new, race-transcending syntheses gave voice to such
nonmusical ideals as the judging of people by the
content of their characters (or musical talents) rather
than by the color of their skin. To put it another way,
if Prince’s flamboyantly aggressive eroticism was ev-
ery bit as threatening to parents as Elvis Presley’s or
Little Richard’s had once been (Prince’s song “Dar-
ling Nikki,” from his 1984 chart-topping albumPur-
ple Rain, single-handedly gave rise to the censorious
Parents’ Music Resource Center), the fact that he
was an African American had relatively little to do
with his menace.
Prince exercised a greater influence over the con-
tent of the pop-music airwaves than had any other
single act since the Bee Gees in the late 1970’s. Like
the Bee Gees, whose disco-era hits often sat side by
side on the charts with hits that they had written or
produced for other acts, Prince was represented on
the charts by others as frequently as by himself:
Prince’s “Take Me with U” shared chart space with
Sheena Easton’s “Sugar Walls” (which Prince wrote
and coproduced), as did his “Kiss” with the Bangles’
“Manic Monday” (which he wrote) and his “Pop
Life” with Sheila E.’s “A Love Bizarre” (on which
he sang). “Kiss” even provided middle-aged lounge
singer Tom Jones with his first hit in more than a de-
cade, when Jones teamed with the deconstructionist
pop group the Art of Noise to cover the song in 1988.
New Wave, Old Wave Despite the popularity dur-
ing the early 1980’s of the punk-derived style known
as New Wave music, the decade’s most consistently
lucrative stars took little if any of their inspiration
from social discontent. Prince, for all of his raunchy
notoriety, scored his biggest hits the way performers
had for decades, with songs that redirected his obses-
sion with sex until it was possible (if not always easy)
to overlook. Michael Jackson, on the other hand, de-
emphasized erotic content altogether, focusing in-
stead on a combination of rock, funk, and soul that
not only highlighted his dancing but also for a time
made his 1982 albumThrillerthe best-selling album
of all time. Meanwhile, although Michael’s sister
Janet Jackson would acquire a very erotic image in
the 1990’s, her 1980’s output mirrored her brother’s
in its emphasis on danceability, as was highlighted by
her decision to title her sextuple-platinum 1989 al-
bumRhythm Nation, 1814.
The socially conscious music of Bruce Spring-
steen and Irish quartet U2 did not so much down-
play hedonism as eschew it. Springsteen became a
symbol, at times almost a caricature, of the earnest,
hardworking, blue-collar common man, whether
sketching solo, stark, acoustic parables onNebraska
(1982); creating celebratory, full-band anthems on
Born in the U.S.A.(1984); or dissecting the difficul-
ties of marriage onTunnel of Love(1987). So whole-
some was his image that in 1984 President Ronald
Reagan cited him as a positive role model for Ameri-
can youth. (It was an endorsement that Spring-
steen, who donated generously to Democratic Party-
supporting unions, vigorously repudiated.) To a large
extent, Bon Jovi, John Cougar Mellencamp, Bob
Seger, Bryan Adams, and Tom Petty and the Heart-
breakers plowed similar terrain.
U2 added a boldly religious twist to their social
conscience, which was every bit as sensitive as Spring-
steen’s. The group’s first platinum album,War(1983),
not only mentioned Jesus (in “Sunday Bloody Sun-
day”) but also contained a song taken directly from
Psalm 40 (“40”). As if to drive home the Gospel ele-
ment of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking
For,” one of two number-one singles from the
Grammy-winning 1987 albumThe Joshua Tree, the
group rerecorded the song with a gospel choir for
the sound track of its 1988 documentary filmRattle
and Hum.
If the rest of the decade’s superstars dealt mainly
with less weighty matters, they did so in a distinctively
inoffensive way. The music of Billy Joel’s most popu-
lar 1980’s album,An Innocent Man(1983), was rooted
firmly in street-corner doo-wop, and its lyrics were
generally interpreted to have been inspired by his
marriage to supermodel Christie Brinkley. In 1984,
the hard-rock veterans of the band Foreigner aban-
doned the image of macho aggression that they had
cultivated for years and scored the biggest (and only
number-one) hit of their career with “I Want to
Know What Love Is.”
Phil Collins, who had spent the 1970’s embodying
somber pretension as the drummer and eventual
lead singer of Genesis, reinvented himself, both
solo and with Genesis, as a purveyor of upbeat pop
(“Sussudio” and “Don’t Lose My Number”) and ro-
mantic ballads (“Against All Odds” and “Groovy
Kind of Love”). Journey and its lead singer Steve
Perry, a group that like Genesis entered the decade
saddled with a 1970’s progressive-rock reputation,
shed its past in a similar fashion. When Huey Lewis
and the News declared it “Hip to Be Square” in 1986,The Eighties in America Pop music 769