New Wave Hits 1984
Victorio Galindo
Big Wave is the soundtrack album for the motion picture of the same name, produced and recorded by Japanese singer-songwriter Tatsuro Yamashita. It was released in June 1984 and peaked at No.2 on the Oricon Albums Chart for a 19-week stay. The album was heavily influenced by the songwriting and production of Brian Wilson. Its first half consists of original songs, with English lyrics by Alan O'Day, while the second is mostly cover versions of Beach Boys songs.
The film, directed by Walter McConnelly and released May 25, 1984, features big wave surfers Mark Richards, Michael Ho, Tommy Carroll, Sam George, Rabbit Bartholomew, Peter Townend, Cheyne Horan, Willie Morris, Martin Potter, and others riding huge waves on the North Shore of Oahu and Maui. In addition, other summer sports such as windsurfing with Richard White and Matt Schweitzer, water skiing, and roller skating are featured. The film Big Wave was released on DVD by Pony Canyon (PCBH-50151) on May 27, 2005.[1]
The A-side of Big Wave is composed of the songs Tatsuro Yamashita wrote, and the rest of the album consists mostly of cover versions of compositions of the Beach Boys' frontman Brian Wilson. The song "The Theme from Big Wave" was first aired on the NHK-FM radio program hosted by Yamashita in January 1983 as "Mahou wo Oshiete" (魔法を教えて, "Teach Me Magic"). It features his former bandmate Taeko Onuki on lead vocals, and its lyrics were written in Japanese by her. As the title indicated, he remade the song as the theme for the film. English-language lyrics were written by Alan O'Day, who worked with him for the first time on Mariya Takeuchi's Miss.M album released in 1980. O'Day also contributed the lyrics for all the Yamashita-penned songs which appeared on the Big Wave, including "Your Eyes" which had earlier appeared on Yamashita's 1982 album For You. "Jody" is a newly recorded version of the lead-off track for his album Melodies released in 1983, which was originally sung in Japanese lyrics. "I Love You" was featured on Suntory's TV advertising aired from 1983 for about three years. Except instrumental version of "I Love You" and "Girls on the Beach", most songs included on the B-Side of the soundtrack were previously issued on his albums or flip side for singles, although some of them remixed or additionally recorded.
Big Wave peaked at #2 on the Japanese Oricon and sold over 450,000 copies while it was staying on the chart, becoming one of the most commercially successful soundtrack albums in Japan at the time.
Hot 100 Peak: Number Seven
With help from producer Jon Astley, who'd worked on the Who's Who Are You (Pete Townshend was his brother-in-law at the time), Hart rode to short-lived stardom on a distinctively Eighties synth ostinato that was all nagging paranoia and Orwellian menace. He soon demonstrated a keen knack for dodging success, turning down Spielberg's offer to screen test for the role of Marty McFly and passing on an invite to record "Danger Zone" for the Top Gun soundtrack. Still, his career bounced back some in the Nineties, with Hart writing for and performing with fellow Canadian Celine Dion. K.H.
Hot 100 Peak: Number 39
With their very first single, glam-metal trailblazers Bon Jovi nailed the perfect combination of desperation and decadence that would define their career, thanks to "Runaway"'s slithery synths and suggestive lyrics. It came after years of woodshedding, since the band wrote the song in 1980 or '81. The tune only hinted at the unifying power of songs like "Livin' on a Prayer," "I'll Be There for You" and "Bed of Roses," but it showed that these New Jersey no-goodniks had found the nexus of heartfelt balladry and hard-rock guts that would define huge swaths of hard rock later in the Eighties. K.G.
Hot 100 Peak: Number Three
Michael Jackson began 1984 at Number One: Thriller broke the all-time sales record, topping the month-end charts for January, February and March, and the Paul McCartney collab "Say Say Say" was the most popular single in the country for the first two weeks of the year. Sixth months later, he and his brothers scored their final group Top Five by recruiting none other than Mick Jagger to plead for a little "mouth-to-mouth re-susc-it-ation" on the arena funk "State of Shock." Appropriately, the tune was a live favorite, performed both by Jagger (with Tina Turner) at Live Aid and during the closing medley at the Jacksons' Victory Tour, one the highest-grossing shows of the decade. N.M.
Hot 100 Peak: Number 26
Perhaps the most unconvincing anti-drug song of all time, "White Horse" (slang for both heroin and cocaine) became an electro-funk standard by locating that unmistakable Eighties niche of playfully naughty garbaggio. With a wheezing, slide-whistle click-and-thud 808 beat, some proto-acid flickers and a comically ominous Euro voice intoning random claptrap like, "If you wanna be rich/Then you got to be a bitch," Danish duo Tim Stahl and John Guldberg created a time-capsule of borderless synth-and-drum-machine flukery (though you can certainly hear hints of Green Velvet's sly techno prankishness). The B-side of dubious European hit "Sunshine Reggae" (Jack Johnson's ballsy by comparison), "White Horse" was a Number One dance track in the U.S. (Number 26 pop), thanks in part to the help of Prince, who urged Warner Bros. to release a 12-inch single featuring "White Horse" on one side and "When Doves Cry" on the other. C.A.
Hot 100 Peak: Number Three
The Pointer Sisters may have dabbled successfully in Forties retro and M.O.R. previously, but pleasure-droid synthpop was just them. Their full-tilt conversion into glossy Eighties electronics was as exciting a makeover as the Bee Gees going disco. We had to wait till 1992 for Kris Kross and House of Pain to definitively prove the Jump Theorem (every hit single called "Jump" is awesome), but this gravity-defiant hit (released in close proximity to Van Halen's "Jump," it should be said) clued us in early on. K.H.
Hot 100 Peak: Number Eight
"Every Breath You Take" stole all the oxygen, but the moody keybs and tiny-cymbal crashes and Sting's 200-pound Greek mythology shout-outs ("You consider me a young apprentice/Caught between Scylla and Charybdis") all added up to "Wrapped Around Your Finger" being the powerful secret hero of the indomitable Synchronicity. It is for the best that 5 Seconds of Summer didn't actually attempt to cover it; and whoever lit all those candles in the video (it was most likely neither Godley nor Creme) hopefully got a raise. The one-two punch of this and "Tea in the Sahara" is the best surprise-bummer-ending album closer of the Eighties. R.H.
Hot 100 Peak: Number 85
Nameless when they played it in 1983 on Late Night With David Letterman (their TV debut), and later tagged "Southern Central Rain" before being abbreviated by singer Michael Stipe, this suggestive, ambling almost countryish song was quickly identified as R.E.M.'s obvious crossover shot (though it only got as far as Number 85 on Billboard). The band's label, I.R.S. urged a move to a bigger, pro-style studio to record second album Reckoning and Pete Buck even used the "Rockman" amp set-up (developed by Boston's Tom Scholz) for his 12-string Rickenbacker on the chiming, inviting intro. Stipe's lyrics were cryptic and doleful till toward the end, when the band locked into an insistent, would-be krautrock drone, with a plinking piano, pealing guitar and Stipe wailing "I'm sorry." This was R.E.M.'s commercial throat-lump moment, when their mystery became not just something to immerse yourself in, but a stance to adopt and buy into. Refusing to lip-sync for the video, Stipe sang live, while his bandmates were obscured by scrims, unwittingly setting in motion the cult of authenticity that would dominate the alt-rock Nineties. C.A.
Hot 100 Peak: Number 37
The blue-eyed-soul Bee Gee made his New Wave move late, with stuttering, silly synth-pop that somehow echoed the then-emergent evolution of both Italodisco (the song went Top 10 in Italy) and Latin freestyle (it was shaped by a team of producers who'd just kicked off the genre with Shannon's "Let the Music Play"). Chirpingly cheerful about boys getting love on a Saturday night, yet sheltering a secret sadness that slips out whenever Gibb grabs angelic high notes, "Boys Do Fall in Love" can also be heard as a male mirroring of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." And in its sci-fi video, set in A.D. 2184, people do futuristic things: wearing Devo glasses, for instance, and sliding CDs into a player. C.E.
Hot 100 Peak: Number 6
A simple piano-driven tune written in homage to the Beatles, "That's All" marked the tipping point of Genesis' transformation from prog pomp-masters to pop hitmakers. It was the band's first Top 10 hit in the U.S., as well as the first for Phil Collins as a songwriter (his cover of "You Can't Hurry Love" grazed the top echelon a couple of years earlier). A few months later, Collins would top the chart as a solo artist with "Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)," and remain a ubiquitous presence for the rest of the decade. A.S.
Hot 100 Peak: Number One
"AOR is starting to go more in our direction, which is black-white crossover," Daryl Hall told Billboard in a 1984 story on their Big Bam Boom LP. "Radio is heading more in that direction now than at any time in the past 15 years." He and Oates responded to these shifts with "Out of Touch," the rare tune that becomes a hit on the pop, R&B, dance and adult contemporary charts. With two thick bass lines and drum machine percussion, "Out of Touch" was even a favorite of New York mix-show DJs like Red Alert and the Latin Rascals, who would occasionally play it (or Arthur Baker's dub remix) alongside electro by Hashim and Man Parrish. N.M.