Let’s say your hood is up and you’re walking down a cold, dark alley on a lightless, rainy night.  You’re immersed in the type of thoughts that occupy your mind completely but really aren’t fully formulated in any way, which is to say that your head is swimming in next to nothing.  Let’s also put your headphones in your ears and call the Black Keys’ “Chulahoma” what you're listening to (which is tremendous dark alley music).  As you’re strolling along with your mind chewing hard on nothing-thoughts and you’re otherwise minding your own p’s and q’s, a faceless nobody suddenly jumps out of the shadows and shouts in your general direction, “Hey you, asshole – The 1980’s!”.  What comes to your mind?

If you would have laid that scenario out in front of me a few weeks ago, I probably would have said big hair, my brother’s sweet Z. Cavaricci pants (tightrolled of course), Van Halen and Rubik’s Cube – probably in that order.  But, it’s been worthwhile to dismantle my misguided perceptions of 80’s yesterdays.  As we continue to pick an album for each year, the intent is to use the divisions to help make some organized sense out of each decade.  The 80’s are not what I thought they were, as it turns out.  In any event, below is a breakdown of what we’ve chronicled thus far.

Albums

1980:  Talking Heads – Remain In Light (Ramones Division)

1981:  Jaco Pastorius – Word of Mouth (Miles Division)

1982:  John Mellencamp – American Fool (Dylan Division)

1983:  The Police – Synchronicity (Ramones Division)

1984:  Van Halen – 1984 (Zeppelin Division)

1985:  Tom Waits – Rain Dogs (Dylan Division)

1986:  Stevie Ray Vaughan – Live Alive (Allmans Division)

1987:  Guns N’ Roses – Appetite for Destruction (Zeppelin Division)

1988:  Pixies – Surfer Rosa (Ramones Division)

1989:  De La Soul – 3 Feet High and Rising (Miles Division)

Divisions

Ramones Division:  3 Albums

Dylan Division:  2 Albums

Zeppelin Division:  2 Albums

Miles Division:  2 Albums

Allmans Division:  1 Album
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There you have it.  The Ramones were the most seminal and dominant influence of the 1980's.  It's now been scientifically proven.  I, for one, feel considerably better about the decade of my birth.  We'll start with the 90's tomorrow.  Flannels, Doc Marten's boots and other misconceptions coming at you.
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Originality is a commodity, especially when it comes to music.  Just about everything’s already been done.  Except hip-hop.  Think about it.  Hip-hop is probably the only new form of music that’s going to be cultivated in our lifetime.  It’s rare when someone can work within an existing framework to come up with a completely different slant – a fresh lens to look at an old picture.  Hip-hop did that, for better or worse.  And within the virgin hip-hop neighborhood in 1989, De La Soul were the first ones to give the beats and rhymes some intellect, some consciousness.

3 Feet High and Rising is De La’s first album and will be the only hip-hop record to make this list.  Some others came close – The Low End Theory, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and Aquemini among them, but 3 Feet was the only one that was a without question, can’t leave it off definite.  Posdnous, Mase, Trugoy the Dove and Prince Paul matched Steely Dan samples and reprimands for just a little bit of peace with hooks that swim in your head for days.  Jazzy beats, smooth flows, guest spots by Q-Tip and an album title that was culled from a Johnny Cash song.  Are you fucking kidding me?  3 Feet High and Rising is as close to hip-hop melting pot perfection as we’ll ever get.

Miles Division:  De La Soul is original.  Not many artists can say that.
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The Pixies are strange.  They shift from melodic and gentle to violent and twisted.  Usually all in the same 3 minutes. 

The Pixies can make you uneasy.  Black’s vocals are piercing and cringe-inducing, and his content treads pretty comfortably in the territory of the bizarre. 

The Pixies are influential.  Surfer Rosa is the Pixies’ first record and it’s an introduction of things to come.  There are catchy acoustic guitar rhythms layered with wailing electric guitar dissonance.  The heavy drum landscape sounds like it was recorded in a freeway tunnel.  Songs like “Vamos” and “Gigantic” are rock.  They’re pop.  They’re punk.  If Neil Young is the rock & roll forefather of grunge, then the Pixies are the punk bastard mongrels. 

The Pixies don’t fit.  Anywhere.  They sound like they can’t make up their mind.  Like they’re the kids in high school that drink PBR with the football players and cheerleaders while wearing trench coats and eyeliner.  Their indecision makes them interesting.  The Pixies are like all of us, really.  They’re baffled by life and they’re doing the best they can to make their own unique sense of it.

Life is fragile.  And that’s what’s great about the Pixies. 

Ramones Division:  Nirvana and Radiohead are self-proclaimed Pixies fans.  That's probably putting it lightly - Kurt Cobain once said that he was just trying to rip off the Pixies when he wrote "Smells Like Teen Spirit".  There's probably no Pixies without the Ramones.  I'll work on the org chart.
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Trust is a funny thing.  It has boundaries that are constantly on the move, and it always has a life cycle.  A good first impression can lead to a lifetime of trust.  Something to build on.  On the other hand, trust can only be taken advantage of so many times.  Even empty promises backed by the best intentions eventually become lies.

Appetite for Destruction earned Guns N’ Roses the trust of an entire generation.  For good reason.  Axl’s high-pitched operatic howl and Slash’s ear-splitting shredding make for a pretty fantastic debut album by any standards.  Not to mention the fact that “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is the best song of the 1980’s.  Mark it.  Try to argue with it.  It’s catchy and it kicks ass.  Both Bender and Anthony Michael Hall could rock to this song at the same party.  That’s the brilliance of Appetite.  It’s the hour-long hard rock detention session that brought us together. 

In the end, Chinese Democracy finally broke us down some 20 years later.  Trust dies too, you know - though sometimes it just takes a little more time and a few more lies.

Zeppelin Division:  As we draw towards the end of the decade, Led Zep is making a push to have its presence felt. 

Honorable Mention:  U2 - The Joshua Tree
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Heroes take on different forms.  There are heroes.  Web-slingers and fireballers.  There’s also the colloquial hero – a dad or an uncle who looked after you and made a developmental impact.  There are also heroes who really don’t have many redeeming qualities on a personal level, or at least you wouldn’t know it if they did.  It doesn’t matter in the end.  The only thing that sets them apart, the only thing that matters, is their output.  What they leave behind.  Everything else fades.  This is usually the case with guitar gods.

SRV was a guitar god.  Nothing less.  He was a drunk, and he had drug problems.  He probably treated the people closest to him like absolute shit.  But his Texas rasp and sawdust-beaten Fender Strat reignited the blues in a time when they were being sidelined for, well…something else.  Stevie Ray fought for the blues, and he played like it was a matter of life and death.  It might have been.  Live Alive is a raucous fucking dose of SRV’s war against the tide. 

Allmans Division:  Duane Allman came first, but Vaughan was the next logical step.  Both played the white man’s blues better than anyone else – before or after. 

Honorable Mention:  Beastie Boys - Licensed to Ill
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Everyone smiles.  We smile when we’re nervous.  We bust a grin when life becomes too inexplicable.  It’s really instinct more than anything else – a smile can communicate to others that we’re willing to roll with the punches, that we’re going to work together and that I am receptive to your ideas.  But not everyone who smiles really means it.  It’s just a reaction sometimes.  Sometimes it's meaningless.  Sometimes, we want destruction and chaos.  Everyone has a dark side, some more than others.  Some of us ignore it and repress it, and some of us embrace it and explore it.

Tom Waits doesn’t smile.  He lives in the gutter and he’s blind drunk on bourbon.  He tells black-beautiful tales about those that are knee deep in the shit with him.  Rain Dogs is the soundtrack to that nightmare.  Its scorched earth, three packs a day blues serve up the pollution fumes oozing out of the grates of the life of a bum-beatnik with nothing to lose and time on his hands.  Or maybe it’s just the gateway drug to the music of a guy who leans toward the surreal and plays a good character.  Either way, Tom Waits and Rain Dogs will plunge you into a different reality.  It’s OK to smile at “Gun Street Girl”, though.  If that’s your thing.

Dylan Division:  Bob and Tom both aspire for the literary.  They're both succeeding. 

Honorable Mention:  Chicago Bears - The Super Bowl Shuffle
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Now we’re talking!  1984 is the ideal debaucherous record to ring in the rest of the 80’s.  The last album of Van Halen’s David Lee Roth era, 1984 is VH’s most commercially successful effort for all the best reasons.  Classic metal / hard rock songs like “Hot For Teacher” and mainstream synth-driven numbers like “Jump” were the ultimate result of the conflict between Eddie Van Halen’s and Roth’s different visions for the direction of the band (a framework for any great record, see also The Beatles’ White Album).

Why do I love this album?  I’ll tell you why – because my brother had it on tape and we listened to that shit endlessly.  It started with “Jump” when I was but a yonder tyke, but it’s still going 25 years later with “Top Jimmy”.  Eddie shreds big, crazy, out of control guitar riffs with Jack Daniel’s on his breath and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.  A shrieking Diamond Dave rips off his shirt and howls as if he’s actually having sex (he might have been, I wasn’t there when they laid this album down).

Listening to this record takes me blissfully back to the time when I could build castles in the air about the band’s lifestyle while being completely naive to any of the pitfalls that went along with it.  Van Halen is justfuckingfun to listen to and 1984 is my favorite VH record.  And, above all – it does kick some righteous ass.

1984 sounds like a train running off the tracks.  And it has an album cover that is goddamn iconic.  Rock and roll excess never tasted so good. 

Zeppelin Division:  How else could you classify this album?  Zeppelin laid the blueprint.  Van Halen carried it into the metal killing fields of the mid-80's.
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I’ve come to realize that the 80’s, up to this point at least, are less eighties than I thought.  Synchronicity was the last record for the Police before they broke up, and it stands up easily today.  Let’s be honest, the Police are pretty effing irresistible.  Synchronicity’s pop brilliance has hits like “Every Breath You Take” nestled right next to punk-reggae tornadoes like “Miss Gradenko”.  They were one of those bands who could toe the line between hit ballads and creative rock surges, and every song on this one is catchier than the next.

Come to think of it, Synchronicity is kind of like Sting himself.  Or at least how I picture him from back then, anyway.  What’s that?  You don’t think the Police can top the Adult Contemporary charts?  Here’s a little “Wrapped Around Your Finger” for you.  Please relax whilst my silky croon sinks deeply into the hearts and minds of your girlfriends and wives.  That’ll show you.  Oh? You think the Police can’t rock?  Hang on for a quick minute so I can spike my hair a little more and cut the sleeves off my t-shirt.  Yeah, that’s right, we just went “Synchronicity II” on your asses. 

Great album.  Great band. 

Ramones Division:  Really the connection here is how melodic both the Police and the Ramones were.  Both had a great sense for how to communicate a tune - but where the Ramones turned it up, the Police turned to reggae.
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Overall, this isn’t a very good album.  But there are about 3 pretty good fucking songs on it.  Not great in the way that they push any boundaries or make you think, but in the way that when you hear them, you probably tap your foot and crack a smile.  Let’s appreciate that for what it is.  I’ve noticed lately that there is a general disdain for Johnny Cougar.  Mellencamp is, possibly at this exact moment, cutting a bluesish album with T. Bone Burnett at Sun Records in Memphis.  He’s fresh off of a tour with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson.  The moral of the story: when you make records like American Fool when you’re young, if you’re smart you can do whatever the hell you want later in life.  So let’s all agree that the Cougar is OK.  There are a lot more reasons to let Mellencamp slide than to hate him.  American Fool has a few of them.

Dylan Division:  It’s tough to imagine Mellencamp without Bobby D. blazing the trail.

Honorable Mention: Michael Jackson – Thriller
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I always thought of this album as the completion of Jaco’s trip back to the middle.  Outside of a few quick moments of blinding anti-harmonic snarl, Word of Mouth has an overall subdued sound that's a lifetime removed from the brilliance of Jaco's incredible self-titled record (although only 5 years apart).  I guess that’s part of the reason why I’ve always loved this one, though.  The sometimes colorful swing that’s built into this record sounds like a man who’s clinging to his balance.  Jaco Pastorius was a tragic character.  And if you listen closely – Word of Mouth can be a pretty sad, wilting record.

Miles Division:  Jaco = Jazz = Miles.

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