The music of the mid-80’s is impossible to mistake for any other era, but don’t assume that the period’s sonic hallmarks are anything to be embarrassed about.
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover. While I can’t promise to leave no stone unturned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before. Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish? Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before. Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time. Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments. So without further ado, here is #33 in the series. My random number generator says that our next year to tackle will be 2002.
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 1985
The eighties are a unique and perplexing decade for music. There is an unmistakable “80’s sound”, a sort of unifying property regardless of what type of music it is. Hip hop and heavy metal were still relatively young forms of expression and so it tracks that they would have a specifically identifiable style in their first or second decade of existence. What about country, pop and rock music, though? The individual elements aren’t the same necessarily, but you can pick out an 80’s track relative to any other period in pretty much any musical genre. That has led to some people despising the “80’s sound”, whether it be due to a preponderance of synthesizer, a generous helping of extraneous saxophone, or maybe a general perception of cheese in the overall presentation. Metal and rap were maybe too underproduced and raw, while every other type of music from the era had the opposite problem. I used to subscribe to the notion that the 80’s were a poor decade for music because of macro trends impacting the sound of the recordings, but now I relish that sound largely for how uncommon it is across the past sixty years. There is a sense you get growing up that what is happening around you is worse than everything that came before, and you hope, everything that is to come later (a notion that is immortalized in the “every other decade theory” scene from Dazed and Confused.) Now that I am well removed from my youth, however, the notion of nostalgia for that time is at war with my long-held bias against the decade of my formative years. I don’t really know what I think about the eighties, in other words, a point that should be annoyingly evident as you read this paragraph.
There is another, more objective measure of how good the music of a particular decade is, and that is how much of it I like. This project has given me unique insight into that metric since it requires me to maintain a painstakingly compiled spreadsheet that outlines what albums I have recommended for any given year (sorry ladies, I’m taken) and the six years I’ve covered across this decade objectively have the least amount of recommended albums on average. The decade boasts a competitive top end featuring the best work from Prince and Metallica and Talking Heads and Eric B & Rakim, but the cliff is steep and sudden. And that’s with me generally liking the “80’s sound” more than I ever have in my life. I know several people who would rather puncture their eardrums with a rusty knitting needle than listen to “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits or play a Ratt album front to back, so even my top ten will be fraught for many of you. I think that I probably consider the 2000’s the least inspiring musical decade at this point in Found or Forgotten’s run, but I can’t deny that my preconceptions about the 1980’s are at least somewhat confirmed. We aren’t here to grouse about what we don’t like, however. This is a celebration of music, and I’m kicking things off with a decidedly celebratory and high quality record. Thanks for sticking around.
The Indestructible Beat of Soweto – Various Artists
Joy.
That would be my one word review of The Indestructible Beat of Soweto if I were so inclined to such brevity. And believe me, I contemplated it (“please, don’t tease us” say the readers). This is a difficult review to write because it is almost certain to be the most obscure album to slot in at number one out of this entire project, and therefore the most needing of a well-articulated recommendation. Yet the same factors that have led to its obscurity make the articulation of such a recommendation difficult. This is not an English-language album. It is a compilation of various young artists on the South African music scene in the eighties, and you will not recognize any of them except for the (pre-Graceland) Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Even if you are versed in the titans of Afro-Beat from the seventies (Fela Kuti, Manu Dibango, etc.), this is a spotlight on the next generation which did not ultimately have the same cultural impact outside of their native continent. It is not immediately apparent to me, in fact, what touchstones from American popular music that I can reference to convey how this music sounds. All of that being said, it is undeniably the most personally impactful album to me of 1985, so we will do our best.
The opening track is called “Awungilobolele”, which translates to “Can You Pay Lobola for Me”. Hmm, that doesn’t quite get us there, does it? “Lobola” translates to “Bride-Price”, which you can think of as a reverse dowry, and is a common cultural practice in parts of Africa. The song is sung by Udokotela Shange Namajaha, who is a man, so I interpret the subject of the song to be about a poor man asking someone (another relative?) to pay the family of the woman he loves so he can marry her. With the evidence available, this is the most sensible explanation, and given the farm animal sounds that periodically emerge in the background of the song, it seems that bride-price might be paid in livestock, which is also relatively customary. See, we’re learning stuff! I didn’t understand any of that before I sat down to write today and invested in some light research, so I can confidently say that “Awungilobolele” can be enjoyed without that context. I offer that because I do not intend to pull the thread on all of these tracks, and the album functions just fine without ascribing any specific meaning to the lyrics. Anyway, the track starts like many on the album, with an unidentified stringed instrument plucking at seemingly discordant notes, searching for a groove that quickly comes into focus and carries the rest of the song forward. It is akin to the intro to a Robert Johnson song, only 100% less pained and morose. Namajaha, who contributes another song later in the album, has a voice that is deep and rich, but with enough contours that he sounds like he could be a hundred years old. He sings some, and talks some, sort of like John Lee Hooker. Is that my cultural comparison, early blues artists? The pieces and parts add up, but the vibe is so antithetical… let’s put a pin in that. There are familiar touchstones of African music – a sturdy, persistent rhythm and call-and-response backing vocals – that carry throughout most of the tracks. Overall, it’s a swimming way to kick off the album, and a great introduction for what is to come.
The next track, “Holotelani” by Nelcy Sedibe, is my favorite of the album and a staple of my Summer playlists. She is a strong and vibrant singer, a cross between Etta James and adolescent Michael Jackson. On this song, the dynamic of the opening track is reversed with the young woman taking the lead vocal and a gritty chorus of male voices providing the background rejoinders. “Holotelani” stands for “Daughter-In-Law”, and I’m actually beginning to notice a theme here. Scanning the translations of other track titles, the album ends on “We Are Waiting for You”, “I Have Made Up My Mind”, and finally “Here is the Money”. Did I just discover that this is a whole damn concept album about this marriage proposal and the transactions behind it? That would be fascinating. I can’t find translations for the lyrics or any other corroborating evidence for that theory, sadly, but I love that it is possible. The remaining songs are all in a similar general style but distinctive enough in vocal approach and instrumentation that the music never runs together. I picture it a bit like the Krush Groove soundtrack in America: Young artists in a burgeoning music scene from the mid-80’s showcasing what makes that music scene special. Every element is fresh and interesting, even today. There are cool synth sounds and prominent bass and multi-layered percussion to accompany the African stringed instruments. You have the goat-voiced Mahlathini Nkabinde participating on a couple of tracks and the sweet, a capella harmonies of Ladysmith Black Mambazo on another, plus everything in between. I have used blues, R&B and hip hop as points of national comparison, but the fact of the matter is you simply have to experience this sound for yourself. If you can get past the language barrier, or simply treat the singing as another instrumental element, I believe everyone will get something out of the radiant, ebullient, and indefatigably joy-inducing Indestructible Beat of Soweto.
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Hounds of Love – Kate Bush
If you tell me that certain music is classified as “Art Rock” or “Art Pop”, I’m going to have an automatic bias against it. That’s not fair, obviously, bias is not a productive tool for exploring art, but there is an assumed pretentiousness that those two terms are saddled with. First is the unstated presumption that other forms of music are not art because they don’t have that term explicitly stated in their genre signifier. Second is the unstated presumption that “art” music is above criticism because any choice that leads to an unpleasant result can be hand-waived as in service of the artistic vision. I have a bias towards humbleness, towards craftsmen and craftswomen instead of artists. It’s dumb. I know it’s dumb because the Velvet Underground exists and so does David Bowie and so does Bjork, and so art rock and pop is obviously viable. More than viable, capable of living up to its own pretense. Yet I have enjoyed all of those artists’ output without ever questioning my own bias against “music explicitly identified as art.” Kate Bush, with Hounds of Love, has challenged my perceptions more than all of those legendary artists combined. This album is art. All albums are art, of course, although not all of them are good art, but Hounds of Love is capital-A “Art”. It is a masterpiece, and it exists in a realm that is beyond concepts like humbleness or pretentiousness.
My entry point into Bush’s catalog was 1978’s The Kick Inside. It is similarly idiosyncratic, although if you squint hard enough you could reasonably classify it alongside Joni Mitchell’s brand of folk music. The stylistic hallmarks of the 80’s suit Bush’s vision remarkably well, however, and so the sonic palette of Hounds of Love seems to have expanded exponentially in the intervening years since her debut. This album doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard before, and I can’t question a single choice that Kate makes across the entire project. It starts with the song that had a massive resurgence last year, due to playing a pivotal role in the year’s best television scene. “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” is archetypal Kate Bush. The lyrics are poetic, cerebral, sexual, and tackle the most common lyrical fodder (relationships between women and men) in the most uncommon way (fantasizing about literally swapping bodies to gain better perspective on each other). The music is cinematic in a way that makes it obvious why Stranger Things trusted it to carry the emotional weight of that scene, yet catchy enough that it was her most successful single in the US at the time it was released. In fact, all of the songs on the first side of this album (barring the somnolent “Mother Stands for Comfort”, perhaps) are sweeping, unexpectedly striking pop tunes in roughly the same mold. The title track might be my favorite, with its anthemic drumming and dramatic strings that surge into the chorus, but “Cloudbusting” and “The Big Sky” are similarly incredible, and any of these tunes could have anchored an album as the big single the way that “Running Up That Hill” did.
The second side is not so different to be unrecognizable, but absolutely designed to stand apart from side one. I’ve picked up enough discourse about the album to know that my take is not precisely right, but I’ll offer it anyway because it’s how I experience the dichotomy: Side one plays like a daydream, with fantastical metaphors for love and imagery that conjures the idea of laying back in a field and staring at the clouds. Side two is more like a real dream, or series of dreams more specifically. The music is more abstract, the lyrics more obtuse. “Waking the Witch” is an out and out nightmare, with a series of background voices at the outset admonishing Kate “You must wake up” as if she was half hearing them as she succumbs to unconsciousness, and then a stark shift into glitchy music and demonic voices and a racing heartbeat rhythm. It is legitimately alarming the first time you hear it. “Under Ice”, while not quite so horror-adjacent, has a sinister undertone as well, and the remaining tracks all carry an undercurrent of darkness until the album closer, “The Morning Fog”, in which the dreams end and the day is faced with whatever new perspective was gleaned from them. It is a stunning side of music, beautifully contrasted with the equally stunning first side. Like the best art it is open to myriad interpretations and invites thorough consideration. Like the best music, it can be enjoyed purely on a visceral level without investing too much brain power into hypothecating.
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Songs from the Big Chair – Tears for Fears
Tears for Fears’ debut, 1983’s The Hurting, is a solid but aggressively melancholy album that fails to predict the band’s potential for hit-making. Just two years later, the group produced a near-perfect pop record that balances the commercial with the artistic in a way that most musicians would die for. Songs from the Big Chair is just eight songs and 41 minutes, but the band makes every moment count. Five of the eight tracks were charting singles, and the three leftovers could have just as easily been as well. The album opens with one of the group’s most recognizable tunes. “Shout” is easy to conflate with other big pop singles of the mid-80’s (“Don’t You (Forget About Me)”; “You Spend Me Right Round”), and that chorus is the most obvious thing that sticks in your mind, but if you really sit down and listen to it there is a ton to unpack. And who knows, maybe those other songs reward similar focus, but I doubt that they weave together so many musical elements (just a hair shy of too many) with this much success. There are multiple instrumental and synth-based breakdowns, a brief but era-appropriate saxophone solo and a tastefully majestic guitar solo to bring it all home. Tears for Fears could have coasted on the song’s great central hook all the way to the pop charts, but there was real care put into every element of the track which makes it a rewarding listen beyond the nostalgia it evokes for someone my age. The rest of the album alternates between similar mid-tempo new wave and slower, admittedly still pretty melancholy tracks, but the constant is the craftsmanship apparent on every one. “Everybody Rules the World” is an even more popular song than “Shout”, and features some stunning harmonies between the two primary vocalists, Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith. Individually and together, Orzabal and Smith are powerful, emotional singers, a more modern spin on the Righteous Brothers. Nothing matches the kinematic movement and sheer drama of “Head Over Heels”, however. It is a show-stopping culmination of the band’s strengths, laid out in a sentimentally old-fashioned yet sonically progressive, five-minute package. You are invited to swoon along with Orzabal as he tries, and fails, to cope with his infatuation with a woman who he expects to break his heart and throw it away.
In many ways, Songs from the Big Chair is the perfect companion piece to Hounds of Love. Bush is a touch more uninhibited creatively and touts the slightly more percipient lyrics, but both works share an earnest, theatrical energy and complete command of the prominent sonic palette available in 1985. The “80’s sound” suffers its share of derision, but if more artists utilized it as successfully as acts like Bush, Prince and Tears for Fears, then we might be debating if that style didn’t make for the greatest decade in popular music.
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Black Codes (From the Underground) – Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis was probably the most prominent jazz musician for a couple of decades across the eighties and nineties, but he also has a reputation as a bit of a scold. I think this is largely due to his appearances on Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series, in which he was the go-to mouthpiece for disparaging jazz artists who sought to progress the artform past what had been achieved by the early sixties. Not to say that he put words in Marsalis’ mouth, but I actually think that criticism should be levied at Burns himself. He is the one who shaped the overall narrative, and while I find Jazz (and the subsequent Country) to be immensely informative and enjoyable, he is hugely conservative in his approach to music of recent vintage. Burns is not going out on a limb, in other words, to speculate on what is important to document if it hasn’t already been solidly codified as canon. Those opinions that Wynton shared about musicians like Cecil Taylor, however, do give some insight into what you might expect from a Marsalis project. Black Codes (From the Underground) feels very much like a culmination of prominent jazz styles like cool, modal and bebop, from a student of the form who spent time under the learning tree of Art Blakey. It does not have a strand of free jazz DNA in its body, nor fusion, nor avant garde, nor even the smooth jazz that was commercially popular at the time. And if I’m being honest, my taste in jazz is remarkably similar to Marsalis’. So for me, it is kind of the perfect album to discover from a decade that is an otherwise pretty barren wasteland for jazz recordings. It’s important to note that this is not anachronistic music, or some kind of retread. Marsalis honors the traditions that he holds in high esteem while at the same time recontextualizing them together in a creative and vibrant manner. It helps that the record is pristinely produced and engineered with the latest technology of the time, betraying a more recent vintage than the music it is inspired by, but it’s more than that. Take “Delfeayo’s Dilemma” as an example. It starts with a horn line that could be straight off of Birth of the Cool, which was recorded at the end of the forties. It then transitions into a mid-fifties bop tempo with a driving rhythm section, while many of the solos sound like something from an early sixties Herbie Hancock or Cannonball Adderley record. Every element has its precedent, but Wynton makes the combined sound his own. The sections that you gravitate towards are likely to be the ones that emulate your favorite jazz of the past (my favorite is “Aural Oasis” which sounds like an outtake from Kind of Blue). So while Marsalis deserves his reputation as a traditionalist, he can hardly be blamed given how rich of a tradition he sets out to mine, and how peerlessly he succeeds in doing it justice.
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Promise – Sade
How do you solve a problem like Sade? She is a pillar of 80’s R&B, an artist I enjoy immensely, but for some reason I find it inordinately difficult to articulate why. I have written about her once before in the series, and I fear I have exhausted everything that I have to say about her music (and we still have Diamond Life looming in a future post.) I think that part of the problem is, while she is a unique artist relative to her peers, her own material doesn’t vary much across multiple releases. It didn’t take her long to land on the style of expression that suited her best and she found little reason to adjust it throughout her career. Her earlier work does reflect a heavier emphasis on the instrumentation, where later albums would hone in the focus on the her ineffable singing. There are long stretches of saxophone on tracks like “Jezebel”, lending Promise a jazzier vibe than Love Deluxe in the subsequent decade, and this perhaps represented a time when the word Sade could be used interchangeably between the woman herself and the band that shares her name. Before long, the singer would subsume the band in terms of identity. The ones that intrigue us the most tend to be the ones who don’t seem to be trying, as if our attention is not especially desired, or at least taken as a given. You won’t hear any bombastic high notes in Sade’s vocal performance, nor any showy runs. She’s not a lackadaisical singer, to be clear, she just knows how to project drama and emotion without resorting to technical wizardry of any kind. If you’ll permit me a weird analogy, Sade is like Dusty Rhodes or Harley Race. Those are wrestlers, by the way, either retired or close to it at the time Promise was released. Current wrestlers fly off the ropes multiple times a match, crash through tables at an alarming rate, and perform feats of athleticism that defy belief. Why? To get the audience to feel something. Rhodes, and Race, and a lot of other grapplers from that era frequently had the crowd eating out of the palm of their their hands, and accomplished it by doing a whole lot less. It isn’t about how much you do, in other words, but what you do and why. When Sade gets to the chorus of “Sweetest Taboo”, the album’s lead single, she almost retreats into it. Instead of amping up the intensity, she does less than she does in the verse, which ironically makes the chorus hit harder. The history of R&B music is littered with multiple-octave voices performing songs designed to show off every technique that they are capable of, but it is not littered with voices as reserved and self-assured as Sade’s. There is only one of those.
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Brothers in Arms – Dire Straits
Brothers in Arms boasts one of my favorite album covers of all time. Maybe it’s nothing too special in that little thumbnail above, but growing up in a household that owned the album on vinyl, I remember being enchanted by the powder blue background and Mark Knopfler’s 14-fret 1937 National Style “O” Resonator floating through the sky. This was a huge album in the mid-eighties, although there are a couple of anachronisms that may have lowered its stock in subsequent decades, and the overall style is simply tied inextricably to the era in which it was released. The lead single was the most overt rocker on the album, “Money for Nothin’”, with it’s monstrous lead riff and lyrics that cleverly poke fun at the MTV era but also smartly embrace it as well. That’s anachronism number one, by the way. I’m sure we are all apt to fall into the occasional Ridiculousness binge every now and then, but I doubt it would inspire us to chant the mantra “I want my MTV” like a moon-lighting Sting does here. In ‘85, however, it was a relevant topic, and older Dire Straits fans could commiserate with the manual laborers whose point of view the song was written from, while kids my age could assume that the song was presenting those viewpoints ironically. (Anachronism #2 is a more sinister one, with a homophobic slur describing an earring-wearing, male pop star. Again, I think fairly ascribed to the fictional, early-CGI refrigerator movers rather than Knopfler or anyone else in the band, but wild to think what was acceptable for a massive radio single back then). Outside of that big hit and “The Man’s Too Strong”, the band leans more pop than rock, particularly on the bright and campy “Walk of Life”. Several of the tracks actually sound closer to Sade than to 70’s Dire Straits, particularly “So Far Away” and “Your Latest Trick” which have prominent horns and vaguely Caribbean percussion in addition to Knopfler’s reserved singing style. Sade doing Sade is one of the coolest things ever, Knopfler doing Sade is… less? That’s the ultimate thing I have observed with Brothers in Arms since its initial release – most people, including most people in my age group who would have been exposed to it as it was originally released, do not jive with this album at all. Everyone has had the experience of playing something that they connect with only to find that it doesn’t land with a particular audience, but, more than any other record, I have witnessed that particular phenomenon occur with this release, as far back as college and as recently as last year. Dire Straits has always been a touch more cerebral and pop-oriented than their hard rock contemporaries like AC/DC and Van Halen, so I think that dynamic mixed with the trappings of 1985 musical styles make for an unbearable combination for some people. I’ll confess that the 80’s trappings – fussy production, excessive use of sax and synths, etc. – rub me the wrong way too, when they are deployed without due care. It isn’t that they are bad in and of themselves, it’s that the era demanded that they be applied to every genre of music indiscriminately without regard to fit or skill. Dire Straits definitely adopts the style of the time, but like the previous several albums on my list, they understand how to use those sounds in a compelling and creative manner. It is unmistakably dated, to be sure, but I don’t think we apply that term as a pejorative to any other decade in the same way.
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Psychocandy – The Jesus and Mary Chain
Are you ready for a break from all the saxophone? Welcome to the first purely forward-looking artistic statement present on this list. Of course, in music, to look forward we often start with looking back. Post-punk and its related branches of alternative rock are genres that I have not had a natural affinity for in the way that I have for afro-beat or boom-bap or outlaw country. It has taken patience, openness, and most critically exposure to the best that the genre has to offer. It remains hit or miss, as I can get with The Pixies or The Jesus and Mary Chain, but acts like Sonic Youth or Television still feel like an impenetrable puzzle to solve. One thing that helps, in the case of tJaMC at least, is that they have an obvious affinity for the simple delights of the surf rock and girl group pop of the early-to-mid-sixties. It’s the same foothold that gave me access to the Ramones, and it makes their music highly listenable no matter how much white noise and reverb they use to drown those dreamy hooks. If your house is built on a foundation this sturdy, I don’t really care what color drapes you hang. And they are shameless about it – the drum intros to both “Just Like Honey” and “Sowing Seeds” are unmistakably lifted directly from the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”, for example – but they have abstracted their influences through a noise rock prism that completely transforms them. Instead of sonorous harmonies, you get laconic, Lou Reed singing buried in echo. Rather than meticulously engineered instrumentation from professional session musicians, you get punk guitar that sounds like it was recorded on a children’s cassette player, played over a radio station that is just out of range, then overdubbed onto the same cassette from across the room while a television plays static in the background. The bass guitar sounds moderately better. Yet… it works. It is kind of thrilling, actually. It’s a fascinating study on what is really important to making music that resonates, and no matter how hard certain elements work against the listening experience, Psychocandy exposes that the core element of melody will withstand almost anything. In the context of all the era-mandated studio excess that we’ve been discussing, it isn’t hard to understand how something so deliberately dissonant and simple struck a chord.
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Spreading the Disease – Anthrax
Out of “The Big Four” of thrash metal, Metallica rests atop my personal rankings, comfortably out of reach of the other three. Megadeth is a distant, but firm, second. Slayer and Anthrax are at the bottom of the list for me, largely indiscriminate from each other in that I haven’t ever been bothered enough to clarify my preference between the two. I don’t particularly like Anthrax, in other words, and I think I like Spreading the Disease because it doesn’t really sound like Anthrax to me. Don’t get me wrong – it’s fast and aggressive and impolite – it’s just largely missing the defiantly abrasive thrash-punk quality that makes “Caught in a Mosh” one of the band’s most enduring songs, but also one that actively grates on my nerves. This is an album that sounds closer to Saxon or Angel Witch, or even to Megadeth whose Killing is My Business… and Business is Good is conspicuously absent from this list. It is still charmingly ramshackle, but I think the band does some really good things compositionally. “S.S.C./Stand or Fall” is downright anthemic and features some cool changes in addition to dynamic singing from Joey Belladona. Belladona is an interesting case. His on again/off again relationship with the band has famously been strained for something as simple as enjoying the music of Journey, but that is probably the thing that makes me like his approach. He isn’t exactly Steve Perry, of course, but I like metal vocals that stretch out and show some range. “The Enemy” boasts a killer, bludgeoning riff and a chugging groove that feels like it belongs to another act entirely. Really, the album picks up tremendously after the first few inoffensive but uninspired tracks. In addition to the prior two songs I mentioned, we get the infamously ballad-averse band delivering “Armed and Dangerous” which starts in a way that predicts Pantera’s “Cemetery Gates”, and “Madusa” which sort of sounds like Metallica and early Motley Crue made a song together. By the time the band careens through “Gung-Ho” at the end of the album with the trademark Anthrax speed and fury, they have won me over to the point that I actually like it. All of which has me questioning if I have given Anthrax a fair shake so far. Luckily, this project gives me ample opportunity to test my preconceptions.
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Invasion of Your Privacy – Ratt
Another example of music that is inextricably affiliated with the eighties is the glam metal (or “hair metal”, blech) that was born out of L.A.’s notorious Sunset Strip. Motley Crue, Guns N’ Roses, Warrant, et al had created a scene that was as much or more about debauchery and fashion as it was about the music. That doesn’t mean that some of the music didn’t transcend the scene anyway. Ratt was one of the early, preeminent acts of this era, and their gritty brand of hard rock has a lineage that is just as easy to trace back to AC/DC and Cheap Trick as it is to trace forward to the day-glo stylings of Poison. While the Sunset Strip ethos did not always include quality control once you got past the big, crowd-pleasing singles, Invasion of Your Privacy is a consistently rock solid album with no weak spots. Anchored by the lively dual-guitar attack of Robbin Crosby and Warren DeMartini and the dynamic bass playing of Juan Croucier, each track is well-crafted and groovy. There are still plenty of cock rock signifiers like the anthemic choruses that are chanted in unison, but they aren’t deployed in place of real song-craft. Frontman Stephen Pearcy is not a particularly nuanced singer, but his gravel and Marlboro Reds voice matches the heavier edge that his bandmates produce, another factor that separates Ratt’s music from the more pop-adjacent acts that would come in the following few years. Ultimately, though, these are just good, tough-sounding songs. “Lay It Down” is an early highlight of the album, buoyed by its killer lead riff. “Closer to My Heart” has the same basic structure as a power ballad, but the band is not willing to commit to a softer approach so it rocks out just as hard as the surrounding material. “You Should Know By Now” is probably the one place where some more pop-leaning concessions were made, although I enjoy that one just as much as the rest, so I can’t really fault the band for veering in that direction. I’m guilty of relegating Ratt to the “one hit wonder” bin in the past (off of the strength of 1984’s “Round and Round”, of course), but I am pretty excited to learn that they had a little more going on than a lot of their contemporaries. Don’t let yourself write off a whole musical movement just because the Mike Slaughters and Kip Wingers of the world eventually came along and ruined it for all of us.
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Love – The Cult
There is a concept in professional team sports called the “coaching tree”. Basically, if you have an influential head coach like Bill Walsh or Paul Brown, their coaching tree refers to all of the assistants and coordinators who learned from them and went on to be successful coaches on their own, and to some extent the assistants and coordinators that spawned from that progeny. The closest musical analog is in the jazz world, where bandleaders and sidemen operate in a similar mentor/mentee fashion. There is a less formal version of this in which a musician can influence the next generation of artists without direct personal contact, and that generation influences others, and so on. In this scenario, the Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen “coaching trees” are massive, as is Rakim’s, as is Woody Guthrie’s, etc.. The Jim Morrison coaching tree is maybe the most fascinating. First, for one of the least technically accomplished singers of his generation, it is massive. Iggy Pop, Billy Idol, Michael Hutchence, even Peter Steele all fall into this category. They are all better singers than Morrison, but his fingerprints are all over their vocal styles. As you have likely surmised by this point, The Cult’s Ian Astbury is another disciple of the Doors’ founder. That means that Astbury is a true frontman, not just a singer. More specifically, he has a flair for the dramatic and a sense of the gothic and a unique approach to phrasing and intonation that makes his performance the natural focal point of the band’s music. It also makes Love a really fun listen. The band would eventually acquiesce to the glam metal tidal wave (1989’s also very good Sonic Temple), but in ‘85 that influence was more of a subtle texture to their post-new wave rock sound. They remind me a bit of Echo and the Bunnymen, but less esoteric. This is a collection of interesting and sonically dynamic music, but at the same time, these are simply well-written rock songs. It sounds very little like Invasion of Your Privacy, but it shares a spirit of uncomplicated immediacy with that album. In the journey across the music of 1985, we have ended up in a very different spot than where we started, but I treasure a year that houses this much diversity. I intimated in the introduction that some readers will have a hard time engaging with a lot of the year’s music, and I imagine that remains true despite my best efforts to sell them on it, but Love is an unqualified recommendation nonetheless.
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Honorable Mentions
Rock/Pop: Dead Man’s Party – Oingo Boingo; Crazy from the Heat – David Lee Roth; Dare to Be Stupid – “Weird” Al Yankovic
Metal: Killing is My Business… and Business as Good – Megadeth; Live After Death – Iron Maiden
Funk/Afro-Beat: Around the World in a Day – Prince and the Revolution; Army Arrangement – Fela Kuti; Inkazimulo – Ladysmith Black Mambazo; Anything You Sow – William Onyeabor; Some of My Best Jokes are Friends – George Clinton; Electric Africa – Manu Dibango
Hip Hop: King of Rock – Run DMC; Radio – LL Cool J
Country: Something Special – George Strait; Me and Paul – Willie Nelson
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