It’s My Birthday!
Today is my birthday! Since I was born in 1988, I am creating a list of some of my favorite albums that were released the year I was born. These are presented in no particular order.
Surfer Rosa - Pixies
Surfer Rosa is one of my all-time favorite albums. It is near-flawless. The A-side makes you think that it might kind of be a regular-ish rock album. The lyrics are so bizarre and mundane, but in finding the middle, Pixies created something truly original. It was, in my opinion, the jumping-off point for the entire grunge movement, along with Nothing’s Shocking, also on this list.
My friend Thea turned on “Broken Face” at a party one time and everyone in the room lost it. We danced our asses off for all 1 minute, 31 seconds. “Gigantic” serves as the closest thing Pixies had to a single off their debut album. Kim Deal’s bass and voice is transformative. Like most Millennials, I was introduced to “Where Is My Mind?” from the movie Fight Club, where it plays prominently in the last scene. It is a brilliant song, and the only song that could have ended the movie that cemented David Fincher’s career, but only the first song on the B-side. The album just goes deeper and deeper into surf rock and garage rock and it just gets better. “Vamos (Surfer Rosa)” is an absolutely wild song that seems out of place everywhere, but by the time you get to the 11th of 13 tracks, it feels totally normal, as your skin melts off your face.
Tracy Chapman - Tracy Chapman
Coming out only 2 days before my birthday, an album that starts off with “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” was destined to be an all-time great. Her voice is simply magnificent. I would recognize it from 100 feet above me. Tracy Chapman embodies the American struggle, but especially the Black American struggle. I’ll be the first to admit that not every track on the album is as strong as all the others, but the good ones here are some of the strongest singer-songwriter songs ever.
“Fast Car” remains Tracy Chapman’s best-known song. But for such a good reason. The lyrics, equal parts delicate and brutal, drill themselves into your brain. It’s a song I turn on when I need a good cry. It’s so relatable, and yet her voice is so special and so different, that it feels like a movement from struggle into nirvana. “You got a fast car, is it fast enough so we can fly away?”
Life’s Too Good - The Sugarcubes
You’ll learn as this blog progresses just how much I love Björk. I love her. A lot of people think of Björk and her music as “weird.” I mean, I see it. But there is nothing weirder than Björk singing in a “rock band” and recording a “mainstream album.” This is that album.
When you listen to it, it’s easy to understand that this was just not a mainstream singer. She had her signature high notes, vocal screeches, and growls. I don’t particularly care for the voice of the male singer in the band. Most of the album is kind of a light surf rock. Life’s Too Good honestly isn’t even one of my favorite albums, but it earns a place on the best albums of 1988 solely for the reason that it introduced the world to one of its greatest performers.
“Motorcrash,” “Birthday,” “Delicious Demon,” “Blue Eyed Pop,” and “Fucking In Rhythm and Sorrow” are my favorite tracks on this album, if you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing.
Forever Your Girl - Paula Abdul
What can I even say here? For those of us who are fans of the genre, Forever Your Girl is one of the most consequential albums in the dance-pop arena. You could play any song on this album (except the slow “Next to You”) in a club and get people to dance. The artificialness of the instrumentation could be considered a negative, perhaps, but I think it’s part of what makes it special. And knowing what we know now, that Paula Abdul is one of the greatest dancers and choreographers of modern times, this album resulted in a legendary series of music videos.
She built off the success of Janet Jackson with Control and Rhythm Nation 1814, but notably stripped away all of the seriousness, the depth of the lyrics, and the complexity of the production, and simply made a legendary, pure dance-pop album.
Nothing’s Shocking - Jane’s Addiction
I hadn’t listened to this album for quite some time until today. It’s a weird one. It incorporates a lot more surf rock than I remember (apparently, this was very popular in the late 80s) and parts of it sound like an unsanctioned sequel to Appetite for Destruction, just sung by Perry Farrell. A lot of the songs sound pretty similar to one another, with “Mountain Song” as the archetype.
Where Nothing’s Shocking shines the most is when the band slows down, focusing on their lyrics, the soundscape they are creating, and the details. While it remains their most well-known song, “Jane Says” is heartbreaking, gorgeous, and extremely intimate. Jane’s Addiction pioneered the concept of one slower song being the focal point of an album, used a few years later to great effect by Smashing Pumpkins on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. My other favorite songs on the album include the similarly slow “Ted, Just Admit It…” and “Ocean Size.” “Pig’s in Zen” acts as a transition to Nine Inch Nails’s The Downward Spiral, while “Idiots Rule” inspired later bands like No Doubt on The Beacon Street Collection.
…And Justice for All - Metallica
I will always maintain that Master of Puppets is Metallica’s best album, but …And Justice for All is in second place. It’s an interesting transition between the masterpiece Master of Puppets (1986) and their crossover hit The Black Album (1991).
It’s hard to compare metal albums to any other genre of music, including other rock subgenres. For starters, people either love it or hate it. Second, at least in the 80s, there was essentially zero intersectionality between metal and other genres. Third, the albums act as a single unit rather than a collection of songs. Despite that, Metallica always had an ear for big sound, big songs, and catchiness with their hooks.
The guitar work on “One” and “Dyers Eve,” particularly, rest among some of the most impressive and technically challenging parts in all of music history.
Generally speaking, I tend to enjoy metal more when played live than on recorded albums. I got to see Metallica last summer, finally, but because it was in a huge stadium and I couldn’t afford field-level seats, the sound got super warped on the way up to the stratosphere, where I was sitting. But the recordings on this album are exquisite. It shows why Metallica has had much more staying power and extended success when compared to most 80s rock bands.
Watermark - Enya
Is this my actual favorite album from the year I was born? Probably.
What I love about Enya, and especially this album, is her unrelenting authenticity. Do I think Celtic-themed, ethereal music is the best kind of music? Not really. But Enya is 100% herself at all times on this album, and that makes it special.
Who else could release a best-selling album using only several layers of her own voice, and the 15 least-popular synth presets on a mid-range keyboard? Some of the songs are so slow they border on dirges, but it doesn’t matter. It is a thoroughly enjoyable album from start to finish.
I can’t write this without gushing a little about “Orinoco Flow.” What a fantastic song! Endlessly memorable, with excellent replay value. The lyrics are a little bit gobbledygook-like, but who cares? Enya making a radio-friendly song is cause for celebration all on its own. And yes, we all remember it from the advertisement for Pure Moods, alongside Enigma, but is this album actually new-age at all? I would argue not. Celtic music shares some features with new-age, but this album is in no way preachy or condescending.
Look Sharp! - Roxette
This is another fantastic album. Roxette marks the midway point between Huey Lewis and the News and Ace of Base. Swedish pop’s viability had already been proven in the 1970s by ABBA, but Roxette proved that Swedish rock was also viable. Although, the album is probably more of a pop album than a rock album. This album likely led to the 30+ year reign of Max Martin more than any other album.
Marie Fredriksson was one of my favorite pop-rock frontwomen. Her voice is so powerful. But even opening track “The Look,” which doesn’t feature Fredriksson’s voice except in the background, is a stellar song, because guitarist Per Gessle’s voice is great too.
The album is just full of late-80s charm. “Dangerous” sounds like a riff off the Pointer Sisters, “Dance Away” could be an Erasure B-side, “Sleeping Single” is just at home with Paula Abdul as it is here, “Paint” sounds like it was co-written by Cyndi Lauper, “Dressed for Success” has a Bangles influence, and “Listen To Your Heart” is one of the greatest ballads of the 1980s. It’s still a super fun listen.
Tougher Than Leather - Run-D.M.C.
This isn’t one of Run-D.M.C.’s more popular or well-known albums, but it is such a good listen. It’s their fourth studio album, so they were already very well established and beloved when this came out.
If you don’t listen to the lyrics, it’s easy to mistake Tougher Than Leather as a feel-good party album. To be clear, you could play most any song on this album at a party and people would dance to it. But when you do listen to the lyrics, the depth and complexity of Run-D.M.C.’s music comes through clearly. This was still at a time when rap was focused on cleverness of rhymes and structure, creative use of samples, ease of listening, light boasting, and hyping each other and your audience up.
It’s where Run-D.M.C. is willing to experiment that they are the most interesting. The title track, “Tougher Than Leather,” features a hard rock instrumentation that still outshines later rock-rap, both musically and lyrically. “Mary Mary” has a borderline-hilarious sample of The Monkees. Other songs sample The Temptations, James Brown, Kurtis Blow, and Public Enemy. Plus the expanded version of the album has the classic song “Christmas in Hollis” on it!
But then you have songs like “Papa Crazy” and “Crack” (only on the expanded rerelease) where the power of the group’s music comes through the most. The lyrics are nothing short of devastating.
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