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

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is really astute when he talks about "the musical effect of words as sounds, but where the meaning is not totally withdrawn."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.

Paid in Full was one of the ones I had to cut from my list in the end, mainly because I know and love the big hitters but not the entirety of the album. From memory, I think I ended up with only 3/30 hip-hop albums, which probably reflects my listening ratio, but is a bit lame. Thinking about it in light of the discussions on the other threads is making me feel like a tokenistic NME-style wank. Which it shouldn't do, so thanks you guys. Bah.

Great to see Arthur Russell on the list, was low down on my ballot as it isn't as yet that fixed into my personal canon, but it is an awesome record.

the version of "Eric B. Is President" on Paid in Full is so much better than the original 12" single version.

"Chinese Arithmetic" still sucks, though.

sorry emil.y for making you feel like an nme reader

Yeah, I see your point, and I can appreciate it. On one level PiF is the perfect rap album, it's almost impossible to find a flaw in it. It's just that there are certain things I most like in rap that I can't get out of it, which is why I rate some other rap albums higher, even if they are less perfect that PiF. It's kinda like I feel about certain intricate pieces of abstract art: I can totally appreciate what they're trying to do, and admire the craft that's put into them, but they don't touch me in ways some other art pieces do.

(x-post to A Hoy Hoy)

sorry emil.y for making you feel like an nme reader

― liverpolol da don (a hoy hoy)

I don't know why this is making me lol so hard, but it is. I feel better now, thank you.

i guess so. its like punk albums that don't give a toss about any of the related politics or whatever or pop albums just about dancing. if they are done perfectly, i don't give a toss that there is no expansive themes. it still has a message i guess: "i am so fucking good at this that i am going to make an album about it". if rakim and marley didn't the ability it would be ridiculous but i dunno, it just works sooooooooooo well.

59. Mekons - Fear and Whiskey [1985] (111 points, 8 votes, 2 first place votes)

http://nobrasil.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/0553.jpg

Fear and Whiskey was the first one I ever heard (back in '86), so that's the one for me.

― JN$OT, 4. toukokuuta 2007 13:19

give mekons another chance, man, they rule - start with Honky Tonkin', Retreat from Memphis, I love Mekons, Fear and Whiskey, Curse of the Mekons...fuck it, most of them are great. Oh, and definitely see them live - that's half of it right there

― roger adultery (roger adultery), 12. maaliskuuta 2003 23:10

This isn't even hard - the Gang of Four released two fantastic albums and numerous single sides before sliding irreparably to "Karate Kid 2" - for nearly a quarter of century, they managed only "Hard," an inconsequential live album, two hideous "comeback albums" and a meager amount of solo work. Their more recent comeback album is actually excellent, but features only 25+ year old tunes.

The Mekons have had their ups and downs, and it's probably fair to say that - despite early classics such as Never Been In A Riot," "Where Were You?", "Teeth," "Rosanne," "Guardian," "Snow," "Karen" and a few others - the Gang of Four were more consistent early on. But for both bands, I've only compared two albums and related singles -since then the Mekons have been generally great - sometimes incredible (I'd cite "Fun 90," "Rock And Roll," "Fear & Whiskey" and "So Good It Hurts" as some of the best releases in the past 20 years) and always at least worth a spin. More than I can say for "Mall" or "Shrinkrapped" or "Dispossession" or introducing the world to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And that's not even including the many odd perfect moments that the Mekons still manage - their weird but perfect remake of "Sporting Life" last year, for one.

Plus they have a sense of humor!

Mekons by a mile.

― dee xtro (dee xtro), 19. helmikuuta 2006 5:18

xxxxxp a hoy hoy:

Polls are never about objective truth or universal consensus, but about demographics. This poll is telling us something not about music but about who we are.

I started lurking here years ago in part because of past polls, which (seemed to) place a hazy focus on strands of music emerging out of the common hinterlands of (mostly european) pop and experiment in the 80s, but welcomed genius arriving from other corners. Thats more or less my trajectory, too. Those who see the best of modern music as a continual divergence of musics of the African diaspora, and there's a lot of merit to the idea, generally found other forums.

shame that my #1 has been pretty much the only album w/ a shitty cover so far tho. the artwork of the 80s was terrific according to this thread of records i've never heard.

Derelict- I know. But hiphop does have a pretty big ilx following and its not like there werent great hiphop albums made in the eighties, so i feel it should at least have someone bang on about it. now there isn't just 1 token rap record on this list though it doesn't seem as bad. And I did also vote and nominate a bunch of lol indie.

There's rap on Fear and Whiskey.

there's a new Mekons version of "Sporting Life"?!?!

XP

That's an old quote, probably referring to Punk Rock album

cool, thanks! I never gave that the chance I should have.