Imagine if the records that came out during the year of your birth actually had some bearing on your development. As if an album somehow can be inextricably linked to your own lifeline. It’s a funny thing to imagine- music sharing the same age as you. Of course, while our presence here is temporary, there is hope the music will live on forever. Our writers examine one album that shares their birthday, and in the process, expose not only their age, but why this special record still means so much to them today. - David Harris
1968: The Kinks – The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
I was born in one of those years that history teachers inflict on their students: “1968, year of revolutions.” Vietnam, Johnson’s resignation, King’s assassination, RFK’s assassination, May of ’68 in Paris, Prague Spring and that’s all in the first half of the year. It was a big year in music as well: the Beatles (and others) went to India and released the white album, Hendrix released Electric Ladyland, The Byrds went country, Dylan went back to folk and the Velvet Underground put out White Light/White Heat. However, aside from William Shatner’s The Transformed Man, the transcendent beauty of which probably means it belongs on a different list, the 1968 album that is most important to me is The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society.
In a year of revolutions, Village Green stands out because it’s a revolution against revolutions. In a year of urban progress, Village Green stands out because it’s all about small-town nostalgia. It’s a defiantly English album, and far from swinging London. It’s English in the sense of pubs, J.R.R. Tolkein and Blake’s “Green and pleasant land.” Though England had dominated rock music for much of the ’60s, this is in a way one of the first truly English albums. Much of British Rock, like the Stones or the Yardbirds, was very self-consciously American. Even the Beatles, who show many British elements in their music, were deliberately international in their outlook. For the Kinks to make such a deliberately parochial, domestic album in this of all years shows their courage and individuality. Sadly, it also goes a good way to explain why their name doesn’t usually rank among the greatest British rock bands, though it deserves to.
That 1968 was a difficult year in which to release this album is shown in the pains of its birth. It was originally conceived as a two-record set. When Pye records rejected this, a 12 song version was released in France, Sweden and Norway, originally to be followed by a US release called “Four More Respected Gentlemen.” Eventually, the now familiar 15 song sequence was released in both Europe and America. The initial reception was tepid, though it has since been recognized as a classic, leading Ray Davies to call it “the most successful flop of all time.”
The (more or less) title track’s list of traditions for God to save, from “Donald Duck, vaudeville, and variety” to “little shops, china cups and virginity” suggests irony, especially in 1968. Hearing only this song, one might suspect the album of satirizing small town life, and this would be far more in keeping with the legacy of 1968, which has not been at all friendly to ordinary people and their commercial traditions. However, whether he intended this or not Ray Davies is too great an artist to give in to malicious irony. He understands that an artist must love and understand his subject, and his sincerity comes through clearly as the album unfolds. By “Village Green” (side two on the original release) it’s clear that he’s very sad about the decay of small towns and their traditions, and about his own part in this decay (“Although I loved my Daisy/ I saw fame/ And so I left the Village Green“).
Though Village Green is nostalgic, it is not blindly so. The last lines of the album, from “People take Pictures of Each Other,” are “Oh, how I love things as they used to be/ Don’t show me no more, please.” Below the surface, Davies’ nostalgia here is not for a place but for himself. This is clearest on “Starstruck” and “All of My Friends Were There,” which are overtly about stardom and the alienation that results from the shallowness and fickleness of fame. However, even a song as abstract and silly as “Phenomenal Cat” is about traveling and about endless empty need – “He just lived to eat ’cause it kept him fat/ And that’s how he wanted to stay,” but then “He gave up his diet and sat in a tree/ And ate himself through eternity.”
To make an album about the difficulty of stardom and not make it suck is perhaps a unique achievement in the history of Rock. Ray Davies makes a beautiful album about loss and redemption, but he’s clever enough not to make side one “loss” and side two “redemption.” Instead, he weaves the two together to show how we must always wrestle with loss, especially loss of self. We build meaning for ourselves, in fame, in power, in memory, but that meaning never lasts, never quite does what we want. At the same time, though the world is full of false ways “just to show that we love one another” (a pointed line in a musical world dominated by the Beatles’ empty praise of universal love), there are flashes of real love, some in the lyrics but mostly in the performance. Though meaning is always fleeting, and “this world is big and wild and half insane,” there are places where “people are real people not just playing.” The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is one of those places. In a world gone insane, in a year of complete insanity, Ray Davies created a world of sincerity and real love. - Bob McCarthy
1969: Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin II
Except for the tendency towards minimal bathing, the aesthetics of the hippie era have always appealed to me. I’ve spent a lot time trying to figure out how to be a low-maintenance flower child, and I have a closet full of boho-chic garments to prove it. If I had been born a generation earlier, I would have writhed to “Whole Lotta Love” in a peasant blouse, instead of moped to “How Soon Is Now” in shoulder pads. But, alas, I was born 15 years too late and I was only 19 days old when Led Zeppelin released their second album, Led Zeppelin II.
II, aka “The Brown Bomber,” was written and recorded almost entirely on the road at various North American recording studios during a very hectic touring period for the band. II further developed ideas the band established on their debut album, Led Zeppelin I, and became even more widely acclaimed and arguably more influential, prompting many to suggest that the album largely wrote the blueprint for 1970s hard rock. Led Zeppelin’s brilliant sophomore effort is a universally acknowledged rock masterpiece and has been as influential as any release by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, if not more so. As with almost all of Led Zeppelin’s music, it hasn’t aged one bit. When you listen to truly great music, it always feels like it’s the first time, a true revelation.
“Whole Lotta Love,” which opens the album, runs over me every single time. From the first grinding notes of the famous riff that introduces it, II announces for all to hear that Led Zeppelin is the rock band of their generation. This track, along with Jimmy Page’s mind-bending solos and lengthy light-speed guitar barrages, is the essence of the band’s heart-pounding energy. Forget about settling into groove. Things take a hard left turn when Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones, in perfect unison, blaze into a new rhythm and spacey middle break, exotically flavored by Page’s droning feedback and innovative use of a violin bow (Page wrenches some simply indescribable sounds while my iPod goes ape-shit), before it climbs to the equivalent of a rock and roll orgasm with an amazingly energetic ending. By tune’s end, Led Zeppelin has repeatedly toyed with our expectations, and we, need a cigarette. Nothing brings out my raunchy side like some of the songs on this album and I’m sure I’m not alone.
Filled with funk, groove, energy, excitement, wit, intelligence, inventiveness, harmony and musical expressiveness, this album truly is the textbook of hard rock; to be kept next to the dictionary, the Bible and the Encyclopedia Britannica. II’s subversive quality distinguishes most its arrangements, evident in the soft/hard dynamic shifts of “What Is And What Should Never Be,” the gospel-like mood of “Thank You,” the rocking vamps and funk rhythms of “Heartbreaker” and “Living Loving Maid,” and the country music echoes of “Ramble On.” The album ends with the far-out “Bring It On Home,” with Page and company mining the rich vein of the blues, borrowing from Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Who can deny that Jimmy Page is the absolute best guitarist in the world? On this album he demonstrates that he could absolutely fucking shut down any bluesman alive with one hand tied behind his back. In the most telling moment in the documentary It Might Get Loud, The Edge and Jack White look on as Jimmy Page plays riffs from “Whole Lotta Love.” The look on their faces says it all. I know exactly what they are thinking and feeling because I’m thinking and feeling it too: pleasure, admiration, and awe but mostly, envy. Honestly, with mind-boggling music like this, who needs mescaline? II takes you on a trip that cannot be equaled by any other group in their greatest of days. - Teri Carson
1973: Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon
Some bands can come off as preoccupied with success, some handle it in stride and others never deal with it at all. Some bands will settle for the common, pop friendly pollution being played on traditional radio; others will progress nicely into the next phase of their careers. But the remaining will put forward their best work, forging new steel, giving you something unique to gaze upon. On March 24th, 1973 one band did just that and more, changing the way we hear music, the way we gauge a band’s worth, or influence the way we choose what is perfection.
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon has widely been considered one of the greatest albums of all time and one of the most dissected. Thirty five years since its original release, it has been critiqued in every possible fathom. To understand Dark Side of the Moon, you need to understand the concept behind the album. Too may artists put out conceptual albums but fail to get the idea across. The Fiery Furnaces, Alice Cooper, Funkadelic and even Bob Dylan, among many others, have all fallen victim to ill-conceived attempts to provide us with their vision of something destined to be larger than what the ending result actually became. The idea behind Roger Waters’ masterpiece was to have each of the band members come up with an idea for a song about the trials and tribulations of every day life, societal aspects or the deeper realms of the psyche. It is not a stretch to say that lyrically, this may be the best they ever wrote due to the overall involvement of each member, and the subjects presented.
The first 1:16 minutes of the first song,” Speak to Me/Breath” is a drawn out heartbeat, culminating in madcap howling, sonically giving birth to the effort. Obvious reference to Syd Barrett, original co-founding member of Pink Floyd, well known for his disconnect from reality and subsequent breakdown, pepper this album. The theme in “Money” is both tongue-in-cheek and self-explanatory, while “Us and Them” is about war and the ravages it creates over time, on the body, mind and soul. “On the Run”, with it’s sporadic pace and unusual timing is meant to put anxiety into focus. With “Time”, the listener is meant to experience youth and the subsequent loss of it before realizing they were in it to begin with. “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse” each deal with free will and the wear and tear on the mind and the efforts to cope with it. The themes, however, were not what separated this album from other current releases, no matter how well the concept was perpetrated. What really makes this album so good is the music.
The “modern” studio was still fairly new and there were many technological advances that were being birthed during this time. Alan Parsons, who worked previously with the Beatles, engineered the Dark Side. This was both a groundbreaking moment for both Pink Floyd and Parsons. Most of the non-musical sounds you hear, cash machine and chiming clocks, were recorded by Parsons and applied to various layers of the music. This very simple idea added to the overall complexity of the record, giving life to the soul of the production. The heavy layering of different instruments was an idea still being explored by other studios, but Parsons was gaining a reputation for his ability to push the technological envelope and applied his new science to perfection here.
What this album eventually achieved was a surreal stream of consciousness pieced together in a solid flow of music. It is not progressive in nature, even though that is the “venue” that Pink Floyd was most commonly placed in, with justification. Previous albums such as Ummagumma, Meddle and Atom Heart Mother were each progressive, if not experimental in nature. The difference between all of the prior releases was that they were heavy in psychedelic rock. Dark Side of the Moon was a more straightforward approach to the music, with the concept and themes taking on the progressive role.
Although Pink Floyd proper lasted less than a decade after its release, the music contained herein will no doubt live on forever. The fact that this record is still being discussed, sold and listened to ad nauseum, rivaled only by a handful of other albums, is a testament to its overall strength. Listen to this album again. It still stands up to today’s music, which is all you could want in a great album. - Josh Vietti
1974: Leonard Cohen – New Skin for the Old Ceremony
Leonard Cohen’s fourth album New Skin for the Old Ceremony is, perhaps, his most understated and most overlooked album. Much of Cohen’s initial reputation and influence rested on his first three classic albums, all of which have been re-released by Columbia. Countless versions of the songs on those albums (“Bird on a Wire,” “Suzanne”) have been covered and so they may even be familiar to those who aren’t fans of Cohen. New Skin does boast two of his most iconic songs, “Chelsea Hotel # 2″ and “Who by Fire,” both of which appear on his 1975 Best Of compilation and both of which he’s been performing on his recent tour. But the album is uniformly strong and robust and maybe because it’s a lesser album in his oeuvre, it remains fresh and surprising.
I’m not sure when I first heard Leonard Cohen. Probably on one of the many soundtracks that featured his songs in the early ’90s (Natural Born Killers, Pump up the Volume, Bird on a Wire) or around the time of The Future, when he appeared on Letterman. Then he disappeared into a Buddhist monastery for the remainder of the decade. I had a copied cassette version of his Best of and picked up the LP of his first album at a library sale, both of which I listened to a lot. I kind of kicked myself for not getting him in college and increasing my dark and brooding cachet. New Skin was one of the last of his albums that I heard and even now I don’t know it as well.
After the starkness and bleakness of 1971′s bluntly titled Songs of Love and Hate, Cohen painted himself into a (very black) corner and New Skin is, out of necessity, a brighter, less depressing album. It’s also a Leonard Cohen album, which means it’s not a bucket of sunshine either. However, it is a fuller sounding album with rich musical arrangements, subtle dynamics, strings and female backing vocals. As always, his subjects are men and women, the battlefield of the human heart, love and desire and God.
There’s an ironic self-awareness and dry humor that runs throughout and keeps his darker undercurrents in check. In the opening song, “Is This What You Wanted,” he compares himself to Steve McQueen, Freud, Mr. Clean and Vaseline and his lover to Christ, Brando, KY jelly and the whore of Babylon. He casts himself as the lead in “Field Commander Cohen,” one of his many songs that uses military imagery (he had briefly considered joining the Israeli army) and puts his profession on trial in “A Singer Must Die.”
The albums two best known songs, “Chelsea Hotel # 2″ (# 1 was only performed live) and “Who by Fire” are justly celebrated. The former, a semi-autobiographical account about Janis Joplin written on a plane trip, is both unstinting in its details (“Giving me head on the unmade bed/ While the limousines wait in the street“) and quietly heartbreaking: “I don’t mean to suggest that I loved you the best/ I can’t keep track of each fallen robin.” The spare, litany of death “Who by Fire,” is one of his most intense and taut songs, with backing vocals by Janis Ian and lyrics inspired by a Jewish prayer. It is Cohen’s ability to draw from much older sources, particularly Biblical and religious that is one of his great strengths as a writer. The final song reworks the old English folk song “Green Sleeves.” The cover is taken from an old alchemical book and shows two angels having sex in mid-air. It’s a strong image of the sacred and profane and Cohen has few peers in his ability to combine the two. However, on the album’s release it was thought too graphic and was replaced with a picture of Cohen.
Cohen planned a follow-up album, tentatively titled Songs for Rebecca, but scrapped it and his next album would be the semi-legendary disaster, Death of a Ladies’ Man, on which he worked with Phil Spector, making for one of the most mismatched collaborations in pop music history. It wasn’t until 1979′s Recent Songs that New Skin gained a suitable companion piece.
I saw Leonard Cohen live for the first time last spring in Seattle and he was in a great form and voice: unexpectedly spry, graceful, and dignified. After a long absence from the stage, it was a reminder of his stature not just as a songwriter, but as a performer and as a cultural icon. Given his age (74), it’s doubtful I’ll see him again, but I expect I’ll be listening to his albums until I’m 74. - Lukas Sherman
1977: Richard Hell & The Voidoids – Blank Generation
Richard Hell’s timing was always just a little bit off. Throughout punk’s 1970s heyday he found himself on the cusp of something monumental; several times he was long gone by the time these key moments actually occurred. Most famously, his days with Television ended in 1975 after he was either sacked from or quit the band over disagreements with Tom Verlaine. A short while later the band released the landmark Marquee Moon while Hell was attempting a new project after leaving the Heartbreakers in 1976, a doomed collaboration with former New York Dolls Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders from which Hell eventually jumped ship.
Perhaps not surprisingly, that project, Richard Hell & The Voidoids, never managed to emerge from the long shadow cast by Marquee Moon or other key 1977 albums. The band’s Blank Generation is still in some ways overlooked when albums from that mythical year are discussed, though it’s aged far better than either Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols or the laughably naïve proselytizing and macho posturing of The Clash’s self-titled debut. It’s far more layered and complex than much of its punk brethren (and if you wanted to argue that it’s not even a punk album, I wouldn’t disagree), with Robert Quine and Ivan Julian’s guitars sounding both abrasive and textured on songs like “New Pleasure” and “Down at the Rock and Roll Club.” Of course the musical dexterity of Marquee Moon has by now put to rest the incorrect stereotype that punk bands couldn’t play their instruments, but Blank Generation doesn’t trail too far behind. The music is often matched by Hell’s wit and lyricism, whether it’s the double entendre and Hell’s sneering vocals of “Love Comes In Spurts,” the suspicion and paranoia of “Betrayal Takes Two,” or the ambiguous sentiment of the album’s title track.
Though Hell’s later musical efforts failed to match Blank Generation’s brilliance, one near-flawless album is one more than most artists achieve. For me it’s always been of the purest examples of an overlooked masterpiece that, unlike many other 1977 albums, doesn’t sound hopelessly stuck in a particular genre or period. Though that long-ago tension between Verlaine and Hell will likely still cause some people to view Blank Generation as the bastard stepchild of what might have been, such an approach does a disservice to the album. Today it still sounds wonderfully out of step with most punk albums from either side of the Atlantic, an album that still continues to surprise decades after all of that Year Zero nonsense has been largely forgotten. - Eric Dennis
1980: Bruce Springsteen – The River
In listening to The River again as I was writing this piece, I was struck its relevance now, 29 years after its release. Sure, it has a few fun, mindless cute girl/nice car E Street rockers like “Cadillac Ranch” and “Crush on You,” as well as concert staples like “Hungry Heart” and “Ramrod” but the heart and soul of the album lies in the struggling, aching lyrics about American life in times of despair, the longing for happier days past and the ultimate feeling of cautious hopefulness that somehow, there’s some sort of silver lining in all of it, even if it’s not the one we want. The title track, especially, has poignancy in today’s America, the lyrics “I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company/ But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy” summing up our collective national reality and the ending verse lamenting about happier days, “Now those memories come back to haunt me/ They haunt me like a curse/ Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true/ Or is it something worse” hitting home for the thousands of folks who saw their own dreams and lies shattered. The song ends both ominously and hopefully – the river that was once the site of happiness and a bright future is now dry, but the narrator and his wife ride along it anyway, unsure of what will happen next.
The River, for me, was a gateway kind of an album. I was drawn in at a young age to those fun, forgettable, rollicking tunes and as my tape wore itself out, I started to tune into the emotion of the rawer ones. The River is often pointed to as a sort of maturation for Springsteen, the rough, cocky stars of his two previous albums Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town giving way to more weathered, world-weary protagonists, and the songwriting itself moving towards the spare, haunting lyrics and melodies of his next release, Nebraska. For me, Nebraska was the album that got me digging through my dad’s record collection and discovering the gems of Guthrie, Dylan and Baez, and by extension, the record that led me to current favorites like Wilco, Ani DiFranco and M. Ward. I don’t know that I would have gotten to Nebraska without The River, though. And to be honest, I’m not sure Bruce would have, either. - Tara Pierson Hoey
1982: The Gun Club – Miami
Somewhat of an unknown legend himself, Mark Lanegan was quoted in 2004, calling the Gun Club’s first three albums “essential,” and stated their lack of celebration after 25 years was “a crime.” His own 1999 covers record, I’ll Take Care of You, opened with his own take on their “Carry Home,” a road-weary tune that opened their second release, Miami. “Carry Home” is a brief summation of Miami’s concerns and of the obsessions of Gun Club leader Jeffrey Lee Pierce, himself. The narrator pleads with a love after a long absence on the road. He knows that the space between the two of them, geographically and emotionally, has taken its toll and whatever dangers that wide open expanse keeps hidden has exacted some kind of change upon him. “Though I’ve howled across fields and my eyes turned grey/ Are yours still the same,” Pierce admits stoically to his lover, before insisting later “No, but I didn’t change/ I just had to work!”
Miami, recorded and produced in a cramped New York City studio by Blondie’s Chris Stein, is about the phantoms and memories that haunt those roads that convolutedly connect Los Angeles to New York. Like John Fogerty before him, Pierce grew fascinated by the desperate characters in desperate landscapes that to many are little more than flyover states. If their debut, Fire of Love, was the sound of a late-’70s L.A. punk band “preaching the blues,” then Miami was the sound of those punks caught somewhere on the long, lonely highways of red states. Drummer Terry Graham, bassist Rob Ritter and guitarist Ward Dotson (together for a very short period of time due to Pierce’s firing them all) sound at times like the quintessential American rock band, completely blending the sounds of punk, rockabilly, blues and country into a seamless, swinging whole. When Mark Tomco’s pedal steel illuminates “Mother of Earth” and the suburban murder mystery “Texas Serenade,” the result is slightly psychedelic, a little melancholy and utterly gorgeous.
Pierce, had he not lost a long battle with alcohol, could have been an American answer to Nick Cave, with lyrics that echo the heritage of America yet lack Cave’s arch, evangelical authority. Pierce tells the story of outlaw “John Hardy” and drags us through Babylon in “Sleeping in Blood City,” yet in the same song, he mentions modernity- a “parking light.” Later, in the beautifully forlorn closer “Mother of Earth,” Pierce laments, “I gave you the key to the highway/ And the key to my motel door/ I’m tired of leavin’ and leavin’/ So I won’t come back no more.” Pierce, evoking icons as diverse as Howlin’ Wolf, Jim Morrison, Elvis and Marty Robbins, sounds more American than American, representing the beautiful losers caught in heart-rending dramas in the wide vistas of all those flyover territories. While Debbie Harry coos at the end of “Texas Serenade,” Pierce gives up on words; his vocals, full of echo, become the howling of ghosts that haunt the prairie, the desert, and the swamp. The Gun Club made fierce music that was fiercely American. Pierce, dead since 1996, still haunts those imagined hills that are now cut up and developed into the cultural strip malls of today. - Chris Middleman
1982: Lou Reed – The Blue Mask
Everyone at some point has a person in their life who introduces them to a new world of music- for a lot, it’s a teacher or an older sibling or that one weird old dude who hangs out at the record store. Whoever it is, it’s someone who shows you that there’s music in the world that your parents didn’t listen to. For me, it was my old boss Mark, who I first met at his soup cart just off my college campus. In addition to fostering my love of soup, it turned out that his voluminous knowledge of punk, new wave and Brit-rock was going to be a big figure in my musical landscape.
And one of the albums he turned me on to was Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask, released in the year of my birth- 1982. The Blue Mask was one of the first albums that I ever listened that I could conceptualize as mature. By his eleventh solo album, Reed wasn’t trying to impress anyone. He wasn’t even trying to be daring or edgy or sordid or whatever “Lou Reed” was supposed to be at that point. He was just doing what he did best, playing songs about the things he cared about and singing stories that sounded straight from his own life, even if they weren’t.
It shows- some of his best and most played live latter day songs are from The Blue Mask. In the space of one album, he lovingly sings respect for his past mentors and his own domesticity in “My House,” de-mythologizes himself with “Average Guy” and contemplates a dream of national innocence, one that may or may not have any basis in reality in the bitter “The Day John Kennedy Died.” But more than that, he made me think of myself while singing about himself. “Underneath the Bottle” reminded me of my own incipient drinking, while “Waves of Fear” became my own personal paranoia ballad. The remarkable thing is not that Reed put out such a great album; he’s always done that, albeit in fits and starts. Don’t talk to me about Sally Can’t Dance. It’s that he was willing to put out a record of songs that were written as a man, not as some fake idealization of his own image.
Even the cover, the blue tinted reflection of the famed Transformer art hints that this wasn’t the Lou Reed of “Walk on the Wild Side” or “Heroin.” This was a Lou Reed who wanted to sing about his teachers and his wife. And for me, it was the first record where I realized that was okay. - Nathan Kamal
1983: Cyndi Lauper – She’s So Unusual
Loving Sierra could sometimes be a chore. She would spend seven hours on AIM, imploring me to list every reason I liked her, until the limitless possibilities had reached their limit. She would panic about being seen in public with me, because I was (according to her) so much less attractive. At 21, she had nightmares about her half-Jewish cousins getting more presents than she did, because they celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah. And yet one morning, when she pulled She’s So Unusual from her crate of vinyl, and placed the record on her brand-new turntable, all that mattered was that Sierra’s tongue was melting into mine, our clumsy, inexperienced bodies one on her tiny dorm room couch. And man, “Time After Time” is a great song to hear when you’re holding someone you never want to let go.
Sierra was, in a word, unusual, and quite fittingly, she adored Cyndi Lauper. Released in fall 1983, inescapable throughout 1984, She’s So Unusual was a cultural phenomenon, in a year overflowing with cultural phenomena. Five of its 10 tracks made the Top 40 (four hit the Top Five), and a sixth (her gender-fucking cover of Prince’s “When You Were Mine”) became a Lauper signature. The 30-year-old Lauper dressed like a seven-year-old playing in Mommy’s bureau (Mr. Blackwell was not a fan), danced like a free-spirited boho, talked like a Noo Yawk caricature and sang in a screechy but perfectly controlled wail. She could tailor others’ material to her own oddball demeanor, imbuing the Brains’ “Money Changes Everything” and Robert Hazard’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” with resolute female empowerment. “Money,” which kicks off Unusual, even complemented the opening salvo from 1984′s other vintage-clad sensation: Madonna’s “Material Girl” (first cut on Like a Virgin, and released as a single around the same time as “Money”). Despite her label’s skepticism, Lauper was also an accomplished songwriter: she could close side one with arguably the greatest pop ballad of the ’80s (covered by everyone from Miles Davis to Ashley Tisdale), and then start side two with a blithely frank female masturbation anthem. If the album is a bit top-heavy, its first six cuts unforgettable even before they were overexposed, let us not discount its later songs: “Witness” and “I’ll Kiss You” are joyful 2 Tone-by-way-of-Queens approximations, and the half-sarcastic cover of “He’s So Unusual” is a lark. Unusual was one of the most entertaining, and commercially successful, debut albums of the decade, and it heralded an incomparable talent seemingly destined to challenge Madonna for the girl-pop crown.
Despite her nutty sexpot affectations, Lauper’s career did not mirror Madonna’s. She fell closer to the trajectory of another wacky act with a mind-blowing debut: the Violent Femmes. Like Gano’s brood, Lauper’s post-Unusual career was an array of letdowns: music that was consistently respectable, sometimes poignant, but never galvanizing. She could have been one of the most compelling pop stars of our time. Instead, she became a female James Taylor, and never summoned the sprightly effervescence that made Unusual such a blast.
Of course, during Unusual’s ubiquity, I was an infant, and it never resonated as anything more than quirky synth-pop until I met Sierra, a good 20 years after its release. Though a little curvier, and more professionally dressed, Sierra even looked a bit like Lauper: cherubic cheeks, porcelain white skin, glimmering red lips that give way to a slyly enchanting grin. And like Lauper, the immense pleasure she offered was limited, relegated to one all-too-brief phase of our lives. Within two months of that marvelous day, for which Unusual was the soundtrack, Sierra dumped me for another guy, and we both eventually moved on, respecting but never again loving each other. But She’s So Unusual became an artifact, a magical album that transports me back to those blissful months as Sierra’s boyfriend. And as such, I love it more than I did when she was mine. - Charles A. Hohman
1984: Bruce Springsteen – Born in the U.S.A.
Born In The U.S.A. is something of a tricky album. It’s not The Boss’s best rock album (in my opinion, that’s Born to Run). It’s not his best artistic one, either (ahem, Nebraska). Still, it’s his most commercially successful, most melodic and probably his most grossly misunderstood. Peaking at #9 on the Billboard Top 100 and containing seven Top-10 singles, it’s the record that thrust him and the E Street Band into pop culture forever, destroying any possibility of history remembering him merely a charismatic frontman with a few great records.
For me, it’s more than a collection of hit songs. It’s a record that literally shaped my musical tastes as a child and sense of “cool” as a young adult, not to mention a lesson in the power of an overlooked message. My dad was (and is) a classic rock enthusiast, and gave my brothers and I the beginner’s course in popular musical history we deserved. The Beatles, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones… we listened and loved them all. Most groups had disbanded or past their prime by the time we’d gotten to know them. Not so with Bruce.
The cover of the Springsteen LP was iconic, and easy for my young eyes to remember (and impersonate). The riffs were there, too – I didn’t know what a power chord was or why the choruses was so easy to remember, but I liked them. I sang along. I heard the songs everywhere, from the local radio station to my Dad’s softball tournaments. Every band at every county picnic had a few E Street covers in their arsenal. I grew up with the songs, they are and always will be familiar to me. I can’t help but associate them with warm summer nights and the back of pickup trucks, sports games and the family stereo.
As I grew older and my tastes matured and changed, I put classic rock on the back-burner. I dabbled in grunge and nu-metal before falling indie rock and alt-country. While in college, I downloaded Born In The U.S.A. again – for nostalgia, I’m sure – and realized the deeper message I’d missed in my youth. The title track is the most infamous example, with the story of a Vietnam veteran’s struggles completely overshadowed by the anthemic chorus. Even “Glory Days” is a lament for better times, and seems to pity those who get stuck in the past. All over the record, Springsteen’s writing was darker than I’d ever realized.
I downloaded all of Springsteen’s earlier records and familiarized myself beyond the radio hits. When I got a turntable, I had all the Springsteen records up to and including Tunnel Of Love. I evangelized the music to my friends and family, and dove into records by artists who’d been influenced by The Boss. I bought books on the man’s career, and reworked my personal definition of “cool” to “anyone who can deceive an entire nation with a catchy chorus and enough attitude.” So, while Born In The U.S.A. isn’t my favorite Springsteen record, it’s definitely the one I owe the most to. It was exactly the record I needed growing up – without a doubt, I wouldn’t be the person I am today without it. - Jason Stoff
1985: The Replacements – Tim
Despite being a child of the 1990s, my first exposure to The Replacements wasn’t the teen party film Can’t Hardly Wait, but rather an early They Might Be Giants song — Hi, we’re The Replacements/And we’re playing in a rock & roll band — and if They Might Be Giants write a song about you, then you must be special (see also: “XTC vs. Adam Ant” — well, at least the former contender).
Tim is The Replacements’ “sellout” album, their major label debut for the Warner Brothers-owned Sire Records after their beloved Let It Be got them loads of attention from critics and record companies alike. You have to wonder, though, if it’s really considered selling out if nobody buys your record. I’ve spun Tim more than any other Replacements album. Initial blame can be put to its abrupt opening into the hooky “Hold My Life.”
It took me far too long to discover The Replacements outside of a cute TMBG reference. A girl I liked gave me a mix CD with “Androgynous” on it, but that song hardly represents the band as I’ve come to love them. Rather, the true Replacements comes with the frenzied, youthful rock of “Left of the Dial” or the high school sentimentality of “Kiss Me On the Bus.” It’s about being young and feeling everything. “Bastards of Young” is the great standout of Tim, an anthem of youthful angst that starts out brilliantly: that guitar hook, Paul Westerberg’s punk rock wail, and that opening line: God, what a mess. The song is youth in a nutshell: an impassioned, almost meaningless shout and a self-important, all-encompassing assertion. We are the sons of no one/ Bastards of the young. Oh, how I wish I discovered them in high school. - Danny Djeljosevic
1985: Dead Kennedys – Frankenchrist
Independent music was giving way to the new underground in 1985. The punk aesthetic was hitting more sensitive territory by retreating inside of itself. Rites of Spring and Husker Du’s New Day Rising had set the tone for hardcore punk’s separation from political manifestos in favor of loud and emotionally driven testaments. Black Flag and Minor Threat (broken up since ’83) had their last releases while the post-punk decedents of the Spirit of ’77 scene had begun to bend their will to the commercial interests which they had originally set out to poison. A far gentler brand of indie music was going national with R.E.M., The Replacements and Talking Heads hitting their stride. Meanwhile, the Billboard Charts looked like a disaster. ’85 was a year of very stupid pop music and those who complain about the same in the 21st Century need to get a good hard look at Starship, Foreigner, Mr. Mister and Phil Collins again and keep their mouths shut.
A decidedly less pissed off landscape came to the fore slowly but surely out of these many developments. Social commentary was a waste of time in the grotesque and reactionary trenches of Reagan’s America. Better to embrace angst and elegance instead of injustice and the grotesque. This was not an environment where a band like Dead Kennedys would last very long. It certainly wasn’t what they had signed up for in the heady and defiant early days of the California hardcore scene. But with Frankenchrist they would make a go of it as long as they could; tweaking and expanding the scope of their demented leftist pep rally meets surf guitar sound. From a larger perspective, they recorded a punk rock counterpart to Born in the U.S.A.’s lament on the passing of a more thoughtful and considerate country. True to their nature, the DKs saw more fit to throw up on their diseased society rather than pull out the old home movies E Street was so found of showing.
The satiric reach Jello Biafra’s lyrics and East Bay Ray’s stinging guitar lines are expanded on the band’s fourth release like an anthology of short stories. With the exception of the brief and pungent throwback tune “Hellnation,” both veered the group in a less anthemic direction with longer arrangements and more vivid glimpses of working slob immolation. In fairness, time has been kinder to the ambitions of Frankenchrist and harsher to its targets. The nightmarish working class descent described in “Soup is Good Food” may at one point have seemed like Dante’s Inferno. Now it’s accepted as more commonplace than any dream of industrial labor prosperity. The same goes for the cultural banality and athletic cannibalism portrayed in “This Could Be Anywhere” and “Jock-O-Rama.” While these statements are always timeless to a degree, the same kind of crass commercialism isn’t even hidden behind an artifice of regional pride anymore. Jello was being optimistic by even thinking that there would anything as unifying as a sense of community to go nuts over in the years to come.
Among their new style of playing and songwriting was “MTV Get Off the Air.” Making fun of MTV directly in 1985 was not a cool thing. Even though the channel was about artifice and fashion co-option, they would throw enough bones to edgier acts to keep the network, just barely, in the counterculture business. You didn’t mess with that if you hoped to achieve some degree of success. They didn’t care. All these years later, the way Jello and his boys start the song with a vapid VJ monologue over a soulless New Romanic Go-Go pop single still has a hateful sort of self-righteousness about it. At their best moments the DKs could always make you revel in the most evil reaction to everyday consumption. It just felt right to hate MTV.
Obscenity lawsuits and a criminal trial due to the original phallic cover art of Frankenchrist helped hasten the acrimony and eventual demise of the original DKs lineup before their next and final record Bedtime for Democracy. Frankenchrist itself remains in stasis among fans and critics. Old school DK fans don’t particularly like the record and see the use murderous mariachi trumpets and synthesizers as decadent add-ons. Mainstream appeal has almost always been out of the question. But for the harsh toll it took on the band and their relationship to fans and civilization in general, it was exactly the macabre political freak show that the placid and overly introverted music scenes of 1985 desperately needed. - Neal Fersko
1985: Hüsker Dü – New Day Rising
The 1980s were a period of remarkable transition in rock music. The integrity of the art form–so the story goes–went from better to worse, hard to soft, authentic to bogus. Of course this story is supported by a number of obvious developments throughout the decade. Punk rock morphed and hybridized into a mixed bag of New Wave pretentiousness. The death of John Bonham in 1980 ended Led Zeppelin and the era of respectable arena rock. Mötley Crüe, Poison, Warrant and other hair metal punch lines rose to incredible popularity in their place on the strength and volume of a few power chords. ‘The man’ had won, rock ‘n’ roll was over, it’s essence captured, copied and stamped out by the million on production lines across the Western world.
But there are a great number of chapters in this story left untold by those who would have you believe that rock went comatose between London Calling and Nevermind. Beneath the steaming piles of excrement that filled record stores throughout the ’80s, a raw aesthetic remained that would ultimately connect the dots between reputable late-’70s punk and early-’90s alternative scenes.
The Minnesotan twin-cites were the setting of just such a chapter when guitarist Bob Mould and drummer Grant Hart joined forces in 1979 with bassist Greg Norton and keyboardist Charlie Pine. Together they formed Hüsker Dü and would proceed to fuse raw punk into a melodic pop structure, creating some of the most influential music in modern rock history. Through the early ’80s they developed quickly, racing between the stage and the studio to drop five albums in five years, each more powerful and focused than the last. While they would not achieve the mainstream notoriety of their equally influential post-punk counterparts R.E.M., Hüsker Dü came to personify the rise of underground indie rock and amassed a devoted cult following.
Released to the world in January of ’85, a short four months before myself, New Day Rising was the absolute peak of Hüsker Dü’s creative output. The album is relentless with its fierce onslaught of concise, to-the-point hardcore rock ‘n’ roll. Powerfully coarse instrumentals are married with just the right touch of pop melody, filling the album with two and three minute bricks that build into a formidable wall of sound. A wall etched with genuine lyricism that’s as full of bitter humour as it is pain and anger. It’s the pop sensibility of The Buzzcocks and the noise of Sonic Youth. It’s accessible without conceding an inch of integrity to the mainstream.
Aside from the substantial historical weight of the album, New Day Rising is a power player in my library for two specific reasons. The first being one of my all-time favorite summer jams in “Celebrated Summer.” Where most summer songs deal in glorification of the sunny months (see Bryan Adams), Hüsker Dü covers the topic with a degree of subtlety and straight-up honesty. Fishing? Drinking on the beach? Great ideas. But the summer’s over before you have the chance to figure out if you’re making the most of it. Let me tell you, this is especially relevant when you live somewhere that’s covered in snow for eight months of the year.
The second reason is the track “Books About UFOs,” where a delicate piano melody and an intense fuzzed out guitar riff dovetail into the foundation of a surprisingly tender three-minute story of unrequited love. Mould can only watch from afar as the object of his affection sits out stargazing from her roof, “I’m going to turn into a lens and focus all my attention/ On finding a new planet and naming it right after her,” he vows. I dare you to find a more touching sentiment in the genre.
So this is where rock ‘n’ roll lived in 1985. Hüsker Dü roamed the underground with the likes of Black Flag, Meat Puppets, The Replacements and Minutemen, hidden from view and nowhere to be found on the radio dial. But in their element they were loudly taking rock in a new direction. When the alternative and grunge scenes hit in the early ’90s with Frank Black and Kurt Cobain leading flagship outfits, the mainstream paid no recognition to the transitional forces of the mid-’80s. Post-punk, pop-punk, post-hardcore, call it what you want. Hüsker Dü, and New Day Rising specifically, were the hyphen in a highly hyphenated era of music. – Brady Baker
1985: Sade – Promise
The year was 1985, Prince was still telling everyone to go crazy and dance in the purple rain, the high-top fade was in, tight pants and thin ties were in and Ronald Reagan was sworn in for his second term as President. Those were indeed good times. I searched long and hard, high and low for an album in my collection that not only was released that year, but could sum up who I am after about 10 seconds of listening. Although, for some reason all of my favorite jazz and blues artists took the year off from recording. I thought my birth year was a bust until I realized that in 1985, a little known Nigerian singer named Sade emerged onto the international stage with her debut album Diamond Life. Her debut flew off the shelves and later on in the same year, she released Promise.
Sade has always had a knack of churning out hits. Critics claim that Sade’s brand of over synthesized, lyrically challenged music isn’t jazz. Though I dare you to listen to this album and tell me she doesn’t croon like an Sarah Vaughn or Billie Holiday during their heyday. Besides, overdubbed, synthesized music was the ’80s! Listening to Promise channels memories I would rather forget. Track by track stories of my life that bring laughter, tears, and old emotions. The music is fresh, inventive, and passionately speaking softly and authoritatively about the consequences of love. With every word she sings, I feel as if her words were meant for me.
When I listen to “Is It A Crime,” it reminds me of an long time friend and ex-girlfriend who slept with my so-called best friend a few months after we broke up. Not only did I feel betrayed, I was angry. Just days prior, my ex sent me an email pleading me to give her another chance at a relationship. Needless to say, we never got back together. One of my favorite songs of all time, “Jezebel,” congers up vivid images of a prostitute who walks around in a daze of self righteousness even though the world knows she roams the streets looking for her next score. “War of the Hearts,” is a tune you’ll probably rip onto your iPod when you hear it. Its sweet melody and catchy lyrics have me listening to this song over and over.
The story of my life is written in the lyrics of every song on this album. Love is never as good as the first time. Is it a crime to love someone even after they left you? Was I Mr. Wrong? To some of these questions, I’ll never know. Though with every listen I ask myself those same questions in hope that one day I’ll come up with the answers. Promise has a special place in my life and in my heart, hopefully it’ll have a special place in yours. - Andrew Cray
1986: The Smiths – The Queen is Dead
It’s remarkable that the songs of Morrissey and Johnny Marr are now held up as the heirs to the Lennon and McCartney catalog from the prior generation. This comparison, which it should be noted was hoisted on dozens of songwriting teams by the British press during the ’80s, was never as true as it was on the band’s masterpiece, The Queen is Dead.
In part this is because at this point in time, the partnership of Morrissey and Marr had reached a level of confrontation that Lennon and McCartney would have been instantly familiar with. On The Queen is Dead the band sounded even more venomous, the songs more enraged than normal both sonically and lyrically. Label issues had fractured the band beyond repair, as detailed in “Frankly, Mr. Shankly,” and relentless touring had exhausted the members. But that conflict was ultimately the inspiration it took to propel the band towards what may have previously seemed unattainable heights, cementing their reputation for all time and arguably allowing the band to ease into the title of England’s most important group.
The album was announced to the world via “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” which was coincidentally also the first Smiths song I ever heard. Though I was 13 when I discovered the band through the track, “Bigmouth” could easily be interpreted as a blueprint for so much of what I’ve come to value in music. Its rhythm is danceable, influenced by disco and funk, the guitar alternately brittle and majestic,and above all its lyrics clever, sharp, and full of bile (is there a better send-off “Sweetness /I was only joking when I said/ By rights you should be/ Bludgeoned in your bed“), “Bigmouth” is a tidy capsule summation of everything The Smiths were.
Morrissey’s outlook on life holds an appeal to outcasts of any age but what so many people seem to forget is that his songs are full of a dark humor that allow his music to rise above any obtuse melancholy that so many of his pretenders to the throne deal in. And though the music of the Smith’s is wonderfully varied on Queen, with detours towards country and Merseybeat to augment the band’s normal jangly pop, it’s that dark humor in the lyrics that specifically appeals to me. Surely everyone spends a disproportionate amount of time voicing an irritation with the way the world works and their place in it, but casting a humorous light on the proceedings at least stands to make things more bearable.
Morrissey’s specific battles with both critics and the music industry at large occupy most of his focus, but like his idol Oscar Wilde, Morrissey is capable of making his targets universal, allowing the words to take on resonance amongst all audiences. For Morrissey, “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” may have been directed at what he felt was his inability to make everyone happy, for the listener it could have dealt with the burdens we all carry on our own. Marr’s dazzlingly versatile guitar work filled the gaps, offering a range of emotion to match Morrissey’s vocals and expressing musically what words often fail to.
Like Lennon and McCartney, Morrissey and Marr had brought intelligence and flair to the world of pop music, ensuring that their music would outlast their doomed partnership and the British indie scene that spawned it. Where peers like Aztec Camera have largely been forgotten with time, the merger of Morrissey’s seething humor and passionate voice and Marr’s varied, vital guitar allowed the work of the band to attain a sort of timelessness. So I suppose it really isn’t any wonder that over the years the Smiths have only grown to be more important, after all. - Morgan Davis
1987: Prince – Sign ‘O’ the Times
Prince was an ambitious motherfucker back in the ’80s, even if his efforts didn’t always warrant the best results. It was a frustrating time for one of popular music’s greatest innovative minds. Fresh from the commercial disappointments of the Parade album and the not-once funny musical dramedy, Under the Cherry Moon, Prince may have been a bit under pressure to surface the waters of critical success. His master plan: a massive three-LP work titled, Crystal Ball. This large-scale piece had been in the works since 1982, starting in the form of Dream Factory, a double-disc piece Prince planned to be his last collaboration with his ever-talented band, The Revolution. Crystal Ball included many of the 16 tracks that made it to the final release of Sign, but came with so much more. Too much more according to Prince’s label at the time, Warner Bros. Records, who felt weary due to the results of Prince’s recent big-budget outings. Consequentially, they asked him to trim back this epic task a bit. In the end, this album edit became what has graced lists upon lists as one of the best albums of all time.
Sign ‘O’ the Times exhibits some of Prince’s more stripped-down work. For example, the title track was conceived and performed almost completely on a Fairlight CMI sampling synthesizer–a relic and completely thrown by the wayside in today’s world, Prince found something in this machine to create a minimalist yet blunt social commentary with words and a desolate, yet funky tone with the ability to scare the shit out of us and make us want more all at the same time. The album paints an intensely vivid picture, its scenes, colors, melodies and tones all stemming from the era; all telling a story set in a truly dissonant world. Gang violence runs rampant, natural disasters rip through the nation and the government has the power to blow holes in whomever they please. All of these evils are ever-present, but as Prince has made very clear over his three-decade long career, love can always be that silver lining to the shitstorm that surrounds us all.
My first recollection of the album stems from a car ride when I was about 10 years old. Baltimore’s local R&B radio station had a knack for playing an eclectic set of classic treasures from Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” to “Between the Sheets” by the Isley Brothers to Stephanie Mills’ recording of “Home” from The Wiz along with the hits of the present. I remember waking up from one of the many naps I took at that age to the sound of a school bell ringing with an awesome beat to follow. At that age, I couldn’t remember much other than an interesting chorus, the likes of which I had yet to hear: “Starfish and coffee/ Maple syrup and jam/ Butterscotch clouds, a tangerine/ And a side order of ham/ If U set your mind free, baby/ Maybe you’d understand/ Starfish and coffee/ Maple syrup and jam.” The idea of setting my mind free latched on strong and stayed with me for quite a while. Flash forward to two years ago. I had been going through a Prince kick and I stumbled upon Sign after just becoming unhealthily addicted to Purple Rain. I immediately noticed that this magical song originated from this album and I now had Prince to blame for this subtle but lifting life lesson. It was then that I, like Warner Bros. realized that this Prince Nelson guy was on to something.
This album’s strengths lie in its ability to scare the fuck out of you, lift you back up, seduce you, let you go and bring you back–all shifting at the master’s discretion. The best part of it all is it’s a ride worth taking over and over again. The inventive production, shifting between studio recordings and live tapings (taking a page from the Purple playbook) must have been quite an undertaking, being that half the album originated as a full concept and was later watered down to the essentials. Prince’s instrumentation on the album may be stripped-down, but are in peak condition nonetheless here. Times is heavy with that always welcome mix of guitars and synths and the snare drum, probably most notable on the hopeful and upbeat dance jam, “Play in the Sunshine”. But, Prince–being the sonic innovator he is could never leave it there, employing a beautifully jazzy brass and strings section on the highly sensual ballad, “Slow Love”. The dissonance of the messages of the aforementioned songs isn’t so much dissonance as it is a list of necessities. In Prince’s world, it’s just as important to acknowledge the hope to overcome injustice as it is to make to make that slow, slow love. Every song is conveyed with that same A-game passion that is essential to a Prince hit, whether it be a simple pop-rock tune like “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” or the intensely audacious slow jam that is “Adore”.
Sign ‘O’ the Times, I feel isn’t one of those albums to mark the year or mark a generation (I think 1987 would probably be best repped by Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction), but its themes and musicality are so strikingly unique and come with a ferocity that push it just over the top and to be considered classic is almost a bit of an understatement. This is a work of genius. - Cameron Mason
