by Alan Light
Especially for those of us in the class of ’84, the year had always loomed large, and somewhat ominously, because of the dystopian warnings in George Orwell’s visionary novel: the distant future invoked by his words in Nineteen Eighty-Four came speeding at us through our school years. Winston Smith’s battles with Big Brother may not have come to pass in full, but as Ronald Reagan’s first term came to a close and it became clear that his victory over Walter Mondale would be a history-making rout, many young people certainly experienced a strong sense of alienation and despair.
With serious debate around the “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative and an official in the Department of Defense claiming with a straight face that with enough shovels we could dig our way to safety in the event of nuclear attack, the apocalyptic visions that Prince was expressing felt very close at hand. “It was the worst of times,” wrote novelist Rick Moody in an essay about the year 1984. “Atomic jitters were everywhere.” With such political folly as the invasion of Granada and the exposure of the Iran-Contra machinations dominating the news but having little actual public impact, the government seemed ridiculous, out of control—while the popularity of Reagan, with his Hollywood-honed paternal cowboy image, only kept soaring.
The codification of modern conservative values meant big things for business. Corporations were expanding; money was defining the culture. This extended to the popular arts, where blockbusters became crucial commodities. It was a time of extravagance—big hair, bright colors, grand ambition.
“Have you heard that in the United States, when a conservative government is in power, the standard of beauty for women is large breasts, and that when a liberal government is in power, it’s small breasts?” says Susan Rogers, who is currently a professor at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. “In class, I talk to my students about how, as an artist, you need to be able to read your culture and know what’s coming. In the height of the Reagan excesses and that movie Wall Street and ‘greed is good’ and all that, you would pay money to see an artist onstage whose hair was done, whose makeup was done, and who wore clothes and shoes that were worth more than your whole life. Then by the nineties, it was Bill Clinton and it was grunge and the rawer rap, the gangster stuff. It was inevitable that the glam thing was going to collapse, along with Wall Street and everything else with it.”
Nothing exemplified the era more than MTV, which had transformed the rules and the scale of pop success. The network, which had launched in 1981, had effectively become the equivalent of a national radio station—a video in heavy rotation meant a hit single. In the channel’s earliest days this was exciting, because the simple fact that MTV had to fill up all of its hours of programming before there was a surplus of videos to play meant that some weird stuff got exposure, and a band like Talking Heads could reach an audience that radio formats never would have granted them. But as the power of music video became evident, the clips became mandatory for even the biggest acts, and the higher production values started to push out the smaller bands.
Not all rock stars were quick to embrace music videos. Some found the idea crass or felt that it compromised their music, taking away the listeners’ ability to create their own images and associations for a song. Bruce Springsteen initially said that he wouldn’t make videos; he grudgingly allowed an abstract black-and-white clip—in which he did not appear—for “Atlantic City,” from his stark, somber Nebraska album. By the time of Born in the USA, of course, this attitude had changed, which marked a crucial shift in Springsteen’s entire career.
Prince, however, had no such qualms about music video. “Instead of thinking, ‘Ugh, MTV ruined music,’ he was like, ‘MTV!’ ” says Coleman. “He was always very visually oriented.”
“Prince was stoked about MTV,” adds Wendy Melvoin. “He loved the idea of videos and doing performance stuff for them.”
“I’ll never forget the time I went in and he was playing a new song,” says Alan Leeds. “The volume was jacked so loud, he’s trying to say something and you don’t even hear a word, you’re just nodding, pretending you hear him. Finally I realize he’s describing a video treatment for the song. And I’m like, ‘You just wrote the song this morning! You’ve already got the video?’ And he says, ‘Alan, you don’t understand. Today, people don’t hear music; they see it. It all comes together to me.’ It was an aha moment for me, being old-school and thinking video was just an add-on, and recognizing that he literally created those things simultaneously was very profound to me.”
The impact of MTV extended well beyond the music business. It shook up all forms of visual media, including advertising, graphic design, and film. “The movies took their cue from the music,” wrote Aaron Aradillas in an essay about Purple Rain for Indiewire, “as Hollywood entered into a symbiotic relationship with MTV, both as a new form of storytelling but, more importantly, as a powerful marketing tool to reach the coveted youth audience.” He mentions the role of music and the MTV-influenced high-speed editing in such 1984 movies as Footloose (the sound track from which was the biggest-selling album of the first half of the year), Against All Odds, and Repo Man. The sound track and scores of projects like Streets of Fire and Body Double moved pop music further to the center of the movie experience; Ray Parker Jr.’s Ghostbusters theme would be the song that knocked “When Doves Cry” out of its number one position. Talking Heads’ concert film Stop Making Sense was an art-house blockbuster, and both Paul McCartney (Give My Regards to Broad Street) and Rick Springfield (Hard to Hold) even released their own (failed) star vehicles that year.
The real power of MTV, though, and the escalation to a true sky’s-the-limit potential for music hinged primarily on the accomplishments of one man, who cast a shadow over everything that happened in pop in 1984: Michael Jackson.
• • •
The cyclone known as Thriller came out in late 1982 and sold impressively from the beginning, but it really went into overdrive a full year later. Jackson’s unforgettable appearance on the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever television special, when he introduced the moonwalk—a dance move that would have the biggest impact on the world since Elvis shook his hips—aired in the spring of 1983. It was followed in December by his most ambitious creation to date, the fourteen-minute “short film” for Thriller’s title track, which is still generally recognized as the most important music video of all time.
“Thriller” solidified what the clips for “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” had already put into motion: Jackson was the most creative, most popular force that MTV had to deal with, and the network’s initial resistance to playing black artists (because they felt that the channel had to maintain a “rock ’n’ roll” format) simply was not viable. As Thriller continued its march to more than 25 million albums sold, and the racial and stylistic walls for programming on MTV fell, the playlists of pop radio nationwide began to transform.
“Pop fans, now accustomed to seeing black artists and white artists on the same video channel, came to expect the same mix of music on pop radio,” wrote Steve Greenberg in “Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ at 30: How One Album Changed the World,” a 2012 report for Billboard magazine. “It was impossible to keep the various fragments of the audience isolated from one another any longer. Mass-appeal Top 40 radio itself made a big comeback due to this seismic shift. Beginning in early 1983 in Philadelphia and rapidly spreading through the country, one or more FM stations in every city switched to Top 40, and many rose to the top of the ratings playing the mix of music made popular by MTV—young rock and urban hits.”
The representation of black music on the pop charts quickly skyrocketed. “If 1982 was the genre’s low point in terms of pop success,” said Greenberg, “by 1985 more than one-third of all the hits on the Billboard Hot 100 were of urban radio origin.” Thriller had, virtually single-handedly, changed the racial composition of pop radio and reopened doors that had been closed to black artists in the post-disco da
ys.
The relationship between Prince and Michael Jackson has been the source of much speculation, with frequent references to a competition between the two. Those within Prince’s inner circle offer conflicting ideas about how much attention he was paying to Jackson. Alan Leeds recalls that well before Purple Rain, Prince saw Jackson as a professional target. “Even on the Controversy tour, I was already picking up on the fact that there was a feeling of rivalry in the Prince camp, that Prince was out to get [Jackson],” he says. The month that the Purple Rain album was released, while Prince was still conceptualizing his own tour, he chartered a jet and took Leeds and lighting director LeRoy Bennett to see the Jacksons’ mega-hyped Victory tour at a stop in Dallas. “It was about ‘I want to see their show before we finish mounting ours.’ We very much wanted to see it, just to know what we were following professionally—but with the attitude that ‘this is our competition,’ like, ‘he’s the Yankees, but we’re the Red Sox.’ ”
Howard Bloom, who worked with both Prince and Jackson, remembers it differently, maintaining that he had no sense that Prince was scoping out Jackson. “I actually experienced it the other way around,” he says. “There was somebody in Michael’s camp who was telling him that I was a spy for Prince, and that I was there to make sure that Michael didn’t outshine Prince. Fortunately, he didn’t buy it. But Prince’s job was to be Prince—he was sui generis; there was no competition, and it wasn’t that we were looking for competition and there wasn’t any. It was that, in his world, everything dropped out of sight except for Prince and the audience.” (According to bodyguard Bill Whitfield, Jackson still felt a rivalry until his final days, possibly scheduling the fifty dates at London’s O2 Arena that he would not live to see so that he could break Prince’s record twenty-one shows in the venue: “Mr. Jackson was always competitive about being compared to Prince,” he said.)
“Everybody was playing Thriller on tour, but he wouldn’t talk about it and he wouldn’t be playing it,” says Jill Jones. “If he did, he kept it on the down-low, and in those days, we weren’t politically correct; Prince would laugh about somebody’s record in a second. He was very competitive with Michael Jackson, but would he really admit it? No. He had to be the different black guy.”
According to journalist Ronin Ro’s 2011 book Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks, Michael Jackson attended one of the Warner Bros. screenings of Purple Rain, leaving ten minutes before the end. “The music’s okay, I guess,” he reportedly said to one of his entourage. “But I don’t like Prince. He looks mean, and I don’t like the way he treats women. He reminds me of some of my relatives. And not only that—the guy can’t act at all. He’s really not very good.”
When Prince and Jackson met in September of 1984 to discuss the possibility of collaborating, according to Jackson’s lawyer John Branca, Prince freaked Jackson out by presenting him with a voodoo amulet. (“I never want to talk to that guy again,” Jackson said to Branca.) Prince would resist Jackson’s overtures to record the song “Bad” as a duet. “The first line of that song is ‘Your butt is mine,’ ” he explained. “Who’s gonna sing that to whom? Right there, we got a problem.” Years later, in the documentary This Is It, which chronicled Jackson’s 2009 rehearsals for the series of concerts at London’s O2 Arena that he did not live to perform, Jackson joked that if he didn’t follow through on ideas that he dreamed up at night, God might give them to Prince.
In 1984, between record sales, the Victory tour, endorsements (including his record-breaking Pepsi deal), and numerous other business deals, Michael Jackson earned $91 million. In that same year—the most important, if not necessarily the most lucrative—of his career, Prince (who turned down an endorsement deal from Coca-Cola, which they offered after Jackson signed with the competition) took in $17 million. But Prince achieved something that Jackson dreamed of his entire life yet never accomplished: he became a movie star.
Prince and Michael Jackson weren’t the only black figures who were changing lanes, breaking rules, and making history in 1984. The year marked a genuine revolution in terms of the visibility and impact of African Americans across popular culture. As Nelson George points out in 2010’s Thriller: The Musical Life of Michael Jackson, “Michael was a harbinger.” Among the highlights of 1984, some of which seemed significant at the time, others only in retrospect: on January 4, Oprah Winfrey made her debut as a cohost of A.M. Chicago; in February, Run-D.M.C.’s self-titled debut hit record stores, becoming the first rap album to go gold; on June 19, the Chicago Bulls made Michael Jordan their number one choice in the NBA draft; on September 20, The Cosby Show debuted on NBC; in November, L. L. Cool J’s “I Need a Beat,” catalogue number DJ001, was the first official release on Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin’s new Def Jam label; and on December 5, Beverly Hills Cop opened, elevating Eddie Murphy from star to genuine superstar level.
Concurrently, Jesse Jackson was running for president, claiming the “Rainbow Coalition” as his constituency; widely dismissed when he announced his candidacy, Jackson won five primaries and caucuses before his own missteps (the infamous interview in which he referred to New York City as “Hymietown”) and lack of support from the Democratic party machine caught up with his campaign. Yet he left a significant impact on the national debate, as well as the voter rolls, and thus helped play a part in the election of multiple black candidates at the state and national levels over the coming years.
One remarkable aspect of these monumental figures is that while they all had their eyes on the mass market, they were also proudly and strongly black-identified. Writing in The Village Voice about the parallel phenomena of Prince, Murphy, and young jazz virtuoso Wynton Marsalis, Greg Tate stated that “right now black America’s got more crossover acts happening than it’s had since the ’60s, and the funny thing is that they’re all taking Babylon by storm in an era noticeably absent of agitation from the streets . . . unlike their forefathers, they’ve managed to make it to the mainstream without compromising their edge.”
Tate acknowledged the role that Michael Jackson played in this explosion of black culture for a general audience, but concluded that with Purple Rain, Prince had taken things even further. “Although Michael may have kicked the door in,” he wrote, “Prince done stormed the whole castle and come back handing the brothers and sisters the keys to the rock and roll kingdom.”
• • •
With MTV as a unified promotional front, Thriller illustrating the new and unprecedented heights that music could reach, and radio open to a more integrated version of pop, everything was in place for a remarkable moment. And 1984 did not fail to deliver. In 2012, Chris Molanphy wrote on NPR’s website, “Widely agreed to be the greatest year for pop a generation ago, 1984 offered amazing variety on vinyl and represented a cultural peak for Top 40 radio.” And in 2014, Rolling Stone called it “pop’s greatest year,” offering a list of the one hundred best songs of 1984 that was topped by “When Doves Cry” and featured no less than five Prince compositions (three Purple Rain singles, plus Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You” and Sheila E.’s “The Glamorous Life”) in their Top Ten.
Van Halen set the tone for the year. Perhaps the most popular hard rock group in America, they had proudly boasted of using no synthesizers on their previous albums. They titled their sixth record 1984, added a synth part as the most prominent sound on the single “Jump,” and watched the song turn into the biggest hit of their career. What’s overwhelming about the year’s releases set end-to-end are the number of true blockbusters, how many albums would have been the phenomenon of the year at any other time: Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual, Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, ZZ Top’s Eliminator. John Cougar Mellencamp’s Uh-Huh marked the start of his transition from snotty young rocker to more mature singer-songwriter, especially when “Pink Houses” took off. It was the year that U2 cracked pop radio with their first Top 40 U.S. hit, “Pride (in the Name of Love),” and that Bon Jovi
broke through with “Runaway.”
“Everything seemed to be getting bigger,” says Bob Merlis. “For the first time, the Warner Brothers record division eclipsed the film division for revenue—the company’s biggest revenue source was now music. We knew it was bigger than it had ever been; it felt like something historic was happening. It was an era of great possibility, a lot of it realized by things like Purple Rain—well, as if there were other things like this; it really was the one.”
Several events demonstrated that there was a passing of generations under way. In April, Marvin Gaye was murdered by his father, an incomprehensible tragedy that seemed almost biblical. Coming so soon after John Lennon’s death, it was a bracing reminder that the utopian dreams of the 1960s were long gone. In fact, the gestures and images of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest era (solidifying into the playlists of the classic-rock radio format at the time) had become so laughably clichéd that they fueled the definitive rock parody, the “mockumentary” This Is Spinal Tap, which was also released in 1984.
There was a new strain of underground rock emerging: sounds from the sloppy punk funk of the Red Hot Chili Peppers to the literate moping of the Smiths debuted during the year, as the nascent “college rock” of the time continued its journey toward the “alternative rock” explosion of the early ’90s. And, of course, there was plenty of junk—some enjoyable, some not—that was also hugely popular in 1984, songs (often propelled by videos more compelling than the music) that were just as omnipresent but didn’t have the same enduring appeal: it was also the year when Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” Huey Lewis and the News’ “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” Deniece Williams’s “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” and Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” were in constant rotation. If that doesn’t add up to a list of classics, it’s certainly indicative of an impressive range of styles happening concurrently.