Review: '501 Essential Albums of the '80s'

Late last year we got a swollen tome determined to canonize 501 albums from the 1990s. Alas, such a project was doomed to frustrate because by the 1990s pop music had wandered off into such disparate directions that simply enjoying nineties music in general signals a lack of personal taste instead of broadmindedness. In other words, anyone who'd go straight for the entry on Exile in Guyville could only suppress their barf reflex when seeing that Baby One More Time followed several pages later. In other other words, in attempting to please everyone the book seemed aimed at no one.

A similar project focused on the eighties works a bit better because a great deal of the decade's most ingenious underground music and most overground mainstream pablum share a sort of kicky new wave frivolity. A good deal of cheesy eighties music is a lot of fun with hindsight. While Britney's debut has aged just as badly as it debuted, lots of the albums eighties hipsters surely would have given a good scoffing—Hall & Oates's Voices, Duran Duran's Rio, Def Leppard's Pyromania, The Bangles' Different Light, for starters—are good fun in retrospect. There's certainly a a more direct line between, say, Elvis Costello and the Attractions' Imperial Bedroom and Billy Joel's Glass Houses than there is between Nirvana's In Utero and some Brian Adams album. 

So I had considerably fewer beefs with 501 Essential Albums of the '80s than I did with its achronological predecessor. Sure its treatment of the underground tends to be condescendingly slight (fine, Kate Bush, The Jam, Echo and the Bunnymen, XTC, and Siouxsie, we'll give you one album each...but that's it!) and the confusion regarding what is genuinely essential and what just sold a lot of units continues (Milli Vanilli are the Britney of this latest volume).

However, one could probably justify the presence of at least half the albums included. There's no excuse for the complete absence of anything by Pete Townshend (where's Empty Glass?!?), Missing Persons (Spring Session M is missing!), The Misfits (Walk Among Us doesn't in this book!), or Throwing Muses (all of their eighties albums should have been in here. All of them), but most of the other stuff that I would have included could be filed under "obnoxiously esoteric personal preferences" (I'll refrain from gasping over the absence of The Damned's Strawberries, GBV's Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia, or The Vaselines' Dum Dum).

As was the case with the previous volume the short entries that make up the majority of the book are inadequate (kudos for including The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight, but its entry is only three sentences long) while the longer, full-page ones are adequate (though some of the choices for full-page treatment are highly suspect: Rick Springfield's Working Class Dog? Really?). Some commentaries lack critical perspective, reading more like press releases. Billy Joel's utterly ambivalent "Goodnight Saigon" "dropped up into the dark consciousness of a Vietnam veteran"? You sure about that? 

The hardcover, well-illustrated, full-color format is totally tubular.