Left of the Dial: Dispatches from the '80s Underground Box CD3 Poll

"Swamp Thing" beats all.

Seconded

All That Money Wants is a doozy, but Teenage Riot is an unstoppable musical force.

Sonic Youth

Thank god, an easy one at last. "Ana Ng" it is.

"She Bangs The Drums" might be the best song on here but feels out of place...i didn't discover the Stone Roses until 1990 so they seem more fitted for the 90's than the 80's.

I love the Rain Parade and Stone Roses, among others here, but Pay to Cum is one of the songs that I've just played over and over in amazement.

I love the Rain Parade and Stone Roses, among others here, but Pay to Cum is one of the songs that I've just played over and over in amazement.

swamp thing though i love that hitchcock song too

Teenage Riot is an unstoppable musical force.

"Pay to Cum" even more so.

i love all the things spoken for so far, but since they're spoken for i'll toss a vote to poor old chuck mosely. introduce yourself was a really important album to me my freshman year of college for some reason.

I couldbe wronnnnnggg....

"rise" got my vote.

bad brains

Kind of disappointing when compared to the first two. Went for Stone Roses, but good contributions from Robyn Hitchcock, The Church and TMBG too.

"She Bangs The Drums" might be the best song on here but feels out of place...i didn't discover the Stone Roses until 1990 so they seem more fitted for the 90's than the 80's.

Virtually all of the best music they made was made in the 80s.

The Mercy Seat, say I

"Pay to cum", though it's in mighty odd company here.

"The Cutter," "Birthday." "Teen Age Riot," "Swamp Thing," "Under The Milky Way" and "Rise" are all some of the best songs from the 1980's. it's the six minute version of "Kundalini Express" that gets my vote as its just a little bit better.

bump

Nick Cave.

A hypnotically intense performance of Mercy Seat here:

"Rise" seems like the best song here though "Pay to Cum" is so intense and iconic it's hard to vote against it. "Mercy Seat" live is super-great no doubt but the studio version is just OK. Surprised not to see anybody repping for "Adrenalin" yet.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I voted for "Teenage Riot" and am also very partial to "Ana Ng" and "Under the Milky Way." But I'd like instead, to talk about the worst on this list, which is very clearly Faith No More's "We Care A Lot."

It's lame-o sentiment presented through a lame-o form for an audience that was for the most part lame-o itself.

Nothing on this rather admirable disc comes close to its shallowness.

From Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Care_a_Lot_(song)

The lyrics of this song are a sarcastic parody of "the popstar posing that accompanied those [Live Aid style] charitable events"[4] and mentions a range of things the band ironically claims to 'care a lot' about, such as the LAPD, the "food that Live Aid bought", the Garbage Pail Kids and even The Transformers.

It was an interesting lyric for the time, very much against the grain in that it implied that there was no real compassion or sincerity behind those charity pop events, and that worthy, unworthy and irrelevant causes alike were equally fleeting publicity grist for a certain kind of messianically deluded pop star. Crass were making the same point more directly shortly earlier. It was a good tonic for songs like Boy George's 'War is Stupid', and most of the U2 canon for that matter. There was a lot of that token all-join-hands stuff around at the time. Subsequent controversies about money and food going straight into the hands of corrupt Ethiopian government officials at least allow a certain degree of respect for Roddy's point of view in this lyric, which was not without a degree of insight.

So your point is that because the song mocked those who might have tried in their admitted earnestness to get to get some good accomplished that it's then somehow clever?

The song is vapid, my friend.

It's also a little difficult to get one's brain around this concept that Faith No More were some kind of silver dart plunged through the balloon of pretention after you've seen that video a thousand times or more with the flopping fish and the slow overdone reverbed piano exit . . . .

so right, you don't understand either of the songs

the Good Dr. Bill or Andrew, are you out there?

Understand? Please. Save the whole golden chalice of received meaning thing for an act that might actually deserve sch treatment . . .

From the whole ill-conceived proto-rap/rock thing to Mike Patton's execrable vocals and pretentious execution of vapid concept to the selling of same through MTV, the whole project stank to high heaven.

I'm just surprised this isn't something that's just understood by this point.

I am disappointed to discover that "Swamp Thing" is not the "Wild Thing" parody that USA used in commercials for the early 90s TV series.

Can't fuck with Swamp Thing, as many great songs as this poll contains.

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

Shocked and pleased by TMBG's high standing here.