Plus I’ll Tell You What The 80’s Like: 14 Fascinating Behind-The-Scenes Stories About 80s Music
Published in
2 min readMar 13, 2017
The 80s were a great decade for music. New jack swing, new wave, pop, rap, and lots of other genres and sub genres were evolving in all sorts of exciting and unprecedented ways. Since I’ve been listening to and writing about music from the 80s more than usual as of late, I decided to compile a list of some of the best stories I’ve stumbled upon.
If you’d like to learn more about the stories listed below, links to the articles are included in each numbered point. Enjoy.
- Ant Banks sold hundreds of thousands of cassettes and CDs without a record label.
- Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend” started out as “You Must Be On Speed”.
- Bobby Brown copied Rakim’s flow and lyrics from “Follow The Leader” for his rap in “On Our Own”.
- Easy Mo Bee produced songs for Big Daddy Kane with a Casio SK-1.
- Guy recorded their debut in a bathroom.
- It took Gary Numan 30 minutes to write “Cars”.
- Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis used distortion to record Janet Jackson’s Control album.
- Large Professor’s mentor Paul C programmed two songs for Devo.
- MC Lyte was 12 when she wrote “I Cram To Understand U”.
- Prince wrote “Manic Monday” for The Bangles.
- Q-Tip made most of People’s Instinctive Travels on pause-tapes when he was 16.
- Sir Mix-A-Lot sold millions of records before “Baby Got Back”.
- The opening of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” is the exact replay of a synth demo record.
- Whitney Houston sang “How Will I Know” in one take and it was originally written for Janet Jackson.
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