Hey, guys, remember that girl in college? The one whose intellect was sometimes intimidating, but sometimes eye-roll-inducing, depending on how far she ventured into cliché? The one you thought about dating, but probably never did, and if you didn’t you figured, well, she’s probably gay anyway?
If you’re buying into my obnoxious stereotype so far – and if you’re part of the distaff sector of the species, I sincerely apologize for it — then you know where this is going. Because if you’re old like me, you sat around with your buddies and called that girl “Janis Ian.” But by the time I got to graduate school in 1990, her name was “Indigo Girl.”
This album is why. And at this point I’ll pull out of the Neanderthal mentality of my opening and state, simply, that Indigo Girls was one of the finest major-label debuts of the ’80s. Its long-term impact is undeniable, not only upon the duo’s career but upon an entire generation of female singer-songwriters who gained a path to popularity on the radio and the concert stage in part because of its success. (more…)
Marking 
Things should have been going swimmingly for The Cult. Their album Electric had succeeded in becoming the biker-rock record they hoped it would be – raw, straight-ahead and helmed by a fledgling production wunderkind named Rick Rubin. It gained some necessary traction in the sales and recognition departments as well, based in part on the single “Love Removal Machine.” By the time the band went on the road, however, the future for the Cult looked grim. By most accounts, the blame fell squarely on the shoulders of frontman Ian Astbury, his hedonism and earth-child eccentricities becoming far too difficult for the rest of the band to absorb. The Japanese leg of the tour was nixed as Astbury’s proclivity toward destroying the instruments every night was becoming too costly to continue.
The Georgia Satellites shot to the top of the charts in the fall of 1986 with “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” a jokey little play on Southern morality that sounded nothing like anything else on the radio at the time. Real drums, no keyboard player, and a sound that wasn’t so much produced as it was simply recorded. With their bad hair, crooked teeth, and dirty clothes, they looked more like beer-swilling rednecks than rock stars; in the age when physical imperfections were beginning to be sanded out of the music business by MTV, the Sats were exceptions to just about every commonly accepted rule of fame. Their debut album, the simply titled Georgia Satellites, was a reminder of what rock & roll was supposed to be: loud, rude, and sloppy. They covered Terry Anderson’s “Battleship Chains,” one of those musician’s favorites that was later recorded by Warren Zevon and The Replacements, among others. They tore the shit out of Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story.” Overall, they channeled their rock heroes (a group that includes the Stones, the Faces, the Beatles, and Jerry Lee Lewis) without simply aping them. What they didn’t do was record another hit single. “Hands to Yourself,” great as it was, pigeonholed the band as something of a novelty act, and they receded from the public eye almost as quickly as they’d entered it. (Thus proving the rock & roll maxim that you can’t yodel in a song and have a long career:unless you have a 
The Material Girl actually had gone sorta quiet in 1988, leaving the pop charts to George Michael and Michael Jackson while she tried her hand at theater in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. Even as her not-too-badly received Broadway run continued from May through December, Madonna went into the studio in the fall with her usual compatriots, Patrick Leonard and Stephen Bray – along with a certain diminutive purple-clad figure with whom she would record one song publicly, and who would contribute to a couple others in secret.