What Is Pop Music?

Hello and welcome back for this dispatch of The Rinse. As it is the first Saturday of the month, we’re going to continue our dive into music history, putting 1985 under the microscope.

As you may know, 1985 was a pretty wretched time in the world. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were deep into their respective reigns as leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively. Both had created enormous wealth for small sections of their countries while leaving the majority of them destitute. Reagan allowed gay men to die in droves as he refused to do anything about the rapidly growing AIDS epidemic. Furthermore, he allowed for crack cocaine to spread through Black America, destroying millions of Black people and thousands of families, my own included. But what does it matter if some Black people end up in jail if some extremely rich men can get a little bit richer?

If the domestic situation weren’t bad enough, we were still in the midst of the Cold War; the USSR—USA relationship sat on a perpetual knife’s edge, with things threatening to erupt with the slightest provocation. The concept of nuclear war was much more concrete than it is now, even though its presence still looms over us now thanks to the egotism of Vladimir Putin.

Even though everything was terrible for a great number of people, you would not know it from listening to the hit music of 1985. The top songs of 1985 still conveyed the optimism and yearning for love that always sells well. In 1985, we saw such unimpeachable songs as Wham!’s “Careless Whisper,” Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” Chaka Khan’s “I Feel For You,” and Prince’s “Raspberry Beret.” In addition, synths had become a mainstay of pop music. You can hear them all over the aforementioned songs.

With the synthesizer and the regular use of electronic instrumentation (e.g., drum machines), you start to notice that there is the interest in creating flawless pop songs that reach the largest audiences. All of the instruments are perfect. The singers, while not all blessed with the greatest ranges, are pretty, upbeat, and engaging. The lyrics are poignant if not profound. The songs are sonically perfect even though many of them do not stir the soul. I want to be clear that this is not a bad thing. However, this is what pop music in 1985 was aiming for, and in fairness to many of the artists from that time, they absolutely achieved their goal. However, this was not the only way that pop music was conceptualized in 1985.

There were a variety of artists who were taking pop music, both current and past, and reconceptualizing it into something far weirder than what was crowding the radios at the time. For this dispatch, I’m going to focus on two albums that accomplish what I’m talking about here: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love and Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs. These two albums, with their sonic daring and singular voices, became defining statements of the artists and provided inspiration for generations of future artists.

On Hounds of Love, Kate Bush takes the tools of pop music to make an eclectic album that exists without equal to this day. The breakout (and first) track from this album, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” is pretty straightforward, but it is not simple. With the insistence of the drum machine, the synthesizer darts across the sonic palette, playing in elongated stabs and highlighting the longing in Bush’s voice and lyrics. It sounds massive yet there is still so much desolation, so much space in the track, highlighting the yearning of Bush’s protagonist.

This song serves as the first in a five-part suite on Hounds of Love in which Bush explores the concept of love and desire. This is present in the lyrics of the songs as well as in the sounds of the songs. The instrumentation that Bush chose highlights the optimism, worry, confusion, and grandeur of love. In contrast to the longing of “Running Up That Hill,” “The Big Sky” is exciting. The drums are lively, and the electric guitar runs wild across the track, representing the way that one should feel about the moments in love that can both come and go in a flash: ecstatic and free. The sustained synths and pounding, insistent drums on “Hounds of Love” reinforce the hunting of the hounds chasing the protagonist, trying to make her succumb to the love she fears. The cellos on “Cloudbusting” highlight the uncertainty of life when you realize that your parents aren’t infallible. Every component on these five songs fits perfectly into place, bringing you on an emotional journey with the characters in Bush’s songs.

After these first five, the album takes an abrupt shift and becomes conceptual. This suite is called The Ninth Wave, and it is about a woman considering her life as she attempts to avoid drowning. This suite starts with a relatively simple song, featuring primarily Bush’s voice, a piano, and acoustic guitar, with the occasional sample. As the suite moves along, the music becomes increasingly more experimental as the protagonist fights to not drown. In our current era, we would never hear a song as experimental like “Waking the Witch” on a major label album that was as popular as Hounds of Love.

The track is sonically dense, with Bush’s voice playing against a demonic entity as drums and a chugging guitar churn at the center of the song. As the protagonist continues to fight against sleep, the soundscape is further crowded by chopped vocal samples and recordings of church bells. While this seems chaotic, in the hands of Bush it makes total sense, and it feels almost controlled. It is a track that is as dazzling as it is challenging.

The density displayed here is fractured by “Watching You Without Me,” a song in which the protagonist imagines the people in her life moving through their lives with her no longer there. The music has an appropriately ethereal quality. The fretless bass, sliding into and out of notes, amplifies the sadness of watching the people you love go on with their lives without you. You can feel the protagonist floating, disconnected from her reality. As the protagonist falls further from the waking world on “Hello Earth,” the music takes a darker tone, with this song feeling rather funereal. It is not until the last track, “The Morning Fog,” that we know our protagonist survives her ordeal. This is done through the exuberant instrumentation and the much lighter tone. After the rollercoaster ride that is this suite, “The Morning Fog” is a necessary pressure release and a beautiful conclusion to this album.

Just as Kate Bush takes the tools of popular music and shapes them to her own ends, Tom Waits takes the American Songbook and infuses it with his own beat sensibility. His 1985 album Rain Dogs is a journey through various dark corners and back alleys. Each song tells a compact story about lost souls and people down on their luck. The album starts with “Singapore,” a dark, quasi-sea shanty about men going insane on a boat. Waits’s tale is accompanied by abstract guitar noodling and rhythms reminiscent of Dixieland Jazz. The song is both engaging and disorienting in equal parts, reflecting the insanity setting upon the men on the boat. Truly one of the stronger album openers I know of.

Over the course of the 19 tracks on this album, Waits tells detailed, slightly surreal stories about death, dislocation, longing, and characters being down on their luck. He never looks down on his protagonists. They are always shown with heart, and he does excellent work to make the listener care about the people in his tales. His lyrics are accompanied by a countless number of musical styles. Points of reference include polka, the blues, heartland rock, downtown noise, tribal rhythms, lounge music, and exotica, among others. Rather than talk around it or do a song-by-song breakdown (I really am trying to get the word count down somewhat), let’s get into one of the tracks on this album in a bit more depth. That song will be “Downtown Train,” a standout track on an album absolutely full of them.

Over a twanging guitar rhythm, drums, and a simmering organ, Waits sings of catching a glimpse of a woman, of trying to catch her attention. This song abuts the canon of Bruce Springsteen, but Waits makes it just weird enough to have its own presence. That starts with his voice, which is singular. Gravelly and rough, no one ever has sounded like Tom Waits, nor will they sound like him. Even with that roughness, he conveys a deep emotion, a longing for this tough woman who he is awe of. Furthermore, the guitars are odd. They lurch and stop. Their lines are jagged, felt out rather than clearly thought about. Their raggedness suits the desperation of the protagonist as he longs for this woman who may never come.

Having little experience with the music of Tom Waits (please save your complaints for another day), listening to Rain Dogs was a truly wild experience. It was an album on which Waits and his collaborators take distinctly American popular musical styles and turn them inside out. It serves as the vision of a man who presents the unseen in American society in a sympathetic light. An absolutely beautiful listening experience that I will happily take again.

With Kate Bush and Tom Waits, we see two people who are familiar with the popular music canon, but take it upon themselves to warp those traditions into something novel. The albums pushed pop into a new realm, offering something different from the glossy synth pop of the time. This what I always want for pop music: stuff that masters the genre (“Careless Whisper”) and stuff that can point to a true future for what pop can sound like going forward. Tom Waits and Kate Bush did this with their albums, and 1985 thanks them for their work.

This ends this week at the Rinse. Next week, we’re back on Spins. Will I have some random gripe? Surely. Will I have some new jams to recommend? I sure will. Will I go on a long diatribe about Italo Disco? Probably. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other.