Now this is how it started: THE ILX 1980s ALBUM POLL RESULTS!!

Wow, I can't imagine what World of Echo sounds like. Slowdive?

ok just listened to a track off the Arthur Russell (which i dont know at all) and it is really incredible

a lot of the '98 'Force Of Nature' ended up on 'Hurricane' i think (which is why a lot of does sound a bit like it was produced ten years prior ha)

my prediction for ilx's top ten: (not in particular order) -
talk talk - spirit+laughing
the fall - hex+ grace
jesus and mary chain - psychocandy
sonic youth - daydream nation+evol
replacements - let it be
pixies - surfer rosa
talking heads - remain in light

70 - 61 is a pretty awesome list of records

I assume "Sex Drive", the single she relesed in 1993, would've been on the 1994 album. It's pretty good, not earth-shattering or anything, but it's fun to hear on a straight house track.

(xx-post)

way xpost

it... doesn't really sound like anything? I think everybody reacts to that album in a very different, very personal way. It's so intimate but also so wide open. There's nothing like it.

hell ya this list keeps getting better. i love every single album posted today, prefab sprout wooo!

i like this list so far. there are at least 5 albums i need to find now.

World of Echo sounds closer to the ambient cello + singing bits off AR Kane's 69 than it does to Slowdive.

Four from my ballot have turned up so far but nearly all of these albums are ones where I think, "Yeah, that deserves to be in here". Plus I really want to hear The Chills now! Also thosee Violent Femmes and X albums, which I've never bought for some reason.

bringin things up 2 speed...

100. Robyn Hitchcock: I Often Dream of Trains [1984] (75 points, 5 votes)
98. (tie) Scraping Foetus off the Wheel - Hole [1984] (76 points, 5 votes)
98. (tie) Spacemen 3 - The Perfect Prescription [1987] (76 points, 5 votes
97. Big Black - Atomizer [1986] (77 points, 8 votes)
96. Associates - Sulk [1982] (79 points, 6 votes)
95. Jane's Addiction - Nothing's Shocking [1988] (79 points, 7 votes)
94. Def Leppard - Pyromania [1983] (80 points, 6 votes, 1 first place vote)
93. Thomas Dolby - The Golden Age of Wireless [1982] (80 points, 7 votes, 1 first place vote)
92. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Dazzle Ships [1983] (80 points, 9 votes)
91. Run-D.M.C. - Raising Hell [1986] (80 points, 10 votes)
90. Meat Puppets - Meat Puppets II [1984] (81 points, 9 votes)
89. Prince and the Revolution - Parade [1986] (83 points, 10 votes)
88. Bruce Springsteen - Tunnel of Love [1987] (86 points, 7 votes)
87. Pet Shop Boys - Actually [1987] (86 points, 8 votes)
86. Pet Shop Boys - Please [1986] (87 points, 8 votes)
84. (tie) Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine [1989] (87 points, 8 votes, 1 first place vote)
84. (tie) Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues [1983] (87 points, 8 votes, 1 first place vote)
83. David Bowie - Scary Monsters [1980] (89 points, 6 votes, 1 first place vote)
82. Scraping Foetus off the Wheel - Nail [1985] (91 points, 5 votes, 1 first place vote)
81. The Beat (aka The English Beat) - I Just Can't Stop It [1980] (91 points, 13 votes)
80. Various - The Indestructible Beat of Soweto [1985] (93 points, 6 votes, 1 first place vote)
79. The The - Soul Mining [1983] (93 points, 7 votes, 1 first place vote)
78. The Pogues - Rum, Sodomy & the Lash [1985] (93 points, 16 votes)
77. Meat Puppets - Up on the Sun [1985] (94 points, 8 votes)
76. U2 - The Joshua Tree [1987] (95 points, 7 votes, 1 first place vote)
75. Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual [1983] (95 points, 9 votes)
74. Galaxie 500 - On Fire [1989] (96 points, 10 votes)
73. X - Wild Gift [1981] (97 points, 9 votes)
72. The Chills - Kaleidoscope World [1986] (98 points, 7 votes, 1 first place vote)
71. Roxy Music - Avalon [1982] (99 points, 10 votes)
70. Laurie Anderson - Big Science [1982] (99 points, 11 votes)
69. Scritti Politti - Cupid & Psyche 85 [1985] (100 points, 7 votes)
68. New Order - Power, Corruption & Lies [1983] (100 points, 16 votes)
67. Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes [1983] (101 points, 12 votes)
66. Prefab Sprout - Steve McQueen [1985] (104 points, 10 votes, 1 first place vote)
65. Donald Fagen - The Nightfly [1982] (105 points, 8 votes, 1 first place vote)
63. (tie) Tom Waits - Rain Dogs [1985] (106 points, 12 votes)
63. (tie) Cocteau Twins - Treasure [1984] (106 points, 12 votes)
62. Grace Jones - Nightclubbing [1981] (106 points, 12 votes, 1 first place vote)
61. Arthur Russell - World of Echo [1986] (108 points, 11 votes, 1 first place vote)

just watched that Associates viddy and i barely restrained myself from ripping my ears off...

(2xp) Yeah, with so many entries I keep thinking "how could I not have voted for that?" - was really hard getting it down to 30 and so much stuff had to be ditched is how; bunch of stuff I like but I'm not as familiar with as I felt I should be to vote for it, some stuff I thought would do well enough without me, plus a couple of albums where I love the bands but had to admit that the one album nominated for each did nothing for me, etc

World of Echo is also probably one of the last ones where a single number one vote means the difference between making the list and not making it. I think that's what's interesting about this last stretch of albums--even though it's a consensus vote, they still feel very personal.

"It's so intimate but also so wide open" is exactly right about World Of Echo. Such a cohesive and singular record. Russell's own comparison with foreign language singing is really astute when he talks about "the musical effect of words as sounds, but where the meaning is not totally withdrawn." If I'd voted this would have been number one, with Double Nickels the only serious contender, 80s all about original use of vocals w/me, apparently.

I just don't get "World of Echo", although I do understand what other people see in it. You'd think that AR Kane gone ambient AND funky would be right up my alley, but this music does nothing for me, and I've accepted that.

World Of Echo is the first album I've not heard that I really want to get after reading the descriptions.

Zeno laughing stock was 90s

unless you meant colour of spring which will probably show up too

folks there is an elephant in the room, it has 8 tracks, and one of them is called 'hold back the rain'

just sayin'

xpostin bout WoE
It's too odd to easily recommend; it sounds kind of like plainsong, fuzzed out, dubby, lonely, plainsong. It's very emotional, but it's balanced by that meditative quality - I bet it was good for him to make. It's pretty interesting that Panda Bear got kind of close to that sound without hearing it, mining similar turf.

Maybe there should be a separate predictions thread, but I can only see 4 or 5 of Zeno's list being top ten.

the ilx xtc contingent could land an album in the top 10 if everyone voted for the same one

(the right one being english settlement of course!)

am gonna stick my neck out and predict a surprisingly low turnout for psychocandy

ooh i think i put ES about 6th or 7th

xp that'll be in for sure and prob skylarking too and maybe even black sea? but not in the top 10.

i'm really enjoying how much of this list i don't have though. plenty of stuff to belatedly check out

i had black sea 6th, ES 8th and skylarking 19th (out of 20 voted for)

yeah there's LOADS to check out! totally gonna investigate this arthur russell stuff.

most of my choices are yet to come. stoked.

yeah i just listened to a song from the arthur russell album on youtube and I AM INTRIGUED

ain't web 2.0 neat

dude this album is on spotify that is like web 2.3 at least

world of echo is so thick and troubling but soothing, takes me to another place when i put it on *is set adrift on memory bliss*

yay for grace jones! arthur russel's cool and all, but nightclubbing is an all time classic. "i've done it again" gives me chills every time even after all these years. three scoops of <333

agree that this is one of the most satisfying "best of the 80s" type deals i've ever seen - so far. yay for ilm!

i'm really enjoying how much of this list i don't have though. plenty of stuff to belatedly check out

For real – it'll make for a fun next couple of months trying to hear all these.

SO far have introduced myself to the new-to-me Associates...that version of Gloomy Sunday is INSANE>

I'm thinking that in a perfect universe someone posts a big zipfile of all the albums on this list on their blog and I get to listen to all of them in order over the Xms holidays.

do kids like this feel this way? will some 15-year old buy M.I.A.'s next album, and then go back and, discovering "arular," consider it some kind of benjaminian angel of history?
Your prev. paragraph pretty much describes how I discovered punk and post-punk circa 1988. Even the Smiths (who had only broken up, like, a year earlier) seemed old and distant, and I felt inauthentic for digging them up, along with all the rest. The stuff from the early 80s was, like, antediluvian.

I expect all 15-year-olds feel that way. This year's crop are going, "2006 was so long ago, when old people roamed the earth!"

I can't believe how long ago the 80s actually were. The 18-23 year olds I work with view me with the same tender pity and slight awe at age & experience that I viewed the Original Hippies with once upon a time.

This latest batch is the first to have a few albums I might want to check out: Donald Fagan especially (I've heard some of these songs, but would have just assumed they were Steely Dan songs), and maybe Grace Jones and Arthur Russell (the latter of whom I somehow know nothing about). (It's not as though I've heard everything else on the list so far, but I've heard enough Foetus and Meat Puppets, for instance, to know I'm not really interested.)

I voted for 7 of the 40. happily canonical over here.

same here - 7 for 40 so far

do kids like this feel this way? will some 15-year old buy M.I.A.'s next album, and then go back and, discovering "arular," consider it some kind of benjaminian angel of history?
Your prev. paragraph pretty much describes how I discovered punk and post-punk circa 1988. Even the Smiths (who had only broken up, like, a year earlier) seemed old and distant, and I felt inauthentic for digging them up, along with all the rest. The stuff from the early 80s was, like, antediluvian.

― I've got some funny ideas about what sounds good (staggerlee), Wednesday, November 25, 2009 6:00 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

yup, i had the same thing going in 84 or so. was all jazzed about of-the-moment music like the violent femmes, husker du's zen arcade, sonic youth, etc. but stuff that had come out only a few years before, like early black flag and dead kennedys records, seemed to belong to someone else in another place & time. they weren't of MY moment.

on the other hand, it was easy to relate to much older stuff like the stooges, sonics, vu, etc. it's a weird dynamic

Kind of opposite for me. When I started getting heavy into music around 86, I was kicking myself for not having done so sooner and thus missing out on Minutemen and Burma as going concerns. (On Horrible Truth, they even had a song played at Tuts! I coulda been there!) Those self-kicks as much as anything propelled me into about a decade of extreme music consumption & helped foster the checklisty aspects of same. And look at me now, nominating Double Nickels and the Burma comp, how little I've changed ...

When I was 15, I was convinced all the good music had been made 10 years earlier.

31 of these albums now on the spotify list: http://open.spotify.com/user/thomp1985/playlist/7vewFkAlw3bKDbMNziktOF

much thanks to whoever put yesterday's on when i couldn't get to a computer btw ~

also also did the second violent femmes album get nominated? that one actually rings a lot truer to my experience of teenagerdom (well, except 'black girls') than the first one, though the first one is often awesome.

Your pa molested you, threw you in a well and committed suicide too?

i dont usually like to talk about it :(

60. Eric B. & Rakim - Paid In Full [1987] (111 points, 8 votes, 1 first place vote)

http://a4.vox.com/6a00cd96fde2fe4cd500d4143e6c9c685e-500pi

Bona fide classic. Rakim speaks the Truth knowwhatamsayinnn? Probably to good and heavy for recent hip hop fans, you know what with the real scratching and rhymes that make sense ;)

― Omar, 16. toukokuuta 2001 3:00

Almost every song on there is a bona fide classic, but I've never even particularly thought about it as a whole. Possibly due to the endless re-issues of the 12s, er, and the fact that I've bought them. 'Eric B Is President' is one of the ten greatest songs ever made.

I don't know that hiphop purists hated the Coldcut mix of 'Paid In Full' at the time, at least in Britain, as I remember first hearing it on a comp called Machine Gun Poetry, which was mostly underground Brit stuff like Overlord X and London Posse. Still think it's a great song too.

― joel, 16. toukokuuta 2001 3:00

Classic. Before Rakim, if you tried to bust your amateur rhyme and you were, uh, white like me, you always ended up with that really corny heavy handed meter, like maybe somebody reading a limerick or something, but if you got some Rakim in your head, you could sound GOOD.

I remember hearing people saying "You thought I was a donut/You tried to glaze me" before I ever heard anything off that first record (I can't even remember which cut it's from though). I also remember when the next album came out, convincing all my housemates and several friends that instead of "Rakim I say, follow the leader, Rakim I say" he was saying "Rakimitate, follow the leader Rakimitate". I'm still not sure which one it is.

― Ken L (Ken L), 13. marraskuuta 2004 5:17

my #1 :D

only 2 hiphop albums in the first 40 = mental tho. and only think 3 or 4 more left to come that will do better than paid in full.

I remember when I first heard Paid in Full years ago, it totally blew my mind... It felt unbelievable someone was doing shit like this back in 1987! But these days my feelings towards Paid in Full have cooled down a little bit; even though I still admire the sheer technical brilliance and innovativeness of it, it feels kinda too insular and airtight. It's a rap album that's about nothing else than rap, Rakim's rhymes only relate to other rhymes, and I like my rap music a bit more expansive than that. When we're talking about taking-it-to-the-next-level rap albums of that era, I rate Crititical Beatdown over Paid in Full, even if Rakim has more skills than Kool Keith or Ced Gee. Still, it is an awesome-sounding, classic album, and I did vote for it, so it deserves to be on the list.

It's my second favourite album of the decade. I thought the first Run DMC album was a lock to be nominated so I used mine on other things but I rate it #1. Paid In Full is perfect. I don't care if it is insular, half the best records from the time were (Radio wasn't nominated either!) Rakim out-raps everyone else and Marley's beats are the better than any others. Critical Beatdown and Nations of Millions may be more expansive, Pauls Boutique and 3 Ft High & Rising may be more fun- but Paid In Full is the only one of the lot which is 100% perfect. In fact I think the strict subject matter and sound might be the reason for it, they made 1 perfect album about rapping and dj-ing and then didn't really know what to do after. They still made good records (and Microphone Fiend!) but never really came close since. The new Rakim is just embarrasing.