In Hindsight...Worst Top 3 Pazz and Jop Albums: 80s

I've not heard these:

The Costello Show (Featuring Elvis Costello) - King Of America (1986, #2)
The Robert Cray Band - Strong Persuader (1986, #3)

I would listen to any of these except the Robert Cray

Probably one of the elvis costello albums after trust. They're not terrible. they're ... acceptable?

I don't think I've heard Scarecrow or the Robert Cray album.

The Cray has one stone classic: "Right Next Door (Because Of Me)," a lyrical POV that I don't think I've heard before or since.

King of America is one of EC’s best, the songwriting and performances are superlative and there’s no annoying affectations. The Nashville pros show why they’re pros.

Some best-ever songs and performances weighted down by "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," "Glitter Gulch," "Eisenhower Blues," "Poisoned Rose," etc.

Its relative merits aside, Little Creatures at #1 of 1985 was a surprise to see.

To my young British eyes the 1985 P&J is the most impenetrable edition ever. Was the love-in for Little Creatures over earlier TH albums an extension of the roots rock Lone Justice/Scorchers/Del Fuegos/Del Lords et al 'real music' school of thought?

Also I'm sad I forgot to vote in the True Stories poll. Radio Head deserved at least a vote I feel - I think I enjoy later day TH most of all the zestier and more zydeco/texmex/salsa/latin/los lobos they got.

The AMERICA IS BACK WHOA NELLY was a thing even in 1985. I wrote a Pop Con presentation a few years back arguing how peak Reaganism infected even the most liberal writers and acts.

Some best-ever songs and performances weighted down by "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," "Glitter Gulch," "Eisenhower Blues," "Poisoned Rose," etc.

the Robert Cray one is pretty good stuff but it strikes me as somewhat par for the course with respect to ‘80s blues-soul albums. Better than Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows, well below BB King’s There Must Be a Better World Somewhere. I’m glad that album blew up for RC, though.

My 10th grade Social Studies teacher made us listen to Scarecrow in class in its entirety when it came out. Sounded like Kirkland Signature Springsteen, IIRC.

Lol

Was the love-in for Little Creatures over earlier TH albums an extension of the roots rock Lone Justice/Scorchers/Del Fuegos/Del Lords et al 'real music' school of thought?

speaking as someone who was there at the time, no this was not the case, the record was very much viewed as part of the TH continuum and apart from most other influences

what it DID do was appeal to the earliest Gen-Xers to go fully domestic/family mode

It inspired them to look at the little peepee and little toes of their children.

yup

Rather than the redblooded back-to-our-roots Rea America scene, I feel like it was seen as being more associated with things like Paris Texas, 80s euro directors exploring Americana. TH the cosmopolitan global explorers turning their gaze on the exoticism of Middle America

Scarecrow is peek Coop imo

*Coug

this is tough, there's definitely a wide range of quality but nothing i actively want to vote for as worst or would object to someone putting on the stereo.

My 10th grade Social Studies teacher made us listen to Scarecrow in class in its entirety when it came out. Sounded like Kirkland Signature Springsteen, IIRC.

― bookmarkflaglink (Darin), Tuesday, May 20, 2025 2:47 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

is this a good thing?

Torn by these three:

Lou Reed, New York ("Strawman" is good)
Elvis Costello, Imperial Bedroom
Talking Heads, Little Creatures

Probably gonna vote LC because that was one that actively offended teenage me. "I know you can make good music, so why are you doing this bullshit instead?"

Little Creatures is certainly one of the weaker albums here but I can't muster much ill will against a record with 3 singles I never tire of.

I was in a record shop a few years ago, appalled at the low quality of the music they were playing. I really wanted it to stop. Then I realised it was Sandinista!, so that one gets my vote.

classic ILM post right there

Living through the era, I heard and/or owned most of these including the Robert Cray (it's got a couple of great songs amongst some not so memorable tracks but the rock critic hype was weapons grade). I wasn't much of a fan of major label era Replacements so think I'll vote for Pleased To Meet Me.

Kind of surprised Robert Cray landed in the top three. (Back then, Robert Christgau actually gave that an album an A+. Greil Marcus HATED it.) I guess it's a testament to how big the blues revival (and possibly roots revival) really was in the mid-to-late '80s. I wouldn't rate it so highly but it's a very good album and probably the one most people have heard from Cray.

I can't vote for any of these because even the least of them are very good. The worst I can say is that some of them are really uneven: half of Scarecrow is actually very good or great, but the other half not so much with some songs too poor for even Mellencamp's top-notch band to overcome. The stuff I don't like on Thriller really feels like the pits - half of it is very good or flat out amazing, but the other half I can't stand. Freedom has a lot of my very favorite Neil Young music, but the "Perry Como" material (as he calls it) is pretty jarring. Had he dropped those cuts and included everything on the Eldorado EP as well as, say, the outtake "Box Car" and the live electric version of "Sixty to Zero" (which eventually was released on Bluenote Café) it would be his greatest album IMHO.

Sandinista! should've been a double LP IMHO, but it helps me to think of the sixth side tracks as a bonus EP that can be skipped. Nearly all of the keepers are on the first two LP's anyway but the fifth side has a few cut that I'd take over some of the weaker tracks on the first two LP's.

King Of America is nearly my favorite Elvis Costello album but it should've dropped the two covers (I would've issued them as B-sides) and some of the weaker cuts on the first side. I also would've added "King of Confidence" - IIRC, it's the one true outtake in that it was finished and polished and seriously considered for inclusion. Everything else was never recorded as such or never considered in the running (even though some of them are mighty fine songs).

I wish "Birthday Gal" made it on to Pleased To Meet Me. I wish "Nowhere Is My Home" and the "Tim" version of "Can't Hardly Wait" replaced "Dose of Thunder" and "Lay It Down Clown" on Tim. Love them both but I don't listen to them without those songs.

FWIW, there are a couple of really good bootlegged shows from Tracy Chapman's 1988 tour that I prefer over her debut album. She's solo on both, with one sounding kind of dry and one with a bit of reverb, but they're both sourced from soundboard tapes.

I *think* they're these two shows:

https://www.guitars101.com/threads/tracy-chapman-1988-07-25-philadelphia-pa-sbd.762276/
https://www.guitars101.com/threads/tracy-chapman-1988-07-04-montreux-ch-sbd-flac.218221/

Little Creatures

The stuff I don't like on Thriller really feels like the pits - half of it is very good or flat out amazing, but the other half I can't stand

what

There's not a bad record on this list.

otm, yeah this is the hardest one of these polls by far

Went with Thriller because anything Jackson related makes me cringe now what with all the sexual assault.

the rock critic hype was weapons grade

I feel like even more than being convinced to buy Big & Rich, Dizzee Rascal and M.I.A. albums in the early 2000s, the most susceptible I have ever been to rock critic hype was in the late 80s when I bought a ticket to see John Hiatt, with Robert Cray opening.

Good post birdistheword.

otm, yeah this is the hardest one of these polls by far

― waste of compute (One Eye Open), Wednesday, May 21, 2025 9:07 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

There are a couple of records on the 70s list that I expect to be lightning rods

what always astounds me about King of America is how damn long it is. I have it on LP and it's nearly an hour. I agree the covers probably didn't need to be there. almost wanted to vote it because it is kind of a slog but nah it's too good

"I'll Wear It Proudly" really is an all-timer in his catalog, no? Always imagined George Jones or George Strait killing it.

It may have been excluded from this poll because it's actually from 1979, but London Calling was #1 in the 1980 poll, with Sandinista winning in 1981.

I know all of these except Tunnel of Love, and really like at least one song from each except for Tracy Chapman, Los Lobos and New York. But I'll vote for the latter in honour of Lou Reed ruining my enjoyment of it permanently at his show in 1989.

Favourite is probably Trust: inspiration and craft balanced perfectly for the last time. Though of later records, I much prefer Blood and Chocolate to King of America.

Lou Reed ruining my enjoyment of it permanently at his show in 1989

What did he do?

Played the whole record in order with a heavy hand and an "eat this up, it's good for you" attitude. This was the start of his Professor Lou era.

But the lecturing tone is there on the record itself as well.

He did the same in his tour for Magic and Loss (played the whole album).

Ah, yeah, that's the album. I thought he did something like walk out or lose it with the audience. (I don't think he's ever done that though, even when he's been booed. Like for real booed, not Loooooou.)

You should do the equivalent of these for worst P&J singles by decade. Searched through five or six screens of results and doesn't seem to have been done.

Was the love-in for Little Creatures over earlier TH albums an extension of the roots rock Lone Justice/Scorchers/Del Fuegos/Del Lords et al 'real music' school of thought?

I was dubious about this theory until listening to a playlist I made of songs from these records, and I didn't notice the segue from "Give Me Back My Name" to "More Than I Can Stand" from the Cray album because they nearly sound the same until the singing begins.

I'm not sure it was a preference of Little Creatures over the other Heads albums so much as no album was a runaway favorite among the 1985 poll's pool of voters. Little Creatures probably got significantly more votes and points than it would in both the previous or following year. At least that was implied by Christgau's breakdowns of the ballot stats.

For example, it got 1078 points across 99 votes (or ballot mentions). The following year, poll winner Graceland got on less ballots - 96 - but scored 1131 points and had 37 more votes than the runner-up compared to Little Creature's 17 ballot margin over its runner-up. (Hard to compare numbers to 1984 because it was a crazy year that saw two titanic favorites duking it out for the top spot, namely Purple Rain and Born in the USA.)

To an extent Talking Heads coasted in on prior goodwill, but what I doubted was the extent to which they could be mistaken for roots rock.

the top 30 albums of the 1989 rolling stone best 100 of the 80s is probably a better list than this one

Kind of an unfair comparison. One has the benefit of hindsight. Should compare the RS EOY winners.

this is an easy scarecrow vote for me. grew up in kansas in the 80s and that sound is the sound i've been running from all my life. to this day when my wife puts on celtic folk music the violins sometimes make me think of the mellencamp sound and i get hives.

I mean, it's your trauma, I guess, but I can't hear it. I wish more bands chased Mellencamp's rangy-hard sound -- and had Larry Crane and Kenny Aronoff in the band.

He brought that band and sound when he produced James McMurtry's debut a few years later, too.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

There’s nothing on the list that I actively dislike (of the ones I’ve heard) but I’m throwing a mention to Pleased to Meet Me. As a fan from their very first gigs it was the first Replacements album that I couldn’t work up much more than tepid appreciation for.

voted for mellencamp. screw the pacers.

I agree PTTM is the end of their great era, but I still think it's in their great era. "Shooting Dirty Pool" is the only real dud on it imo, and there are a bunch of classics.

PTMM I mean

Yeah, it's one of their three best albums IMHO. I only wish "Birthday Gal" had been included - it's not like they didn't have space, it's only 33 minutes long. ("P.O. Box" is also a great demo, it's frustrating they didn't try to turn it into an album track.)

We had Mellencamp in a 'guess the song' pub quiz round tonight. Inevitably, as this is the UK, no one knew who he was.

LOL. FWIW, I took part in a pub quiz at a very packed bar in Boerum Hill in Brooklyn, and one question's answer was Loretta Lynn - I was the only person there who knew who she was. (I was on a team with two people who went to see Jack White and was surprised they didn't know her, not even through Van Lear Rose.)

I actually like Mellencamp. I think he's a great bandleader and arranger, he's got my respect for doing what he can to be a good human being with the success he's had, and he's recorded stuff I like a lot. I also realize he can be a bit of chowderhead and his work can be wildly uneven, the inevitable result of someone who's typically ambitious but often struggling to overcome his limitations as a lyricist.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Only 3 votes for Sandinista?

BECAUSE IT'S AWESOME

genuinely surprised by these results tho

King of America, Sandinista and Pleased to Meet Me are among my favourite albums of the decade/ever. Harsh!

Sandinista has been reclaimed/redeemed in the past few years.

I listened to Sandinista for the first time ever earlier this year and it rules

Mildly put out that anyone would vote Los Lobos for this but ymmv etc

Mildly put out that anyone would vote Los Lobos Little Creatures for this but ymmv etc

Pleased To Meet Me is great xposts

I'm not surprised Little Creatures won, especially not given the recent Stop Making Sense revival/reassessment, but I am surprised by that margin of victory.

I like Little Creatures quite a bit but I see what it represents to people; a turn away from the REALLY GOOD STUFF towards something poppier and, well, not as good.

ha see for me that was SMS so I was already inured

I have never heard Shoot Out The Lights or really listened to the Thompsons. I should probably check that out sometime.

that one and Bright Lights are essential

I love Little Creatures, I probably listen to it more often than the earlier albums. I voted for Robert Cray because I tried listening to it and couldn't make it through - even though that's really about my own issues with blues probably

well modern electric blues, yeah

https://images.genius.com/cc68074d3966ba3d01eb34df3faa80ea.424x424x1.jpg

If Talking Heads had progressed straight from 77 to More Songs About Buildings And Food to Little Creatures without making all the albums in between, they'd probably have a roughly Feelies-sized cult today.

Los Lobos voters are trippppin

Sandinista simultaneously has more good and more weak songs than any of the other records on this list (I find it exactly 50/50).
I wonder whether Little Creatures would have received fewer votes if it had been voted #3 of its year.

the sprawl/variety/"weak" tracks on Sandinista are the point!

OK, but it someone rejects "the point" it's a lot of aimless music.

I had a work buddy that loathed Los Lobos and I struggled to understand it for a bit before giving up. He kept lumping them in with jam bands.

I voted Cray because my dad listened to him a lot and it has never struck me as anything special at all. But I could have voted for New York. I don't have much love for Lou after Street Hassle.

The zero votes for Remain in Light and poll-topping 12 for Little Creatures says a lot. I love Little Creatures, I have no problem calling it a classic - probably the last in a string of six classic studio LP's for Talking Heads - but to be uncharitable, it's also the "least" of them.

Re: Los Lobos, I'd probably recommend Kiko over anything else they did. It's steadily grown on me over the years - I liked it initially but I absolutely love it now.

They were the “La Bamba” movie band for me until I heard Kiko and went back and explored their other stuff.

Kiko gets at a dreamy Tom Waits kinda thing that’s really nice.

Yeah, everyone brings their A game to Kiko, from the band to Froom and Blake to all the engineers involved. I even love the sleeve design, particularly the color scheme - it always felt like part of an aesthetic that I really liked from the '80s, one that I'd usually come across from indie records and underground comics.

FWIW, Los Lobos is touring with X this fall. (Hidalgo should be able to rejoin the band then. He's sitting out of the European shows due to a non-emergency medical procedure he had.)

I discovered Los Lobos' discography exactly five years ago and I was aghast by how good it was: I mean, every album through 1992 bested its predecessor.

It's impressive considering how often they were pushed into a situation where they were like "what the hell are we doing here?," from the Paul Simon session that landed them on Graceland (because Simon basically stole one of their songs) to La Bamba which to them seemed like a disaster in the making until they finally saw a cut of the movie (until then they were re-recording the music over and over again due to constant changes, so they were surprised that it was actually a pretty good movie).

IIRC they actually didn't get along that well with T-Bone Burnett either - not in terms of personal relations or even taste, but in terms of making records because they didn't really see eye-to-eye in terms of how to go about it. Also "La Bamba" nearly set them on a course they didn't want to take, so they did push back on that.

I actually don't believe Hidalgo's account: it's his word against Simon's, and Simon paid his musicians quite well for those sessions.

It's funny how often we've taken Los Lobos' account of those sessions without question. I mean, Simon credited his bassist and guitarists on a few songs from this era.

I think Berlin's account is the one that gets repeated the most - he doesn't pull any punches, but Hidalogo and Perez were asked about it, and they sounded more disappointed than angry.

I actually don't think their accounts are that different in terms of what happened at the session. To me the disagreement stems more from whether or not it constituted session work (which Simon believes it was and therefore not entitled to composing credit). But there's also the continuing debate of cultural appropriation in terms of what Simon does with his records, and it sounded like Hidalgo and Perez were more disappointed about that. Here's a conversation I found on a blog:

Pete: I didn’t know until recently of your involvement with Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’. I read a Jambase interview with Steve Berlin from about four years ago – I just read it this past week – and found it real interesting because one of Steve’s quotes is that Paul Simon is the “world’s biggest prick”…

David Hidalgo: No, he’s only about this tall [measures with his hand about four feet off the ground] *laughter*

Pete: ..and that’s kind of where I’m going with this question! He doesn’t remember the sessions too fondly because I guess you guys got there, you sat down, and there really were no ideas for songs – so you guys started jamming on what later became “Myth of the Fingerprints”. I guess when the album came out you guys didn’t get credit for songwriting or music – I don’t know if the album has been modified to have that or anything, but what are your memories of those sessions and do you think Paul Simon is world’s biggest prick?

Louie Perez: Do you really want us to rag on him?

Pete: Sort of. *laughter* No, not really, I just wanted your feelings of the sessions…

Louie: I think he’s a great songwriter, I always enjoyed his songwriting. That’s why we got together with him. That’s business, you know – it’s just kind of unfortunate that he…looked at us as some kind of anthropology…like a study or something.

David:… like “You guys go in the studio, you play, and I’ll capture the moment, and I’ll write a song over it.”

Louie: …and then goes home and writes a song over it. But that wasn’t the first time. He did that with “El Condor Pasa“. There’s a group called Los Incas in South America that plays indigenous folk music. And he did the same thing. They took a traditional song…

David: “El Condor Pasa”, that’s the one right? “I’d rather be a [hums a little] muppetera”.

Louie: …he wrote a song over it…. but no, nothing’s been modified – I don’t know why all of a sudden it came back, someone else asked me about that recently – I guess I forgot about it.

"I actually don't think their accounts are that different" meaning the members of Los Lobos and Paul Simon's own accounts

Actually there's one detail Hidalgo and Perez don't cover so I don't know if there's an agreement on it, but Berlin claimed Hidalgo started jamming on a piece of music Hidalgo had already composed, not something that was created or improvised at the session.

Berlin claimed Hidalgo started jamming on a piece of music Hidalgo had already composed, not something that was created or improvised at the session

Well, that sounds like a fuckup on his part. Never bring anything into a jam that you don't want to get stolen.

exactly!

This is the old Al Kooper-should've-gotten-credit-for-Like-a-Rolling-Stone argument -- and why not?

Would the 2 Prince voters care to weigh in?

Pleased to Meet Me was my entry to the Mats and remains my favorite of theirs. Hard to believe anyone could think an album with Alex Chilton and Can’t Hardly Wait was dramatically overrated, though I get that the fans of their earlier work didn’t care for some of the forays into pop.

xp yeah, that is utterly baffling to me