they summarized a great deal of the pop-music senti-
ment that had by then taken hold.
One notable exception to the decade’s over-
ridingly proper decorum was the Rolling Stones,
whose members maintained their image as lecher-
ous bad boys even as they entered middle age, most
notably by prominently displaying a nude woman’s
body on the cover of their 1983 album,Undercover.
Considered in the light of the Rolling Stones’s debo-
nair jadedness, the on- and offstage debauchery of
the decade’s two biggest hard-rock acts, Van Halen
and Def Leppard, came off as reckless, if not down-
right juvenile, delinquency.
Material Girls Another exception to the prevailing
effort to cultivate a sense of good taste was Madonna,
the most successful and controversial female per-
former of the decade. So routinely did she flout tra-
ditional morality and confound the stereotypes asso-
ciated with women in pop music that she sometimes
attracted attention just by recording music that did
neither (such as her implicitly pro-life “Papa Don’t
Preach,” her introspective ballad “Live to Tell,” or
her carefree love song “Cherish”). Although fre-
quently criticized for her blatant sexuality (in the
video for her 1986 hit “Open Your Heart,” she por-
trayed a peep-show stripper whose onlookers in-
cluded a boy who was clearly a minor), Madonna
provoked the most outrage when she blended eroti-
cism with an iconoclasm that many regarded as anti-
Catholic. From her statement that she liked cruci-
fixes because they had a “naked man” on them to
her unorthodox deployment of Catholic imagery in
the video for “Like a Prayer” (1989), she seemed in-
tent not only on expressing her own sensuality but
also on criticizing the root of any authority that
would condemn her for doing so.
Compared to Madonna, the decade’s other top-
selling women seemed tame. It would be many years
before Whitney Houston became more notorious for
drug abuse and Barbra Streisand for liberal political
activism than for their wholesome, resolutely middle-
of-the-road music. Olivia Newton-John scored her
biggest 1980’s hit with the erotically charged “Physi-
cal,” but the main difference between her edgy techno-
pop 1980’s hits and her soft country-rock 1970’s hits
was stylistic. Pat Benatar, who had begun the decade
as a tough hard-rocker, seldom played up her consid-
erable sensual appeal, eventually easing so smoothly
into soft pop with “We Belong” in 1984 that the song
hit number five, becoming one of her biggest hits.
Cyndi Lauper became more identified with the sen-
timentality of her number-one hit “True Colors”
(partly because it was used in a high-profile Kodak ad-
vertising campaign) than with her implicitly anticapi-
talist “Money Changes Everything” or her explicitly
pro-onanism “She Bop.” Donna Summer, whose or-
gasmic disco song “Love to Love You Baby” had made
her the quintessential “bad girl” of the 1970’s, became
a born-again Christian, devoting songs onThe Wan-
derer(1980) andShe Works Hard for the Money(1983) to
her newfound faith.The Revolution Televised Unquestionably, the pop-
ularity of music videos in general and MTV in particu-
lar played a very important role in establishing com-
mon ground for an otherwise fragmented audience.
Radio stations remained local in their outreach, but
MTV was viewed nationwide and broadcast its con-
tent twenty-four hours a day. Thus, whereas acts such
as Whitney Houston and Wham! would once have
had to build their fan bases incrementally, MTV en-
abled them to implant their sound and image simul-
taneously in the minds of millions, much as Elvis Pres-
ley and the Beatles had done onThe Ed Sullivan Show
in the 1950’s and 1960’s, respectively.
The video phenomenon was not invulnerable to
criticism. The accusation that bands and singers
were becoming popular for their taste in hairstyles,
fashions, and video directors—for reasons, in other
words, that had nothing to do with their music—was
often made to account for the popularity (and to dis-
miss the musical merit) of such visually provocative
or cinematically creative performers as Boy George
and Culture Club, Duran Duran, Thompson Twins,
Thomas Dolby, A-Ha, and any of number of latter-
day heavy-metal acts (Twisted Sister chief among
them). Implied in such criticism was the idea that
MTV was devaluing the quality of popular music by
making the music itself superfluous.
In one sense, such fears proved unfounded. Of
the decade’s thirty-seven best-selling acts, the vast
majority had either already established themselves
as musicians or otherwise demonstrated their ability
to captivate audiences without television. Like every
major-label act of the 1980’s (and like many of the
decade’s minor-label acts as well), Daryl Hall and
John Oates, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, REO
Speedwagon, and Aerosmith produced videos, but
most of them seemed like the glorified promotional770 Pop music The Eighties in America