pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

or country...

no Yoakam or Cash fer instance.

yeah total lack of country and anything made in Latin America (iirc) were the glaring omissions to me.

king's record shop robbed again

I feel like the 60s and 70s hipster canons are way more wide open for country and latin american music

My feeling skimming was that while critical culture broadly had recognized the significance of 80s r&b on a much bigger scale than was true previously it seems to have only manifested on this list in certain Sade-Esque tokens

No “Diana” is insane

Hip hop wise I think it *has* kind of been reduced to the bare bones minimum, canonically ... Eazy e’s first solo should have made it

To my mind, anyone listing Technique and Music For The Masses but not Introspective should be called to account before a jury of some kind.

yeah total lack of country and anything made in Latin America (iirc) were the glaring omissions to me.

Was there anything on the list not sung in English?

also lol at my no. 1 appearing absolutely nowhere on this list, it is not yet rickie lee jones' time i guess

I feel like the 60s and 70s hipster canons are way more wide open for country and latin american music

― President Keyes, Monday, September 10, 2018 11:37 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah part of why I noticed is I don't know much about these albums and could use pointers

and tbf I did enjoy the hipster-canon-subverting fact that there are half a dozen Jamaican albums on this list while there is only one on the old 70s list (though smh at still managing to rank the Marley album highest)

Was there anything on the list not sung in English?

― grawlix (unperson), 10. september 2018 17:46 (forty-five seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, the Indestructable Beat of Soweto, for one.

I always feel very guilty about voting in these lists because I don't feel like I am a useful counterbalance in any direction and particularly not in any direction lists get criticized for

(except gender parity, I guess)

w/r/t Tom Waits, it's a little weird considering how those '80s albums are right up Pitchfork's alley, but i guess the old hat men aren't as likely to hang w/the canon as much.

any list is going to have a lot of obvious picks up high. Purple Rain is predictable but also as good a #1 as one could hope for. Thriller is a good #2. The album is ridiculously fantastic, just listened to it again recently after unearthing my vinyl copy from my folks' house and playing it for my kid. "Wanna Be Startin Something" still makes 7 year olds bounce around.

Digging this Virginia Astley album. I'd never heard of her.

As soon as Rio turned up at #172 I knew this list wouldn't be made with my ears even remotely in mind but although I'm not solipsistic enough to expect Cardiacs, Rudimentary Peni, Julian Cope, Foetus, The The, The Astronauts, The Chameleons or any XTC album not made by Todd Rundgren to all appear, one of them might have been nice. I mean, this list was made by the sorts of people who (in the main) prefer The Head On The Door to Pornography, so there was never any chance, was there? At least Big Science is high - although it should be in the top three

The metal choices are all great. I wish there were more.

i forgot i voted for another metal album that didn't make it, coroner's no more color

which fine, more coroner for me

Quick, dirty, imperfect, subject to change:

Top 40 Eighties Rap Records Missed by the Pitchfork List pic.twitter.com/7OpjqlGiiW

— Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) September 10, 2018

I did a thing on my radio show like 10 years ago where I played a 2-3 song block from every album on the original '80s list. So that's when I figured out that I liked Swordfishtrombones a lot better than Rain Dogs, or that I even appreciated Tom Waits at all.

Re: country, Randy Travis "Storms Of Life" would have been a good choice, although knowing 2018-era Pitchfork I'm sure Dolly Parton probably came closest.

tbh I'm surprised that Stevie Nicks is absent.

I always thought This Heat was a strange choice for the original top 20. It's a great album, but it seems more accurately placed here.

seriously though, where the eff is mary margaret o'hara?

Aah bummer - they yanked both Ghost In The Machine and Synchronicity. :(

Was there no Police at all? I guess Sting’s solo career is a lot to overcome.

They're both on the original list.

i love the police but every single one of their albums is flawed in one way or another

Robert Cray Strong Persuader not being anywhere on the list is a complete joke.

Other "how the hell is this not on there" records include
Psychedelic Furs Talk Talk Talk
Lou Reed The Blue Mask
Elvis Costello Trust
X Wild Gift (way better than Los Angeles)
Mekons Rock n Roll or Fear and Whiskey
Vulgar Boatmen You and Your Sister

Talk Talk Talk I would've big upped too

If Cecil Taylor's gonna be one of your two token jazz titles, how do you opt for For Olim instead of nodding to the In Berlin '88 box set, a landmark in jazz history, period?

Would also have liked to see Miles Davis (You're Under Arrest or Tutu) and Wynton Marsalis (Black Codes From the Underground) make the list, not to mention David Murray, Anthony Braxton, Carla Bley, Arthur Blythe...

David Sylvian is needed on some list at some point.

Wonderful x 1000000 to see Virginia Astley pop up. Heckuva record.

not sure tutu will ever get the reevaluation it deserves

xp Yeah, this is a gorgeous record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpzzJ9Y8F3I

No major complaints with this list. I flagged about a dozen albums from the upper reaches that I hadn’t heard before, so looking forward to digging into those.

I appreciated all the dub and dancehall - been getting into that a lot lately and glad to have a few more to check out, like Tenor Saw and Horace Andy.

I guess you gotta make room for a lot of genres etc but I was surprised none of OMD’s albums made it in. There is some treasure in that discography.

Also can we note REM’s falling stock? I think I saw only two of their albums? And this is the era I thought everyone agreed was their most classic.

Re lack of country - there was a Lucinda Williams album in there. I just went back to my own folders of 80s countrybto seenwhat was missing and to be honest it was kind of a crap decade for the genre.

great list, 80s best decade

If Cecil Taylor's gonna be one of your two token jazz titles, how do you opt for /For Olim/ instead of nodding to the /In Berlin '88/ box set, a landmark in jazz history, period?

Would also have liked to see Miles Davis (/You're Under Arrest/ or /Tutu/) and Wynton Marsalis (/Black Codes From the Underground/) make the list, not to mention David Murray, Anthony Braxton, Carla Bley, Arthur Blythe...

special ed youngest in charge is great

glad DOC made it

Spy Vs Spy!

Speaking of dudes whose stock has plummeted in recent years...does anyone outside the cult pay attention to Zorn anymore?

guys 200 for a decade is not a lot of records, omissions will occur, maybe don't be so shocked?

/Spy Vs Spy!/

Speaking of dudes whose stock has plummeted in recent years...does anyone outside the cult pay attention to Zorn anymore?

I assume. Or just growing up on Reddit

there are quite a few artists with multiple entries in the list that seem unnecessary. would have liked to have seen them shed a bunch of these and have a greater range of artists represented.

playlist is complete:

https://open.spotify.com/user/olken2000/playlist/3FT4IqZf9kXh7APS5rCIZr?si=RzD4HMnmRoGh4mMjmiEqZA

there's some good 80s country:
Diamonds and Dirt
Guitars, Cadillacs, etc.
Guitar Town
King's Record Shop
I Wonder Do You Ever Think Of Me
I Am What I Am
Storms of Life
Killing Time
Shadowland
+ stuff by Kathy Mattea, Emmylou Harris, Nanci Griffith, Carlene Carter, Suzy Boggus, Patty Loveless, etc.

Also can we note REM’s falling stock? I think I saw only two of their albums? And this is the era I thought everyone agreed was their most classic.

Looks like the 2002 list included "Murmur," "Reckoning," and "Document"; while the new list finds room for only "Reckoning" and "Murmur."

I would say that R.E.M. is no more or less cool now than they were in 2002 (i.e., they've been uncool since the late '90s), but their stock is due to rise with Gen-Z listeners (as has been discussed here recently)

there are quite a few artists with multiple entries in the list that seem unnecessary. would have liked to have seen them shed a bunch of these and have a greater range of artists represented.

I mean I think multiple entries per artist is dumb on any year/decade list including the ones we do every year but it seems to be a permanent fixture

I'm scanning the Top 10 of both lists to try to discern some "trend" in how consensus taste has changed in past 16 years, but I'm tired and not really coming up w/anything meaningful

it's unfortunate that these lists seem to stimulate more discussion among music lovers than anything else

would you prefer the music haters weighed in