The Year in Music: 1983
In 1983, probably the most significant year in music since the polar ascendancies of punk and disco in 1977, only Michael Jackson had things pretty much figured out. His scenario for Thriller looked something like this: satisfy the black/urban-contemporary audience at the year’s outset with the dance-club-styled “Billie Jean.” Then, as LP sales hit 2 million, launch a major assault on the whites-only land of MTV and album-oriented radio (AOR) with “Beat It,” a rock & roll slammer that features a blazing Eddie Van Halen guitar solo and is accompanied by an invigorating video directed by Miller Lite lensman Bob Giraldi.
It was a smart plan, but it didn’t work. It didn’t have to. There was simply no resisting “Billie Jean” — that pile-driving bass line, that soaring vocal and that magnificent Steve Barron video, each frame of which is a further testament to Jackson’s amazing talent as a dancer. With charges of racism already filling their ears, MTV and AOR were facing heavy pressure to air “Billie Jean.” In March, MTV finally blinked: The week that “Billie Jean” hit Number One, the honchos at the 24-hour cable channel reversed their earlier stance and added the video to their playlist. Why? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Or because CBS Records Group president Walter Yetnikoff threatened to pull each and every CBS video off the channel if they didn’t? No matter: The door that blocked black artists from getting exposure on rock & roll TV and radio stations had been kicked down by the industry’s most talented foot. Nothing was the same after that.
The immediate effect of Jackson’s breakthrough was to boost the sales of Thriller into the stratosphere. The 25-year-old’s second solo LP for CBS became the biggest-selling album in the history of CBS Records. By November, it had sold 16 million copies worldwide and 10 million in the U.S. alone. It had also become the first nonsoundtrack LP to spawn five Top Ten singles: “The Girl Is Mine,” “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Wanna Be Starting Something” and “Human Nature,” with “P.Y.T.” looking to make it six.
Jackson’s showing was the high-water mark of a good — not a great — year for the music industry, a rebound of sorts from 1981 and 1982. Other megawinners of ’83 included the Police, whose triple platinum (sales of 3 million) album even had the temerity to bump Thriller from the Number One slot. Led by the undeniably charismatic figure of bassist-vocalist Sting, the Police undertook a massive summer tour of the U.S. that included some of the most stirringly effective stadium shows in recent memory. Into the typical sex-appeal-plus-chops rock-star equation, Sting added a disquieting note of ultimate alienation: the sight of him wailing the plangent “So Lonely” in front of 60,000 cheering, dancing fans couldn’t help but stick in your mind, no matter how arrogant he otherwise seemed. Ironic — and touching, too — was that despite the frequent references to the complexities of the Police’s music, the group built the year’s biggest single, “Every Breath You Take,” around a simple I-IV-V progression and a limpid, heart-hurt lyric.
The other artist who attracted significant attention from old and new fans alike was David Bowie. The chameleonic showman inked a multimillion-dollar pact with EMI-America at the beginning of the year and promptly delivered Let’s Dance, an album that sold 1.5 million copies and produced two Top Ten singles. On his world tour — reputed by some to be the biggest-grossing rock excursion — Bowie happily unveiled a new, “normal” image. To be taken, one imagines, with Lot’s wife.
But in a year full of successes and trends, from the Aussie Invasion to the Tide of Technopop, the crossover of Jackson’s “Billie Jean” was the most important. It exposed black music to a white rock & roll audience for the first time in the post-disco era; it led to the collapse of AOR and its consultants; and it signified the utter primacy of MTV.
In the wake of “Billie Jean,” a number of black artists notched major hits. Caribbean performer Eddy Grant scored with a Number Two single, “Electric Avenue,” and a gold LP. Donna Summer, who couldn’t crack AOR in ’82 with a Bruce Springsteen song, “Protection,” nailed a crossover classic with “She Works Hard for the Money,” a Michael Omartian-produced throwback to her Giorgio Moroder-Pete Bellotte glory days. Prince’s guitar-heavy, synth-fried 1999 had already gone gold before rock stations opened their eyes. After white radio and MTV came around, 1999‘s “Little Red Corvette” and “Delirious” became Top Ten singles, and the pint-size founder of the “Minneapolis sound” was starting to look like the most influential music man of the Eighties so far.
The commercial triumph of black music finished off an ossified rock-radio establishment that had already been mortally wounded by what became known as the British Invasion, but what was, more accurately, the Tide of Technopop: fresh-faced Brit clotheshorses who made hit singles out of catchy synthesizer hooks (Hey, anybody can play these things!) and soulful, legato melody lines. And hit singles is what they were: Culture Club notched three Top Ten 45s before their first album went platinum; Eurythmics bagged a Number One single with “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” but the album of the same name didn’t even sell 500,000 copies. No wonder the Recording Industry Association of America’s certifications for singles were up, while gold and platinum albums decreased in number.
Hits by these groups and others like them — Spandau Ballet, Men Without Hats — reassembled the all-but-forgotten Top Forty coalition of male and female older teens and adults, with a healthy dollop of MTV’d prepubes tossed into the bargain. AOR flagships like New York’s WPLJ and Boston’s WCOZ turned to a hits format that varied widely in its choice of music.
These developments appeared to baffle rock radio’s consultants, who had their roughest year since the Seventies. The Kent Burkhart-Lee Abrams consultancy decreed that all its stations file away their Led Zep LPs and play 80 percent “new music,” but that formula came under a firestorm of flak from stations still wearing out copies of Doors albums. Not surprisingly, Lee Abrams reworked his edict in the autumn. AOR hardliner John Sebastian seemed a woeful specter of his researching self when he moaned this summer about the great job he could do with an MTV-style television program, if someone would give him the chance.
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