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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.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0Top 30 Albums of 1986, as\u00a0selected by the UCR staff, listed below.<\/p>\n
The year’s biggest records \u2014 career-best offerings from\u00a0Bon Jovi<\/a>,\u00a0Peter Gabriel<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Paul Simon<\/a>, among others \u2014\u00a0can 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.<\/span><\/p>\n