1985 poll: My ballot

why music doesn't suck

ALBUMS

For last year’s poll of 1974, a poor year for rock/soul albums outside the very top, I had little trouble finding great LPs, in particular from Africa but also from South America and jazz. So for this summer’s retro-poll I picked 1985, another year with a weak rep. I might’ve pushed my luck too far. To my ears, it was an off year for many of my usual sources of out-of-the-mainline picks (jazz, Brazil), while the up-and-coming scenes (rap, New Zealand) weren’t making consistent albums yet. The one place that had an unambiguous peak year was Argentina, but I couldn’t quite get Virus and Sumo on to my list. Even sub-Saharan Africa seemed slightly thin outside of an era-defining comp and the inevitable Franco (near-misses: Zani Diabaté, Hailu Mergia, Fela’s Army Arrangement not the Laswell mix please.) Meanwhile, the Christgau-Pazz canon held up fine but short of great, save maybe back-to-basics country and country-adjacent. (Steve Pick has been working through the ’85 Pazz albums list in order, and he didn’t find a true dud until The Dream of the Blue Turtles; I decided to take his word on that one.) So my top twenty ended up including four Various Artists collections, a greatest hits, and a Sixties live recording—not signs of overwhelming strength. Still, looking at my list, if this is what a bad year looks like, that’s why music’s what I do.

Top five were clear and got 25 points each; everything else got 5.

1. The Indestructible Beat of Soweto

2. Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill

3. Kate Bush: Hounds of Love

4. Franco & O.K. Jazz: Mario

Technically these are two different albums led by two versions of “Mario” that differ mostly in the details of their accidentally feminist lyrics, but I made an early executive decision to count them as one entry, concatenating them in the above YouTube playlist. In any case, one (or two) of the best sets of vocal performances by Franco’s troupe (esp. Madilu System), and more 1985-y than Omona Wapi.

5. Willie Nelson & Hank Snow: Brand on My Heart

6. Cecil Taylor Segments II (Orchestra of Two Continents): Winged Serpent

Here’s an album I was nudged towards by Marshall Gu’s estimable top 100 albums of the 1980s list, though it’s hardly unknown in free jazz circles. It’s a rare chance to hear Taylor in a biggish (11-piece) band context; two trumpets, four saxes, and a bassoon make a lot of noise, yet Taylor has no problem cutting through when he feels like it. On “Womb Waters Scent of the Burning Armadillo Shell” (don’t tell me what this means, it can’t be as good as my imagination), the group remembers to have actual dynamics and quietens things down, so that Jimmy Lyons I think can nearly invent “Tom’s Diner”, while Taylor drops some incredible glissando-speed run ultracombos on the title track.

7. Double Dee & Steinski: The Payoff Mix/Lesson 2/Lesson 3

8. Mekons: Fear and Whiskey

9. Sam Cooke: Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963

10. George Strait: Greatest Hits

I’m including it because it’s strait-forward—his first ten singles, from three albums I’ll never listen to—and because it’s clearly better than Something Special (though if this’d had his first fourteen singles through “The Chair”, it’d be at the business end of this list.) Only the early “Down and Out” is a miss; starting with “If You’re Thinking You Want a Stranger”, great performances are more than not (thanks not least to the A-team of Nashville session cats; the fiddle work by the likes of Buddy Spicher and Johnny Gimble is best-in-genre.) Coming home from Marina del Rey or going to Amarillo, Strait evokes past loves of varying durations; whether he keeps indulging or wipes the slate depends on who he runs into when he gets there.

11. The Replacements: Tim

I positively reviewed the Let It Bleed mix a year and a half ago, but was wrong when I said it was “not transformative”. Turns out being able to hear the songs does help a lot! My bad!

12. Steve Reich, Michael Tilson Thomas, Brooklyn Philharmonic: The Desert Music

Another Gu pick, Reich’s setting of poems from William Carlos Williams (including a translation of an Ancient Greek idyll) starts out sounding like a bombastification of Music for 18 Musicians—fuck eighteen, we need a full orchestra with three string sections and a choir. But it soon shows that Reich’s minimalism did develop over the years: there are big tempo shifts, and the slow bits have real tunelets in them. Reich’s notes and the odd air raid siren emphasize the post A-bomb composition of Williams’s poems, yet to me the music strikes a note of survival: we’re still here, for now.

13. Hüsker Dü: New Day Rising

14. Aretha Franklin: Who’s Zoomin’ Who?

15. The Fall: This Nation’s Saving Grace

16. Cheb Khaled: Sidi Boumediene

Again, a YouTube reconstruction I can’t vouch for the fidelity of: four songs, including the title track you might know from Raï Rebels. Worth the effort because it’s the most impressive early Khaled I’ve found. The prize is “Saber Inal” (or “Ynal” or “Yenal”), an epic not in length (at a mere eight minutes, the second-shortest track) but in ambition: a keyboard opens, then Khaled begins a long dialogue with analog and virtual drums, improvising microtonal runs that don’t overshadow the song. TikTok claims the co-vocalist is Chaba Nacera; the next mystery: who’s she?

17. Tuatara: A Flying Nun Compilation

The great Flying Nun acts didn’t start making great LPs until the end of the decade, so at the time this was the best album-length evidence that something special was in the South Island water. The likes of the Chills, the Clean, and the Bats got international attention, but some of the acts who remained domestic concerns are in the same ballpark (that would be Carisbrook, RIP.) Faves include the spooky “Isol”, by Meredith Monk fans Marie and the Atom, and the roadrunnin’ “Needles and Plastic” by the ill-fated DoubleHappys (Shayne Carter and John Collie would see much more success in the Straitjacket Fits.)

18. Fuzz Dance

A Chuck Eddy cause célèbre. Knowing nothing about Italo-Disco (except in its reprocessed by e.g. the Pet Shop Boys form), I found this an ideal intro. The synth sax! The exploding choruses! Whoever Gina and/or the Flexix is wailing that they wanna believe! The novelty of supermarkets that open on Sundays! The secret appears to be remixer Ivan Ivan, who brings the music a crucial quantum closer to New Wave.

19. New Order: Low-Life

20. Rosanne Cash: Rhythm & Romance

SINGLES

Unlike my albums list, which is weak in an absolute sense, these singles are only weak relative to all-time singles year 1984. “I Wonder If You Take Me Home” was battling for number one here until I reluctantly backpassed it (and Barrington Levy’s “Here I Come”) to ’84, where it should settle around number eight. Once it was out of the way, I had a “oh duh, of course that should be number one” moment. The upper echelon of the list is mostly a reshuffling of the last time I did this year, save for “Take on Me” dropping like a testicle once I realized I preferred the otamatone cover.

1. Pet Shop Boys: “West End Girls”

The Stephen Hague version (i.e. the one everyone knows) of course.

2. Tom Waits: “Downtown Train”

3. Wayne Smith: “Under Me Sleng Teng”*

Gave this my extra half-point since I figured the PSBs didn’t need it and nobody besides Rod Stewart agrees that “Downtown Train” is Waits’s greatest song. The most consequential hit of the year has its origins in Casio hiring reggae/Bowie fan Hiroko Okuda to program presets for the MT-40, starting a chain that would drive Jamaican and subsequently most of Caribbean music into the digital era we’re still living in. Amidst all this history, it’s easy to overlook how well put-together “Sleng Teng” is: the repeated riddim, the vocals, and the lyrics work together to create one of the most genially addled moods in pop. No cocaine necessary.

4. Double Dee & Steinski: “The Payoff Mix”

5. Aretha Franklin: “Freeway of Love”

6. Kate Bush: “Running Up That Hill”

7. Netherworld Dancing Toys: “For Today”

Three minutes in, it’s a very good if formulaic song of the era. The late Malcolm Black may appear less like a star than like a small nation’s greatest entertainment lawyer, but he handles the tune well enough, and the full drums coming in with the second chorus is a fine pop moment. Then, rather than one more go-around and a fade out, the drums drop back and someone decides to give rented teenage backing singer Annie Crummer a lead turn. What follows the single greatest minute of singing in New Zealand history: just an uncanny display of controlled melisma that somehow has a modesty about it. That the band then gets to repeat their chorus entry trick is the whipped cream on the pavlova.

8. Commodores: “Nightshift”

9. Mariya Takeuchi: “Plastic Love”

The best thing the YouTube algorithm ever gave us: a song largely forgotten even in Japan, where it had peaked at number 86, was revived and turned out to be as great as the regressions said it was. (This of course does not make up for all the other things the YouTube algorithm gave us.) Takeuchi, who wrote the lyrics, analytically describes the flings she’s had since her one big heartbreak, and producer/husband Tatsuro Yamashita makes falling asleep on the highway at dawn sound oh so sophisticated.

10. Cheech & Chong: “Born in East L.A.”

If you went back to 1985 and told everyone the song from that year that would turn out to be most politically relevant in 2025 was by Cheech Marin, Democrats would probably guess that weed was finally legal and Republicans that the country was a farce. Well, we were partly right. The jokes are barely jokes, but the attitude and the patriotism are funny, and the mariachi understands that Springsteen’s song sounds triumphant better than Bruce did. Finally: what I wouldn’t give for President John Wayne right now.

11. Madonna: “Into the Groove”

12. The Smiths: “How Soon Is Now?”

13. LL Cool J: “I Can’t Live Without My Radio”

14. Tenor Saw: “Ring the Alarm”

Another transitional reggae-to-dancehall hit, this time over the Stalag riddim (it was part of a whole album of the stuff allegedly out in ’84, but everyone appears to date the single release of this to ’85.) Tenor Saw has a pretty subtle attack—listening to the diminuendo of “watch the sound man a tremble, watch the sound man a pray”, it’s like he’s bringing the guy to his knees.

15. Tears for Fears: “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”

16. Cheb Khaled: “Saber Inal”

17. Run-D.M.C.: “King of Rock”

18. Prince & the Revolution: “Raspberry Beret”

19. Roxanne Shante vs. Sparky Dee: “Round 1”

It’s borderline, but this gets single eligibility as an EP title track (and obvious raison d’être.) It starts out with good-natured boasts and accusations of sexuality transmitted infections, and then for no or some reason (possibly Sparky calling her “too damn black”) Roxanne flips a switch and just annihilates poor Sparky—even Kendrick might think the doctor bit harsh. Last I heard Sparky had turned to Christian rap.

20. Falco: “Rock Me Amadeus”

Runners up:

21. Ramones: “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg”

22. Whitney Houston: “How Will I Know”

23. Madonna: “Crazy for You”

24. Doug E. Fresh & the Get Fresh Crew: “The Show”/“La-Di-Da-Di”

25. A-ha: “Take on Me”

26. Felt: “Primitive Painters”

27. Kate Bush: “Cloudbusting”

28. Jean Knight: “My Toot Toot”

29. The Cult: “She Sells Sanctuary”

30. The Waterboys: “The Whole of the Moon”

31. Mai Tai: “History”

32. Bryan Adams: “Summer of ’69”

33. John Cougar Mellencamp: “Small Town”

34. Katrina & the Waves: “Walking on Sunshine”

35. Artists United Against Apartheid: “Sun City”

36. Bruce Springsteen: “I’m on Fire”

37. Prince: “Pop Life”

38. The Replacements: “Bastards of Young”

39. Miami Sound Machine: “Conga!”

40. Emeneya Emerite & le Victoria Eleison: “Kimpiatu”

Full poll results tomorrow!