The Factual Opinion

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #14

Def Leppard
Pyromania

Pyromania—as in, Def Leppard settin’ shit on fire.  As monolithic, immaculately-produced, chart-baiting, blockbuster albums go, Pyromania may be eclipsed only by its successor, the behemoth Hysteria.  Def Leppard’s breakthrough album is wall to wall hits, made from bricks of rock and mortar of rock.  That’s two rocks, people.  Three, if you count “Rock Rock (Till You Drop)” twice.  That’s how you know they’re serious.  If there wasn’t a cultural stigma about genuinely universal music, Def Leppard might still be the biggest band in the world.  Instead, we live through their influence on Fall-Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco singles (and, yeah, there are plenty of people out there who will try to convince you that “Sugar, We’re Going Down” isn’t a monster of a song, but these people are not your friends.)

And yet, there’s a reason Def Leppard are unparalleled hit-makers of rock: because they play both sides of the gender war.  Check out the lyrical conceit of “Photograph:” Joe Elliott has your picture from a magazine, you’re his every fantasy, but he doesn’t want your photograph, he wants the real you.  This is why Def Leppard have a reputation as a band dug more by chicks than by dudes.  This is also why they’re geniuses—they speak equally to both sexes.  When the song’s for the women, the women have the power; when the song’s for the men, it’s time to party.  Guys: let’s pretend for a second that we still live in a world where the laws of rock are laid out right there in Pyromania’s opening track:  1) Women to the left, women to the right; 2) Your momma don’t mind what your momma don’t see; and 3) Anything goes.  Girls: let’s pretend we live in a world where all the men want you but know you’re going to break their hearts.  What would that be like?  Pretty nice, wouldn’t it?

-Marty Brown, 2007

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #15

Talking Heads
Speaking In Tongues

Yes, it's the one that has "Burning Down The House."  Yes, it's the one that doesn't have Brian Eno.  And, yes, it's the one the one that spawned the "Stop Making Sense" tour, the Jonathan Demme movie, and the big suit.  It's a good Talking Heads album, which, by definition, makes it pretty great--and that's where the confusion arises for the guys here at the Factual Opinion.  When you're dealing with a monster year, and make no mistake, 1983 was a monster, with debut albums from some of the greatest American bands to ever appear on the scene, what is one to do with albums that are merely solid pieces of cultural ephemera?  These lists, for all their flaws, are an attempt to nail both the voice of a year as it was then, and the sounds of that year that resonate now.  Unlike January's 2006 breakdown, this is a list that can be interpreted through the work as history, whereas a more immediate "look-back" is always going to be infected by the personal--the Bloc Party album you're not sick of yet, but will be, the Mars Volta album that turns out to be something you don't miss when you lose the mp3 file--but with the 80's (and the new 70's project that Mr. Brown and Mr. Stone are currently making out with,) you've heard a lot of this stuff before.  You just didn't know it fell into the limited eyeball of the 1983. 

In other words, Speaking In Tongues is an album that will always be a favorite, even though most of it's songs are better addressed on the live "Stop Making Sense" issue, it just doesn't happen to be a powerhouse in the veins of the earlier masterstrokes--Remain In Light, '77, and Fear of Music.  Speaking In Tongues is great, and for 1983, it's just nearly top ten material, but it's not a revelation unless it's your first experience with Byrne and Co.  Happily, to get to that point of realization, you have to listen to it--a lot.  If you're in your late 20's, or mid 30's, than you probably already have.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #16

James "Blood Ulmer
Odyssey

A disciple of Ornette Colman, James Blood Ulmer has quietly cranked out more than 20 albums in the last 30 years, and heads the very short list of master jazz guitarists of that era (alongside maybe only Sonny Sharrock).  As an introduction to Ulmer’s massive body of work, Odyssey is damn near unimpeachable, swimming effortlessly between free jazz, electric blues, and funk.  Assisted only by violinist Charles Burnham and drummer Warren Benbow, Ulmer twists though a series of what feel almost like avant-garde lullabies.  He alternates instrumental tracks with vocal tracks, and when Ulmer sings—as he does on “Little Red House,” “Are You Glad To Be In America” and “Please Tell Her”—he sounds a little like the classic bluesman and a little like Jimi Hendrix.  On “Please Tell Her” he sings, “Please please tell her that I had to go/ And I could hardly stay to wake her/ I love her so,” and when the song shifts abruptly into album closer “Swing & Things” it’s not difficult to imagine that Ulmer is already gone, chasing after the ephemeral beauty that Odyssey conjures.

-Marty Brown, 2007

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #17

New Order
Power, Corruption & Lies

It's safe to say, even without a consult with Marty Brown, that if this countdown were about "The Coolest 25 Albums of 1983," then this album would be fighting for the number one spot with an album we haven't talked about yet.  (Can you stand the suspense?)  It's also safe to say that if this countdown were about Marty and Tucker trying to prove how "cool" we are, than this album would be higher up.  Luckily for you, and for the people unfortunate enough to work under those two's supervision, Marty and Tucker base their estimation of cool solely off how many books they've read found listed in Harold Bloom's Western Canon. 

For those in the know, New Order was the band formed from the ashes of Joy Division, following the suicide of Ian Curtis.  Due to a few years of unfortunate choices regarding the use (and abuse) of synthesizers and electronics in the mid to late 90's, those unversed in the glory that is Power, Corruption & Lies might operate under the misconception that this album is one they can safely ignore, shelving it in the "get to it never" pile that most of the 1980's new wave/post punk/shit music properly lives in.  That would be a horrendous mistake--there's a reason why this album outsold Joy Division, and why it put New Order on the map.  It's a tremendous force to be reckoned with, a crackerjack album that stands alongside the Ian Curtis era, and puts to shame any of it's genre's counterparts.  More than twenty years later, it's one of the strongest arguments for the magic that electronic music can have, and it's one of the few albums labeled Post Punk that deserves the name.   After you've put away your sharpie marker and stopped wearing those beat-up Vans, this is the album you listen to while experimenting with black sweaters.  In other words, this is the music that you're actually going to get laid too.  And she won't be drunk, either!

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #18

The P-Funk All Stars
Urban Dancefloor Guerillas

P-Funk doesn’t settle nicely into today’s pop landscape because it’s not typical headphones music; it demands a party.  Known mostly as George Clinton’s touring band through the 90’s, Clinton initially formed the P-Funk All Stars in 1982, while still riding a decade-plus stride of genius that showed no signs of slowing down.  He wasn’t kidding around with the name, either: Parliament/Funkadelic superstars Bootsy Collins, Eddie Hazel, Dewayne Blackbird, Gary Shider and Walter “Junie” Morrison all show up in various combinations on the All Stars’ debut album, Urban Dancefloor Guerillas.  So do Bobby Womack, Maceo Parker and Sly Motherfuckin Stone, who composed “Catch A Keeper” for the album.  Throughout, Guerillas provides exactly the kind of gut-punching, dancefloor-baiting funk we’ve come to expect and need from Clinton, with plenty of high points (album opener “Generator Pop,” lost barbecue classic “One Of Those Summers”) and a couple of low ones (“Acupuncture”.)  Yet Guerillas has been largely forgotten—maybe because Clinton and the P-Funk Allstars were still chasing after an expansive, encompassing sound (with Prince and his crew quickly picking up the torch after them) at a time when popular music was becoming increasingly insular.

-Marty Brown, 2007

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #19

Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble
Texas Flood

It's relatively difficult to overstate the impact that this album had on the Blues--while the album certainly suffers in comparison to, well, just about any of the 20th Century's earlier Blues greats, Stevie Ray Vaughan has to be credited with not only re-inventing a genre that hadn't had anything commercially successful in twenty years, but he did it straight out of the box.  It's not like Vaughan was the sort of "secret everybody knew about"--the man was laboring in hiding, playing the sort of non-trendmaking spots usually reserved for Led Zeppelin cover bands.  Until the release of Texas Flood, you didn't know who the guy was--unless you knew what a county fair was, or you preferred to drink in bars that treated all non-Pabst beers like an order of Japanese Sake.  The album was released not on the strength of a clamoring fanbase, but on the strength of Vaughan's supreme talent and technical mastery in a genre that was, and remains, dominated by dead men like Robert Johnson and Howling Wolf.  Vaughan amped up the rock aspect of the Blues sound, he ditched (whether it was the right choice or not) the more histrionic folk aspects that Dylan had infected it with, and he was hideously successful.  Although Vaughan passed too early, in a field where too many pretenders were left standing, his short studio recordings exist to document one of the rarest, and impossible to replicate, successful musical excursions of the 1980's. -Tucker Stone, 2007

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #20

Various Artists
The Wild Style Soundtrack

There was a time when soundtracks didn't matter, when movies got their lifeblood from a pop reference here and there, but it was composers who controlled what accompanied the sex, the car crash & the betrayal.  Sometimes a film like The Graduate would roll around, but it wasn't until the Denis Leary vs. Emilio Estevez blockbuster Judgment Night that a films music totally eclipsed the movie it encompassed.  (Technically, that's a completely absurd statement.  True, but completely incorrect.)  Wild Style (the soundtrack), like Wild Style (the film), takes some serious liberties with it's portrayal of William Wallace's battle for Scottish independence--the worst being a grossly homophobic portrayal of one of England's finest Princes--yet it is still one of the more compelling, and visceral, portrayals of epic war seen in American cinema.  Winner of multiple Academy Awards, Wild Style (the film) would seem to be one of the most unlikely of films to be outclassed and ignored in favor of it's soundtrack, a veritable cornucopia of the state of hip-hop at the dawn of it's era.  Grand Wizard Theodore, The Cold Crush Brothers, Fab Five Freddy and Double Trouble all show up, adding so much heart and excitement that it, quite literally, makes the current state of cynicism that laces too much hip-hop appear as the embarrassment that it is.  It's completely incongruous to a film that seems designed to cause Mel Gibson as much physical damage as possible.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #21

Mark Stewart & The Maffia
Learning To Cope With Cowardice

The joke around The Factual Opinion offices (alright, fine, it was Tucker’s joke) is that the title of Learning To Cope With Cowardice is actually a reference to British playwright and actor Noel Coward.  What makes this especially funny (funny in an extremely geeky way) is that Cowardice—Mark Stewart’s debut album as a solo artist after the dissolution of the Pop Group—is essentially a dub album cobbled together from disparate elements of black music (reggae, hip-hop) and American culture (Woody Guthrie, Walt Whitman.)  In other words, musically, Stewart moves about as far from the image of the iconic, dapper British gentleman as possible.  Politically, too.  It’s right there in the song titles: “High Ideals And Crazy Dreams,” “Don’t You Ever Lay Down Your Arms,” “The Paranoia Of Power.”  With the help of super-producer and reggae legend Adrian Sherwood, who would keep Stewart at the forefront of his On-U label’s roster, what emerges is as subversive and forward-thinking as anything else that came out in 1983.

-Marty Brown, 2007