The cultural melting pot stirred by music tastes in the mid-’80s brought to the surface several styles and genres that barely existed a decade earlier. By 1986, it wasn’t all that rare to find music as diverse as heavy metal and world sharing bedspace with standbys such as pop and hard rock.
Credit MTV with some of this open-eared diplomacy. Mid-decade, the groundbreaking music-video network was instrumental in breaking various acts across the range of recording artists to mainstream audiences. Its influence helped multiply the mass appeal of many of the Top 30 Albums of 1986, as selected by the UCR staff, listed below.
The year’s biggest records — career-best offerings from Bon Jovi, Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon, among others — can trace their roots to distinct genres: pop-metal, art-rock and world, respectively, here. Yet somehow in 1986, they all found a way to coexist in a shared landscape.
READ MORE: Top 40 Songs of 1986
Over the next 12 to 18 months, that landscape narrowed as artists gradually moved to their own corners, but the lasting impact of many top albums released in 1986 never fully faded. Their influence can still be heard in everything from pop and indie rock to hip-hop and heavy metal.
The scope of the recordings below includes one of the final albums by a jazz giant, the debut from an MTV-extolled pop-metal band, a pair of wildly different LPs from a prolific singer-songwriter, the first concert set by one of the world’s biggest and best live performers, and records that gave second chances to hitmakers from the ’60s and ’70s. 1986 was that kind of year.
Top 30 Albums of 1986
World music, metal, art-rock and old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll converged at the 1980s’ midpoint.
Gallery Credit: Michael Gallucci
