I Bit the Head Off That Bat, Too

Hiding metal albums from your parents in the 1980s wasn’t merely some act of adolescent rebellion, but a kind of domestic espionage, equal parts cultural self-preservation and logistical absurdity. Consider the sheer physicality of fandom in that era, especially when your tastes leaned toward the sonically aggressive and parentally incomprehensible.

A significant portion of our readers may not fully understand what it meant to live in an era when the dominant medium for music consumption was neither concealable nor shrinkable. Just these unwieldy 12″ x 12″ slabs of cardboard and vinyl that announced their contents in shrieking, apocalyptic fonts. Imagine trying to sneak Blizzard of Ozz past your parents when it’s the size of a dinner plate.

By high school, my parents were probably braced for the depravity dial on my music obsession to spin out. I knew who Ozzy Osbourne was well before junior high. The groundwork had been laid around 1976, when I started reading Creem magazine more or less obsessively, ostensibly for its Kiss coverage, but also because Creem, in its snide, half-ironic way, kept name-dropping this other band, Black Sabbath. Of course, I should pause here to note, if only for the sake of context, that I started reading Creem in fourth grade, which, looking back, renders the whole scenario a bit off-kilter in a way that didn’t strike me at the time.

By junior high, I’d already heard my first Black Sabbath record, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973), bought by a friend who paid for it with lawn-mowing cash, which now feels almost folkloric. Honestly, I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d bought it solely for the cover art—this lurid, deeply disturbed tableau by Drew Struzan of some half-naked figure mid-torment, surrounded by clawed grotesques, the number 666 floating above the bed, the whole thing soaked in reds so aggressive they almost hum. Then countered by the contemplative blues of the back cover, which initially tempered the front’s hellish overload, but soon felt like the slow pull of original sin.

When the needle dropped, the turntable made this faint but audible effort, as though the record itself was somehow too heavy. What came out was bottomless and sacred in a way I didn’t yet have language for, something that made the air feel thicker, denser. The kind of memory that replays itself in your head decades later.

By the time I finally saw Ozzy Osbourne live, in the flesh, I was 16, steeped in that volatile stew of adolescent rage and suburban stagnation that felt like a fist pounding against a locked interior door. The guitarist from my garage band drove us to Atlanta in his windex-blue 1974 Camaro, rattling like a shopping cart of bricks. We landed ten rows from the stage, where adoration crashes into anarchy. 

That concert happened in the spring of 1984. Bark at the Moon dropped the previous November, and by then Ozzy was a snarling, bleeding myth, held together by volume and sheer will. The album cover features Ozzy fully monstered-up, straight out of a Saturday matinee nightmare: not the classic, jumpsuit-wearing Lon Chaney Jr. werewolf, but something more feral and cinematic—think An American Werewolf in London (1981). Ozzy spent six hours in makeup to become that beast (courtesy of Greg Cannom, the same guy who would later turn Gary Oldman into that blood-romantic in Coppola’s Dracula), and you get the sense Ozzy didn’t have to act too much. 

Take the album cover and the lyrics to the title track at face value, assuming one informs the other, and the song is about a werewolf who returns from the dead, frothing with revenge after being buried in a nameless grave and laboring in hell for a while. This interpretation, however,  is confounded somewhat by the video (which debuted on MTV nearly three weeks before Michael Jackson‘s “Thriller”), the first Ozzy Osbourne song to have a conceptual music video.

Set in a Victorian gothic world, Ozzy plays a mad scientist who concocts a potion that turns him into a werewolf—only to be forcibly committed to a sanatorium (where parts of the video were actually filmed), with the werewolf version of himself chasing the doctor through narrow boiler-room passages.

One might have a psychoanalytic field day here, discussing the Jekyll and Hyde motif as some Freudian take on Ozzy Osbourne’s attempts to control his darker impulses while dealing with alcoholism and the loss of guitarist Randy Rhoads. Then again, a Jungian lens might turn this whole thing a bit and align the werewolf with Jung’s Shadow archetype, where the lunar lunatic becomes a personification of Ozzy’s darker, animalistic, and immoral self. 

Of course, Jung believed that confronting and integrating the Shadow is crucial for psychological wholeness—a process that, in theory, demands self-awareness and a level of spiritual maturity most adults can’t muster, let alone hormone-rattled teenagers.

Yet, leaving the parking deck and making our way toward the arena that night, it became immediately apparent that some folks out there had taken it upon themselves to project the Shadow rather than integrate it, as evidenced by the pamphlet-disseminators flanking the main entrance, grim-faced emissaries of some loosely affiliated evangelical effort whose materials, if you actually read them, bore only the faintest trace of actual scripture and instead leaned heavily on apocalyptic shorthand: lake of fire, beasts, marks, end times, etc.

Not much about Jesus (who barely made an appearance), but more like Revelation fan-fiction stripped of context, all fire and beasts with no mercy or messiah. The message wasn’t exactly clear (as A didn’t lead to C, or even really B), but the tone was unmistakable—accusatory, urgent, vaguely disgusted, and clearly aimed at Ozzy or maybe all of us by association. Even at sixteen, the episode read as a kind of moral panic, as though we’d walked into someone else’s hallucination. 

That was 1984, after all, and what we now retroactively tag as the “Satanic Panic” was already crawling out of the cultural woodwork, pointing its trembling finger at whatever happened to be the least easily absorbed into the Reagan-era delusion of moral cleanliness and upward momentum. Ozzy Osbourne somehow ended up the bleating goat led up the cultural altar, twitching under the weight of everyone else’s horned-head hysteria, because there’s something perversely satisfying, and cosmically tidy, about projecting your darkest fears onto a guy who once bit the head off a bat and looked mildly horrified when it bled. 

As someone who’s had decades to loop back and rethink all this, Ozzy seems less a corrupter than a kind of cultural Rorschach test. Whatever America was most afraid of at the moment—suburban family collapse, moral entropy, middle-class fallout, distortion pedals—he somehow became a vessel for the great American living-room unraveling, which is both pathetic and sort of miraculous when you think about it.

The part no one in the pamphlet brigade seemed interested in noticing is that Ozzy wasn’t leading anyone astray. If you actually take the time to listen to what’s happening underneath the spectacle, past the theatrics, you’ll hear something far more complicated. His body of work, with Black Sabbath and solo, doesn’t celebrate evil so much as name it: war, ecological collapse, addiction, alienation, inner torment— you know, the shit people deal with. Ozzy didn’t dial it down, either. He howled, and there’s always been something redemptive in that howl that wants to crawl back toward the light. Even his onstage sign-off—”God bless you all”—never felt like shtick. You knew he meant it, or at least I did.

Like a million others, I’ll say the same old line, not out of laziness but because it’s true: Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath sparked my obsession with heavy music. Not just music, but the whole aesthetic orbit around it, the strange beauty in the distorted. Without that spark, my interior world would be thinner, safer, duller. More than that, without Ozzy as an accidental patron saint of the weird kids, a lot of us might’ve sleepwalked into the plastic-wrapped version of life they start handing you around 11th grade. Instead, we learned how to defend the outlier within, to give the strange voice in our heads a little more room to breathe, even if it sometimes screamed.

— Matthew McEver

A Kaleidoscope of Melody and Madness

I’m just of the age where I didn’t fully start digging into music until the early 1980s, which meant that Ozzy Osbourne didn’t sing on the first Black Sabbath music I ever heard. When I delved into their back catalog, however, the chemistry of that original lineup hit me in a way that only a handful of bands ever have. I look back with tremendous fondness at the days when I wandered the streets of New York City as a 12-year-old with my yellow auto-reverse Sony Walkman, completely enraptured by the song “A National Acrobat”. To this day, that song takes the cake as one of the most powerful musical experiences of my life. 

The way Ozzy’s voice trails off when he sings lines like “Well, I know it’s hard for you / To know the reason why” speaks to a vibration in my being that has always felt like a message from somewhere deep within the soul of the universe. I’ve never quite been able to discern what the message is, because the goosebump-y sensation I get transcends the actual words themselves. Those words, in any case, were written not by Osbourne, but by bassist Geezer Butler, who, for my money, is one of the most poetic—indeed romantic—lyricists rock music has ever given us. Nevertheless, Ozzy did a beautiful job of embodying whatever Butler’s imagination was channeling from the ether. 

It didn’t take long after Ozzy Osbourne left Sabbath for him to transform into music’s answer to a pro-wrestler: goofy, over-the-top, and lovable but ultimately less of a musical presence than a kind of living, breathing action figure. It’s not like his antics weren’t satisfying. From biting the head off a bat to snorting ants poolside with members of Mötley Crüe to his gut-busting punchlines in Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization Part II to his ascent as a reality-TV icon, Osbourne gave us plenty to remember him by. Just to put this in perspective: the “Drugs” section of his Wikipedia page sprawls out at nearly ten paragraphs! 

Hopefully, though, Osbourne will be remembered first and foremost for the voice that brought melody—and even a touch of airy grace—to so many songs. A devoted Beatles lover and an admirer of singers like Elton John and Peter Gabriel, at his most nimble Ozzy had a way of soaring above the infernal roar of riff-churning guitarists like Tony Iommi, Randy Rhoads, Jake E. Lee, Zakk Wylde, Joe Holmes, and Gus G. Where Black Sabbath’s range gave him ample runway to touch the stratosphere on genre-defying numbers like “Changes”, “Looking for Today”, “Over to You”, and others, Ozzy also scaled heights with his own bands too. 

Of all the songs he released under his own name, the one that I come back to most often is “Flying High Again”. Originally released on his sophomore solo offering, 1981’s Diary of a Madman, “Flying High Again” perfectly captures Osbourne’s winning combination of tunefulness and spirit. It’s also hard to point to a more anthemic song in his entire body of work.

With substantial help from Rhoads and original Blizzard of Ozz rhythm section Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake, Ozzy Osbourne nailed the fist-pumping vibe of early 1980s metal—a paradigm he and his bandmates were instrumental in getting off the ground. Whether or not you care for that brand of metal, we’ve all come to regard that period through the rosy tint of nostalgia. That song, though, sent shivers up my spine well before Stranger Things crystallized our hunger for retro cool. 

I can still remember bringing home the 1987 live album Tribute, released five years after Rhoads’ untimely passing. In that rendition, Ozzy’s voice in the chorus, again trailing in a glorious wash of reverb and delay, carries with it the intoxicating fragrance of summers past. No doubt Ozzy Osbourne’s prodigious drug use did real damage to his body—and, presumably, his mind as well.

However, there’s a delightful sense of playfulness when he sings, “I can see mountains, watch me disappear / I can even touch the sky / Swallowing colors of the sound I hear.” The studio version of “Flying High Again” reached number two on the Billboard chart, but it’s not like the song ever achieved status as the perennial staple it deserves to be. Now would be as good a time as any. 

Monoculture may be fading before our very eyes, but I hope “Flying High Again” outlives Ozzy Osbourne’s legacy as rock’s most outrageous wildman. If you want to remember him with a smile on your face, I’d argue that there’s no better song to start with. 

— Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

Hindsight would have us pretend the 1960s were all sunshine and rainbows, incense and peppermints, and good vibes only. Even the most casual pop culture historian will tell you that’s more than a slight distortion. Some historians suggest that hippies made up less than .2% of the American population by the end of the 1960s. Peace, love, and pacifism weren’t a luxury everybody could afford. Seventy-six percent of American soldiers in Vietnam came from lower-class or working-class backgrounds, for instance. Civil rights demonstrations and protests would frequently erupt into chaos and violence.

To put it bluntly, those who “have” got to have an idyllic, utopian existence that is still being romanticized and rhapsodized after nearly 60 years later. Those who “have not” got to have a remarkably different experience; navigating a morally bankrupt culture with nowhere to hide its hypocrisies, dealing with a whole new class of mass media ultraviolence scarring the collective psyche in ways previously unimagined. For every free love commune, there was a murderous, deranged Manson cult. Every consciousness-raising group had its equal and opposite Weathermen. 

There was a lot of light in the 1960s, but there was a lot of darkness, too. To try and make sense of the collective consciousness of the latter half of the 20th century, you must look at both the light and the shadows. You can’t fully discuss The Partridge Family or The Brady Bunch without considering The Addams Family or The Munsters. You can’t appreciate the full psychological depth of DC or Marvel superheroes without also considering the ghoulish counterpoint of EC Comics. 

Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t afraid to delve into the shadows. He is the Prince of Darkness, after all. As such, he might be seen as an anti-hippy, a figure of depressed, rustbelt Birmingham rather than the peace and love of San Francisco. Instead of the flower power and prayer beads and beautiful people hinted at in songs like Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Wooden Ships”, Ozzy conjured an alternate counterculture of bikers and boogeymen, wizards and warlocks, serial killers and atom bombs, bad speed and bad vibes, like he’d given the late 20th century a spinal tap and was busily trying to instigate his acid flashback.

Just because he wasn’t afraid to gaze into the abyss doesn’t mean he was wallowing in it, though. Black Sabbath routinely wore crosses, after all, and not even inverted ones, to protect them from witches. Lester Bangs called Black Sabbath “the first truly Catholic rock group, or the first group to completely immerse themselves in the Fall and Redemption: the traditional Christian dualism which asserts that if you don’t walk in the light of the Lord then Satan is certainly pulling your strings, and a bad end can be expected, is even imminent”. 

Due to a lifetime of shocking and aweing with grand guignol theatrics, Ozzy Osbourne got pigeonholed as a resurrection of “the wickedest man in the world”, the Great Beast 2.0 for the MTV Generation. That misses the point of Ozzy’s music and worldview. It’s full of witches and wizards, ghouls and ghosts, brutal battlefields where wars for the human soul were being waged. The witches to fear weren’t the ones riding skyclad on greased broomsticks. They were shadowy military ghouls perpetrating crimes against humanity in smoky, dimly lit backrooms.

To know your enemy, you’ve got to see them clearly. Ozzy Osbourne introduced us to them all: a heavy metal Hermit casting his lantern light on hideous truths impossible to look away from once they’re seen. He was a fearless, irreverent truth-seeker unafraid to shout truth to power. He will be dearly, dearly missed. 

— J. Simpson

The Riff Heard ‘Round the World: Black Sabbath at Live Aid

July 13 marked the 40th anniversary of the Live Aid concerts, held primarily in London and Philadelphia, as well as other cities around the world. Typically, retrospectives about the legendary concert to alleviate famine conditions in Ethiopia focus on the great (performances by Queen, David Bowie, and U2, among others), the abysmal (a woeful set by Led Zeppelin members), and the novel (Phil Collins‘ trans-Atlantic antics, and Bob Dylan‘s stray remarks that led to the Farm Aid series of concerts).

Live Aid was at least 16 hours long (longer if you factor in Oz for Africa, which happened in Sydney, Australia), and a whole lot can happen in that much time. Many artists showed up, gave great performances, and headed off to their next gigs, to eventually be overshadowed in Live Aid mythology by Queen (and yes, Freddie and the boys were indeed brilliant that day). However, take the only time over 15 years that all four original members of Black Sabbath took the stage together. 

Black Sabbath were practically a non-entity in July 1985. Ozzy Osbourne was deep into his solo career, and the band hadn’t released an album since 1983’s Born Again, the only Sabbath record to feature Ian Gillian as lead vocalist. But at 9:55 on Live Aid morning, Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward, took the stage together and turned John F. Kennedy Stadium in South Philadelphia into a seething caldron of head-banging metal maniacs. 

It was glorious, and I know this because I was there. Between 9:00 am and noon in Philly that day, those of us at JFK were treated to one of the most bizarre concerts-within-a-concert you can imagine: Joan Baez, Hooters, Four Tops, Billy Ocean, Black Sabbath, Run-D.M.C., Rick Springfield, REO Speedwagon, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Judas Priest. The sheer variety of acts during that sliver of time was bewildering. Yet, it soon became apparent that, as an audience, we were ready to love everything that came our way, including the reunited-and-it-temporarily-feels-so-good Black Sabbath. 

Grainy YouTube videos tell the story better than I can. Despite the fragile nature of their relationships, the founding members of Black Sabbath brought their A-game to Live Aid. Ward and Butler beautifully and brutally anchor the songs, and Iommi’s guitar playing is stunning. 

However, above all, there is Ozzy, throwing himself into three Sabbath classics, “Children of the Grave,” “Iron Man,” and “Paranoid”, with abandon. Ozzy reminded the crowd repeatedly to “go crazy” and asked God to bless us several times. Prince of Darkness? Yes, of course, but on stage that day, Osbourne radiated positive energy and joy, and the crowd at JFK that morning devoured it.

It would be seven years before the original Black Sabbath lineup would play together again. Four decades later– with the happy knowledge that Ozzy managed to outlive his demons— I’m still thrilled that I spent 20 minutes with him, Black Sabbath, and thousands of metalheads at Live Aid. 

Long live Ozzy Osbourne. 

— Rich Wilhelm

Late July 1986, I was 14, and my uncle jerked the patio door and yelled to turn the television down as Ozzy Osbourne’s video for “Lightning Strikes” played on MTV. “You can hear that all the way in the yard,” he said, being a dick. He married my aunt five years earlier and could be touchy. I didn’t know that he had a good reason, though. It wasn’t until recently, while writing this article, that I read civil trial transcripts and better understood why Uncle James was so worried about the neighbors,

I was a teenage metal fan, visiting family in Fitzgerald, Georgia. My uncle was a prominent doctor in a community of ten thousand residents, a member of the church choir, a man of God, and a leader. He would have known that, two months earlier, on 3 May 1986, a 16-year-old Fitzgerald resident died by suicide. The boy’s grieving parents blamed Ozzy Osbourne and claimed their son was influenced by “Suicide Solution” from Blizzard of Ozz (1980), a staple of Ozzy’s live shows, usually featuring an extended guitar solo from the various shred masters in the band over the years. 

I knew of Black Sabbath and Ozzy from Circus and Hit Parader, and as a huge Mötley Crüe fan, I’d read all about their wild tour antics opening for him. But I was grossed out by whatever nastiness fell from his mouth on the cover of  Speak of the Devil (1982). I wouldn’t have called myself a fan until that summer of 1986 and The Ultimate Sin record. 

We didn’t have cable at home in rural Kentucky, so visits to my family in southern Georgia were opportunities to binge hair metal videos. Every summer, I spent almost two months at my grandmother’s house. Metal dominated MTV, and that season featured “Shake Me” by Cinderella, “Yankee Rose” by David Lee Roth, and the gargantuan, omnipresent “Home Sweet Home” from Crüe. As well as clips from The Ultimate Sin.

“Shot in the Dark” was the first single, and its opening bass line grabbed me, an odd experience for a lead guitar fanatic in the era of guitar heroes. Written by bassist Phil Soussan, the riff rides a series of repetitive eighth notes, varied through a combination of downstrokes, upstrokes, and alternate picking. Drummer Randy Castillo’s sound is massive, and guitarist Jake E. Lee comes in with a piercing whammy maneuver.

The video mixes concert performances with a storyline involving a group of fans attending the show. Actress Julie Gray suffers from blinding headaches and glowing eyes as the spirit of metal possesses her, transforming her into the otherworldly figure in tiger-striped pants from the album cover, as a young Dweezil Zappa watches. 

The second single was “Ultimate Sin”, and the video combines live performance with scenes of Ozzy wearing a cowboy hat and a gray three-piece suit, riding in a limo with steer horns on the hood like a demented J.R. Ewing. He is alternatively enticed and tormented by the apparition of Gray from the “Shot in the Dark” video. The performance scenes feature the universe of can lights that hang over Ozzy’s massive stage like a multi-colored constellation. 

“Lightning Strikes” was the third video release, but the non-single tracks were equally strong. “Never Know Why” opens with a haunting, sustained guitar line from Jake E. Lee before the band come roaring in. “Killer of Giants” and “Thank God for the Bomb” both tackle nuclear war because it was the mid-1980s after all. I devoured The Ultimate Sin when it came out, and I still love and defend that record.

The following summer in Fitzgerald, 1987, an older friend played me the live version of “Suicide Solution” from the newly released Tribute. The record featured recordings from Ozzy’s 1980/1981 tours with the late Randy Rhoads, who had died in a plane crash. His guitar solo in “Suicide Solution” prompted Patrick to declare, “That’s the greatest guitar player who ever lived”. Many metalheads would agree, or at least entertain the debate. 

By this point, even a visitor like me knew that there was a kid who died and whose parents held Ozzy responsible. Rumors were that the youth-gone-wild of Fitzgerald, at least the ones who liked metal and had loud sound systems in their vehicles, organized a sort of ear-splitting torment-slash-protest. They planned to drive by the family home of the deceased teen broadcasting “Suicide Solution” at all hours of the night. I never heard that they actually did it, because, 40 years ago, even shithead kids still had some vestiges of decency. In today’s YouTube and social media world, I’m not so confident that this generation would decline the clicks and the ability to own anyone, even bereaved parents.

Tribute introduced me to Ozzy’s early work and cemented my status as a full-fledged fan. The live recording featured Ozzy on vocals, Rhoads on guitar, Rudy Sarzo on bass, and Tommy Aldridge on drums. It opened with “Carmina Burana” chanting through the speakers—a dramatic intro I recognized from Excalibur—and soon learned Ozzy used it regularly to kick off his shows.

I quickly grasped why my metal colleagues  raved about “Flying High Again” and “I Don’t Know.” Having just read Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods, I was already familiar with Aleister Crowley, so Ozzy’s song, named after the infamous occultist, conjurer, and charlatan, jumped out at me. Curiously, “Crazy Train” didn’t blow me away at first. It wasn’t until years later, after playing the song next to Rudy Sarzo himself, the Heavy Metal Dalai Lama, veteran of Ozzy, Quiet Riot, Whitesnake, Dio, and others, that I finally understood the allure. The propulsion of that song is like a geyser eruption.

On 28 April 1988, the teenage suicide victim’s family filed a $9 million lawsuit against Ozzy, CBS Records, and the writers of “Suicide Solution”, alleging that the lyrics, music, and subliminal messages caused the wrongful death of their son. Meanwhile, in October of that year, Ozzy released No Rest for the Wicked, featuring a new hotshot guitar player, Zakk Wylde, a skinny kid with long straight hair from Bayonne, New Jersey. His style was aggressive and employed pinch harmonics, which create a sort of squeal sound.

The first single, “Miracle Man”, was a broadside attack on recently disgraced televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, where Ozzy sings of “a devil with a crucifix… [who] needs another carnal fix”. In the video, Ozzy and Wylde even take turns wearing a Swaggart Halloween mask while the singer herds pigs into a church with a staff topped by a dollar sign— not the first time Ozzy spoofed overzealous religious critics.

He made his film debut as Reverend Aaron Gilstrom in the horror movie Trick or Treat (1986). The singer was presumably tired of the hypocrites who loudly preached about faith by attacking loud music. In hindsight, the two sides of the argument needed each other. Ozzy’s career probably benefited from the clergy as much as their donations grew from scaring parents about him. 

In the fall of 1991, Ozzy released the landmark No More Tears album, a proper, adult, lasting rock record, not easily dismissed by critics as hair metal fluff. I was a freshman in college and no longer spent weeks on end with my family in Georgia. In my dorm room, MTV was on around the clock.

The first single, “No More Tears”, is an ominous, foreboding tune that perfectly aligns with other cultural milestones, such as The Silence of the Lambs, released the same year. The ballad “Mama, I’m Coming Home” cemented itself as an Ozzy signature song. The album also contained “Road to Nowhere”, the first in what I consider to be Ozzy’s Regret Library. 

Ozzy Osbourne’s career and cultural impact are as much about debauchery and hedonism as they are about his music. Biting bats, pissin’ on the Alamo, snorting ants with the Crüe, arrests, and bad behavior make the Ozzy legend what it is. However, I always admired his ability to acknowledge the downside of this behavior vulnerably. “Road to Nowhere” includes the lines, “The wreckage of my past keeps haunting me. It just won’t leave me alone.”

He revisits this theme in 2001’s “Running Out of Time,” singing, “I wouldn’t wish my hell on you… picking up the pieces of my mind, running out of faith and hope and reason”. It’s tough to imagine other rockers of the era being so open about the cost of the lifestyles they bragged about in earlier decades. 

In 1991, the US District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, Albany/Americus Division, ruled in Ozzy Osbourne’s favor in the lawsuit concerning the teenager’s suicide. The court found that the plaintiffs failed to prove the existence or influence of subliminal messages in his music. However, it acknowledged “no doubt as to the sincerity of their motives in following through with what must be an extremely painful course of action”. Ozzy won other similar lawsuits in the early nineties, as did his heavy metal peers Judas Priest. 

In 1992, I saw Ozzy live in Memphis at the Pyramid—possibly the worst concert venue in the history of humanity. The show was part of his No More Tours run. At 44, he was said to be worn out from years of self-inflicted damage. It was billed as his final tour. The farewell tour trope would become a joke in future years with bands like Kiss, Scorpions, Mötley Crüe, and others, but we all believed Ozzy. No one could argue that he deserved some rest and relaxation. 

The only song he played from The Ultimate Sin that night was “Shot in the Dark”. In later interviews, Ozzy was outspoken about it being his least favorite solo album and singled out producer Ron Nevison for doing a poor job. In the early 2000s, I met Nevison and made a point of complimenting him on Sin. He was an engineer on Physical Graffiti and Quadrophenia. He produced Thin Lizzy, Kiss, and the mammoth 1985 self-titled album from Heart that sold almost six million copies. He didn’t need my validation of his work, but I wanted to share how important The Ultimate Sin was to me. 

We don’t choose when we’re born, nor do we select which era of an artist we first encounter. The universe exposes us as it deems appropriate. It’s no one’s fault if they discovered U2 through the imperially forced Apple inclusion or R.E.M. through “Shiny Happy People”. Hopefully, we will come to appreciate the full breadth of that artist’s career, encompassing both the highs and the lows. 

I am grateful and unashamed that I encountered Ozzy Osbourne – in all his sequined, padded shoulder Bea Arthur glory – through The Ultimate Sin. As lawsuits, the Satanic Panic, and televangelists faded, as spandex and makeup were discarded from tour buses, as grunge washed over heavy metal and then receded, as Ozzy and his family became reality stars. The Prince of Darkness ascended to his rightful throne as metal royalty, and my life was forever altered by that 1986 discovery in a small town in Georgia. 

Ozzy purists might sneer at the record, but I am one of them now, because of it. While I do consider myself a heavy metal expert, I never judge another listener’s introduction to the genre. 

— Thomas Scott McKenzie

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The name of the teenager and his bereaved family were intentionally omitted from this article. The media coverage and legal documents are widely available online if you want to read further.

If you or someone in your life needs immediate help due to having suicidal thoughts, call, chat, or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or text the Crisis Text Line by texting “START” to 741-741. If there is an immediate safety concern, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.

In the lyrics of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (1985), a woman floats atop a sea, drifting in and out of consciousness as fear and exhaustion overtake her body and mind. She withers away in memories of a life filled with promise and regret, while also longing to run up a hill to fulfill an otherworldly swap with her romantic partner to “exchange the experience”.

That same voice seeks meaning in the abstract realm of fantasies, where logic is defined by the childlike idealism of a beautiful, nostalgia-tinged blue sky, scored to an array of adventurous synths. A soundscape where the Fairlight CMI of the production evokes both a cutting realism mixed with an otherworldly dreamscape. For listeners embarking on the 47-minute journey for the first or 100th time, a visual mosaic of lush images, galactic experimentation, and old-world folk charm awaits. Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love finds a musical artist embracing a willingness to canvas beauty in emotional explosions and subtlety. 

Forty summers ago, during the afterglow of the “Live Aid” concerts, Kate Bush broke a two-and-a-half-year silence with her fifth studio album. That prolonged absence from the industry followed the Top 40 failure of the expressionistic singularity, The Dreaming (1982). For an artist as celebrated as Bush was by the early 1980s, and with a creative sensibility that favored the abstract, an album of nonstop abstract experimentation should have been expected, not shunned.

Her fourth outing allowed Bush to not only produce her work independently of co-producers but also drive full force into the aura of weirdness mixed with intellectualism that her fans had been waiting for. Since she was signed to a contract with EMI, her art needed to meld with mainstream taste in her next album, as two monetary flops in a row would spell a clear death sentence to that deal so defiantly forged by the artist since she was a teenager.

Hounds of Love not only succeeded without a tour, but it also showcased an artist not afraid to fall flat on her face in the public consciousness (she rarely did).  If The Dreaming was Bush’s oscillating hellscape of bizarre fragmentation and nightmarish beauty, Hounds of Love was the album that taught pop how to dream and capture those contradictions in sound.

Running with the Hounds

When I first heard “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” on a greatest female singer-songwriter compilation CD in the summer of 2002, I was struck by how it sounded like what imagination feels like. The track opens to the sounds of mournful synths that remain steady throughout the entire song. A slow hum of electronic emoting that sounds like an entryway for the protagonist to slow-motion run into a calm dimension, in tandem with a heavenly-sounding tinnitus-like vibration, is a foreboding drum. The LinnDrum sounds hold steady but give way to a second synth that plays like howling dogs mixed into an electronic violin.

Kate Bush’s vocals roar in with delicacy on top of a broader, richer pitch than what can be heard in her higher performances years before. As she tells her story about swapping places with a lover to share how it feels from both perspectives, the sounds complement the expected originality of the story.

The imagery positions the man and woman almost as if they are performers for a deity, trying to grapple with the idea of one another, whilst the track’s god watches and judges. The video’s dueling ballet of contrasting feelings between Bush and the dancer Misha Hervieu reflects this visualization.

“RUTH” sounds like highbrow erotica mixed with existential longing, with a universality across all social dynamics. All of that exists inside an ethereal palette of auditory sensuality. It provides visuals indicative of a deeply personal mime performance or Kabuki theater set in the clouds right before a thunderstorm. 

If “A Deal with God” (as it’s known to Kate Bush) opened the album with creative emotional perplexity, the title track grounds the bombastic auditory panorama. “Hounds of Love” starts with the sound bite “It’s in the trees, it’s coming!” from Jacques Tourneur‘s 1957 horror flick, Curse of the Demon (also titled Night of the Demon), but it’s once again the production that takes the listener’s imagination into those trees and beyond.

The tempo remains relatively the same as “RUTH”, but drifts into earthly nature and a sense of defiance. The synths find their protagonist comparing the longing for love to being “ashamed” of running away from an injured fox left to succumb to the cruelty of the wilderness. The voice’s propulsive swoops paired with rising violins resemble an aerial tracking shot barreling full force into the wind atop the treelines. The locomotive intensity of the track is trying to feel something, anything, before hopefully landing into the loving embrace of another. 

We segue immediately into the Disney song on steroids propulsion of “Big Sky” with a bass line, drum machine rhythm, up-tempo dynamism set to a story about a young girl’s wonder when daydreaming. Again, the listener is being driven forward as we “pause for the jet” the Fairlight CMI provides our ears. 

Kate Bush ends the tune across minutes, not seconds, with a tribal beat and refrain of “Rolling over like a great big cloud/ Walking out in the big sky.” She references Noah’s Ark in the lyrics, invoking the vision of a chorus line of animals, people, memories, disappointments, and the sometimes-lost sense of wonder that adulthood brings. All running through a giant field as the sun’s rays shine down on the army of dreamers.

Hounds of Love‘s tone and mood drastically shift with “Mother Stands for Comfort”. Bush sings about the non-judgmental passion that comes with motherhood, even if protecting a child who turns out to be a murderer lands at their doorstep. The song is classic Kate Bush, featuring a piano, but the synth riff sounds like an alien being that has infiltrated the Fairlight and is sharing its perspective on human compassion, even if the actions being observed are morally grey.  

“Cloudbusting” is like “Big Sky” but quieter. It embraces a story and musicality even more epic. The song transitions from motherhood in the previous track to fatherhood, telling Wilhelm Reich’s story from 1973’s A Book of Dreams from the POV of his son Peter. Strings that rise and fall in intensity against a one/two drumbeat find Bush stretching her vocals across arrangements that conjure longing for the past and the bewilderment of awe that children instill in their parents. 

Surrendering to Submersion

“The Ninth Wave” finds a delicate/subtle Kate Bush taking over from the kinetic drama of the first side of the album, but only momentarily. “And Dream of Sheep” sounds like an interlude, but a longer one compared to something like “Prelude” on side two of 2005’s Aerial. The listener is swept up in the swaying longing of a lady lost at sea, set to a lullaby with aquatic noises drowning out her fear of drifting to a certain death. The childlike vulnerability of the track unfolds across a cascade of cinematic Fairlight imagery.

Yet it’s the segue into “Under Ice” that transports “The Ninth Wave” into the eerie Kate Bush ethos that The Dreaming provided in lush, unearthly tones. In Hounds of Love, Synthetic violins accompany Bush’s deeper vocal delivery of a nightmare inspired by her unconscious, drifting REM sleep. The cinematic lens the song conjures maintains a steady, hypnotic hold over the listener for the remainder of the suite. Our minds conjure what it looks like for a woman to be trapped beneath ice as she experiences her final moments before freezing to death. Sounds of thunder crack in the background, complemented by the sound of a beeping SOS signal, which is likely her imagined hope of rescue.

The listener is slowly pulled out of the dim trance by Bush screaming, “It’s me!” when looking at herself from the perspective of those standing on top of the ice, looking down at her frozen corpse. The woman drifting through the water loses consciousness after a brief awakening, where the fear of the enormity surrounding her, and underneath her, sends a signal to her brain to escape reality. 

“Waking the Witch” picks back up the empathetic pace of the suite’s opening track. The woman dreams of those in her life, likely past and present, urging her to awaken and not give up. As I listen, I see a woman staring at a wall filled with family photographs, their haunting voices pleading with her. Then, in a violent jolt, the tempo charges to a piercing volume as tentacles spill out of the photographs and grab the woman, pulling her into the ocean and down into the pits of hell. A devilish voice growls with dominance as it seeks to pull her soul away from the life she clings to.

The woman is dreaming of a witch trial, where she smells the fire and brimstone in the onlookers’ voices crying out to watch the damned burn in agony. The sound of helicopters calling “get out of the water” is still not enough to wake up the floating figure in the waves, so we jump to another imaginative fragment. 

“Watching You Without Me” sounds like a Fairlight CMI submerged underwater with the hum of a Kate Bush vocal on loop. The drifting woman watches her family moving through their lives without her. Her mind scrambles words forward and backward, much like the brain processing non-linear visuals in a REM cycle while under distress. There’s a playfulness to the sounds, like the urge to burst out laughing at the absurdity of life when you are exhausted from constantly fighting one battle after the next. In the case of the drowning figure, the jumbled words come after a stronger urge to survive keeps failing her.

“Jig of Life” takes us back to the dreamland of the suite’s first song, but there’s a certain cringiness to the theatricality of the concept Bush leans into, because why not imagine an entire Irish jig when the fear of drowning or being devoured by a shark is imminent? For all its maximalist splendor, the track serves as an important bridge to the suite’s crescendo as it gives the protagonist the surge of adrenaline she needs to hold onto her life. 

“Hello Earth” is a piece of visual cinema that begins with a drowning woman envisioning a UFO late at night as it flies across a desolate American horizon. As Kate Bush sings “Look at it go”, the tempo drops to a choir of Gregorian chants, mixing the macabre and mournful simultaneously in their deep wails. The choir’s drop in tempo before returning to the woman’s watery, lung-fueled dreamworld conjures an image of her screaming with wide-open eyes into the floating UFO camera.

It watches her with curiosity as the randomness of destruction our world provides randomly appears. She sees a tsunami wipe out a coastline of fishermen and beach goers in one fell swoop before her soul begins to leave her body and ascend into the spaceship. The baritone choir returns and holds its grieving chants as the woman is cast in a bright light set against the dark backdrop of space, and carried far above earthly troubles.

The aliens pull her closer to their craft as she speaks in German, “Tiefer, tiefer, irgendwo in der Tiefe gibt es ein Licht”, “Deeper, deeper, somewhere in the depth there is a light.” The otherworldly beings hold the figure in their gaze, extracting whatever emotional or memoirist processing her aura gives off before…

“The Morning Fog” awakens the woman on a coastline, having survived the rough uncertainty of the open oceans. A cascade of uplifting 1980s synths and samples finds a beaming, grateful protagonist walking back into her life with a renewed sense of wonder. She understands the world better, the fleeting brevity of life itself, and how quickly it can all be taken away. Perhaps most importantly, she thinks of her loved ones and tells them all how much she loves them, which, even in its cheesy or simplistic interpretations, is truly what this album is all about. 

Hounds of Love was arranged, produced, and written by Kate Bush in an era when female singer-songwriters, to say nothing of producers, were scarce to find. Apart from its historical significance, it is a piece of music that, like all of the best concept albums, tells a string of interconnected stories against the backdrop of emotional architecture in free fall.

Kate Bush’s 2014 residency, Before the Dawn, memorably staged “The Ninth Wave”. For the millions who weren’t there, the mystery remains. Forty years later, Hounds of Love‘s true power lies in this invitation: to use its sound to neurologically film what our dream worlds sound like.

The term “New Wave” is open to many interpretations, but a simple description might be this: a more pop-oriented version of punk rock, with its anarchic edges smoothed and replaced by synthesizers and hooks. Musical artists of all stripes who weren’t quite raw enough to sound like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Ramones, or the Damned were undoubtedly pleased to see the genre transform to a more radio-friendly, pop-oriented, and often danceable new version of punk. Artists who attempted this genre shift achieved it with varying degrees of success. While a few tried it once or twice before returning to their original genres, several persevered for the remainder of their careers.

We’re going to look at 20 of these albums. Actually, 23. In three cases, we’ll examine the artists’ foray into New Wave, as well as similar attempts by one of their solo counterparts. As always with these types of lists, caveats abound. First of all, since New Wave is open to a slew of interpretations, we wouldn’t be surprised if readers challenge some of these entries. That’s fine. Music, like all art, is subjective, and we won’t be offended if you disagree (as long as you aren’t offended by our choices).

Also, we almost certainly left out a few crucial entries – a LOT of artists jumped on the new wave bandwagon, and we likely either forgot about them, didn’t know they existed, or realized that we had to stop somewhere. So break out your neons and pastels and get that cheesy synthesizer out of storage. It’s time to rock.

Fleetwood Mac – Tusk (1979) / Lindsey Buckingham – Go Insane (1984)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Following the monster success of Rumours (1977), Fleetwood Mac guitarist and vocalist Lindsey Buckingham was determined to create a different kind of record. Spurred on by his love for bands like Talking Heads, he helped conceive the sprawling double album Tusk in 1979. It should be noted that the contributions of his fellow songwriters Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks stuck mainly to the sounds of the previous album, particularly luminous singles like “Sara” and “Think About Me”. Still, Buckingham went a little bit mad, substituting snare drums with Kleenex boxes, taping microphones to the floor and singing into them in push-up position, and using raw demos as finished products.

This resulted in some weird but catchy tunes like “The Ledge”, “What Makes You Think You’re the One”, and “Not That Funny”, New Wave earworms that sound more like Nick Lowe or Jonathan Richman than anything on Rumours. Predictably, Tusk didn’t sell nearly as well as its predecessor, but it’s an ambitious, delightful record that’s become something of a cult classic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Buckingham kept mining New Wave on subsequent solo albums, never more so than on Go Insane, where he eschewed acoustic drums in favor of drum machines and made good use of the Fairlight CMI sampling synthesizer (a favorite of artists ranging from Stevie Wonder to Devo to Peter Gabriel). With initial production work courtesy of Roy Thomas Baker (Queen, the Cars), the result is nothing short of a pop gem, albeit one that sounds instantly dated. Highlights include the up-tempo dancefloor frenzy of “I Want You”, and catchy singles like “Slow Dancing” and the title track, which performed respectably on the pop charts. – Chris Ingalls

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Wings – Back to the Egg (1979) / Paul McCartney – McCartney II (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

While Paul McCartney’s early self-titled solo album has become a legendary example of do-it-yourself pop and thus has a new wave vibe all its own (at least conceptually, if not musically), his full immersion into skinny-tie rock can be more directly traced to Back to the Egg, his last album with Wings. Back to the Egg was supposed to be a back-to-basics rock album, and it had traces of new wave, particularly in its first single, “Getting Closer”.

A driving rocker, “Getting Closer” peaked at #20 on Billboard’s Top 40, which did not bode well for the overall success of the album. The follow-up single, an oddball ballad called “Arrow Through Me”, did worse on the chart, and McCartney’s pot bust in Japan scuttled further promotion for “Back to the Egg”, ultimately marking the end of Wings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

For the real new wave McCartney, check out McCartney II. Recorded in the summer of 1979, after the release of Back to the Egg, this second eponymous album finds McCartney playing all the instruments himself, with a focus on synthesizers and electronics. The lead-off track, “Coming Up”, is a prime piece of technopop that John Lennon allegedly loved (though it should be noted that the version that hit #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 was a live recording from 1979).

“Coming Up” is followed by “Temporary Secretary”, one of the most polarizing tunes in McCartney’s discography. It’s a love-it-or-hate-it blast of synthpop that has attracted a cult following and has made it onto McCartney’s concert setlists in recent years. “Temporary Secretary” alone guarantees that McCartney II is on this list. However, “Nobody Knows”, which sounds like one of Lindsey Buckingham’s quirky Tusk tunes, and the instrumental “Front Parlor” find McCartney having weird home studio fun as well. – Rich Wilhelm

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Carlene Carter – Musical Shapes (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

As the daughter of June Carter Cash and the granddaughter of Maybelle Carter, Carlene Carter is country music royalty. Carter has made it clear, though, from her 1978 self-titled debut album through to 2014’s Carter Girl, that she plays and sings country music her way.

Take, for example, Carter’s third album, Musical Shapes. Produced by Nick Lowe (Carter’s husband at the time) and with Lowe’s band, Rockpile, playing behind her, Carter delivers a potent rockabilly-infused record that includes many of her own songs.

Rockpile do not appear on the two most curious tracks of the album. Carter’s cover of June Carter Cash’s “Ring of Fire” (made famous by Johnny) can be described as living at the intersection where country, disco, and techno meet. It’s a bit over-the-top, but it’s also tons of fun. “So Proud”, the other track without Rockpile, is a power ballad that could have fit on one of Cher’s big late 1980s albums.

Make no mistake: Musical Shapes is a fine country album, though we’d probably label it “Americana” today. But Carter’s sharp songwriting, Lowe’s production, Rockpile’s playing, and even the cover art by famed graphic designer Barney Bubbles all contribute to a vibe that can easily be described as “new wavy”. – Rich Wilhelm

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Shaun Cassidy – Wasp (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Shaun Cassidy burst onto the pop music scene with his self-titled debut album, released in Europe and Australia in 1976, and in the US the following year. Cassidy, the son of actors and singers Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones, had a meteoric rise with hit singles and albums, as well as a starring role in The Hardy Boys Mysteries TV show, all of which made him a teen heartthrob. By 1980, though, Cassidy’s star had begun to fade, and he decided to shake things up, recruiting Todd Rundgren to produce his fifth album, Wasp. Rundgren, in turn, brought his band Utopia into the studio to play on the record.

Wasp opens with Cassidy singing a faithful, but still unhinged, cover of David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel”. He follows through with a record that combines cover songs with Rundgren originals. Cassidy shares one songwriting credit with Rundgren and Utopia members on “Cool Fire”.

While Wasp is no classic, it’s an easy album to root for, as Cassidy takes on a hodgepodge of tunes that include Talking Heads’ “The Book I Read”, Pete Townshend’s “So Sad About Us”, and Ian Hunter’s “Once Bitten Twice Shy”. Cassidy adds a bit too much musical theater to “The Book I Read”, but it’s still fun to hear him sing it. His synth-drenched remake of the Four Tops “Shake Me, Wake Me (When It’s Over)” is a bop. A weird bop, but a bop just the same.

As a career restart, Wasp was a failure, but what a glorious one it was! Don’t worry about Shaun Cassidy, who has handily survived being a teen idol by becoming a successful television producer. – Rich Wilhelm

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Alice Cooper – Flush the Fashion (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Talk about your 1980s makeover! Alice Cooper was coming off his 1978 confessional album, From the Inside (co-written with lyricist Bernie Taupin, on hiatus from usual partner Elton John). Years into being an avatar of “shock rock”, Alice Cooper (aka “Alice Cooper ‘80” per the album cover) may not have known what to do next, so he called Cars producer Roy Thomas Baker and decided to give new wave a spin. Cooper borrows another of Elton’s longtime collaborators, Davey Johnstone, who splatters lead guitar all over the synths and is listed as one of the co-writers on several songs.

Flush the Fashion is most well-known for the woozy electronics of “Clones (We’re All)”, a cover written by David Carron. Released as a single in April 1980, “Clones (We’re All)” scraped its way to #40 on Billboard’s Top 40 singles chart, and then dropped off immediately, doing little to help the commercial success of the album.

No matter, at least from today’s vantage point. Flush the Fashion was poorly reviewed and didn’t sell. Still, it’s a 28-minute blast, one short, punchy song after another, including “Model Citizen”, on which Alice reveals, “I’m a friend of Sammy Davis (casually).” Flush the Fashion is clearly not the most brilliant album Alice Cooper’s ever made, but it is one of the most fun and funny, and when it comes to new wave, fun and funny will take you a long way. – Rich Wilhelm

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Daryl Hall – Sacred Songs (recorded 1977; released 1980) / Daryl Hall & John Oates – Voices (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

It feels impossible to talk about Daryl Hall & John Oates’ breakthrough 1980 album without talking about Hall’s solo album, Sacred Songs, released in May 1980, just a few months before Voices, but recorded back in 1977. Hall, taking a creative break from his primary partnership, hit the studio with Robert Fripp, of King Crimson and “Frippertronics” fame. The resulting album, Sacred Songs, was deemed uncommercial by RCA Records and stuffed in a vault, not to be released until 1980.

RCA wasn’t entirely wrong: Sacred Songs is an odd album, featuring the nearly eight-minute “Babs and Babs”, a strange tale that eventually devolves into a Frippish soundscape; an instrumental Fripp piece called “Urban Landscape;” and the guitar and vocal freakout, “NYNYC”. At the same time, the record also contains some of Hall’s trademark haunting ballads and at least two skewed pop songs that seem to contain metadata about the songwriting process, including the title track and “Something in 4/4 Time”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

It’s those last two songs that appear to have influenced the more commercially successful Voices album. The album includes two tortured love songs, “Everytime You Go Away”, later covered successfully by Paul Young, and a hit cover of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”, neither of which is particularly new wavy.

However, both the massive hits, the sleek “Kiss on My List” and the bouncy “You Make My Dreams”, hint at new wave. More importantly, the rest of the album is comprised of nervy power pop tunes like “Big Kids” and “United State” that harken back to the twisted pop of Sacred Songs and earn Voices its place here. Yes, even John Oates gets in on the new wave fun with the synth-and-sax-enhanced bop, “Africa”. – Rich Wilhelm

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J. Geils Band – Love Stinks (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Under the influence of keyboard player and co-songwriter Seth Justman, the Boston blues/R&B sensations led by frontman Peter Wolf gave their gritty funk a makeover. They introduced an arsenal of synthesizers for their ninth studio album. While the follow-up, Freeze Frame (1981) is more overtly New Wave, Love Stinks works much better because it combines their bluesy roots with New Wave far more seamlessly.

Opening track “Just Can’t Wait” is a power-pop masterpiece, as Justman’s synths meld perfectly with J. Geils’ deft guitar work. The infamous title track combines sizzling keyboards with a shameless crib of the Troggs’ riff from “Wild Thing”. And they even made room for a good old-fashioned party anthem with their cover of the Strangeloves’ “Night Time”, as well as a weird but hilarious novelty song, “No Anchovies, Please”. A tremendous party album from a band known for their party albums. – Chris Ingalls

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Billy Joel – Glass Houses (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

After four albums that earned him some critical acclaim and an equal amount of derision, Billy Joel hit the big time with his 1977 album, The Stranger, a cinematic piano-based pop-rock album filled with massive hits (“Just the Way You Are”) and significant deep cuts (“Vienna”). Joel followed up The Stranger” with 52nd Street, on which Joel wove threads of Latin music and jazz into his songs. Both albums earned Joel a degree of critical respect and a collection of Grammy Awards, but after so much ambition, Billy Joel just wanted to rock out.  

That’s what he did on Glass Houses. Opening with the breaking glass intro of “You May Be Right”, Glass Houses remains Billy Joel’s most straightforward rock album and his most fun. In addition to “You May Be Right”, the following three tracks on the album—ode to phone sex, “Sometimes a Fantasy”; Paul McCartney/Paul Simon homage, “Don’t Ask Me Why”; and statement-of-purpose, “It’s Still Rock’n’Roll to Me” all hit the Billboard’s Top 40 singles charts. But the fun doesn’t end with the singles.

“Sleeping with the Television On” is a snappy power pop tune. “Close to the Borderline” features a crunchy guitar duel courtesy of Russell Javors and David Brown, which sounds great with headphones, and a trio of ballads feels heartfelt and self-effacing. And while simultaneously playing piano and synth toward the end of everybody’s secret favorite Billy Joel song, “All for Leyna”, the Piano-Turned-Synth Man reaches new wave nirvana, whatever that is. – Rich Wilhelm

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Robert Palmer – Clues (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

After leaving the British soul band Vinegar Joe in 1974, singer Robert Palmer was signed to a solo record deal with Island Records. He proceeded to crank out critically acclaimed albums that blended reggae, soul, and impeccably designed adult contemporary pop. In 1980, he shifted gears with Clues, which introduced twitchy keyboard work and a decidedly New Wave feel but sacrificed none of the soul or songwriting smarts that were in abundance on his five previous solo albums.

The irrepressible “Looking for Clues” bounces around with hooks and sly vocal work (and a goofy accompanying music video that was in heavy rotation in MTV’s early days), heavier guitars beef up the overall sound on “Sulky Girl” and “What Do You Care”, and the low-key single “Johnny and Mary” is easily one of the greatest songs Palmer ever wrote. Adding to Palmer’s New Wave bona fides is the presence of Gary Numan, who plays keyboards on two songs, including one of his own compositions, the simmering, atmospheric “I Dream of Wires”. – Chris Ingalls

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Queen – The Game (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

While its follow-up, the funky Hot Space (1982), is much more modern in its execution, Queen’s eighth album is the one where the British foursome kicked down the doors of New Wave, thanks in large part to the ample use of synthesizers (an instrument they deliberately avoided up to that point). Sure, this is the album that includes chart-topping forays into rockabilly (“Crazy Little Thing Called Love”) and disco (“Another One Bites the Dust”).

However, it also features drummer Roger Taylor’s synth-drenched foot stomper “Rock It (Prime Jive)”, bassist John Deacon’s glorious power-pop single “Need Your Loving Tonight”, and Brian May’s funk rock guitar workout “Dragon Attack”. Maybe not textbook New Wave across the board, but The Game sees Queen hanging up their progressive rock capes and embracing something far more immediate. – Chris Ingalls

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Linda Ronstadt – Mad Love (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

For someone associated with the 1970s southern California music scene, Linda Ronstadt always seemed creatively restless, eager to follow her muse. While this was a trait that had marked her progression from early in her career, it became strikingly apparent on her new wave gambit, Mad Love.

Being an album highlighting the “new” sound, it’s natural that three Elvis Costello songs are featured on Mad Love, and “Party Girl”, “Girls Talk”, and “Talking in the Dark” are all just fine. However, the real excitement begins with the opening title track, written by Mark Goldenberg, a member of the Los Angeles power pop band the Cretones. Ronstandt sings two other Goldenberg songs here—“Cost of Love” and “Justine”—and Goldenberg plays some punchy guitar throughout the album.

Ronstadt also rocks out with “How Do I Make You”, an early hit by Billy Steinberg, who’d write a succession of massive hits over the next several decades. As was her custom, Ronstadt included a few older songs on the album, “I Can’t Let Go” (originally recorded by Evie Sands and later by the Hollies) and “Hurt So Bad” (Little Anthony and the Imperials), both of which were transformed into punchy hit singles.

While Ronstadt included a few tracks on her 1982 follow-up album, Get Close, she mostly left new wave behind, in search of Nelson Riddle and mariachi music. That’s OK, though. Ronstadt has a restless spirit and, anyway, we’ll always have Mad Love. – Chris Ingalls

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Genesis – Abacab (1981)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Progressive rock titans Genesis began paring down their sound in the mid-1970s when vocalist Peter Gabriel jumped ship (replaced by existing drummer Phil Collins) and even more so after the departure of guitarist Steve Hackett (at which point bassist Mike Rutherford pulled double duty). Their first album as a trio was the aptly titled And Then There Were Three (1978), featuring Collins, Rutherford, and keyboard player Tony Banks. While that album and its follow-up, Duke (1980), still featured plenty of prog overtones, there was also a decidedly pop edge to their new lineup.

However, on Abacab, synthesizers were more overt and New Wave-centric, incorporating a smattering of horns to add a more soulful edge. While the second half of the title track tends to plod aimlessly like a prog classic in search of a good idea, the first half is full of tight, three-piece instrumentation, Collins’ urgent vocals, and plenty of catchy keyboard flourishes.

Deep cuts like the moody, surreal “Keep It Dark” and “Dodo/Lurker” nicely bridge New Wave with classic rock, and while the quirky, robotic “Who Dunnit?” seems like a weird outtake that somehow managed to sneak onto the record, Collins’ “Man on the Corner” is ballad-mode Genesis at its absolute best. – Chris Ingalls

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Ian Hunter – Short Back ’n’ Sides (1981)

Ian Hunter’s solo career after leaving Mott the Hoople embraced hard rock, glam, and soul, but it was his fifth album, Short Back ‘n’ Sides, that brought him into the New Wave fray, aided by the production and guitar work of the Clash’s Mick Jones (frequent Hunter collaborator Mick Ronson co-produced). The record’s compact, immediate feel is often reminiscent of the Clash, and the fact that Hunter’s voice is fairly similar to Joe Strummer’s certainly doesn’t hurt. Modern touches bring a contemporary feel to the anthemic opener “Central Park n’West” and the Bo Diddley-fied “Lisa Likes Rock n’ Roll”.

While tracks like “Noises” and “Rain” have a more daring, experimental feel, Hunter still pulls old-school rock and soul out of his pocket with terrific numbers like “I Need Your Love” and the gorgeous album closer “Keep on Burnin’”. Hunter was still as vital as ever in 1981. – Chris Ingalls

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John Hiatt – All of a Sudden (1982)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Anyone who fell in love with John Hiatt’s critical breakout album, Bring the Family (1987), and then decided to dig into his discography might have been shocked when their needle dropped on All of a Sudden. Instead of the rootsy sound concocted by Hiatt, Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe, and Jim Keltner, the listener would be greeted with the opening to “I Look for Love”, which sounds like Gary Numan, only with more synths. The electronics settle down as Hiatt begins to sing, only to return anytime Hiatt shuts his mouth. And that’s pretty much the way for much of All of a Sudden.

From the beginning of his career, Hiatt was a formidable songwriter. Still, it took him a while to find his footing as a recording artist, experimenting with various production techniques from one album to the next. Tony Visconti, who had produced David Bowie, was on board for All of a Sudden, and bringing a Bowie vibe was clearly on the agenda.

Despite the approach being light years from where Hiatt finally found acclaim with Bring the Family, All of a Sudden is one of the oddball winners in this new wave sweepstakes. Hiatt has always been too good a songwriter to write an entire album of bad tunes, and there are gems to be found on All of a Sudden, buried underneath the synths. However, why scrape the synths away? They’re fun! – Rich Wilhelm

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Rush – Signals (1982)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

By 1982, synthesizers were nothing new for the Canadian progressive rock trio of Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart. Permanent Waves (1980) combined keyboards with a more radio-friendly sound, and the unimpeachable classic Moving Pictures (1981) brought even more success as they expertly straddled the lines between pop and prog. However, Signals was the point where the keyboards, courtesy of bassist/vocalist Lee, began to overpower Lifeson’s guitar. Purists may scoff, but this new sound perfected the balance.

With singles like “Subdivisions” and “New World Man” (the latter being their only song to crack the US Top 40), the keyboard textures and slimmed-down sound not only worked in 1982, but they still hold up spectacularly well in 2025. Other highlights include the driving, powerful “Analog Kid”, the reggae-tinged “The Weapon”, and the sublime “Losing It” (featuring future k.d. lang collaborator Ben Mink on violin). Signals isn’t necessarily typical Rush, but it pulls off the rare feat of sounding very much of its time while remaining highly enjoyable more than 40 years later. – Chris Ingalls

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The Pointer Sisters – Break Out (1983)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

The Pointer Sisters have a fascinating discography. Their 1973 debut album opened with “Yes We Can Can”, a song by the great Allen Toussaint. Their follow-up record included both Dizzy Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts” and an Anita and Bonnie Pointer original, “Fairytale”, that won a Grammy for Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group in 1974. Along the way, they covered Bruce Springsteen (“Fire’) and Steely Dan (“Dirty Work”). With this kind of variety in their recent past, it isn’t as surprising as one might think that the Pointer Sisters struck platinum in 1984 with Break Out, an album that deftly split the difference between dance pop and new wave.

The Break Out hit parade started with “Automatic”, which peaked at #5 on the Hot 100 in early 1984. In a year of big, shiny pop hits by the likes of Cyndi Lauper, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, and Tina Turner, “Automatic” is one of the biggest and shiniest, a synthpop masterpiece that must have sounded great on the hottest dance floors of 1984.

“Automatic” was followed by three more Top Ten hits from Break Out. “Jump (For My Love)” had its parenthetical title added after Van Halen scored with their own “Jump”. “I’m So Excited”, originally from their previous album, was appended to a new pressing of Break Out and climbed the charts a second time. Finally, the jittery “Neutron Dance” found the Pointer Sisters sashaying their way into 1985. It’s a fantastic run of singles and, aside from a pair of relatively conventional ballads, the whole album continues the vibe of those fabulous hits. – Rich Wilhelm

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Yes – 90125 (1983)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Calling Yes’ 11th studio album New Wave is a bit of a stretch. It’s more like synthpop with heavy doses of progressive rock, but context is everything. After making one album with future super-producer Trevor Horn in 1980 (Drama), original vocalist Jon Anderson was back on board, bringing along original keyboard player Tony Kaye, new guitarist Trevor Rabin, and longstanding bassist Chris Squire and drummer Alan White. The blending of band members old and new brought modern sensibilities while retaining much of Yes’ original essence, all against the backdrop of the MTV New Wave era.

The opening track and monster hit, “Owner of a Lonely Heart”, combined pop smarts with funk samples (still a novelty in 1983), as well as a searing, effects-laden Rabin guitar solo. Elsewhere, there’s the vocal harmony showcase “Leave It”, the bluesy pop sheen of “Hold On”, and even some prog rock throwbacks like “Changes” and “Hearts”. Yes didn’t completely abandon their prog roots on 90125, but they were fully immersed in the sounds of the time. – Chris Ingalls

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Neil Young – Trans (1983)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Neil Young always excelled at confounding expectations and pissing off record company executives, never more so than in the early 1980s, releasing albums in a variety of genres that often sounded very little like early, “classic” Neil. After the bruising, proto-grunge of Re*Ac*Tor (1981), Young signed with Geffen Records, where he was guaranteed $1 million per album and complete creative control.

As a result, Young did a complete 180 with his first Geffen record, Trans, which was extremely heavy on keyboards and samplers, inspired by his young son Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak. With Young’s voice filtered through a vocoder, the distorted vocals were Young’s attempt to communicate with his son.

The result is an album that evokes the sounds of Devo, Daft Punk, and Kraftwerk. This bold move angered and confused fans, but has its share of staunch defenders and is regarded by many as a daring classic (two songs, “Little Thing Called Love” and “Hold on to Your Love”, were recorded during a separate session in Honolulu and are slightly more conventional Young tracks).

Young even throws in an odd remake of his Buffalo Springfield classic “Mr. Soul”, described by Stereogum in a 2013 reappraisal as “Thomas Dolby off the meds.” The robotic arrangements aren’t without their emotional heft, however. “Transformer Man”, in particular, is one of Young’s most moving compositions. – Chris Ingalls

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ZZ Top – Eliminator (1983)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

One of the most obvious entries on this list sees the gritty Texas blues trio ZZ Top embracing the 1980s as if their lives depended on it. Their previous album, El Loco (1981), was undoubtedly a dip into the waters of New Wave, thanks to compact rockers like “Tube Snake Boogie” and the synth-heavy “Groovy Little Hippie Pad”.

However, if El Loco was something of a tentative dip, Eliminator was a full-on cannonball. If it was a gamble, it paid off in spades. Eliminator eventually sold more than ten million copies, mainly on the strength of white-hot pop/rock/boogie/new wave singles like “Gimme All Your Lovin’”, “Sharp Dressed Man”, and “Legs”.

What’s more, Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, and Frank Beard took full advantage of MTV, as all the singles were made into classic music videos that combined their scruffy, down-home Texas charm with supermodels, souped-up classic cars, and plenty of contemporary touches. Even a brief listen to Eliminator will instantly take you back to 1983, but best of all, it still sounds great. – Chris Ingalls

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Robert Plant – Shaken’n’Stirred (1985)

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Following the death of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham in 1980, Robert Plant launched a fascinating solo career. His debut, Pictures at Eleven (1982), leaned into a sleeker 1980s sound, while his follow-up, The Principle of Moments, was more atmospheric. Both albums included the ever-more-ubiquitous Phil Collins on drums.

After a detour into the Top 40 with the Honeydrippers’ “Sea of Love” single, Plant plunged headlong into his most experimental album to date, 1985’s Shaken’n’Stirred. The album was filled with herky-jerky rhythms, odd blasts of percussion and keyboards, and cryptic lyrics (cryptic song titles as well: “Hip to Hoo”, “Kallalou Kallalou”, “Doo Doo a Do Do”, and the possible in-joke pun, “Easily Lead”). Two songs, “Little By Little” and the closing track, “Sixes and Sevens”, could have slotted comfortably into The Principle of Moments, but otherwise, Plant was striking out in new territory.

Plant launched a Shaken’n’Stirred tour, with Led Zeppelin-free setlists. He couldn’t escape his previous band, though. Amid Plant’s tour, Led Zeppelin reunited (with Phil Collins and Tony Thompson on drums) to play Live Aid in Philadelphia. Zep’s Live Aid set is universally considered to be one of their worst performances as a band, and one of the worst sets from Live Aid. The Led Zeppelin set did nothing to move any units of Shaken’n’Stirred, and the record was soon forgotten, though it could be seen as a template for Plant’s next, far more successful stab at modern rock, Now and Zen, released in 1988. – Rich Wilhelm

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