What music genres were popular in the 80's?
Generally from the late 60s to the mid 80s there were many many genres. Many were linked to fashion, to technology and music influencing each other, general social unrest and innovation by the the artists. As such many of the 80s genres were carried over from the 70s - especially in the early 80s - such as disco, funk, punk (uk), new wave, post punk, ska/two-tone (uk), reggae, power pop, hard rock, heavy metal, etc, etc. Soft rock and other variations of rock carried over but became more broad-stream (soft rock, goth-rock, power rock). Even the new electronic synth music had its origins in the 70s, but the early 80s made it more commercial. The main genre in the 80s to emerge was new wave and dance music (technology based) whilst the earlier funk, soul and disco genres that had been popular went out of fashion. Many recent survey in America and Europe have shown that the 1980s is the most favored decade of music of the last 60 years. So looking at popularity the early 80s had (from a uk perspective) two-tone (8082) new wave (remnants of punk) Industrial/alternative (post punk) synth pop/ electronic music (dominated charts for a couple years 8083); new romantic (duran duran, spandau ballet 8183) euro disco (mid 80s) smooth jazz (latin influenced matt bianco, and smooth dance such as Shakatack) hip hop contemporary RNB (Micheal Jackson, etc) power hard rock early beginnings of dream pop, grunge, heavy metal continued across decade Many of these genres had strong fashion identified with them. It was generally very apparent from ones fashion as to the artist or music genre (tribe) they were associated with. Much more obvious then, than in the past twenty years. You could be in a high school in the early-mid 80s and you could see a dozen or so fashion/musical artist tribes. Much of that dedication / obsession to the genre has been lost.