I was listening to a generic 80s station recently, and the song

>>75047545
It's autism.
The Beatles sounds like the 60s (except for a few songs, I guess), and Jackson sounds 100% like the 80s.

that sort of music was so popular because
a) it had never been done before, and
b) a lot of people liked it
that's why it stood out and that's why it will be remembered

>>75047545
>The Beatles

After Sgt. Pepper literally a huge hefty majority of pop songs sounded like that or tried to imitate it, the Beatles were huge and made a new sound not known to the public and it adapted, music changes all the time and in order to make that change something has to sound different.

And besides, songs like Way You Make Me Feel or Human Nature sound incredibly 80s.

>>75047545
The whole album Bad sounds like the 80's

>>75047545
Thriller was a partial holdover (same with Bowie's Let's Dance) from late '70s dance/disco where it kind of sounds like that era but is also gearing toward more synth-oriented stuff.

>>75047545
There isn't a whole lot of difference between the acts that you mentioned and their contemporaries. It can definitely be argued that they were of higher quality, but I think what is happening here is that those artists themselves stand out more to you than other artists from those periods because of their iconic status. You KNOW who Michael Jackson is. You know his life's story, you know his face and personality and love of fucking kids and owning a monkey and building an amusement park and having more press coverage of his death than fucking 9/11 and everything else. Same with the Beatles. You KNOW they were the biggest pop act in the history of modern music, you know Paul McCartney's solo work, you know John Lennon was murdered horrifically, you know about Yoko Ono and conspiracy theories about Paul's death. When you hear their music you think of them, not the decade the were from.

What do you know about Tears for Fears or A-Ha or Duran Duran? Odds are you know some of their songs, but unless you are fan, you probably don't know very much else outside of the fact that they were popular in the 80s. In that case, when you hear "Take on Me", you're not thinking of the context in which it was written, or probably even what album it is from. All you have associate it with is the decade.

it sounds like shit

>>75047545
What ? Billie Jean and Madonna's Material Girl are likely the songs that pop in people's mind when they think of the 80's

>>75047545
When people think of that "80s" sound, they're thinking of music from like '84 and up. Thriller still had a lot of 70s residue.

>>75047545
Michael Jackson had a unique sound, imagine that.

The other day my dad put MTV and they where playing thriller, he bring my little bro and told him to look at the vide, that was really scary and top tier at the time. In the fuking middle of the song the cut and go to ads. You gotta be kidding me, instead of cutting the cinema intro they throwed away the last half