1989
The most difficult music I ever heard was played in department stores and optometrists' offices. It was different than the oldies radio my parents played on long trips: thematically, those songs were almost indecipherable to a silly little kid, but they had a shape; they had heft. What I heard on errands and appointments was different: it was a geometric jumble of hard angles, dotted drums, and synths that receded to the horizon. It was soft rock and power ballads, made for the adults all around me, made to give expression to their yearning and their joys, made to guide them through and out the store in as good a state as possible.
For all the musical crash courses I undertook - and I know I'm not alone in this - late-century pop-rock and R&B stayed way out of my comprehension. Some of that was due to a lack of guidance: there aren't a lot of primers for eager students of Richard Marx and Taylor Dayne. Some of that is due to the music itself, and when I heard it: to parse a Starship song felt like examining the air. It happened, eventually. Listen to an artist's imperial period enough, and you can hear how they assert themselves in later climates. Or find a mix like Sky Girl or The Trip, where what might've sounded like banalities gain power in good company. Or just do what you did for black metal or new jack: listen to people who already delighted in these sounds. Try to hear as they hear.
This is the second mix I've put together for a particular year; I did 1982 a few months back, and I'm working on something for the 1960s that I may never finish. This playlist contains - as best as I could determine - songs that were first released in 1989. I didn't bother with singles released on albums from '88; I can always do an '88 playlist some other time, and tracking down peak chart positions is too much work for something already so ridiculous. I limited myself to adding songs currently on Spotify, which includes tracks (from Anna Oxa, UT, Woo, and others) unavailable in America. Maybe someone out there will be able to play the whole thing, I dunno. As always, I tried to incorporate a huge range of styles and countries of origin: you'll find a late-period calypso from (The Mighty) Shadow, hectic punk rock from Russia, and German power metal. I tried to include only tracks under 10 minutes: apologies to Pauline Oliveros and Fela Kuti/Egypt 80.
Why 1989? Partly because I wanted to explore those strange sounds from my childhood. Partly because I was burned out on sludgy psych-rock and perfectly acceptable soul jazz; I needed to listen to rap again. Though the playlist is sequenced, there's no way anyone (even me!) is going to listen to the whole thing straight through. These playlists are a combination of primer and exorcism: I want to get some sense of what everyone was listening to, and I want to find new songs to love, and I want to transfer this type of listening to other places.
Not that '89 isn't an interesting year! A lot of major artists were caught between album cycles: there's nothing here by Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., Bon Jovi, Metallica, N.W.A., U2, or Guns N’ Roses. The industry was similarly in a liminal state: Island sold to Polygram in '89, and a merger between Warner Communications and Time Inc. was announced the same year (though it wouldn't be finished until 1990). Anglo rock music was in flux: the industry wasn't quite sure what was next, a state exemplified by Metallica's loss to Jethro Tull for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental at the '89 Grammys. It was the award's first year, and the backlash was so bad and so instant that the Recording Academy split the award into two: Hard Rock Performance and Metal Performance. Some people knew, though: 1990 saw the founding of Interscope and DGC, two labels that did as much as anyone to commodify alternative and modern rock in the '90s.
And rap, too: Interscope eventually nabbed the distribution rights for Death Row. (DGC released some of the first Roots records, and, uh... The Game.) The knotty, kinetic sound of the Bomb Squad production team was ascendant: besides Public Enemy's immortal "Fight the Power" (first released on the Do The Right Thing soundtrack) they tracked '89 cuts for 3rd Bass, LL Cool J, and KRS-ONE's Stop the Violence Movement project. (In the playlist, you can hear Chuck D in tracks from Ice-T and the Beasties. There may be more; I can't remember.) '89 saw the first ATCQ single, and landmark debuts from De La Soul and Willie D, who saw himself as more of a solo artist, but was convinced to join Ghetto Boys (sic) the year before. (There's also a Gregory D and Mannie Fresh cut in the playlist, along with a couple great never-were Oakland acts.)
What else? House was hanging onto life, while its acid variant was taking Europe by storm - Italian producers were forsaking Hi-NRG for the squelchy stuff. The Stock-Aitken-Waterman imperial phase ended with a bang: Jason Donovan's massive Ten Good Reasons and Donna Summer's Another Place & Time and Kylie Minogue's Enjoy Yourself and the second Band Aid single and the Reynolds Girls' immortal "I'd Rather Jack" (as in "...then Fleetwood Mac"). Madonna's Like a Prayer spawned hit after controversy after hit: she achieved the ultimate honor when Indian singer Alisha Chinai released an entire album of Madonna covers, one of which is here. Ice Cube left NWA, soon to find the prickly embrace of the Bomb Squad. After their debut LP, NIrvana was big enough to headline with Tad. The Who broke up for the second time; Ringo formed his All-Starr Band; James Brown went to jail after succumbing to new jack swing; the Stones' Bill Wyman got married for the first time in 30 years, to a woman who was 13 at the relationship's outset. Glam metal still had a few more years in the sun, while Morbid Angel and a host of other death metal acts were beating down thrash's door. Black metal was due for a comeback, but in '89 you generally found it through trading tapes with Europeans.
In country music, Garth Brooks (not included, tragically) and Clint Black released their debuts; Alison Krauss issued her first album with Union Station; Travis Tritt dropped his first single. Scotland's Texas was years away from collaborating with the RZA and Method Man; they still sounded... well, like Texas. New age music was still as gorgeous as ever, and so was Miami bass. In the realm of punk rock, Jello Biafra couldn't stop collaborating, the Offspring released their debut LP six years after forming, and a teenaged Tré Cool was still drumming for his boss, instead of his freshly-waxed labelmates Green Day. And in my beloved freestyle, great things were still happening.
And, yes, pop was a giant cold crystal. I've got Taylor Dayne's soul-deep wish "Love Will Lead You Back," Don Henley's nice-guy headache "The Heart of the Matter," and Michael Bolton's hirsute tantrum "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You" (originally a hit for Laura Branigan). Each song has something to offer, even now. If everything we do is a response to our individual externalities - crushing or elevating - then the resulting creative outputs are always worth investigating: for what they might say about the people who did them, for what hey might say about the people who latched onto them, and what they might say to you. There's just as much to be found in tracks by, say, Xuxa or First Call or Jane Child as you might hear in Prince or Carcass or Kate Bush. That's what I've found, anyway. On to another year.