I graduated high school in 1986 and it recently struck me how music from before I graduated is different in my mind from music that came out later. Perhaps it was the change of mind that accompanies the exit from puberty, the reduction in impressability after childhood’s end. As I did a little exploration of the pop hits of 1985-86, while many brought back memories, they also brought back something of a bad taste in my mouth, musically speaking. That 80s sound got so very overused…

Starting around February 1980, experiments in gated drum effects that go back to 1978 came to the forefront in pop music recording. A gated drum sound is essentially all of the main hit without any fall-off in sound. If you’ve heard Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”, which came out in 1981, you’ve heard gated drums. And those things are all over 80s pop. Once the 90s started, more natural drum sounds were back in style, so this is a sound that very much defines the decade. Before 1980, one has to dig to find the gated drums, and they tend to be mostly live effects. Starting in 1980, one has to dig to find pop songs without them, and they tend to be studio effects.

Synthesizers entered the musical vocabulary in the 1970s, but they all had a certain “wee-ooommm” sound to them that made it very clear they were making their own sounds, not really copying other instruments. But with the introduction of the Yamaha DX-7 in 1983, we had a digital synthesizer that could mimic other instruments to the point where it began to replace them. And, because the DX-7 was so hard to program, its presets dominated the musical landscape. “E Piano 1” was so popular, it found its way into 40% of the country hits of the decade and 60% of the pop hits. And if it wasn’t E Piano 1 the keyboardist was using, it was some other easily recognizable Yamaha DX-7 preset. After 1987, the Roland D50 came onto the scene with its presets and served to further define the keyboard sounds of the late 80s. Succeeding generations of digital synthesizers had their own presets and tonalities, leaving these two to dominate and define the sounds of the 80s.

Combining drums with synthesizers, we get the drum machines. Roger Linn, a guitarist, designed a drum machine that would use recorded acoustic samples. The fact that a guitarist created a machine to replace a drummer is, in my view, part of the endless tension between guitarists and their drummers. But I digress. Linn’s drum machines sounded much more real than the drum machines of the early 70s, such as are heard on Sly Stone’s album There’s a Riot Going On. Being machines, they were also more amenable to the application of effects, like gating, so these Linn drum machines accelerated the use of that sound. And while they didn’t always get played with gated effects, there was an identifiable sound quality to the Linn drums that set them apart from live drummers. As the 80s continued, sampling tech expanded into more hands, leading to greater variety in drum machine sounds. But if you listen to a Prince record, chances are you’re hearing a Linn machine doing the percussion.

There were other things, like the infamous Stravinsky orchestra stab and other studio effects, but those are the ones I equate with 80s pop, as they were mandatorially ladled out on just about every record being made at the time where the artists didn’t have complete artistic control over their output – and that only happened for musicians at the very bottom or the very top of the music industry food chain. They work out OK enough on tracks here and there, but when I hear them just dominating the production on recordings, it breaks my heart. That’s especially so for performers that had incredible, lively, vibrant work in the 1970s and before. If they were unfortunate enough to make a pop record in the 80s, they got musically straight-jacketed by an industry getting more interested in “playing it safe” and making formulaic music more than ever before.