How did 70s rock music transition into 80s music?


80s music appeared to be a re-visitation of the beginning of Rock — when "singles" ruled the AM radio. In those early days, in the event that a craftsman had a hit, he/she could get to record an "collection" (when those modern LP records appeared). A LP could have two hits and 10 tunes of forgettable filler melodies. Most craftsmen were characterized by their hit singles.

The 60s and 70s saw an ascent in FM radio and AOR (Album Oriented Rock) which gave numerous specialists the opportunity to make bigger works, or gatherings of melodies which frequently remained all in all work, and empowered a more extended tuning in/focus time. Beside funk and disco dance hits, the 70s inclined towards Album Oriented Rock.

The 80s saw a swing away from longer works and AOR, and back towards snappy singles. I'd say MTV had a great deal to do with the progress to 80s music. ("Video killed the radio star"):

MTV presented many gatherings who had fantastic singles, yet probably won't have accomplished acknowledgment without MTV video openness: Squeeze, The Vapors, Duran, Adam and the Ants, the B-52s, The Cars — to give some examples. (Note, I said "may" — yet that is my hypothesis.)
MTV constrained many long settled stars — David Bowie, Rod Stewart, even The Rolling Stones — to make video-commendable tunes. (That is — SINGLES.)
Peter Gabriel is a story regardless of anyone else's opinion. He was genuinely known from his Genesis Days — yet those astonishing recordings of "For sure" and "Demolition hammer" certainly kicked him into the super frightening.
MTV — after a ton of asking, cajoling, and dangers — at last changed their bigoted whites-just strategy, and began broadcasting recordings by people like Michael Jackson and Prince — presenting various dark craftsman to a lot bigger crowd.
In outline, I think MTV during the 80s — and later the Internet and YouTube — abbreviated individuals' capacity to focus, made a market weighty on short snappy singles, and made it progressively hard for craftsman to make "collections" which would allow them an opportunity to introduce their bigger vision.

davidjohan

@simonmoon -- Hey, I was a regular at Moby's. Excellent selection and interesting stuff played on the store's hi-fi. I may be imagining things, too, but do I remember a very interesting if small selection of classical?

@simonmoon and @edcyn: Which Moby Disc? I lived a few blocks from the one on Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks. In the mid-80’s Lucinda Williams worked there for awhile. I’d go in and there she was, standing behind the register, staring off into space. She was already playing around L.A. with her little 3-pc band: Gurf Morlix on Telecaster, David Lindley on drums, and Dr. John (a different one ;-) on bass. I saw them a few times, once in a little pizza parlor, playing to an audience of a half-dozen. The stage was so small Lindley had to play washboard instead of a drumset.

The Moby Disc store manager---a very pleasant (and cute) young fella named Kip Brown---was in the Punk band Shock. I knew the band’s bass player (he worked at Licorice Pizza Records on Topanga Canyon Blvd. in Canoga Park) , and when Kip found out I was a Brian Wilson fanatic we developed a nice little friendship. Kip eventually left MD and opened his own shop, Ear Candy, still in Sherman Oaks. He’s been working on a book about James Dean since the late-90’s!

@bdp24 

I worked at the Sherman Oaks and the Canoga Park stores.

I worked with Kip for quite a while. Good guy. Not sure I'd call his band punk though, more power pop.

2 other guys I worked with, Bob Say and Tom Gracyk, have a great store just a couple of miles east of the Moby location, called Freakbeat.

In the late Seventies and early Eighties, I did my best to find and listen to any band that didn't have hair down to their feet and that played endless blues solos. Short hair became as rebellious as long hair was just a few years before, and I truly reveled in the energy the short-haired bands wrought. My long-haired buddies thought I'd turned Republican when, to paraphrase David Crosby, I didn't "almost cut my hair." Then I saw a photo of the long-haired Ramones...uh, er, uh...

Did either of you get to see The Beat? The American/Paul Collins Beat, of course. I saw them twice at The Whiskey in late-'79/early-'80, and they were fan-f*cking-tastic! They created as much kinetic energy as The Who, but had (imo) better songs and singing (I don't at all care for Roger Daltry's voice.).