The Song of the Summer Is Actually the Song of 1982 (2024)

It’s June, school’s out (or almost), and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” is everywhere. Since its release in April, it has become a Top 5 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and outside the U.S., it’s already the biggest song in the world, including in the U.K., where it has spent five consecutive weeks at the top of the charts. She has performed the song at Coachella and on Saturday Night Live. It’s approaching half a billion streams on Spotify. She has even got Adele’s cosign. And these are just ripples from Carpenter’s larger takeover of the memeosphere. Her delivery is assured and alluring, the melody falling in desultory “My give-a-f—s are on vacation” wisps over a rhythm driven by syncopated synth bass and steady handclaps, all atop two rich chords that share a buoyant common tone. An irresistible song about irresistibility, it was widely declared the song of the summer before we even got to the end of April.

But “Espresso,” frankly, belongs to the summer of 1982. Pretty much every musical idea in America’s Pop Song of the Moment can be traced back to an entire genre of music that, in its own time, was resoundingly rejected as “not pop enough” by radio and MTV. Ironic indeed that so much pop in the past couple of years, whether it’s Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk!,” Dua Lipa’s Barbie soundtrack entry “Dance the Night,” or Doja Cat’s SZA team-up “Kiss Me More,” derives from this musical movement that never even had a name of its own.

This is not a case of an underground style finally edging into the mainstream, like punk did in various forms in the 1990s. This particular case is a cold case. A RICO case, even. It’s about the people who decide what pop does and doesn’t sound like—or, more to the point, what pop looks and doesn’t look like. And after all these years, it still makes me mad.

Back in the early ’80s, the section of the record store where one found these records—by artists like D-Train and Evelyn King and Junior and Unlimited Touch—was most often labeled “Soul & Funk.” Both of those terms were inexact. The word soul conjures images of Ray Charles and Otis Redding; this music was far from that. As for funk, that could just as well describe the music of James Brown and Sly Stone from the 1960s, or the P-Funk of the 1970s. In fact, early 1980s funk was an evolution so distinct that, nowadays, music journalists and record collectors have been obliged to posthumously award it more specific names, and still there is no consensus on what to call it: post-disco, roller disco, electro, synth funk, or boogie, the term devised in the U.K.

If your eyes are glazing over just reading this list, I feel you. A genre’s name means absolutely nothing if we don’t unpack it. So let’s do that.

Every genre is a collection of sonic tropes—common musical behaviors shared by songs in a particular category. What are the things we hear in our ear that make, for example, a disco song sound like “disco”? Let’s listen: Disco songs usually have a stomping kick drum on every beat (something drummers call “four on the floor”) and a hi-hat that opens and closes on every beat as well. You’ve probably heard folks make fun of disco by chanting “Boots-and-pants-and-boots-and-pants,” right? That’s the sound of those kick drum and hi-hat tropes: the kick on every boots and pants, and the open hat on each and. Another trope in 1970s disco is a bass line consisting of one note played in alternating high and low octaves. When a genre gets really “tropey”—in other words, when its musical choices become somewhat predictable and cliché—it becomes easier to copy, or lampoon. By the end of that decade, it seemed as if every big artist, from the Rolling Stones to Rod Stewart to Blondie, was adding these disco tropes to their songs. This creeping disco-ization of popular music felt to many fans like something between aesthetic stasis and metastasis, and this hom*ogenization was part of the reason for the growing backlash to disco in the late 1970s, culminating in the famed Disco Demolition Night in July 1979. But only part of the reason.

Less than a decade before, Black artists in popular music had more access to Top 40 radio, and thus more popularity, than at any other point in history. Motown’s marketing machine had a lot to do with that. In Billboard’s year-end chart for 1970, four out of the top 10 songs were by Black artists, and five either were on Motown or were Motown-related. But at the dawn of the ’70s, the structure of the music business was on the precipice of a change that would in many ways reverse that racial and cultural progress. The corporatization of FM radio brought with it the practice of demographic narrowcasting, and soon so-called rock stations were purging Black artists from their playlists. A whole segment of the American audience—mostly white and male—began to lose touch with contemporary Black music. Major record companies invested heavily in Black artists to get access to the “Soul” marketplace, but they ended up segregating those artists in “Black Music” departments, which were always second tier to those companies’ “Pop” departments, and thus many Black artists—even as they enjoyed more sales than ever before—had to prove themselves on Black radio stations first before pop radio promoters would touch them, a fraught process called “crossover.”

During this time, disco emerged from Black communities, like so many American genres before it. And because disco was also linked to other compelling cultural phenomena—to lifestyle, to fashion, to dance, to language, and so on—it followed its predecessors, like rhythm and blues, into the white mainstream. But in this changing business milieu, the nuances of disco, itself a varied agglomeration of different styles, were lost. Ironically, it was the mainstreaming and whitening of disco that made it more “tropey,” and yet that tropey-ness came to signify Blackness (and brownness and gayness) for the alienated and the bigoted. As the progressive ’70s gave way to the more regressive ’80s, it wasn’t just disco that was dumped from pop radio playlists and label rosters; it was pretty much all Black artists who weren’t already established as pop acts, the leading exceptions to that exclusion being Michael Jackson and Donna Summer.

So, in the wake of the disco crash, soul and funk acts were cut loose, floating away from the pop continent on their own segregated ice shelf. A new generation of Black artists lived in a mostly separate ecosystem in which Black dance music lost some of those disco tropes, dialing back into funk. But where ’60s and ’70s funk had been rangy and loose, early-’80s funk adopted disco’s metronomic rhythmic exactitude, even before the widespread use of drum machines. And though it retained disco’s precision and slick production, and often its “four on the floor” kick drum pattern, ’80s funk slowed down the tempos, ramped up the syncopation, leaned into the backbeat with hearty handclaps, and put melody and suspense back into disco’s monotonous, repetitive bass lines.

You could hear that evolution in real time, watching disco icons Chic morph into a funk band in 1979 with “Good Times.” In 1980 one song by Tom Browne, a trumpeter who moonlighted as an airline pilot, called “Funkin’ for Jamaica (N.Y.),” and another in 1981, called “I’ll Do Anything for You,” by Denroy Morgan, collectively set the paradigm for funk’s new school: synthesized elements tangoing with traditional electric and acoustic instruments, amid those ever-present handclaps and huge, gorgeous jazz and gospel keyboard chords. Black dance music, in effect, reclaimed the aesthetic signifiers of Blackness. Outsiders, whether industry gatekeepers or eavesdropping listeners, couldn’t or wouldn’t hear the subtleties of the change. They shrugged and called it disco. It was not.

Both of these two generational anthems were Top 10 hits on the “Soul” chart (which became the “Black” chart the following year), but they were virtually invisible in the mainstream, never charting in the pop Top 40. Likewise, the new movement spawned figures and institutions whose names remain even now just beyond the fringes of our pop music histories. Producers like Patrick Adams, Van Gibbs, Leon Sylvers III, Kashif, and Raymond and Bert Reid. Songwriters like Leroy Burgess, Kenton Nix, and Randy Muller. Musicians like Bernard Wright, Dexter Wansel, and Marcus Miller. Labels like Prelude, SAM, Becket, and West End. New York was a creative center for this movement, but countless American recording acts, including Crown Heights Affair and Fonda Rae, were joined by Black Brits like Central Line, Imagination, Junior, and, later, Loose Ends. The Top 10 of the Billboard Black singles chart became populated with artists who would never receive any airplay on pop stations or video play on MTV. And we are talking, again, generational anthems that folks today might know only because they were included in a film soundtrack or sampled in a hip-hop song: Carl Carlton’s “She’s a Bad Mama Jama,” Frankie Smith’s “Double Dutch Bus,” Unlimited Touch’s “I Hear Music in the Streets,” Junior’s “Mama Used to Say.”

Quincy Jones—who helped shape this emerging post-disco sound from top down in collaboration with stars like Michael Jackson and George Benson—found one way, if not one hundred of them, to crack the new code of pop radio on one of his own albums, The Dude, in 1981: with ballads, specifically those fronted by singer James Ingram. But it is telling that when Jones and Jackson reunited for Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller, neither of them had a foolproof pop passport. Sure, as the legend goes, MTV’s programmers refused to play Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” even as it climbed the pop charts, until forced to do so by a livid Walter Yetnikoff, who needed Jackson’s Thriller to make CBS Records’ fourth-quarter numbers in 1982. One might be tempted to see this milestone as a breakthrough for Black artists. It was not.

MTV, founded in the midst of pop’s virtual blockade against Black artists of all genres, remained a paragon of pop’s new hypocrisy deep into the 1980s. The lie espoused by the channel’s programmers was that they played rock. The reality was that the very first video they ever played was essentially a disco song (“Video Killed the Radio Star,” by the Buggles), and thereafter, they played copious amounts of funk, just funk by white artists: the Clash, Heaven 17, Thomas Dolby, Robert Palmer. White British funk band ABC’s “Poison Arrow” used essentially the same rhythm track as Black American band Skyy’s “Here’s to You” from two years earlier, but Skyy never saw daylight on MTV. Palmer’s covers of songs by Cherrelle, the Gap Band, and the System easily found a perch on MTV, while the artists who recorded the originals did not.

In fact, here’s one very telling example of how this dynamic worked. James Mtume and Reggie Lucas were alumni of Miles Davis’ band who became a successful production team in the 1970s. But their stellar early-’80s work for Black artists—songs like “Never Knew Love Like This Before,” for Stephanie Mills, and “You Know How to Love Me,” for Phyllis Hyman—never knew love on MTV or most pop stations. Mtume, with his own group fronted by female vocalist Tawatha Agee, scored a huge hit with “Juicy Fruit,” hitting No. 1 on the Black chart without cracking the Top 40 of the Hot 100, embargoed as it was from pop stations. Around the same time, Mtume’s partner Lucas had been tapped to produce the debut album of another female vocalist who haunted the New York club scene. Lucas’ musical approach was much the same as his erstwhile partner’s: synth-heavy, rhythmic, post-disco funk. But Lucas’ project, unlike Mtume’s, broke the sonic barrier at MTV in 1983, and the artist he produced became a worldwide star, mostly because of how she looked. You know her as Madonna.

In the years thereafter, this nameless genre of early ’80s music dissipated. Some Black artists, like Prince, showed a way forward that included copious amounts of rock guitar, and others heeded that certain call by relaxing into ballad mode, both strategies to navigate and pass the litmus tests of requisite “aesthetic whiteness” at pop radio. Hip-hop would sample a lot of late ’70s and early ’80s funk in the 1990s (“Juicy Fruit,” for example, became the basis for the Notorious B.I.G.’s immortal “Juicy,” while Will Smith’s “Miami” was built atop the Whispers’ “And the Beat Goes On”), but it wasn’t until the 2010s that the genre’s ideas began to slowly work their way into a changed mainstream with acts like Chromeo, Daft Punk, and Anderson .Paak. (Listen, for example, to .Paak’s “Am I Wrong,” from 2016, back-to-back with D-Train’s 1982 hit “Keep On.”)

Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” is, like .Paak’s work, a pitch-perfect paean to this period. Co-written by Carpenter with Berklee grad Amy Allen, Steph Jones, and Julian Bunetta, the latter of whom also produced, it gets everything so right it’s uncanny. So right, in fact, that it works seamlessly mashed up with some ’80s classics. Listen to Carpenter over the music bed for the 1982 hit “Sooner or Later” by Larry Graham, the artist better known now as Drake’s uncle. Or listen to her over Central Line’s 1981 hit “Walking Into Sunshine.” Or over 1981’s “I’m in Love,” by Evelyn King, produced by Kashif. Carpenter sells a sound, a song, a look, and a character every bit as much as Ms. Ciccone did back in 1983. Should it be surprising that this sound now returns to the pop charts in a similar package? It should not. Most of our musical culture ends up delivered in this form, eventually.

But this is not about Sabrina Carpenter. It is not an argument against copying or sharing styles. And it’s not about cultural appropriation in the way that many folks on social media now wield that term, tending to see the phenomenon as individual behavior rather than something structural, focusing on personal cultural crimes instead of a big economic one.

The early 1980s for Black artists were not a blissful respite from the eyes and ears of culture vultures, a safe space, like the proverbial barbecue, with no one there but the fam and perhaps a white friend or two … maybe Teena, or Bobby, or Darryl & John. This wasn’t some act of creative choice. This was a sonic apartheid coordinated by record executives, radio programmers, artist managers, and promoters. “Not pop” or “too Black” were their perennial, weekly, daily mantras. It rendered a tilted marketplace in which white artists did not have to compete with Black artists for eyes and ears. It was, in effect, nothing short of racketeering.

A few organizations cried foul, notably the NAACP in its scathing 1987 report “The Discordant Sound of Music.” But the damage had already been done. It left a two-tiered system of feast or famine for Black artists: The six superstar exceptions you knew by their first names (Prince, Michael, Tina, Lionel, and, later, Whitney and Janet), and the rest (Luther Vandross, the Gap Band, Midnight Star, Atlantic Starr, and on) whom you might not have. You think Frankie Beverly & Maze wouldn’t have liked “Joy and Pain” or “Before I Let Go” (which Beyoncé brought to the Hot 100, 28 years later) to get a shot at a larger market? You don’t think Rene & Angela wouldn’t have liked “My First Love” to be an all-American prom song? They coulda shoulda woulda been pop.

Having even a fleeting bit of rare access to the wider market could be life-changing, as it was to Reggie Lucas as Madonna’s producer. For most without access, the “crossover” era caused turmoil and lost opportunity for a generation of Black artists and entrepreneurs that can be measured in a number of ways. Of course, there were the aesthetic changes and compromises that some Black artists felt obliged to make: Listen to Kool and the Gang’s Top 5 pop song in 1973 vs. their Top 5 pop song from 1984; to Stevie Wonder in 1973 vs. 1984. But the cost could also be charted in the extra months and years that Dad or Mom had to stay on the road to get paid what other artists could make in a few days or weeks; in the indignity of seeing your style or even your song on MTV, just not with you performing it; in historical disregard; and in the long-term trajectories of the Big Six successful crossover artists who worked so hard and fought for so long that some of them had to dull their physical and mental pain with propofol and fentanyl and cocaine and died far too soon. Was this the way things had to be? As the following decade proved, it was not.

Hip-hop changed the racial calculus of pop music in the 1990s, and for young artists today, the lines between the pop world and the Jim Crow–born–and–still–extant Black or “Urban” segment are more consistently porous, so much so that many talk about the “death of genre.” But chart balance and sonic sharing aren’t as revelatory about how the industry works as is Billboard’s annual Power list, an executive cadre whose denizens remain, as ever, mostly white and male. This cohort ultimately gets to say what pop sounds and looks like. But don’t think for a minute that their reasons are anything but rationalizations. Ultimately, pop is, like whiteness, a malleable, made-up thing used to determine who is in and who is out.

“Espresso” is a bop, and it’s pop. So too were the countless other songs from the early ’80s that sounded just like it. They were, like “Espresso,” irrepressibly happy music. Sadly, the pop designation for the genre with no name came too late for its originators, many of whom are now underground in the literal sense of the term. This summer, I hear music in the streets, and it makes me smile. But I also can’t stop hearing another song, a ballad of irretrievable loss. And the beat goes on.