Top 100 albums 80-89
001: Sonic Youth
Daydream Nation
[Blast First/Enigma; 1987]
I could sit here and force-feed you dietary
information about Daydream Nation\'s purported
Importance, and because it\'s ended up as our
80s MVP, perhaps that\'s expected. But really,
the reason I like Daydream Nation better than
anything else spawned between 1980-89 is that,
hell, it\'s just the greatest f*****g album.
Few musical moments are more guaranteed to bring
me joy than the joyous riff and snare rim clicks
that kick off \"Teen Age Riot\". Never was the
elusive Sonic Youth balance of
noisecraft/songcraft kept so gloriously
intact-- despite containing few songs
under five minutes, this is still the most
accessible album they ever made (including even
that brief period when they were trying to be
accessible). Thank their confidence in allowing
themselves to stretch out their improv legs in the
studio, to present the record with bright, clear
production, to keep all the SKREEERAWWWKKK within
the context of actual melodic songs. Thank the
highest Lee ratio ever to be found on SY product,
and unparalleled composition consistency from
Thurston and, gasp!, Kim. Daydream Nation was a
noisy punctuation mark to the evolution of
sub-radar rock in the Reagan years, and as long as
people are still listening to guitars, it will
remain a milestone. --Rob Mitchum
002: Talking Heads
Remain in Light
[Sire; 1980]
As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the Talking
Heads found themselves at an awkward time: after
punk, which they were at first associated with,
had become synonymous with three chords and a
sneer, but before the arrival of new wave. So they
congregated in a Nassau studio with Brian Eno and
created a record without precedent-- one
that merged the restlessness and anxiety of the
former genre with the futurism of the latter. The
resulting album, drawing influence from tribal
Africa, is massively percussion-fueled, dense with
elaborate polyrhythms and elastic bass. Adrian
Belew\'s bizarre guitar work flavors the music
with erratic, technological pings and effects,
even nailing modem noise with crystalline
foresight. Byrne\'s lyrics are at their
surreal best here, with shapeshifting as a
recurring theme, but also at their most affecting
on songs like \"Once in a Lifetime\", which
poignantly addresses the passage of time and the
crossroads at which we find ourselves during life,
and \"Listening Wind\", whose haunted refrain
finds us sympathizing with a man for whom
terrorism is the last hope for preserving his
culture. Both daringly experimental and
pop-accessible, Remain in Light may be the Talking
Heads\' defining moment. --Ryan
Schreiber
003: Beastie Boys
Paul\'s Boutique
[Capitol; 1989]
Once upon a time, three Brooklyn Jews lost their
Def Jam street cred. They\'d already been
punks and raunchy pop-rappers, and damn if they
didn\'t find themselves lost as to what to be
next-- until down swooped the Brothers
Dust. These fairy godbrothers helped them usher
forth a dense samplorama that tanked sales-wise
because it was so much smarter than its
predecessor. Paul\'s Boutique was free of
riff-slag, and boasted mostly unfunny,
intimidatingly allusive lyrics. Just as the
African-American Gwendolyn Brooks opened up doors
for poetry, allowing epics to be written about
dehumanizing Chicago tenements, the Beasties
expanded hip-hop\'s domain to namecheck
Salinger, Dickens, Galileo, and Newton. So ahead
of its time, it should be on a 90s list. Odelay
would owe it back rent if they didn\'t have
the same landlords. --William Bowers
004: Pixies
Doolittle
[4AD; 1989]
Quick-- pick the most influential
alternative rock band of all time. If you
didn\'t choose The Pixies, I\'ll give you
another chance. In the meantime, listen to
Doolittle and learn from your mistakes. In all of
indie/alternative, there may be no single album
more borrowed from, adapted, or flat-out
ripped-off than The Pixies\' follow-up to
Surfer Rosa. Steve Albini once dismissed the band
as \"boring college rock\", and he was half
right-- The Pixies were college rock in
1989. (The \"boring\" half was obviously added to
pad his notoriety, as anyone who could call this
band boring is surely The World\'s Biggest
Asshole.) Doolittle is almost senselessly
varied-- mood-altering hooks, poetically
insane lyrics, larynx demolishing screams and
surreal croons, surf, thrash, pop, slow burns and
races to the finish line... Let me put it this
way: if not for Doolittle, there would be no
Pitchfork. In other words, the influence of this
record is so vast that, fifteen years on, it has
altered the course of your life at this very
moment. --Eric Carr
005: R.E.M.
Murmur
[IRS; 1983]
Not widely noticed when it was released,
R.E.M.\'s first full-length album was surely a
milestone: a clean break from everything else on
the radio, Murmur introduced the band\'s
simpler, stripped-down, almost folky sound and its
straightforward but insidious music. Guitarist
Peter Buck jangles more gently than his garage or
power-pop peers (like, say, producer Mitch
Easter\'s Let\'s Active); but without a
doubt, it\'s Michael Stipe who defines the
band with his deadly combination of feminine
sensitivity and masculine, stoically cryptic
vocals. And they brought great songs--
\"Radio Free Europe\", \"Pilgrimage\", \"Moral
Kiosk\", \"Catapult\"... everything sounds just as
good, and even as refreshing, two decades later.
If any one album were single-handedly responsible
for inventing alternative rock, this would be it.
--Chris Dahlen
006: The Smiths
The Queen Is Dead
[Sire; 1986]
In a way, this is the Smiths album-of-choice by
default, as it\'s the record that feels least
like it was built around a few great singles. The
pacing and sequencing are key, starting off with
one of the band\'s most urgent songs (the
title track) moving to the jaunty and clever
\"Frankly Mr. Shankly\", before eventually getting
around to the incredible \"Cemetery Gates\". The
back half has two of the finest songs of the
modern guitar-pop era (\"The Boy with a Thorn in
His Side\" and \"There Is a Light That Never Goes
Out\"), some of Morrissey\'s funniest lyrics
(\"Bigmouth Strikes Again\"), and no filler. A new
batch of lonely and alienated American teenagers
discovers The Smiths every year. The reason is
simple: few other bands could ever provide an
antidote to adolescent yearnings as powerful as
The Queen Is Dead. --Mark Richardson
007: Pixies
Surfer Rosa
[4AD; 1988]
Surfer Rosa snapshots the Pixies when they were
still young, fresh-faced, and (I assume) speaking
to each other. Frank Black\'s demonic one-man
choir is already snuff-film disturbing, Kim
Deal\'s voice charms, having yet to be
thoroughly scorched by cigarettes, David
Lovering\'s meaty fills float in ethereal
reverb, and Joey Santiago proves himself master of
the one-note riff. Maybe it\'s Albini on the
knobs, but Santiago\'s six-string, sounding
like a bee with its finger in a socket, is a key
element here, bloodbath-battling Black\'s
tongue-speaking through \"Something Against You\"
and \"Vamos\". The band jumps from the abstract
weirdness of tracks like \"Broken Face\" and
\"Tony\'s Theme\" to the effortless pop
immediacy of timeless indie wonders like \"Where
Is My Mind?\" and \"Gigantic\". How one band could
toe the line between jagged, artful
unpredictability and sublime melodic bliss is
anyone\'s guess, but their gift has not been
equaled since, and Surfer Rosa, easily their
strangest and most chaotic outing, remains an
unparalleled example of rule-smashing innovation
in independent music. --Rob Mitchum
008: Tom Waits
Rain Dogs
[Island; 1985]
Tom Waits\' life-as-theater has been onstage
for nearly three decades, yet of all his albums,
this one edges to the top of the pile. The second
installment in his German art song/\"Island
trilogy\", Rain Dogs has the strongest songs and
the surest grip on its own wanderings. With his
hobo-centric lyrics reinspired by a move to New
York City, Waits belts out \"Union Square\" and
then rumbles out ballads like \"Time\"; the bleak
vaudeville comes with accordion and pump organ
wheezing out oompahs, while the percussion clanks,
romps and slinks (\"Clap Hands\"). And then there
are the guitars: Keith Richards shows up to make
Waits look young and healthy, but it\'s Marc
Ribot whose icepick lines best suit Waits\'
verses, and who owns the riff on \"Jockey Full of
Bourbon\". But c\'mon, Waits, surely you could
have stopped Rod Stewart from destroying
\"Downtown Train\". --Chris Dahlen
009: Public Enemy
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
[Def Jam; 1988]
Public Enemy was the real deal: a codified
cultural force featuring an off-the-hinges
production team (The Bomb Squad), the
black-nationalist scholar (Professor Griff),
menacing Para-Military types (The S1W\'s), the
B-Boy (Flavor Motherf**kin\' Flav), and the
mouthpiece that held it all together (Chuck D).
The unrelenting momentum of Chuck\'s radical
rhetoric was matched pound-for-pound by The Bomb
Squad\'s dense, revolutionary soundghettos;
while Flav (who repped both big clocks and crack
rocks) did his gyrating dance around armed Black
Panther rejects, making Public Enemy possibly the
finest example of Hip-Hop Theater, ever. And when
all these elements gelled on It Takes a Nation of
Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy became the
equivalent of a Molotov Cocktail thrown into the
ever-growing cultural necropolis of Reagan\'s
1980s. --Sam Chennault
010: Joy Division
Closer
[Factory; 1980]
Murmurs of \"...too soon...\" and \"...what
if...\" will never be far from Ian Curtis\'
final statement. Closer was the fulfillment of the
colossal promise of Joy Division\'s brooding
debut masterpiece, Unknown Pleasures, but it
promised even more in return; Curtis\'s
eventual suicide would leave those expectations
tragically unrealized. Though it\'s easy to
diminish the significance of what Joy Division
left behind by second-guessing what could have
come after, that would be more tragic. The true
impact of Joy Division\'s bass-leading,
minimalist works is still being fully realized;
echoes of the themes of fear, alienation and loss
they championed still resonate in so much music.
That they might have gone on to surpass this
fractured, wrenching catharsis is irrelevant; this
is what is, and it is a thing of uncompromising
beauty. --Eric Carr
[
011: Tom Waits
Swordfishtrombones
[Island; 1983]
The edge goes to Rain Dogs, but it was the album
prior that found Waits coming out of the cocoon as
a death\'s head moth. With Swordfishtrombones,
The Black Rider was thrown out of the nightclub
into the alley and, finding himself in his true
element, he made its trashcan residents and urine
stink the genetic code of the rest of his career.
\"Underground\", \"Shore Leave\", and
\"Frank\'s Wild Years\" all convey this
mission nicely, with Waits embracing his inner
Cookie Monster and divine guitar clang.
There\'s even time for a few pint-swinging
shanties to boot, and a heart-shaped declaration
of dependence (\"Johnsburg, Illinois\") to the
woman that preserved Waits\' life, liver, and
hipness quotient. Waits\' early career is
certainly respectable, but Swordfishtrombones is
the corner he turned to become America\'s
proud hobo laureate. --Rob Mitchum
012: Prince & The Revolution
Purple Rain
[Warner Bros; 1984]
Prince was everywhere in 1984. Almost every song
on Purple Rain was in steady rotation on radio or
MTV at some point (don\'t remember hearing
\"Computer Blue\" anywhere), and incredibly, they
never really got old. What carries Purple Rain
over is the unbelievable emotional intensity
Prince brings to nearly every song. He never
screamed with more intensity than on the end of
\"The Beautiful Ones\", he never wrote another
melody as good as \"When Doves Cry\", and he never
integrated his rock leanings into his sound as
completely as on \"Let\'s Go Crazy\". The
great accomplishments of Prince are very great
indeed, and this is his greatest. --Mark
Richardson
013: The Fall
This Nation\'s Saving Grace
[Beggars Banquet; 1985]
The product of years of development into a
powerful rhythmic beast, This Nation\'s Saving
Grace predicts both The Pixies and Pavement with
pristine clarity, and like those bands, it is at
once accessible and utterly uncompromising. Mark
E. Smith stars as the unhinged emcee as the band
rages through the enormous riffs of \"Barmy\" and
the thunderous stomp of \"Gut of the Quantifier\".
\"Spoilt Victorian Child\" is a defining moment
for post-punk, Smith tripping over his own words
while Brix\'s guitarwork anchors the tracks
with melodic fury. The band moves over more
terrain than their usual sturm-und-drang here,
too, stopping off in \"L.A.\" for a go at sleazy,
junkyard new wave and paying tribute to Can with
\"I Am Damo Suzuki\". This Nation\'s Saving
Grace is The Fall at their mightiest, Brix\'s
riffs coaxing you in just far enough for the
Scanlon/Rogers/Burns/Hanley rhythm section to
crush you with a sledgehammer. Genius.
--Joe Tangari
014: Sonic Youth
Sister
[SST; 1987]
Sister was the last time Sonic Youth spent the
majority of an album in full-on Attack Mode, which
explains why it\'s the fist-clenchers\' SY
album of choice. The word of the day is
\"aggressive\", with the album\'s humid
production throwing a blanket over the noise to
convert all instrumentation and vocalization into
power-tool percussion. You can hear the clenched
teeth through \"Catholic Block\" and \"White
Cross\", the grinding machinery on \"Pacific Coast
Highway\". Stranded in the midst, \"Cotton Crown\"
still stands as the band\'s most romantic
moment, frustrating evidence that Thurston and Kim
should\'ve sang together far more often.
Sister was the last burst of Sonic Youth\'s
early stage before they molted and moved on to
bigger labels and bigger audiences, but for those
with a preference for their grainy-footage early
days, it\'s their zenith. --Rob
Mitchum
015: XTC
Skylarking
[Virgin; 1986]
Of all the words I might use to describe XTC,
\"warm\" didn\'t really become applicable
until the band realized it was okay to like Burt
Bacharach. However, on Skylarking, they had the
adjective thrust upon them by alpha-producer Todd
Rundgren. Taking their already ambitious songs
about life, love and the passing of seasons,
Rundgren turned what might have been another
clever-but-distant outing into a beacon of
psychedelic greenery. Andy Partridge\'s
diatribe \"Dear God\" (a b-side not originally
slated for the album) was a modest U.S. hit, but
magic tracks like Colin Moulding\'s \"Grass\",
\"Season Cycle\", and the weeping, orchestral
\"1000 Umbrellas\"-- all lending a modern
sophistication to the amiable eccentricity of The
Beatles and Beach Boys-- revealed a more
peaceful tune at the core of the album.
--Dominique Leone
016: Galaxie 500
On Fire
[Rough Trade; 1989]
A casual listen to On Fire yields little. The
spastic vocals drive some crazy. The drumming
constantly lags a quarter-measure behind the
already-slow compositions. Every song has the
exact same rhythm, which happens to be the first
one every guitar player learns. But if you\'re
wired a certain way, Wareham\'s falsetto
flights on \"Blue Thunder\" and \"Snowstorm\" are
the very definition of majestic. You\'ll
notice that guitar and bass compete to see which
can spin up with the most achingly melodic leads.
Damon Krukowski\'s cymbal washes demonstrate
his preference for color over rhythm. Tying it all
together, producer Kramer smeared Vaseline on the
lens and shot every scene straight into the golden
late-afternoon light. --Mark Richardson
017: Minutemen
Double Nickels on the Dime
[SST; 1984]
It\'s a double-album by a hardcore band that
specialized in one-minute funk-punk blasts. That
adds up to a lot of songs-- over forty of
\'em-- and few are less than
fantastic. The first ten tracks are the disjointed
warm-up; the middle locks together to make one of
the greatest one-sided conversations you\'ll
ever have; the end peters out, exhausted. D. Boon,
channeling co-lyricist Mike Watt, rants about
politics, disses Michael Jackson, makes fun of
suck-ups and reads off \"s**t from an old
notebook\". He reminisces about the band\'s
early days, speak-singing the classic prophecy,
\"Our band could be your life.\" Even the Van
Halen and Steely Dan covers succeed, like singing
along to the car radio, while the Minutemen\'s
own jumpy hooks and short, sharp rants are
unstoppable. And you wouldn\'t it know from
the edited version on Jackass: The Music, Vol. 1,
but \"Corona\" is a thinking man\'s feel-good
masterpiece. --Chris Dahlen
018: De La Soul
3 Feet High and Rising
[Tommy Boy; 1989]
In 1989, Prince Paul dispensed with his musical
pots and pans and ushered hip-hop from its Stone
Age into sampledelia-- never before had
samples been as versatile, intricate, or as
expressive as they were on Three Feet High and
Rising. Paul rarely stepped up to the mic here,
but his voice resonated throughout history; DJ
Shadow, RJD2, Co-Flow, and any number of other
sample-based hip-hop acts owe a long thank you
letter to the real Prince of the 80s. And
let\'s not forget young MC\'s Pos, Trugoy,
and Mase, who rose to the occasion and matched
Paul\'s sound collage quirk-for-quirk, proving
that you didn\'t have to be hard to rock a
mic. --Sam Chennault
019: Public Image, Ltd.
Second Edition
[Virgin; 1980]
Only John Lydon could claim to be \"getting rid
of the albatross\" by tying it around his neck in
the form of an obtuse ten-minute album opener.
Less a band than a menacing juggernaut, PIL
recorded an unforgiving second album, propelled by
Keith Levene\'s livewire guitar work and Jah
Wobble\'s endless, rubbery basslines. Lydon
(still Rotten, just not by name) used these
perpetual motion machines to launch bitter screeds
against society, and it\'s hard to imagine
more anti-social music. But the group were aware
of the potential hypocrisies in holding up a dark
mirror image to the public, implied by their
corporatist name. Second Edition was originally
released as Metal Box, literally packaged in
cost-prohibitive film canisters. For this, Lydon
was eternally grateful to Virgin, his pride and
price for showing that major labels were capable
of issuing genuinely challenging art for mass
consumption. --Christopher Dare
020: This Heat
Deceit
[Rough Trade; 1981]
Superficially, bands like This Heat had very
little business existing in the 80s. Their legacy
appeared to have been comprised of most of the
radical, experimental rock trends of the 70s
(drone, prog, free improv, electronics, punk, et
al), yet in 1981, it\'s hard to imagine many
other bands sounding as out of place as they did.
In retrospect, there may have been a small family
of like-minded ensembles (Art Bears, Etron Fou
Leloublan, Family Fodder), but virtually no
unifying \"scene\" for this music. That Charles
Hayward, Charles Bullen and Gareth Williams\'
music has impacted out-musicians a generation
removed from the actual events speaks volumes of
what they accomplished. The first moments of
Deceit sound current enough to have been recorded
yesterday afternoon. This album is dense, damaged,
furious, inspiring (technically, musically,
perhaps even politically), and it\'s a damn
fine argument for rock as transcendental
experience. --Dominique Leone
021: Brian Eno & David Byrne
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
[Sire; 1981]
Slick politicians, laughing exorcists, Lebanese
folk singers, agitated radio hosts, and radio
reverends all shared speaker space with some
wildly funky music on My Life in the Bush of
Ghosts. With this album, Brian Eno and David Byrne
combined programming, live instrumentation and
samples into a clever stew that anticipated, in
one way or another, nearly every trend in
electronic music for at least the next decade. The
sonic result of their collaboration expanded on
the hypnotic worldbeat experiments of the
Eno-produced Talking Heads albums (particularly
Remain in Light, as this album was recorded during
those sessions), bringing in folk recordings and
plying the wasteland of American talk radio for
choice material. Popular music turned a corner
with this record, and things haven\'t been the
same since. --Joe Tangari
022: My Bloody Valentine
Isn\'t Anything
[Creation/Sire; 1988]
Sure, it was Loveless in chrysalis, but pupating
genius is genius nonetheless. Isn\'t Anything
can be described as a stage in the evolution
towards the next album-- the guitars,
though warped and shredded, still act like
guitars, the vocals haven\'t yet been absorbed
into mix, etc.-- but there was nothing
tentative or vestigial about this record. If
Isn\'t Anything wasn\'t so rippingly
aggressive, so instantaneously
memorable-upon-first-listen, who knows whether the
more oblique Loveless would have been pampered
like it was? Nearly as influential as its
successor would be, Isn\'t Anything was an
inspiration to bands who, not willing to
completely f**k with their axes, were content with
getting to third base. --Brendan Reid
023: The Jesus & Mary Chain
Psychocandy
[Blanco y Negro/Warner Bros; 1985]
The Jesus and Mary Chain stripped pop music down
to its essentials and filled all the leftover
empty space with white noise. Psychocandy is
considered one of the key records in what became
shoegaze, but the band\'s greatest
contribution to the movement may have been to make
walls of guitar racket seem sensual and feminine.
Despite the consistently maxed-out distortion,
Psychocandy seems much more pop than rock, more
Beach Boys and girl groups than Stooges or
Suicide. Not one, but two (rather great) songs use
the \"Be My Baby\" drum intro, for god\'s
sake. --Mark Richardson
024: Gang of Four
Solid Gold
[Warner Bros; 1981]
Solid Gold documents a band that has moved beyond
the comparatively simple, chic politics of their
punk-funk debut Entertainment! into truly cynical,
wicked critique. Despite recent efforts, it\'s
nigh impossible to give Gang of Four too much
credit: a vast majority of underground records
released since 2000 are grievously indebted to the
band whether they know it or not. In the 80s,
groups as varied as R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers,
and INXS all cited them as a key influence. Big
Black simply wouldn\'t exist without them. In
the 90s, The Jesus Lizard, Helmet, and Quicksand
(who completely ripped off \"Paralysed\" on their
album Slip) added a darker gloss to the
Gang\'s shimmering twang, exposing a new
generation to the detached, zombie swagger they
all but invented. For sheer societal terror, few
bands can approach the resigned paranoia of Solid
Gold\'s finest moments: \"If I Could Keep It
for Myself\", \"Cheeseburger\" and their most
harrowing cut, \"He\'d Send in the Army\".
--Chris Ott
025: Black Flag
Damaged
[SST; 1981]
Henry Rollins might be his own running gag now,
but without him, Black Flag might have forever
remained buried under the miles of garbage calling
itself hardcore in Los Angeles circa 1980; with
him, Black Flag took on the essential ferocity of
men about to snap, and combined that with an
acidic sense of humor and these things called
\"songs\"-- a concept that many of the
wannabe punkers of the day were still trying to
sort out. Damaged hit in 1981, and by 1982, four
bars bearing the Black Flag name had been
airbrushed across miles and miles of spiked
leather. Conflicting feelings of violence, apathy,
rage, and self-satire course through this
one-- the essential touchstone of the
entire genre of West Coast hardcore--
crystallizing the turmoil of the movement. Listen
to \"Rise Above\" and try not to be incensed, then
listen to \"TV Party\" and try not to laugh out
loud. That\'s awesome. --Eric Carr
026: Elvis Costello & The Attractions
Get Happy
[Columbia; 1980]
Like something out of a Nick Hornby novel, a
British music geek proves that he \"gets\" soul
music. Elvis Costello leads the Attractions
through twenty tracks that burst the seams of the
original vinyl. At the time, Costello still wrote
his lyrics almost entirely in puns and
double-entendres-- \"love for tender\", or
\"\'til I step on the brake to get out of her
clutches\"-- but the music makes it
weightless. The band is giddy, especially Steve
Nieve, as Costello slings his tightest set of
material ever. Even covers like Sam & Dave\'s
\"I Can\'t Stand Up (For Falling Down)\" blend
right in. --Chris Dahlen
026: Elvis Costello & The Attractions
Get Happy
[Columbia; 1980]
Like something out of a Nick Hornby novel, a
British music geek proves that he \"gets\" soul
music. Elvis Costello leads the Attractions
through twenty tracks that burst the seams of the
original vinyl. At the time, Costello still wrote
his lyrics almost entirely in puns and
double-entendres-- \"love for tender\", or
\"\'til I step on the brake to get out of her
clutches\"-- but the music makes it
weightless. The band is giddy, especially Steve
Nieve, as Costello slings his tightest set of
material ever. Even covers like Sam & Dave\'s
\"I Can\'t Stand Up (For Falling Down)\" blend
right in. --Chris Dahlen
027: Michael Jackson
Thriller
[Epic; 1982]
I don\'t care what kind of music your promo
bait covers; any 80s list without Thriller is
kidding itself. Thanks to a twenty-year campaign
waged by Jacko to completely incinerate his
artistic integrity, revisiting Thriller is a
revelation, cutting through the tabloid baggage
with its crisp, sharp-edged Quincy production.
\"Wanna Be Startin\' Somethin\'\" is
sweltering dance-floor Afro-funk highlighting
Michael\'s abhorrence for personal criticism;
\"Billie Jean\"\'s paranoid bass and hiccup
histrionics are still cooler than its video\'s
illuminated sidewalks; the breakdown in \"PYT\",
with its ecstatic call-and-response and sultry
panting, remains the funkiest goddamn thing since
James Brown\'s \"Hot Pants\". Though the audio
equivalent to Star Wars in that it can be held
responsible for inspiring perhaps more crap than
any other release of its time, Thriller
permanently ziplocked the sound of era so that it
might forever remain as fresh and vital as the
album itself. --Rob Mitchum
028: New Order
Power, Corruption & Lies
[Factory; 1983]
Ian Curtis haunts this album for exactly thirty
seconds: until Bernard Sumner\'s vulnerable
vox begin, one can almost detect combustible
Curtis imploring us to \"Dance! Dance! Dance!
Dance! Dance! To the radio!\" over the
drum-n-bassline opener \"Age of Consent\".
Shifting the lyrical focus from alienation and
fascism to love and lovelessness, and mutating the
band\'s sound from marchy rock to marchy
dance, this was the peak of the New Order\'s
stellar 80s output, before they\'d become
soccer-anthem softies begging us to \"Rock the
Shack\". Every synth sweep holds up. Hear the
jangle everybody in Athens, Georgia was copping.
Hear why Peter Hook is the most fitting name in
Britpop. Hear what you\'re missing if you only
know the hits. --William Bowers
029: The Replacements
Let It Be
[Twin/Tone; 1984]
Youngish lad that I am, I heard plenty of worship
about the \'Mats before I actually got around
to hearing their body of work. Once I finally did,
it became pretty clear that Jeff Tweedy is merely
the reincarnation of Paul Westerberg\'s
relevancy. Through a career that ran from sloppy
alcohol-soaked punk to alt-rock grandpaws (nicely
summarized in the first two-thirds of \"We\'re
Coming Out\"), Let It Be stands as the hingepoint,
and I snuggled up to it more closely than most
albums of either extreme. Since my memories of the
80s are distorted by childhood haze and
retrospective kitsch, Westerberg coughing out
\"Androgynous\" with nothing but tape hiss for
company is necessary proof that the decade\'s
fashion struggles were about more than bad
haircuts and neon. --Rob Mitchum
030: U2
The Joshua Tree
[Island; 1987]
Oh, how the punks hated U2. Just when they\'d
managed to dispel the excess of the 70s, here were
four lads from Ireland trying to capture the
entirety of human pathos in the broad strokes of
the rock song. Yet there\'s an unquenchable
yearning here incommensurate with the bloated
contentment of the worst of 80s pop. Three of
these eleven songs became wildly popular radio
anthems still in heavy rotation today, and
I\'ll be damned if they\'ve lost any of
their power. The pleasure comes in discovering
that the latter tracks prove just as great, from
the moody closer \"Mothers of the Disappeared\" to
Bono\'s aching depiction of just
\"hangin\' on\" in \"Red Hill Mining Town\".
Named for flora that flourish even in the heat of
the desert, The Joshua Tree features songs about
the political fallout of the 20th century, but it
truly justifies the oft-overused adjective
\"timeless\". --Christopher Dare
031: Sonic Youth
EVOL
[SST; 1986]
Like the first slimy creature to pull itself from
the primordial muck, EVOL is an aural document of
Sonic Youth\'s One Small Step. Feedback-soaked
noise had been their hallmark until this album,
but EVOL would mark the true departure point of
Sonic Youth\'s musical evolution-- in
measured increments, Thurston Moore and Lee
Ranaldo began to bring form to the formless, tune
to the tuneless, and with the help of Steve
Shelley\'s drums, they imposed melody and
composition on their trademark dissonance. A
breathtaking fusion of avant-garde noise (as far
as Rock was concerned) and brilliant, propulsive
rock took its first shaky advances out of the
storm and didn\'t look back. That these sonic
youths would go on to release two more of the
decade\'s most impressive albums before you
could say \"Teen Age Riot\" only reinforces the
prominence of EVOL; this is where the seeds of
greatness were sown. --Eric Carr
032: Hüsker Dü
Zen Arcade
[SST; 1984]
While R.E.M. crossed over into pop territory, a
handful of moderately renowned independent bands
continued to make hard art: Sonic Youth, Husker
Dü, and The Minutemen dashed all conventions,
creating astounding, unique material, overflowing
with determined conviction. These bands labored in
a tenuous, low-income network, playing houses,
hole-in-the-walls, and whenever possible, wealthy
liberal arts campuses. Most of the people that
helped make said network would agree or concede
that up to 1984, Zen Arcade was at once the most
artistically and commercially remarkable record to
come out of their nascent scene. Bob Mould\'s
out-of-step, trademark Gibson Flying V stood for
everything the underground were struggling to prop
up, and the smarter-than-hardcore rage of
\"What\'s Going On\" and \"Something I Learned
Today\" silenced any closed-minded quips about the
plaintive \"Never Talking to You Again\". The
blinding winter skies conveyed in \"Chartered
Trips\" and \"Pink Turns to Blue\" exemplify the
power of this massive double album, a testament to
the frustration and isolation underground bands
fought through in the early 80s, as well as the
debt we all owe them. --Chris Ott
033: The Fall
Hex Enduction Hour
[Kamera; 1982]
Beginning with 1980\'s Grotesque, The Fall
set out on a decade-long run of confrontational,
controversial and eventually commercial releases.
It\'s definitely controversy-- perhaps
more than music-- that lands Hex Enduction
Hour its place in our 80s canon. The \"Slates\"
ten-inch that preceded it is far and away their
most accessible record prior to 1985\'s This
Nation\'s Saving Grace, but Hex has history in
spades. Mark E. Smith felt the six-member band was
going nowhere, and decided Hex Enduction Hour
would be the last Fall album, at a then-outlandish
running time of sixty minutes. Unbeknownst to him,
their offbeat, drum-driven singles had caught the
attention of an up-and-coming Motown rep in
London, to whom Smith gave a copy of Hex upon
request. The infamous first yawp from \"The
Classical\" blared from his office: \"Where are
the obligatory niggers?! Hey there, f**k-face! Hey
there, f**k-face!\" and obliterated what could
have been one of the more daring marriages in pop
history. --Chris Ott
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066: The Dukes of Stratosphear
Psonic Psunspot
[Virgin; 1987]
Despite their adoption of florid costuming and
silly pseudonyms like Sir John Johns and The Red
Curtain, it remains obvious that The Dukes of
Stratosphear could be no other band than XTC. For
one, Andy Partridge could never disguise his
trademark throaty vocals, and two, the band\'s
sense of songcraft is utterly distinctive.
Partridge and Colin Moulding brought some of their
best songs to the table for this side project,
ensuring it all the life and vitality of the best
records in XTC\'s back catalog. The
Beatles/Kinks musichall of \"You\'re a Good
Man, Albert Brown\", the phased paisley of
\"You\'re My Drug\", and the Smile-worthy
\"Pale & Precious\" stand wonderfully as single
tracks, but as part of the same piece, and crowned
with the beautifully frail pop blast \"Vanishing
Girl\", they become a surreal rock-opera of
opaque, hallucinogenic wonder. The 60s never
sounded so good in the 80s. --Joe Tangari
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065: The Soft Boys
Underwater Moonlight
[Armageddon; 1980]
A psych-pop oddity released at the height of
punk, and an incredibly important guitar record,
Underwater Moonlight is ageless. Robyn
Hitchcock\'s songwriting was at its demented
peak with the kinky insect imagery of \"Kingdom of
Love\", and on the effervescent title track, a
saga of drowning lovers. The exuberantly
malevolent \"I Wanna Destroy You\" dared punk to
face itself in the mirror, and \"The Queen of
Eyes\" updated The Byrds and found its way into
the musical vocabulary of R.E.M. and their
countless comrades in the early-80s underground.
The Soft Boys were that ever elusive
rarity-- muscle and brains in the same
package, and the package they made was incredible.
--Joe Tangari
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064: Television Personalities
...And Don\'t the Kids Just Love It
[Rough Trade; 1981]
The kids might have loved it but, given the
relative obscurity of this album at the time of
its release, not as much as they ought to have.
Widely acknowledged as a defining influence on
dozens of artists, Television Personalities seem
to have been doomed to be the stepping stone to
greatness without achieving a fraction of the
notoriety of any of the other groundbreaking bands
they left their mark on. But that can\'t
detract from the no-frills attraction of this,
their debut full-length; the hissy lo-fi
techniques that would later come into vogue give
And Don\'t the Kids Just Love It a closeness
that wonderfully amplifies the simple directness
and charm of the band\'s charming, wildly
catchy twee-pop. Though its fuzzy aesthetics are a
result of necessity rather than artistic intent,
the album sounds remarkably prescient. Its
sugar-high enthusiasm and impeccable hooks
don\'t hurt, either. --Eric Carr
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063: Young Marble Giants
Colossal Youth
[Rough Trade; 1980]
The band would have put it more succinctly, but
here\'s my take: Colossal Youth was Zen disco,
new wave haiku, monk-punk that used sweetly
perverted Ramones/Pistols minimalism to gently
sketch out an exploded drawing of pop music.
Though the album\'s spare, perfectly placed
strokes of guitar, bass, organ, and voice would
have more of an effect on mopey slowcore types and
basement four-trackers, the ineffable thing about
the Giants\' music was how simultaneously
haunting and cheery they could be. \"Eating
Noddemix\" is music for brushing your teeth to the
morning after an apocalypse, and the inimitable
\"Wurlitzer Jukebox\" is a dance track for the
last man on earth, with a geiger counter
relentlessly ticking out the beat. Om, baby, yeah.
--Brendan Reid
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062: R.E.M.
Reckoning
[IRS; 1984]
They were already huge underground, but this is
the record that put R.E.M. on mainstream radio for
the first time, unleashing the tide that
eventually swept the word \"alternative\" into the
national musical vocabulary. Musically, R.E.M.
opened up their sound on Reckoning, driving things
home more directly than on their debut. \"Pretty
Persuasion\" was one of the band\'s most
gorgeous songs, while the countrified second
single \"(Don\'t Go Back To) Rockville\" was a
welcome blast of fresh air on the increasingly
artificial airwaves of the early 80s. The record
occasionally drop hints that it\'s not as
young as it sounds, but when it does, at least has
the good taste not to turn attention from its
wrinkles with caked-on mascara. Yeah, Stipe,
I\'m talking to you. --Joe Tangari
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061: Nurse with Wound
Homotopy to Marie
[United Dairies; 1982]
Steven Stapleton was at his most frightening in
the early 1980s, his albums creating stark,
edge-of-seat tension with pitch-black textures and
forboding silence occasionally broken by scraping
metal and humanoid scurrying. Homotopy to Marie is
Stapleton\'s career apex, a twisted
masterpiece of minimalism whispering terrifying
suggestions of death rituals and torture chambers.
This album creeps. It is horror. The 20-minute
title track is avant-garde dismembered for sadists
and perverts. \"The Schmürz\" is hulking army men
barking in reverse. \"The Tumultuous Upsurge\" is
a grotesque death rattle with robotic toys
laughing in proud hysteria. Do not play for
children. --Ryan Schreiber
060: Bruce Springsteen
Nebraska
[Columbia; 1982]
The legend has Springsteen carrying around a
four-track cassette of demos for the new album in
a ratty back pocket and then deciding finally to
release the tape as it was. Nebraska was a
precursor to both the unplugged movement and the
four-track bedroom folk that swept the indie world
in the early 90s, but none of that would matter
now if the music weren\'t so remarkably good.
Springsteen\'s love of the band Suicide helped
shape the claustrophobic sound, and the dawn of
the Reagan era is usually cited as the
album\'s chief thematic inspiration.
Ultimately, the political climate of its birth is
irrelevant, as Springsteen\'s novelist\'s
eye for detail and character ensure that the
stories remain timeless. Live versions of these
songs with the E Street band confirm that these
songs were meant to be performed by a single man,
in a room, alone. --Mark Richardson
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059: Guns N\' Roses
Appetite for Destruction
[Geffen; 1987]
What are your friends\' names? John? Paul?
Evan? That\'s some weak s**t next to the
ultimate rock-o-nyms: Axl, Slash, Izzy, and Duff
(yes, I am leaving out the drummer, the
drug-addled Adler whose ejection begged the
fantasy-question of how far gone you had to be to
get the boot from these guys). Four different
cults of personality! Five shaggy, fatless,
tat-dappled Icaruses! Such creatures of instinct
that Axl\'s channeling of Bowie and Iggy had
to be accidental, right? This album can be
summarized by a holy phrase: No filler. Thank god
the original robo-r**e art got banned; that
skull-cross is the perfect visual accompaniment to
an album that, along with displaying better
songcraft and being more anthemic, was heavier
than all of its competition. Alas, the band would
later defy rock physics by bloating and
disintegrating simultaneously. --William
Bowers
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058: Elvis Costello
Imperial Bedroom
[Columbia; 1982]
Costello\'s famed collaboration with Beatles
engineer Geoff Emerick came at a tumultuous time
for the earnest rock and roller. With his marriage
on the rocks and journalists touting a tryst with
legendary NY groupie Bebe Buell, Imperial Bedroom
marks Elvis Costello\'s most personal
investment, an unflinching examination of
fidelity, trust and the dishonesty of
role-playing. He front-loaded the album with the
most ambitious song he\'d recorded to that
point, explosive as the crashing thunderclap that
introduces its bridge. To this day, the
complicated layering and full bars overlapping in
\"Beyond Belief\" make for an almost psychedelic
listening experience, to say nothing of its
astounding verse. Costello was already
well-established as a master lyricist, but
Imperial Bedroom makes clear he was not f*****g
around this time: \"Charged with insults and
flattery/ Her body moves with malice/ Do you have
to be so cruel to be callous?\" --Chris
Ott
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057: Pixies
Come On Pilgrim
[4AD; 1987]
Compiled from a demo tape recorded in March, 1987
at Boston\'s Fort Apache studios, this disc
served as the world\'s first taste of a band
that would soon become one of the indie music
world\'s all-time greats. It was, at the time,
a curious release for 4AD who, The Birthday Party
aside, largely favored jangly pop and gothic
romance. But in retrospect, The Pixies would have
been at home on any label, mapping their own
rugged terrain with their trademark
whisper/thunder dynamics and Frank Black\'s
infamous turbulent screeching. Come On Pilgrim is
filled with paradox: the narrator of \"Caribou\"
mourns the torture of city life yet wishes for
death as its namesake in the peace of wilderness;
\"Levitate Me\" translates lyrics from a folk
ballad to a shoegazing rocker; \"I\'ve Been
Tired\" is its most antic song. What possessed
them? --Ryan Schreiber
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056: King Crimson
Discipline
[Warner Bros; 1981]
Were punk and new wave really so powerful as to
banish prog from rock history? For a few English
\"dinosaurs\", certainly not. Guitarist Robert
Fripp had already earned his hip underground
stripes working with Brian Eno throughout the 70s,
but for this version of his celebrated prog
outfit, he attempted to completely destroy the
barriers that would segregate cliques. Keeping
drummer Bill Bruford from the previous incarnation
of the band, and adding guitarist/vocalist Adrian
Belew (who\'d played with David Bowie and on
Talking Heads\' earth-shattering Remain in
Light) and bassist Tony Levin (who\'d played
with John Lennon and would go on to back Peter
Gabriel), Fripp\'s gang played music as
angular and tense as any post-punk group while as
precise and rhythmically propulsive as a Bartok
string quartet. Songs like the title track,
\"Thela Hun Ginjeet\", and \"Frame by Frame\" are
almost-danceable maxi-minimalist etudes, and
obvious precursors to virtually all math-rock.
--Dominique Leone
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055: The Police
Synchronicity
[A&M; 1983]
The Police were never a punk band, but that
didn\'t stem accusations that the group were
ditching their rock roots for adult contemporary.
Nor were the Police ever New Romantics, but the
themes suggest meaning behind the makeup:
romanticism not from supposed individuality, but
in the synchronous parallels of our modern lives.
The band was indeed taking a distinct move toward
pop with Synchronicity, but not from substance.
Sting never shied away from the tensions below the
surface: not just in \"Every Breath You Take\",
but in songs like \"Synchronicity II\", in which
\"many miles away, something crawls from the slime
at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake,\" its
identity never revealed. Er... about that shadow
on the door of the cottage...
--Christopher Dare
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054: Big Black
Songs about f*****g
[Touch & Go; 1987]
Child molestation, urban decay, hopeless apathy,
trucking, and racial commentary were all fair game
to Big Black, and the screeching, clanking thud of
their proto-industrial sound was only a shade less
disturbing than their subject matter. Dave
Riley\'s bass is a metallic, twisted train
wreck, and Steve Albini\'s every word so
bile-drenched it barely makes it past his lips.
This, combined with the searing buzzsaw guitars
and the violent percussive force of a jackhammer,
will strip the enamel straight off your goddamn
teeth. Their pervasive stench clings to the
entirety of the burgeoning industrial movement,
and Songs About f*****g is the still the biggest,
baddest sound on the block; underestimate it at
your own peril. --Eric Carr
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053: Mission of Burma
Signals, Calls & Marches
[Ace of Hearts; 1981]
Mission of Burma soundly countered the feel-good
70s rock and roll of The Cars (Boston\'s
biggest export at the time), but their difficult,
indulgent shows alienated most of their potential
audience. As drummer Peter Prescott recently
quipped in L.A.: \"You guys are a lot nicer to us
than your parents were.\" Signals, Calls & Marches
housed their one inescapable hit, \"That\'s
When I Reach for My Revolver\", which, in
comparison to screaming post-punk/pre-hardcore
numbers like \"Outlaw\" and \"Fame and Fortune\",
sounds flat and somewhat dated. But \"This Is Not
a Photograph\" holds up best of all, a delegate
for the songs of Mission of Burma\'s first
wave. --Chris Ott
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052: Eric B. & Rakim
Paid in Full
[4th & Broadway; 1987]
Although Rakim didn\'t invent the art of
rhyming, he was the one who defined what it meant
to be a hip-hop lyricist. With a flow that
would\'ve melted glaciers, Rakim handled the
beat with a precision that sounded otherworldly to
\'87 ears, igniting an entire generation of MC
imitators. On Paid in Full, he used rhymes like
putty to sculpt a lyrical masterpiece that
hasn\'t been touched since. \"I Ain\'t No
Joke\", \"Paid in Full\", \"Move the Crowd\"...
how could you even pretend to f**k with Rakim
Allah? And, oh yeah, the beats were also on-point,
regardless of who produced them. --Sam
Chennault
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051: Leonard Cohen
I\'m Your Man
[Columbia; 1988]
You know you\'re cool when you get all
dressed up in shades and a blazer just to be
eating a banana on your album cover. And dig the
David Lynch font of the song titles. I\'m Your
Man is the perfect midpoint for Cohen\'s
career-- it rivals the poetry of
1969\'s Songs from a Room, but labors under
the resort-lounge production of the apocalyptic,
Oliver Stoned 1992 release The Future (yo,
everyone knows that 2001\'s Ten New Songs was
a non-representative carjacking). My theory is
that there are two Leonard Cohen robots, one of
which is a genius lyricist, and one of which is a
melodramatic, obtuse-voiced mercenary who will
speak-croon over the most Karaokean arrangements.
Yet who else sings lines as piercing as
\"It\'s Father\'s Day and everybody\'s
wounded,\" or, \"Let me be somebody I admire\"? He
talks to Hank Williams, he says we\'re talking
to our pockets, and without his concrete odes to
monkey-mailing there might not be a Smog, or even
Iron & Wine. --William Bowers
050: Spacemen 3
The Perfect Prescription
[Fire; 1987]
Hipsters the world over have tried to assert
that, of The Perfect Prescription and Playing with
Fire, the latter is Spacemen 3\'s landmark
achievement. You will never tell me this and
escape unscathed. Though both are massively
haunting works of dystopian misery and contented
addiction, The Perfect Prescription\'s
dreamweapon is its stunning melodic depth. Whereas
Playing with Fire showed the band already
splintering, the bulk of its songs written solo,
The Perfect Prescription\'s tracklist consists
entirely of collaborations between the band\'s
two primary members, and proves they were at their
euphonic best when working together. The record
drips with harrowing accounts of habitual users
denying their dependence, yet its droning astral
reverence pressures you to try it yourself,
replicating the bliss of the altered state in
gossamer keyboards and celestially aligned vocals.
This is your brain on drugs. --Ryan
Schreiber
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049: Mission of Burma
Vs.
[Ace of Hearts; 1982]
Boston\'s finest art-punk trio-plus-tape-guy
recorded just one studio full-length, and
it\'s a massive legacy. Assessable not in
tunes but in grinding velocity, it\'s
texturally complex and high-energy. Roger
Miller\'s guitar varies from hypnotic
repetition on \"Trem Two\" to sounding like a
power line flailing in a pool of rain, while the
rhythmic noise divides into shards for Martin
Swope\'s tape manipulations; Miller as
vocalist is prone to outbursts and declamations,
while Clint Conley sings with his vulnerabilities
in barbed wire on his sleeve. --Chris
Dahlen
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048: R.E.M.
Document
[IRS; 1987]
As addressed by the double-sided pun on the
sleeve, \"File Under Fire\", Document featured a
harder, more focused R.E.M. From \"The One I
Love\" to \"Fireplace\", it was as if the band had
become enflamed by the times. It was their most
political album yet, with songs like \"Exhuming
McCarthy\" and \"Welcome to the Occupation\"
indicting the Reaganite indulgences of the 1980s.
Avian imagery formed the album\'s other
aesthetic undercurrent in \"King of Birds\" and
\"Disturbance at the Heron House\", hinting at a
phoenix-like rebirth. With their fifth album,
R.E.M. emerged into the mainstream while managing
to address politics with a dignity shared by few
other visible acts of the era, at the same time
offering a new path to the murmuring underground.
Of course, they also gave us the timeless acronym
\"ITEOTWAWKI (AIFF)\". --Christopher Dare
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047: John Zorn
Naked City
[Tzadik; 1989]
In many ways, John Zorn\'s po-mo mishmash
Naked City project was the academic fruition of
no-wave. Just like The Contortions and DNA (one of
Zorn\'s faves), Naked City\'s effortless
deconstruction of popular sounds seemed at once a
reaction to the music, and completely apart from
it. Ever wondered how the James Bond theme would
sound if reinterpreted as noise-rock? They covered
that. Always wished that those hardcore drummers
could mix a little be-bop into their repertoire?
Your wait was over. But Naked City was more than
just raucous genre-bending; it was a visceral,
sometimes violent (especially regarding the murder
and bondage imagery Zorn associated with much of
the music) display of controlled freedom--
and all of that performed by some of the most
accomplished musicians to have ever been
associated with rock. No New York, indeed.
--Dominique Leone
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046: XTC
English Settlement
[Virgin; 1982]
Exit quirky English new wave, enter nervous
breakdown. To Andy Partridge, it was clear XTC
couldn\'t go on producing the same stage-ready
sparxx at this point, and this double-LP was
something of a sonic renaissance. The band\'s
penchant for spiking the pop punch began a gradual
shift towards the pastoral and \"arty\", yet these
tunes could hardly be described as pretentious.
Perhaps taking cues from the Talking Heads and The
Police (XTC toured with both), world music touches
began to creep into the band\'s mix, and a
whole range of state-of-the-80s synth technology
helped flesh out Partridge and Colin
Moulding\'s still-maturing craft. \"Ball and
Chain\", \"Jason and the Argonauts\", and
\"Snowman\" are but a few of the songs from
English Settlement that could not have appeared on
any of their previous records, such was the
complexity of the themes and arrangements. Of
course, Partridge would soon explore these avenues
to an extent that could no longer maintain the
band\'s breakneck zeal in any
capacity-- but that\'s another story.
--Dominique Leone
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045: Prince
Sign \'O\' The Times
[Paisley Park/Warner Bros; 1987]
Along with The White Album and Exile on Main
Street, Sign \'O\' The Times is the
template for the perfect double album. Take an
artist at the peak of his powers, give him the
space to work all his crazy ideas to their logical
conclusion, and then edit the results into a
varied four-sided collection. Club classics (\"Hot
Thing\", \"U Got the Look\"), ballads of epic rock
(\"The Cross\"), sexy R&B (\"Adore\"), and
flat-out amazing pop songs (\"I Could Never Take
the Place of Your Man,\" \"If I Was Your
Girlfriend\") are all here in abundance. Oh yeah,
he wrote, played, produced and sang just about
everything himself, too. Was he the greatest
quadruple threat ever? Listen and decide for
yourself. --Mark Richardson
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044: Kraftwerk
Computer World
[Warner Bros; 1981]
The standard critic\'s line points to
Computer World as the turn where the rest of
electronic music caught the inside corner before
dusting the dour Germans completely on the sad
back stretch of the mid-80s. The truth is, Ralf
and Florian were no longer interested in being
ahead of the game in 1981, and Computer World was
their chance to celebrate the arrival of the world
that they\'d been promising for so long. And
what\'s a celebration without good pop songs?
Ditties like \"It\'s More Fun to Compute\" and
\"Home Computer\" show Kraftwerk at their most
playful and self-aware, their electronics
hadn\'t sounded this rich and warm since
Autobahn, and the beautifully edited three-song
stretch of \"Pocket Calculator\", \"Numbers\", and
\"Computer World 2\" is perhaps Kraftwerk\'s
finest sequence on record. Don\'t stop
believing (until side two of Electric Café, that
is.) --Mark Richardson
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043: Run-DMC
Raising Hell
[Profile; 1986]
Until I reached adolescence, I grew up in an
isolated town in central Louisiana. Although the
community was a majority African-American, most of
us had only heard of hip-hop before Run-DMC. But
after Jam Master Jay & Co dropped, there was a
steady stream of cars headed to New Orleans in
search of boomboxes and Adidas sneakers. Soon, the
swamp was alive with the sounds of boom bap; and
our parents and teachers watched in horror as we
snapped, popped, and spat our way through
childhood. Run-DMC took hip-hop out of the cities
and introduced it to the world. They introduced us
to a culture that is now the most wide-spread and
influential youth culture in the world, making
them every bit as important as Bob Dylan or the
Rolling Stones. This is the group at their peak.
[R.I.P. Jason \"Jam Master Jay\" Mizell:
01.25.62-10.30.02] --Sam Chennault
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042: Cowboy Junkies
The Trinity Session
[RCA; 1988]
It\'s amazing how many of the stylistic
tropes of The Trinity Session have come to be a
standard fare of the underground music scene. Now
it would almost seem like an indie music cliché,
but there just weren\'t many slow,
country-tinged bands recording the Live 1969
version of \"Sweet Jane\" in 1988. Cowboy Junkies
created a sound from VU\'s street poetry,
traditional folk songs, Hank Williams, and Patsy
Cline, then recorded it all live through a single
microphone in a church in Toronto with the studied
reverence of Midwestern graduate students. It
still sounds great in the dark. --Mark
Richardson
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041: Beastie Boys
Licensed to Ill
[Def Jam; 1986]
[Bowers:] Ryan, why is this on the list?
[Schreiber:] Mmmfhhmm... [Bowers]: Dude, wake up!
How\'d you get a Twinkie in your effin\'
hair? Why are we honoring Licensed to Ill?
Hasn\'t it become the frat lodestone it was
supposedly lampooning? Wasn\'t it beneath
them? Wasn\'t it condescending? Didn\'t
even their concerts on this album\'s tour
amount to statements of contempt for their
audience, like their dumb videos? Wasn\'t this
a callous move by Rick Rubin/Russell Simmons to
cash in on \"Walk This Way\" rock-hop with a bunch
of vaudevillian palefaces? [Schreiber:] You mean
Elvises? This album is epochal. Think to when you
first heard it. Then think to the last time you
played it, how good the songs you didn\'t skip
were. [Bowers:] You\'re right. In 1986 and in
2002, \"The New Style\", \"Paul Revere\",
\"Rhymin\' and Stealin\'\" and \"Hold It
Now Hit It\" made/make no sense and made/make
perfect sense, as the Beasties rant like used car
salesmen about fast food, hard drugs, and general
malfeasance over rickety-suave backbeat clusters.
And \"Brass Monkey\" keeps stealing my
brain\'s lunch money. [Schreiber:] Then quit
yer bitchin\'. --William Bowers
040: Dinosaur Jr.
You\'re Living All Over Me
[SST; 1987]
It\'s appropriate that one of the most
revolting, festering cysts on rock and roll\'s
enduring legacy grew out of contempt for the
incomparably deluded fratboys and prissy,
politically correct dilettantes at UMASS, Amherst
College, Holyoke, Hampshire, and of course, Smith.
Dinosaur Jr recorded three albums in this
environment before succumbing to a then-infamous
personality clash between bassist Lou Barlow and
lead singer/guitarist J Mascis; You\'re Living
All Over Me is the finest document of their
struggle, combining elements of Hüsker Dü, Sonic
Youth, Jimi Hendrix and hardcore punk in a
bubbling cauldron of disease. Mascis\'
wavering whine skirts annoyance thanks to even
more grating, explosive distortion--
it\'s a low-fidelity overload unheard of in
1987, save perhaps for Big Black\'s turgid
racket or Sonic Youth\'s Bad Moon Rising. The
brutal onslaughts \"Sludgefeast\" and \"Tarpit\"
are countered by a pair of twang pop songs (\"In a
Jar\" and a version of Peter Frampton\'s
\"Show Me the Way\"), but there\'s an
economical middle ground where you\'ll find
\"Raisans\", \"The Lung\" and \"Little Fury
Things\", the best of Barlow-era Dinosaur
Jr\'s proto-grunge rock. --Chris Ott
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039: The Stone Roses
The Stone Roses
[Silvertone; 1989]
The Stone Roses arrived so fully formed upon the
release of their debut that it destroyed them
altogether. This record simultaneously gathers the
disparate strands of UK rock in the 80s and
predicts the Britpop of the 90s. Guitar hooks drip
from the stereo like honey spiked with acid and a
dab of arsenic. Vocalist Ian Brown exudes boredom
and venom in equal measure, calmly repeating, \"I
wanna be adored/ You adore me,\" as a mantra and
confidently declaring, \"I Am the Resurrection,\"
as though it were pre-written. And it all sounded
so good you believed it, even if just for a
moment. --Joe Tangari
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038: The Cure
Disintegration
[Fiction/Elektra; 1989]
A titan of an album (clocking in at 70+ minutes
with its two cassette/CD bonus tracks),
Disintegration outlines every reason The Cure
inherited the word \"atmospheric\" following the
demise of Joy Division; though it wants for a
single as glorious as \"Just Like Heaven\",
Disintegration stands unquestionably as Robert
Smith\'s magnum opus. The title track is
without peer in their catalog, a tyrannical
eight-minute epic swirling with formless, distant
melodies and sinister, writhing lyrics. \"Pictures
of You\", at 7½ minutes, was nicely trimmed and
remixed for 1990 radio play, but as with
\"Fascination Street\" (the album\'s lead
single, also heavily edited), the sonorous guitar
architecture heard on the album version wins out
every time. More than these highlights,
Disintegration stands alone for its preamble:
scant few albums released in the 1980s can boast
an opener as grand as \"Plainsong\", the most
breathtaking, shimmering anthem the band ever
recorded. --Chris Ott
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037: The Replacements
Tim
[Sire; 1985]
With a shave and a shower, the \'Mats
didn\'t sound half bad. After wiping the puke
off their shoes, they were almost ready for their
big date with radio. Almost. Even armed with the
rough-and-tumble love letter \"Left of the Dial\",
Tim couldn\'t break through at any frequency
that reached past the campus line-- the
angst was too ahead of its time, and Paul
Westerberg\'s voice still refused to stick to
the fantastic melodies that kept flowing from his
brain. Though The Replacements couldn\'t quite
bust down the door here, they did leave it hanging
off its hinges, and when the next wave of
uncompromising bands (who knew that the \'Mats
got a raw deal) finally came of age, they just
waltzed right in. --Brendan Reid
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036: Violent Femmes
Violent Femmes
[Rough Trade; 1983]
Using minimal instrumentation to convey maximal
sexual frustration, the Violent Femmes showed that
you don\'t need a distortion pedal to be punk,
\"Kiss Off\" and \"Add It Up\" being two
mini-sagas that absolutely seethe with
uncompromised hormone overflow (read: \"why
can\'t I get just one f**k!\"). But unsung
heroes shine as well, particularly the
bittersweetness of \"Good Feeling\" and the
pleading \"Prove My Love\". I used to feel sorry
that the Femmes were stuck playing the same
material through their graying years, but they can
at least take comfort in the fact that their debut
will be loved as long as there are horny 10th
graders in the world; in other words, forever.
--Rob Mitchum
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035: N.W.A.
Straight Outta Compton
[Ruthless/Priority; 1988]
While Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions
tried to take the high ground, NWA didn\'t
bother with either coherent political platforms or
constructive pro-unity messages. NWA was dangerous
in the most immediate and scary sense. In their
music, you could hear the reckless adrenaline of
youth pumping through the nihilistic heart of
South Central L.A., where the average man
didn\'t make it out of his twenties.
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