The true importance of 1981 may not be realized by most folks anymore, given the extremely sorry state of "popular music" these days...
...but 1981 was pivotal in that many of the important innovations of the Eighties first flowered in this brilliant, amazing year. For those such as myself who were conditioned to expect non-stop excitement in popular culture, many of the years since have been bitter disappointments.
In fact, 1981 was so great, it actually started in late 1980...
Many of the records released in late 1980 were to dominate the Rock community's consciousness (when such a thing actually still existed) in the first half of 1981.
The Jam's Sound Affects, David Bowie's Scary Monsters, U2's Boy, Blondie's Autoamerican, Talking Heads' Remain in Light, the B-52's Wild Planet, Motörhead's Ace of Spades, The Clash's Sandinista!, Bow Wow Wow's Your Cassette Pet, and Adam and the Ants' Kings of the Wild Frontier were all released within a few short weeks of each other.
This was an astonishing barrage of immeasurably influential music.
Remain in Light and Sandinista! essentially created the "World Music" movement by refocusing New Wave's outlook to the Third World in general, the Caribbean and Africa in particular. To say this innovation would be problematic is to put it extremely mildly, but we did get some great records out of it, such as Paul Simon's Graceland.
These late 1980 records all set the tone for 1981, in many ways raising the goalpost for their rivals and admirers. It's hard to believe now, but once upon a time musicians believed that they were obliged to do something new and innovative, rather than just rehash ideas found in their older siblings' record collections. And once the gauntlet was thrown, the floodgates roared open.
Remain in Light remains a high-water mark for the band, which would step back from the cutting edge with Speaking in Tongues in '83, then go full-bore generic New Wave with Little Creatures in '85.
Byrne and Eno released a companion piece in February—My Life in the Bush of Ghosts—in which recorded found voices were used in place of vocals. The album would become hugely influential with the rise of sampling, with artists ranging from Kate Bush to Public Enemy citing it as an influence.
Sandinista! isn't nearly as impressive as Remain in Light and wasn't nearly as influential, but it's still a fun, sprawling, ridiculous mess of a THC-drenched boondoggle, and makes for a nice nostalgia fix for oldsters like me.
Still, "The Magnificent Seven" was often a live highlight, though, when played at top volume by the actual band. It just doesn't sound like anything any sane person would recognize as being even remotely hip-hop.
Around the same time, Blondie brought rapping (such as it was) to mainstream America with "Rapture," off the filler-clogged Automerican, which acted as the band's biggest big seller and creative nadir.
A consolidation of the ideas explored since Station to Station in 1976, Bowie's Scary Monsters had a huge impact in 1981. It is also thought by many to be his greatest record, and the musicians of 1983's 'New British Invasion' owe a mammoth debt to it.
Monsters featured some notable guest musicians like Pete Townshend, the E Street Band's Roy Bittan, Be Bop Deluxe's Andy Clark, and most crucially, scorched-earth guitar noise provided by Robert Fripp on most of the album's key cuts.
Robert Fripp would take scads of inspiration from Talking Heads and The Police when he relaunched King Crimson with former Heads/Bowie/Zappa guitar ace Adrian Belew as frontman. The result was '81's indelible Discipline, an album that sounds like the far-flung future to this very day.
Prog stalwarts like Genesis and Rush followed suit and similarly moved toward more radio-friendly material.
Gang of Four released their second LP in the spring, the dark and intense Solid Gold. On it, the Gang dropped the last punk rock vestiges in their sound and created a violent, disjointed post-funk assault. You can practically feel sweaty, bloodied hands striking their instruments with blunt force on tantrums like "Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time."
Gang of Four drew on antecedents like Captain Beefheart and Pere Ubu but were utterly unique. They would replace bassist Dave Allen with Parliament/Funkadelic maestro Busta Jones for a U.S. tour in '81 and essentially create the Red Hot Chili Peppers when they rolled into Los Angeles. So you can blame them.
Just don't ask what happened to Gang of Four after that tour. We'd all be better off if we didn't know.
Having fired their thug/genius bass player Jah Wobble for nicking Metal Box backing tapes for his solo LP, PiL decided not to replace him and instead opted to go to a new extreme.
His hands reportedly badly swollen from heroin abuse, Keith Levene could only manage to record two tracks worth of his incredibly influential guitar playing. So PiL recorded track upon track of drum riffs and then overdubbed all sorts of bizarre sounds on top, from eerie synths to detuned pianos to clockwork toys.
Over this din, Johnny Rotten howled lyrics filled with bizarre nightmare imagery and occultic insinuation. A Warner Brothers executive said it was the most uncommercial record he'd ever heard, but the title track was a UK hit for the band.
Incidentally, it was on Flowers that the hugely reverbed drum sound that came to dominate '80s music was perfected. It was inspired by Steve Lillywhite's recording of Phil Collins' drumming on Peter Gabriel's third (and by far, best) solo album. The Flowers engineer was then hired by Collins to produce his first solo album and...
Too bad Gene Krupa died eight years before, because jungle drums were everywhere in 1981.
Adam & the Ants and Bow Wow Wow both served up the exact same formula in 1981—a formula handed over to them by former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. This makes sense since Bow Wow Wow were the original Ants, with a 14-year-old Anglo-Burmese girl taking Adam's place.
Overall, Adam's new Ants were the more successful of the two. Bow Wow Wow had a big hit with their cover of "I Want Candy," but not too much else.
Bonus factoid: Annabella apparently used to perform live without pants or panties. I used to work with the singer of a well-regarded NYC band that opened for Bow Wow Wow back in 1981, and she recounted how Annabella would complain about guys in the crowd grabbing at her. My friend said she advised the younger singer to "put some goddamned pants on, and maybe they'll stop."
I actually saw Annabella at a Chiller Theatre show a few years back. Sadly, it looked like she'd put in some hard years.
I also saw the fake Bow Wow Wow—basically the bassist and a bunch of nobodies—last summer, and it was even more disillusioning. It's why I generally don't care to see old bands live anymore. I want to remember them the way they were.
