My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (3) The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses

[This is the eighth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

The Stone Roses arrived on the international scene fully formed with their eponymous 1989 debut, a vast and outrageously confident album befitting a band that had already been touring for nearly 6 years. Through a complex series of contract disputes and interpersonal conflicts, the band would ultimately come to stand as the forebears not only of the figureheads of a second British Invasion, but also of those groups’ tendency to fizzle out just as they reached their peak. The thin drums and trebly basslines of The Stone Roses anchor in 1989 music that borrows liberally from very nearly everything preceding it – including, almost as if to make a point, Renaissance balladry on “Elizabeth My Dear.” The guitar-dominated proceedings certainly owe a great deal to The Smiths, an influence which may also have unlocked such unabashedly pretty moments as the chiming “Waterfall.” Much has been made of the absence of overt electronica on The Stone Roses, given band’s place within the drug- and dance-centric Madchester scene. If it isn’t quite a party album, though, it’s a relentlessly kinetic one thanks to its powerful rhythm section and swaggering frontman. The latter does ultimately steal the show, singing “I Wanna Be Adored” and “I Am the Resurrection” with absolute conviction, and either no awareness of or no concern for the disconnect. The effect is something of a magic trick, lending plausibility to The Stone Roses as a miraculous flash in the pan arriving at the precipice of the 1980s to encapsulate the decade, rather than the slow brew it really was. It was perfectly appropriate that the band’s next act was effectively to disappear.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (4) Paul's Boutique - Beastie Boys

[This is the seventh in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Following an abortive career in punk, the Beastie Boys made an overnight leap to stardom with Licensed to Ill, a tone poem of gleeful idiocy that quickly became the best-selling album in hip-hop. Headed by producer Rick Rubin, and armed with an even more finely tuned version of the rock formula already worked to near-perfection on Run-D.M.C.'s Raising Hell, Licensed to Ill proved an enduring surprise, thanks to the sharpness with which the Beasties skewered the frat culture they had, from the outset, (mostly) transcended. Even those who appreciated the wink behind "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)," though, could never have anticipated Paul's Boutique, which presented hip-hop as a legitimate mode of expression on a scale never before attempted. It honed the wit of the debut and was saturated with a pop culture referentiality presaging nearly 3 decades of post-Tarantino media to come. It retained the signature, labored rhymes that lent the MCs their peculiar charm, but also provided the maturing rappers with genuinely impressive technical showcases. Finally, it lay upon an unparalleled bed of samples assembled by the Dust Brothers; befitting a medium that lives and dies on the spoken word, it not only surrounds and invigorates the lyrics, but complements and occasionally even answers them. Smarter than Licensed to Ill, better produced than Raising Hell, and more consistent than Straight Outta Compton, Paul's Boutique survived a vigorous commercial flop to find acclaim throughout the world of rap as perhaps the first album fully to live up to the genre’s potential. Of course, subsequent to the album’s release, both momentous litigation and a growing awareness on the part of record labels of the potential profitability of sample-based music would ensure that no album could ever be made to sound quite like Paul's Boutique again. Few other hip-hop albums have ever sounded so literate; far fewer have ever been as immaculately produced; and possibly none to date have been so resoundingly successful in both.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (5) Graceland - Paul Simon

[This is the sixth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Paul Simon followed up Hearts and Bones – the biggest flop of his career - with Graceland, which catapulted his star beyond even the heights he experienced as Art Garfunkel's secret mustache. The album was recorded in apartheid-era South Africa in an act of apolitical musical outreach; it nonetheless drew the ire of the UN and ANC, each of whom condemned Simon's breach of the prevailing cultural embargo. The album's mythology is subsumed by its political context, to which the virtual entirety of the official making-of documentary Under African Skies is devoted. As usual, this unfortunately glosses over what made the album truly special to begin with. Graceland was not only the original mainstream world fusion album, it remains unsurpassed 3 decades later in pure vitality. Paul Simon emerged from his messy divorce from Carrie Fisher with a remarkable, incisive set of lyrics, delivered in some of the best performances of his career. The music, meanwhile, was carefully edited down (mostly) from studio jams directed by Simon himself. These infuse the proceedings with a palpable feeling of discovery: that of an already accomplished artist being exposed, in real time, to an entirely fresh musical vocabulary. And indeed, many of the album's most magical moments are borne of instruments alone, from the storied accordion-and-drums opening bars to the ethereal coda of "Under African Skies." (It helps that he found musicians to perform with so uniformly outstanding as Ladysmith Black Mambazo and bassist Bakithi Kumalo.) Graceland remains touching at such a remove from the collapse of apartheid because it's simultaneously a man's lonely journey through personal turmoil and his being opened up to new, reinvigorating worlds of experience. It remains not only the pinnacle of Paul Simon's career, but an enduring testament to our shared humanity.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (6) The Joshua Tree - U2

[This is the fifth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

U2 have always been searchers. Reviews of the band's albums, positive and negative alike, tend to touch on the sense of yearning that pervades the music. It's likely this very restlessness that lends the group its defining peculiarity: no band has ever put out so many great albums without producing any back-to-back. The Joshua Tree is the quintessential U2 album, not because it's definitively their best - Achtung Baby is at least as good - but because it features the band distilling this essence most successfully. The Unforgettable Fire sessions had expanded U2's palate, but most of the resulting music suffered from a lack of structure. Rattle and Hum, meanwhile, featured a bombast that lands on the album's anthemic highlights, but otherwise comes off as obnoxious. The Joshua Tree sharpens the atmospherics of its predecessor while withholding on self-indulgence just enough to almost never become unctuous [1]. Each band member gets a showcase: Bono sings to rafters on "Red Hill Mining Town," Adam Clayton's groove sets the album in motion on "Where the Streets Have No Name," and Larry Mullen Jr.'s thunderous drumming is the high point of "Bullet the Blue Sky." The Edge, meanwhile, dominates The Joshua Tree. The shimmering arpeggios of "Where the Streets Have No Name" were expressly designed to be the ultimate U2 riff, and the claim has stood the test of eight subsequent albums. He almost single-handedly provides the songs with their atmospheres, summoning dread on "Exit," rapture on "Trip Through Your Wires," and (naturally) yearning on "With or Without You" - a song prudently chosen as the lead single, and one that ultimately couldn't help but become the band's signature composition. It was perfectly in character for Bono to announce "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," but The Joshua Tree represents perhaps the only time that U2 ever did just that. Fortunately for everyone else, it wasn't long before they felt compelled to return once more to the drawing board.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (7) Thriller - Michael Jackson

[This is the fourth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Even before the trials and plastic surgeries, Michael Jackson more closely resembled a cartoon character than a human being, living through the greatest fame any individual has ever known in a private amusement park with a pet chimp named Bubbles. His greatest album endures a similar fate. The vast margin by which Thriller has outsold all other studio albums has in some ways managed to overshadow the music it contains. The issue is compounded by the skepticism often engendered by chart success, where lasting material is cheapened by association with the transient hits with which it shares airtime. Yet one doesn't move 60 million units by accident, and in fact, beyond the sheer magnitude of its success there isn't anything inexplicable - or even particularly surprising - about Thriller. When Jackson entered the studio in April 1982, he did so on the heels of Off the Wall, armed with a returning producer and the artistic freedom from Epic Records that only a critical and popular smash of that magnitude (20 million units in its own right) can provide. In many ways, the follow-up simply constituted a post-disco update: the album featured nine songs written and arranged by the best in the business, comprising ballads and up-tempo numbers expertly balanced against one another. Though Thriller does feature more unexpected additions than Off the Wall - an Eddie van Halen guest solo on "Beat It" and a repurposed African call-and-response coda to "Wanna Be Startin' Something" - the musical feel of the two albums remains much the same. Thriller was able to transcend its predecessor and became a phenomenon in part due to its stellar songwriting. Indeed, it contained enough quality material that its least interesting song was a duet with Paul McCartney; it also spawned seven Top 10 singles (one of which, the immortal "Billie Jean," nearly missed the album's final cut). The true deciding factor, though, was Jackson himself. Primed in the wake of Off the Wall to take over the music business, Jackson produced a supremely danceable album nonetheless infused with enough nervous energy to take advantage of the high-octave vocal leaps which had become his trademark. Though it's easy in retrospect to forecast Jackson's downfall in the paranoia that suffuses Thriller, taken on its own terms the music projects an air less of fear than of a yearning for respect, for success, or simply (as on the exemplary ballad "Human Nature") for love. Of course, in the final analysis, Thriller can't be seen out of context - not in the wake of 25 years of tabloid covers, and not with Jackson cuddling a Bengal tiger cub on the cover of the Special Edition reissue. Beyond the circus with which it will always be associated, though, the most remarkable aspect of Thriller will surely remain that a single listen always reveals what led it to conquer the world in the first place.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (8) The Queen Is Dead - The Smiths

[This is the third in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Internal tensions have often been known to push bands to unprecedented peaks, yet rarely has a group's musical identity rested so squarely upon the contrast between its most visible members as it did with the Smiths. Lead guitarist Johnny Marr was one of England's most accomplished studio masters, an expert at weaving dense layers of guitars into music of striking depth; frontman Morrissey was a militant vegetarian whose outspoken politics were upstaged only by his dubious (purportedly nonexistent) sexuality and endlessly dour outlook on the value of life. Over a span of five prolific years, the Smiths released four studio albums and a bevy of non-album singles. Though the latter group includes an impressive number of the best songs of the decade, the band never produced a work of more consistent quality than its third studio LP, The Queen Is Dead. By the time of its 1986 release, Marr had come to control a range as diverse as that of Jimmy Page, and was as adept at conjuring sunny pastoral scenes ("Cemetery Gates") as crafting the brooding soundscapes that had become the band's signature (with the epic title track rivaling even "How Soon Is Now" in bombastic sweep). Morrissey, too, had refined every aspect of his persona, and they're all on display: never again would he be as morose as on "I Know It's Over," as defensive as on "Bigmouth Strikes Again," or as genuinely funny as on "Frankly, Mr. Shankly" (which presumably holds the distinction of being the only lyric ever to rhyme the phrase "flatulent pain in the ass"). Despite the apparent jockeying for position of the two leads, more than anything, The Queen Is Dead marks the high water mark of collaboration between them. The Smiths had always been at their best when using the beauty of Marr's compositions as counterpoint to Morrissey's melodrama, and they employed the contrast to perfection on both the aforementioned "Cemetery Gates" and "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," the best song of their career. The group ultimately would disband when long-standing differences between Morrissey and Marr - personal and musical - could no longer be reconciled. In retrospect, The Queen Is Dead is a remarkable document of a group that may well have understood it did not have much time left: it speaks to a period in which they were likely, if only so briefly, the greatest band in the world.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (9) Sign "☮" the Times - Prince

[This is the second in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Though few would ever have mistaken Prince's music for something other than the work of the man himself, all of his albums beginning with the breakthrough hit 1999 were co-credited to his backing group, the Revolution. By 1987, Prince had run out of patience with the band. In the beginning of a series of challenges to his established identity - one which would notoriously culminate in replacing his name with a ubiquitous, unpronounceable symbol - Prince disbanded the Revolution and embarked upon a mission to demonstrate the all-encompassing nature of his virtuosity. In the tradition of all great double albums, Sign "☮" the Times is a sprawling hodgepodge of genre and mood which eschews continuity in favor of glorious mess. The low-key foreboding of the title track abruptly gives way to the rollicking psychedelia of "Play in the Sunshine," and before the album is finished, Prince has touched upon every facet of black music that predated him. As ever, The Artist's refusal to be pigeonholed is more than musical: the genuine, austere gospel of "The Cross" lives alongside the bedroom funk of "It" primarily because both, incongruously, are important parts of the man's identity. Indeed, the many sides of Prince's personality are perhaps more prominently on display here than anywhere else in his vast discography. Sign "☮" the Times includes songs from the abandoned Camille project - which was to feature Prince vocals treated to sound (even) more feminine than usual - and as such, it's hardly a surprise that the album has Prince pushing the already exaggerated boundaries of his androgyny to confusing new heights. What is unexpected is the degree to which these tracks manage to transcend their novelty, and moments like the disarmingly (if unsettlingly) insightful "If I Was Your Girlfriend" speak to the quality of his songwriting at the time. Of course, as with all of his classic albums, they bear the distinct stamp of their time: the spartan electronica of "Housequake" is certainly a mark of the 80s, while lines like "Your face is jammin'/Your body's hecka slammin'" smack of 1987 worse than a Mötley Crüe music video. Beyond his ordinary, remarkable range, however - be it on guitar, vocals, or almost any one of the other instruments heard anywhere on the album - Prince imbued the proceedings with the energy of a man who finally felt free to express himself fully. This air of reckless freedom liberates the aptly-titled Sign "☮" the Times from its temporal anchoring, elevating what would otherwise have been simply another great Prince album and making it timeless.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (10) Swordfishtrombones - Tom Waits

[This is the first in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

At least as early as 1982, in an article reporting on his involvement with the soundtrack to the Francis Ford Coppola film One from the Heart, Tom Waits was referred to as a "Hobo Laureate." The honorific has followed him throughout his career, and must be among the most appropriate in all of popular music: everything about Waits' stage persona, from his appearance to his voice, mannerisms, and subject material, suggests either a personal history of homelessness, or else a consistent fascination with the subject. In 1982, Waits found himself at a crossroads, having been dropped from Asylum Records and seeking a new musical formula. Coincidentally, 1982 also marked the last recorded output of the closest thing American popular music had to a Waitsian precursor, Captain Beefheart. Waits and Beefheart had always held much in common: beyond the bottom-of-the-ribcage growls heard throughout their catalogs, both artists had shared an interest in the blues in their most brutal and elemental form, as well as a fondness for spinning musical yarns about the dwellers of societal margins. Prior to signing with Island Records, the music accompanying Waits had always been fairly conventional. The result had been albums like 1975's Nighthawks at the Diner - strong showcases of a highly original talent that nonetheless sounded as though they'd been produced by a peculiarly unhinged Billy Joel.

1983's Swordfishtrombones fulfilled all of Waits' promise in one fell swoop. Abruptly, the bed on which Waits' music rested was found to be as attention-grabbingly bizarre as the artist himself. The result was an exotic exploration of the world’s castoffs, from members of a subterranean society (the lurching stomp of "Underground") to a man who snaps under the pressures of suburban mediocrity (the painfully funny "Frank's Wild Years," later expanded into a concept album). Appropriately, most of the proceedings are very percussion-heavy. Waits sounds invigorated on the album's title track over the marimbas, whose ringing cadences provide an intriguingly shifty soundscape without sacrificing the atavistic sound integral to the artist's appeal. Elsewhere, melodic instruments serve a similar function. The bagpipes of "Town with No Cheer" and the Gary Lucas-esque guitars that ring throughout the album certainly echo latter-day Beefheart, but they also help announce Waits as a musician who's finally perfected accommodating his own eccentricities. Indeed, Swordfishtrombones represents perhaps the pinnacle of Waits' songwriting: his ballads, such as the superlative "Soldier's Things," maintain the sterling quality found throughout his Asylum years, while songs like "16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six" show him to also be uncompromising on harder-edged material. The critical acclaim of Swordfishtrombones and its outstanding follow-up, Rain Dogs, would reinvigorate Waits' career, and he has scarcely released an album over the last three decades to anything less than universal acclaim. Swordfishtrombones, however, continues to mark the boldest jump of Waits' career - an album that propelled him permanently into the vanguard of popular music, and one of the most impressive, cohesive statements of the decade.