Annivyrsary: 1980

ISSUE #90

In 2020, I was dying one night—slowly, as we always are, but seemingly faster than normal—with the chest-caving brutality your heart puts your through in the darkest nights of winter. I put on Bob Marley, trying anything I could to find the sun in the dark (it was probably like 6:00 p.m.). Marley had been a casualty of cliché for me, co-opted by Wal-Mart posters and dorm room losers, and despite knowing the hits by heart, I'd never given him my adult attention. Once again, I found myself wrong.

That night, "Could You Be Loved" blossomed into something it'd never been for me before. For years, I'd taken for granted its perfect danceability, it's clarion call to move and the unfurling of wings that comes with every lurching step. I'd lost so many nights of dancing because, I figured, who would dance with the obsolete? Now, I was hearing things with new ears, "feeling vague and intense at the same time. Needing nothing. Being what there was"1—like when you look at blue so long that it becomes something more than light, and you see that it's energy itself, reflected from the beautiful nature of the object beheld. That song came out in 1980.

Also in 1980, a Japanese manufacturer of electronic instruments launched its first line of drum machines. Instead of pre-recorded samples, this machine made its own sounds—particularly, a booming bass drum that sounded like Flubber hitting a trampoline. The machine was a complete flop, panned for its unrealistic drum sounds, selling almost nothing. Only 12,000 units were made before the semiconductors used to build them were obsolete.

That's when music shops started selling used ones for cheap, and they fell into the right hands—Africa Bambaataa, notably, along with Marvin Gaye, Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and Whitney Houston. These machines were Roland TR-808s, shortened to "808s," and they've since been featured on more hit records than any other drum machine. They've been said to have changed the course of music history more than any instrument since the Stratocaster, all but revolutionizing hip hop and electronic music.

Anything initially dismissed—whether 808s or "Could You Be Loved"—could become an instrument of change. Many new things blossom every day. So I'm disliked for being unrealistic? Sell me for cheap; someone will come along and use me the right way.