in the 80s (and throughout their career, really) — but I probably feel this way because they took the greatest virtues from 60s music and made them work in a more modern setting.

The first few rem and U2 albums — and particularly the latter's "Pride (in the Name of Love)," which is my go-to when asked to name a great song recorded in the 1980s.

There was still under-the-radar power pop being made throughout the decade that I subsisted on when starved for new music.

I remain a huge fan of The Darling Buds' first album Pop Said…, which was released in 1989.

I'm sure there's a few more things, but these are what comes to mind when my least-favorite musical decade is mentioned.