This week, we continue our discussion of 80s rock. Remember, last week, we were talking an awful lot about MTV, and the ways in which MTV coming in really shook up the music business in important kinds of ways. So most of the acts, a lot of the acts that we talked about anyway, were part of the rise of MTV over the course of the decade, and we talked about how early on in 1981. When the network launched, it was really limited to just those people who could get cable TV. And we tied the growth of MTV and not only with the growth of the cable industry, and a lot of the other cable channels that you can get, when you get cable TV. But also with the growth of certain stars, whose videos were so compelling, that people were drawn to, to get MTV, when cable was available in their area. So people like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince Janet Jackson, and then a lot of other groups, that, that, that got exposure on MTV, and groups also from the 70s who continued to have careers in the 80s. Well, this week we're going to focus on some of the other things that were going on during the 1980s. And the way I would like to cast this week's lectures, is to think about them as scenes that developed kind of underground or maybe not so. Some of them really, truly were underground scenes. But others were not so much underground as much as sort of off the main music business radar in a certain kind of sense. We're talking about music rap music and heavy metal music, that the very beginning of the decade were not having tremendous commercial success but began to grow over the course of the 80s. So by the time we get to the second half of the decade, we see that these styles come to dominate or at least be very prominent in the, in, in rock music, and the popular music business, and also tend, we can measure that to a certain extent by their exposure on MTV. So, when we tell the story of heavy metal this week, we'll talk about how it begins to separate heavy metal as the style, begins to separate itself out from rock music in the late 1970s. it's a kind of back to basics movement both in the UK and in the US and it's rise to attention n the late 1980's. is indicated by the success of the show Head Bangers Ball on MTV in the late 1980's. A parallel swab, all that's happening with heavy metal, a paralell thing. It's happening with rap, with hip hop culture and rap during the course of the 80s. developing out of Jamaican roots that are taken to New York City and the, the Bronx, and New York city, and crossing over to an MTV audience. Which we talked about the, the problem with the Michael Jackson video, and the black versus white kinds of issues there. well by the middle of the 1980s, rap videos are starting to make it onto MTV into the more mainstream consciousness, and we see this by the late 1980s on MTV at least, by the rise of the show Yo MTV Raps, which becomes one of the most popular shows on MTV by the end of the decade. While all of this is happening with heavy metal sort of starting out. Kind of off the radar and becoming something that's very big by the end of the decade. Rap starting off, off the radar and ending, ending up being very big by the end of the decade. There's another kind of scene bubbling around in the 80s, which more or less, stays pretty underground during the entire decade and we'll talk a, a, a, about elements of that scene being hardcore punk. indie rock and college rock, which really begins to sort of be the alternative rocks, set of rock styles for people who don't want to participate in the big business of rock music that's, that, that's, that's made up of FM radio and gigantic venues and stadium concerts and expensive videos that go on MTV. This is an alternative. kind of rock culture. Now, it stays relatively off the, the, the, radar, until we get to the early 1990's, which we'll talk about next week, and all of this that I'll talk about with regard to this scene, really sets the stage for the rise of grunge and Nirvana in the early 1990's. And when that happens, it's based on all this stuff that was happening in the 80s, but it really breaks out like crazy. We'll save that discussion for next week. And, and, and by the way this alternative styles that I'm talking about also gets its own show on MTV called 120 Minutes. We'll get to that, when we get to that lecture a little bit later. So let's turn to the first the, the first stylistic survey of this week's lectures and talk about heavy metal and its early days.
