Pitchfork: Top 100 Albums of the 1980s

 

060: Bruce Springsteen
Nebraska
[Columbia; 1982]

The legend has Springsteen carrying around a four-track cassette of demos for the new album in a ratty back pocket and then deciding finally to release the tape as it was. Nebraska was a precursor to both the unplugged movement and the four-track bedroom folk that swept the indie world in the early 90s, but none of that would matter now if the music weren't so remarkably good. Springsteen's love of the band Suicide helped shape the claustrophobic sound, and the dawn of the Reagan era is usually cited as the album's chief thematic inspiration. Ultimately, the political climate of its birth is irrelevant, as Springsteen's novelist's eye for detail and character ensure that the stories remain timeless. Live versions of these songs with the E Street band confirm that these songs were meant to be performed by a single man, in a room, alone. --Mark Richardson

 

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059: Guns N' Roses
Appetite for Destruction
[Geffen; 1987]

What are your friends' names? John? Paul? Evan? That's some weak shit next to the ultimate rock-o-nyms: Axl, Slash, Izzy, and Duff (yes, I am leaving out the drummer, the drug-addled Adler whose ejection begged the fantasy-question of how far gone you had to be to get the boot from these guys). Four different cults of personality! Five shaggy, fatless, tat-dappled Icaruses! Such creatures of instinct that Axl's channeling of Bowie and Iggy had to be accidental, right? This album can be summarized by a holy phrase: No filler. Thank god the original robo-rape art got banned; that skull-cross is the perfect visual accompaniment to an album that, along with displaying better songcraft and being more anthemic, was heavier than all of its competition. Alas, the band would later defy rock physics by bloating and disintegrating simultaneously. --William Bowers

 

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058: Elvis Costello
Imperial Bedroom
[Columbia; 1982]

Costello's famed collaboration with Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick came at a tumultuous time for the earnest rock and roller. With his marriage on the rocks and journalists touting a tryst with legendary NY groupie Bebe Buell, Imperial Bedroom marks Elvis Costello's most personal investment, an unflinching examination of fidelity, trust and the dishonesty of role-playing. He front-loaded the album with the most ambitious song he'd recorded to that point, explosive as the crashing thunderclap that introduces its bridge. To this day, the complicated layering and full bars overlapping in "Beyond Belief" make for an almost psychedelic listening experience, to say nothing of its astounding verse. Costello was already well-established as a master lyricist, but Imperial Bedroom makes clear he was not fucking around this time: "Charged with insults and flattery/ Her body moves with malice/ Do you have to be so cruel to be callous?" --Chris Ott

 

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057: Pixies
Come On Pilgrim
[4AD; 1987]

Compiled from a demo tape recorded in March, 1987 at Boston's Fort Apache studios, this disc served as the world's first taste of a band that would soon become one of the indie music world's all-time greats. It was, at the time, a curious release for 4AD who, The Birthday Party aside, largely favored jangly pop and gothic romance. But in retrospect, The Pixies would have been at home on any label, mapping their own rugged terrain with their trademark whisper/thunder dynamics and Frank Black's infamous turbulent screeching. Come On Pilgrim is filled with paradox: the narrator of "Caribou" mourns the torture of city life yet wishes for death as its namesake in the peace of wilderness; "Levitate Me" translates lyrics from a folk ballad to a shoegazing rocker; "I've Been Tired" is its most antic song. What possessed them? --Ryan Schreiber

 

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056: King Crimson
Discipline
[Warner Bros; 1981]

Were punk and new wave really so powerful as to banish prog from rock history? For a few English "dinosaurs", certainly not. Guitarist Robert Fripp had already earned his hip underground stripes working with Brian Eno throughout the 70s, but for this version of his celebrated prog outfit, he attempted to completely destroy the barriers that would segregate cliques. Keeping drummer Bill Bruford from the previous incarnation of the band, and adding guitarist/vocalist Adrian Belew (who'd played with David Bowie and on Talking Heads' earth-shattering Remain in Light) and bassist Tony Levin (who'd played with John Lennon and would go on to back Peter Gabriel), Fripp's gang played music as angular and tense as any post-punk group while as precise and rhythmically propulsive as a Bartok string quartet. Songs like the title track, "Thela Hun Ginjeet", and "Frame by Frame" are almost-danceable maxi-minimalist etudes, and obvious precursors to virtually all math-rock. --Dominique Leone

 

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055: The Police
Synchronicity
[A&M; 1983]

The Police were never a punk band, but that didn't stem accusations that the group were ditching their rock roots for adult contemporary. Nor were the Police ever New Romantics, but the themes suggest meaning behind the makeup: romanticism not from supposed individuality, but in the synchronous parallels of our modern lives. The band was indeed taking a distinct move toward pop with Synchronicity, but not from substance. Sting never shied away from the tensions below the surface: not just in "Every Breath You Take", but in songs like "Synchronicity II", in which "many miles away, something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake," its identity never revealed. Er... about that shadow on the door of the cottage... --Christopher Dare

 

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054: Big Black
Songs about Fucking
[Touch & Go; 1987]

Child molestation, urban decay, hopeless apathy, trucking, and racial commentary were all fair game to Big Black, and the screeching, clanking thud of their proto-industrial sound was only a shade less disturbing than their subject matter. Dave Riley's bass is a metallic, twisted train wreck, and Steve Albini's every word so bile-drenched it barely makes it past his lips. This, combined with the searing buzzsaw guitars and the violent percussive force of a jackhammer, will strip the enamel straight off your goddamn teeth. Their pervasive stench clings to the entirety of the burgeoning industrial movement, and Songs About Fucking is the still the biggest, baddest sound on the block; underestimate it at your own peril. --Eric Carr

 

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053: Mission of Burma
Signals, Calls & Marches
[Ace of Hearts; 1981]

Mission of Burma soundly countered the feel-good 70s rock and roll of The Cars (Boston's biggest export at the time), but their difficult, indulgent shows alienated most of their potential audience. As drummer Peter Prescott recently quipped in L.A.: "You guys are a lot nicer to us than your parents were." Signals, Calls & Marches housed their one inescapable hit, "That's When I Reach for My Revolver", which, in comparison to screaming post-punk/pre-hardcore numbers like "Outlaw" and "Fame and Fortune", sounds flat and somewhat dated. But "This Is Not a Photograph" holds up best of all, a delegate for the songs of Mission of Burma's first wave. --Chris Ott

 

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052: Eric B. & Rakim
Paid in Full
[4th & Broadway; 1987]

Although Rakim didn't invent the art of rhyming, he was the one who defined what it meant to be a hip-hop lyricist. With a flow that would've melted glaciers, Rakim handled the beat with a precision that sounded otherworldly to '87 ears, igniting an entire generation of MC imitators. On Paid in Full, he used rhymes like putty to sculpt a lyrical masterpiece that hasn't been touched since. "I Ain't No Joke", "Paid in Full", "Move the Crowd"... how could you even pretend to fuck with Rakim Allah? And, oh yeah, the beats were also on-point, regardless of who produced them. --Sam Chennault

 

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051: Leonard Cohen
I'm Your Man
[Columbia; 1988]

You know you're cool when you get all dressed up in shades and a blazer just to be eating a banana on your album cover. And dig the David Lynch font of the song titles. I'm Your Man is the perfect midpoint for Cohen's career-- it rivals the poetry of 1969's Songs from a Room, but labors under the resort-lounge production of the apocalyptic, Oliver Stoned 1992 release The Future (yo, everyone knows that 2001's Ten New Songs was a non-representative carjacking). My theory is that there are two Leonard Cohen robots, one of which is a genius lyricist, and one of which is a melodramatic, obtuse-voiced mercenary who will speak-croon over the most Karaokean arrangements. Yet who else sings lines as piercing as "It's Father's Day and everybody's wounded," or, "Let me be somebody I admire"? He talks to Hank Williams, he says we're talking to our pockets, and without his concrete odes to monkey-mailing there might not be a Smog, or even Iron & Wine. --William Bowers