The Rolling Stones' Undercover (1983)
These days, the Stones are happy to solidify their brand identity, staying strictly within the musical territory marked out by their reputation. They are content to be Stonesy rather than the Stones. Perhaps this retrenching was a result of the critical beating they took for this album, their last effort to actually expand the definition what the Stones could be, their last attempt to be timely rather than nostalgic. The Reagan/Thatcher eighties were dark, dismal times, and this is a dark, dismal album, full of gory exposition of a world of completely commodified emotion, a world without justice or restraint. With lyrics like these -- "A friend of mine was this Japanese, he had a girlfriend in Paris. He tried to date her, in six months and eventually she said yes. You know he took her to his apartment, cut off her head. Put the rest of her body in the refrigerator, ate her piece by piece" (from "Too Much Blood") -- Undercover has to be considered the Stones' American Psycho. But whereas Bret Easton Ellis needed the decade to end before he could compose his satire on the bloody savagery implicit in its ethos, the Stones were in the midst of it. What seemed savage, confused, and inchoate at the time -- the alternation between blase violence, broad sexuality, and contemptuous cruelty -- seems prescient now. As with Ellis's widely misunderstood novel, the difficulty in sorting out the levels of irony and parody involved make the Stones' message ambiguous, contradictory, multi-faceted, in argument with itself (just as Jagger and Richards were apparently arguing with each other). It wasn't easy to digest then, and it isn't easy now, but Undercover is unquestionably the last time the Stones were artists, challenging the status quo rather than endorsing their place within it.

Bob Dylan's Self Portrait (1970)
Though virtually every album Dylan released after 1968 (with the sole exception of Blood on the Tracks) could be on this list, this notorious double album -- full of Countrypolitan torch songs, poorly recorded live tracks, multiple versions of half-baked originals, a murder ballad or two, and goofy half-assed covers of his imitators -- seems most in need justification. Received wisdom is that the album was either designed to alienate what was left of his folkie fan base while mocking those who thought they could re-create his artistry, or to genially give a casual, intimate look at some of Dylan's private interests and influences. I'd argue it's neither -- that instead, the album is a wry suggestion of how one's self-portrait is finally fashioned by one's enemies, adulators, critics, and by the lowest common cultural denominator of one's times, as much as it is by one's own defining efforts. But part of the beauty of the record is that it offers itself to many interpretations, all of them challenging a listener's complacent modes of consuming music and worshipping stars. Regardless of what concept you use to tie the album together thematically, most of it is unified sonically by Bob Johnston's wonderfully warm production and by the supple, comfortable playing of the Nashville-based rhythm section, which included Bob Moore, Charlie Daniels (yes, that Charlie Daniels), Stu Woods, and the amazing Kenneth Buttrey. The sound makes Dylan seem at home and at ease no matter what chicanery he's up to, whether he's lampooning Paul Simon by dueting with himself on "The Boxer", or delivering a sweet irony-free "I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know", or pushing his vocal range to the limit on "Blue Moon", or just moaning unapologetically the wordless "Wigwam" (which was well deployed in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tennenbaums). Dylan never seems so simultaneously close and far away as he does here; it seems both generous and mean-spirited, both sincere and sarcastic. His effortless maintenance of these contradictions makes Self Portrait endlessly fascinating and absolutely essential.

Fleetwood Mac's Tusk (1980)
How does a band follow up one of the best selling albums in the history of music -- an album so omnipresent and emotionally resonant that it defined what it felt like to be alive at a certain moment in time (1978), and so culturally far-reaching that it helped usher in the sense that divorce is an inevitable and acceptable part of American life? Reports at the time suggested that not only Fleetwood Mac's future, but the very future of the record industry itself hinged on Tusk, which retailed at the absurdly high price of $15.98 (it was absurd then, and remains absurd now). The much-expanded audience for this album certainly couldn't have expected the messy, eclectic sprawl it turned out to be. It took three years to record, but many songs (mostly Lindsey Buckingham's home studio concoctions) at first sound half-finished, almost underwritten. The hits from Rumors were lushly and impeccably produced, full of textural touches that smoothed out the emotional turbulence implied in the lyrics. But there is nothing smooth about Tusk's first single, the rancorous and disjointed title track, whose murky paranoia is abruptly bisected by an cacophonous eruption courtesy of the USC marching band's drum corps. Allegedly Buckingham's reaction to his discovery of former girlfriend Stevie Nicks's relationship with fellow band member Mick Fleetwood, the song revolves around phallic imagery and a delusional mindset that is almost always referred to as "cocaine-fueled". It has to be considered the most disturbing song ever to make it to Billboard's top ten, and should be cherished as such. The artistic courage involved in releasing this intensely challenging album, fully realized in terms of a wholly original, wholly anticommercial aesthetic, in the face of all the audience and industry expectations, can't be underestimated. Once you are acclimated to its uncompromising presentation, once you accept that what you're hearing is not a half-baked accident but the result of some painstaking calibration, you will hear the strongest performances Nicks ever gave ("Sara," "Storms"), the most moving songs Buckingham ever wrote ("Save Me a Place," "That's All For Everyone"), and some of the densest, most nuanced rock production, in terms of blended sounds and harmonies, to be heard anywhere outside a Beach Boys record. Avoid the CD -- the magnificent sound is squelched, and "Sara" is presented in a truncated form -- and seek out the vinyl.

The Clash's Sandinista! (1980)
The standard critique of this meandering 36-song collection is that it's too long and too unfocused, it's too self-indulgent, it has too many genre experiments that don't work, and it's really a single album masquerading as a triple LP set. Of course, anything would be a letdown after London Calling, and it's unfair to evaluate Sandinista! by that lofty standard. Because it stands to gain so much by having no fixed form, Sandinista! is far more suited to the digital age, where you can arrange and skip around its plenitude with ease, however you like, making of it a myriad of different albums with different emphases and different themes, discovering in the process some of the many different ideas and protestations The Clash meant to suggest. Much of Sandinista! deals not with Nicaraguan liberation but with music itself, and the political potentialities that adhere in music; the whole album could be seen as an inquiry into the possibilities and implications of making meaningful music in a debased, debasing popular culture. The band's syncretic approach, wherein they fuse a variety of styles developed by oppressed peoples (reggae, rap, calypso, gospel, jazz), shows The Clash testing all formal boundaries in their efforts to keep rock music alive and relevant in the face of enormous industry pressure to turn all of it into commodified hedonistic junk. And though they never adopt trite, soothing subject matter (don't look to Sandinista! for love songs), their examination of imperialism, institutional injustice and Cold War paranoia never becomes dour, preachy, condescending or academic. The best songs -- "The Call Up", "If Music Could Talk", "Up in Heaven (Not Only Here)", "Something About England" -- articulate what politicized rock music should be, where formal considerations reiterate the concerns expressed in the lyrics. Though the whole is not as tight and integrated as London Calling in the Lego-like possibilities of its fragmentary parts, Sandinista! may ultimately be more profound.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Sometime in New York City/Live Jam (1972)
It's hard to understand why some believe Lennon was the target of a right-wing conspiracy that culminated in his assassination until you hear this album, in which he and Yoko make their leftist political views the subject matter of some of Lennon's most abrasive, confrontational songwriting (and that includes the wildly overrated Plastic Ono Band). It's almost inconceivable, while listening to this record, to think that Lennon would subsequently be deified in the commercial pantheon, that his image and his music would be used to shill for Apple Computers and Nike, though it would be wonderful to watch corporate America attempt to appropriate some of these ditties: perhaps the Gap could use "Woman is the Nigger of the World" in one of their choreographed multicultural TV commercial atrocities, letting girls gyrate over Lennon's primal scream of "We make them paint their face and daaance!" The political content on this album is so intense and inflammatory that most critics (who are typically quietists who foist on us a reactionary bourgeois aesthetics of political indifference while performing their roles as boosters for the record industry or apologists for the status quo) don't even bother to condemn it as propaganda, they simply pretend it doesn't exist. Of course it's obviously propaganda, unrepentantly so, and aided by Spector's unrelenting, overwhelming production, it tirelessly agitates for the causes of Irish independence, prison reform, feminism and the right for Yoko to warble atonally for an eternity and have it be called music. The pleasure of hearing a major star go out on a limb for righteous causes is big enough, but the music is compelling, too -- particularly Lennon's incendiary takes on "Cold Turkey" and "Baby, Please Don't Go" with Frank Zappa's band. And the 16-minute "Don't Worry Kyoko" is the ultimate room-clearer -- if you ever encounter it on one of those annoying jukeboxes with seventeen zillion songs on it, play it repeatedly.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse's Re*ac*tor (1981)
While everyone should celebrate the availability, finally, of the 1974 masterpiece On the Beach, you shouldn't overlook the simultaneous reissue of this noisy, angry effort, which finds Young extremely pissed off about, among other things, new wave music, Japanese cars, the transportation industry in general, and about the fact that he's "got mashed potatoes" but "ain't got no T-bone" -- a lamentable situation that he points out about three hundred times in the appropriately named "T-bone". Some seem to take these positions at face value, but the album's title indicates that these songs taken as a whole are intended to portray the reactionary mind at work, petulantly clinging to a host of incoherent and incompatible political opinions. Often derided as the worst of his throwaways, "T-bone", clearly the album's centerpiece, seems to harness too much irate energy to mean nothing, and you'll wonder what he's really talking about -- is he referring to the lack of substance in his own music, which he was forced to release on his record label's timetable, or is he talking about the status of contemporary music, with its abnegation of social responsibility, or is he referring to Jimmy Carter's lethargic 1980 campaign, or Ronald Reagan's subsequent election, or is he making an oblique statement on the endless hostilities between Ireland and England? Of course, there's no way to know, but that he means something is indisputable, and you have about eight minutes of brutal and relentless repetition to figure out where you stand. Other high moments include the rousing opener "Opera Star" (which is either a glorification or a condemnation of the rock and roll life -- it's hard to tell), "Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleeze" (a celebration of disregarding expectations), and the train song "Southern Pacific" (told from the point of view of an old railroad man dismissed by his company). Throughout, the guitar sounds are punishing, and the vocals are littered with grunts, shouts, and guffaws, half-ironic, half-flustered, half-gasped. The epic "Shots", a trunk song from the '70s, closes the album on a stark, distraught note, blending choppy, sputtering soloing with the sounds of machine gun fire. Considering its curious ambivalent tone, the record shares the same mood as the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, the same combination of senseless violence and offhanded irreverence that challenges you to take it seriously even though it's aware of its serious ideas.

The Beach Boys' Love You (1977)
Easily the most entertaining and authentically rewarding of the many "Brian is Back!" hypes, and certainly the goofiest, this album finds Wilson sounding like a proto-Daniel Johnston, making his naïve, bizarre observations about the world into simple songs, anchored by a thick, buzzy bass lines played on an analog synth, and often structured around cheerleading rhythms. "Johnny Carson" dissects the fabled host's prickly on-air persona; "Solar System" offers a straightforward, empirical cosmology ("Saturn has rings all around it, / I searched the sky and I found it"). "Honking Down the Highway" is not nearly as bad as its title might lead you to believe, though "Ding Dang" is -- co-credited to Roger McGuinn; it's impossible to imagine what he could have possibly contributed to such a slight wisp of a song. Even at their silliest, these songs are endearing, albeit slight, and they are never less than catchy. But these light-hearted ditties shouldn't distract you from the album's heart, side two's series of ballads ("The Night Was So Young", "I'll Bet He's Nice", "Let's Put Our Hearts Together"), which constitute the most affecting suite of melodies Wilson ever strung together outside of Pet Sounds (especially moving is Carl's handling of the bridge on "I'll Bet He's Nice"). This album is often described as child-like, but there is nothing childish about these adult love songs, alternately optimistic and pensive, and utterly, unquestionably sincere.

Alex Chilton's Like Flies on Sherbet (1979)
Not content simply to open his first post-Big Star album with a sloppy version of KC and the Sunshine Band's dopey disco hit "Boogie Shoes", Chilton flubs the first vocal cue by coming in several bars too early, a mistake he doesn't even bother to remove from the mix. That tells you what you need to know about the spirit of this anarchic album, a collection of half-assed covers and half-baked originals performed by unmistakably inebriated musicians. But, as with every precious release by this genius, it's an absolute classic. Best is anti-anthem "Rock Hard", which doesn't, and is all the better because of it. "My Rival" and "Hey Little Child" come closest to resembling actual songs, but you'll never mistake them for anything Big Star did -- not even the disintegrating song fragments found on Sister Lovers. What makes this particular Chilton effort so brilliant is his obvious refusal to give a single shit about the music he's making, even while he compulsively continues to make it. The love for music that emerges from this garrulous contradiction is inspirational. Somehow his contempt and loathing are transmuted by the medium of music into a kind of casual, fun-loving irreverence that reminds listeners not to debilitate themselves by taking life or themselves so seriously.

David Bowie's Tonight (1984)
Bowie returned himself to the mainstream by imitating his own imitators (the likes of Spandau Ballet and Ultravox), producing with Nile Rodgers the slick, vacuous Let's Dance, a heinous '80s touchstone (its soulless pseudo-funk, complete with thundering, overamplified drums and brash, tinny synthesizers would become de rigeur if they weren't already when it was recorded) that can blamed for spawning the success of the Power Station and Robert Palmer. To his credit, he didn't repeat his winning formula, though he seemed to have wanted to. He followed his cover of "China Girl" with a few more Iggy Pop covers -- "Don't Look Down", "Neighborhood Threat" and "Tonight", which appears here as a surprisingly poignant duet with Tina Turner -- but must have lost heart. Although Bowie often sounds like he's going through the motions, these songs never approach the brittle artificiality of its predecessor. Instead, his confusion is palpable, almost touching, especially on his version of "I Keep Forgetting", which sounds almost scarily convincing -- you believe he'll forget the words before the recording is over. His rendition of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" is far less embarrassing than one would predict, and the Iggy covers are serviceable, though far inferior to the originals. But the real reason to own this album is for "Blue Jean" (for which Bowie shot an elaborate video that played with the frequent -- and by and large accurate -- accusations that he has always been a Bryan Ferry rip-off) and "Loving the Alien", quite possibly the last good song he's written. Bowie keeps releasing albums, clumsily updating his sound to try to remain relevant, but this was the last time he was any good -- when he was questioning his need to try to seem original while lackadaisically running through some songs he liked.

Iggy Pop's Soldier (1980)
The cover depicts a bedraggled, strung-out-looking Iggy, wearing a sweaty t-shirt and some sinister red eye make-up, throwing himself forward in a posture of total exhaustion. This same sense of depletion marks the lyrics on this blunt, abrasive album. Consider these lines from "I Snub You": "You are a moron / I'm glad to be here / Seeing the sight of you / Smelling the smell of you." Or these, from "Dogfood": "Dog food is so good for you / It makes you strong and clever too / Dog food is a current craze / Eat some every day." Just about every song on Soldier packs in that level of insight, and Iggy seems to be wallowing in the stupidity happily, like a gleefully deranged street person in a puddle of his own puke. For this album, Iggy recruited ex-Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock and ex-XTC (and future Shriekback) keyboardist Barry Andrews to give him a more "modern" edge, though nothing here sounds at all new wave, and the record certainly marks a regression from the avant-garde heights of The Idiot and Lust for Life, both of which are probably still ahead of our time. It can't quite be considered punk either; it certainly lacks the social agenda '70s punk embraced as its reason for being. It's best understood as a progenitor of Andrew W.K.'s I Get Wet, full of dumb, catchy songs designed to mean nothing, played with maximum spirit and attitude. Iggy's snarl is as caustic as it ever sounded, and it balances the bubblegum bounciness of these lightweight songs, making them simultaneously indelible and effervescent. Perhaps Soldier's most significant drawback is the foolishness you feel walking around with these inane tunes stuck in your head.

Roxy Music's Manifesto 1979
The first five Roxy Music albums form an essential body of work necessary for anybody remotely interested in rock music. If you don't know these albums, stop listening to whatever you are listening to, and go get them -- its not an exaggeration to say that the sensibility staked out on these records informs virtually everything you will find reviewed on this web site. After releasing these albums, Roxy Music took a four-year hiatus, from which they returned with Manifesto, widely regarded as a disappointment, and usually taken to task for adopting pop and disco elements into its musical melange. This stems from the remix of the single "Angel Eyes", initially a raucous rocker, but revamped as dance-pop to try to cash in on the disco-rock craze kicked off by the Bee Gees, and unfortunately substituted for the original on later pressings. Manifesto sounds nothing like disco, and nothing like the distant, cushiony new age music that appears on Avalon and Boys and Girls. And these aren't really transitional songs between styles; Manifesto has a murky, plodding tone all its own. Though the title leads you to believe that Ferry has something to say, these songs are generic to the point of abstraction, minimal to the point of opacity. They are all well-crafted, and could be appreciated as straightforward pop songs, as hooky and direct as any Ferry has recorded, but lurking within them is an unsettling undertone. There's a needling irony in Ferry's semi-detached delivery on tracks like "Spin Me Round" and "My Little Girl" that seems to hint that we always are in danger of becoming like those he sings about, or those whose personae he adopts -- the plastic mannequins photographed on the cover in the midst of a party scene redolent of contrived decadence. While it would be easy to mistake the album for a de facto celebration of '70s hedonism, one can't help suspecting it is a bitter condemnation of it, all the more stinging for its obliquity.