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.

Growing up in Decatur, Georgia, outside Atlanta, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers were acquaintances in elementary school, musical partners by high school. They gigged regularly in Atlanta during the mid-’80s, and recorded a single, an EP and an LP (Strange Fire) independently before Epic Records scooped them up in an effort to capitalize on the recent success of Tracy Chapman and 10,000 Maniacs. They built their Epic debut around one of Ray’s songs, “Land of Canaan,” that they’d released twice already, and their label unleashed Indigo Girls in February of ’89 with a veritable blitz of publicity that seemed almost unbecoming for a pair of female folkies.

The secret weapon in Epic’s arsenal was one John Michael Stipe, a fellow Georgian who had already proven (with the Maniacs) his ability to help friendly acts gain wide acceptance via his stamp of approval. Stipe talked up Amy and Emily on MTV, in Rolling Stone and elsewhere, and soon enough MTV and VH1 had placed the video for their first single, Saliers’ “Closer to Fine,” in (somewhat) regular rotation.

Considering the Girls’ longstanding stature as gay icons, and the widespread recognition they’ve received for helping make the musical mainstream more gay-friendly, it’s amusing to recall that the earliest hype surrounding them focused on the intellectual quality of their songwriting. Or, from some quarters, intimations of pseudo-intellectualism. Rolling Stone tempered a generally approving review with a note that “because they mean each song to be ‘serious,’ they feel compelled to drop lifeless ‘meaningful’ lines, like ‘Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable’ … that frequently undermine the power of their delivery.” Robert Christgau, who positively hated the album, said their “big declamatory voices convince people to take their verse seriously, which is the only way they want it.”

Yes, there are plenty of cringe-inducing lines across the spectrum of Indigo Girls’ 10 tracks – and yes, the relentless earnestness of Saliers and Ray took some getting used to. But apart from their pleas to “fasten up your earthly burdens” (whatever that means) and their takedown of college life (replete with stereotypes that put my opening gambit to shame), the sound that burst off of Indigo Girls was the blending of their voices. Each is imperfect on its own – Ray’s often seems to lack subtlety, Saliers’ too frequently devolves into a thin rasp – yet when combined they sound a clarion that’s irresistible … particularly when they sail atop the duo’s driving acoustic-guitar settings. (The occasional tin whistle solo and other Irish touches don’t hurt, either – particularly when they’re provided, as on “Closer to Fine” and “Secure Yourself,” by the Hothouse Flowers.)

Christgau didn’t have it wrong on the details – the Girls were hellbent on having their songs taken seriously during their early years – but he certainly had it wrong on the merits. Even the callous listener who could turn a deaf ear to the hootenanny charms of “Closer to Fine” would surely be lured in by the drama of Ray’s “Kid Fears” (where Stipe makes his presence felt), the vocal counterpoint and gripping lyric of Saliers’ “Prince of Darkness,” or the soaring affirmation of “Land of Canaan.”

College kids of the era, in particular, ate this stuff up. No doubt they heard themselves in the music – the earnestness of their own academic efforts, their own ambitions to engage in lives of Deep Thinking. I attended an outdoor gig the Girls performed on the University of Pennsylvania campus in 1991 – one of numerous times I’ve heard them play, in all sorts of settings – and I was amazed by the ease with which songs as complex as “Prince of Darkness” and as downbeat as “Blood and Fire” so captivated a crowd of rowdy college students. Emily and Amy, their distinct personalities ricocheting off one another through their songs and their voices, have always created that kind of connection with their audiences.

Indigo Girls was the first most of us had ever heard from them, but of course there’s been so much more. If you’ve been following them all these years, you no doubt have your favorites – some prefer the expansion of their folkie sound reflected on Rites of Passage and Swamp Ophelia, while others are fans of the rock moves on Shaming of the Sun and All That We Let In. (Personally, I still harbor the same sort of irrational adoration for Nomads Indians Saints – even over their more beloved debut – that I do for R.E.M.’s Reckoning over Murmur.) But this eponymous Epic debut remains, in many ways, the Girls’ quintessential work … not to mention a keystone for the Lilith Fair generation and, no matter what your gender, the source for some definitive (sorry) late-model, singer-songwriter folk-rock.

It’s barely gone September as I write this, but already in the place where I live the nights are growing cold. The sun, which all summer long took its sweet time to slide away behind the hills at the close of day, drops now like a quarter into a jukebox. Autumn is not here yet, but it’s close enough that it’s time to think about taking the boots and the barn coat out of storage. It’s time to think about building some cold frames and covering the garden. It’s time again to play Acadie.

Marking Daniel Lanois’s recorded debut as a singer-songwriter after serving production duties on some of the biggest records of the ’80s, Acadie was largely unencumbered with the weight of expectation. Oh, it was a given that the thing would sound great, would be charged with the same blend of ethereal atmosphere and smoky groove that characterized Lanois’s work with U2, the Neville Brothers, Robbie Robertson, Peter Gabriel, and Bob Dylan — projects that saw Lanois becoming, in effect, a member of the band. But as anyone who ever paid full price for a Davitt Sigerson album will tell you, it’s no good being the name above the title if you haven’t got the songs to back it up. And it’s the songs that make Acadie such an endearing (and enduring) record.

As a songwriter, Lanois forgoes both the anthemnal gestures of U2 and the carnival funk of the Neville Brothers, pitching Acadie to a very human scale. Listen to “O Marie”(download) — just two close-miked acoustic guitars, plenty of natural room sound, and a soft, sleepy baritone; that’s all there is to it — but it manages to sound massive and intimate all at once, a universal hard-luck story made fresh and specific by the language and the details.

Thopse images recur throughout the album — of working-class French-Canadians, economically displaced, eking it out in the city while pining for the beloved countryside now lost to them, the “Arcadia” of the title. Migration, yearning, loss; the passing of time, keenly felt. This is what autumn is all about.

Acadie has a large roster of guest musicians, and Lanois deploys them discreetly, in service to the songs, giving each a distinctive sonic character while sustaining the overall mood. “Still Water” (download) features U2’s rhythm section at their most understated and lyrical, and subtle, almost subliminal keyboards from Brian Eno. Aaron Neville’s unmistakable voice comes in as a counterpoint on a spacey, album-closing version of “Amazing Grace,” brimming with stately melancholy; but he sounds a celebratory note, as well, on “The Maker” (download), which turns a New Orleans groove inside out and reassembles it into a plaintive modern hymn.

Then there is Lanois’s own voice; not just his singing — so conversational, so present, slipping freely between English and Quebecois French within a single line, with the shifting of a thought — but the voice of his lyrics. The words are plain, but there’s an air of mystery, like we’re hearing only snatches of a long ongoing conversation. He never overreaches, but the images are full of emotion. Lanois always resists the urge to tell us too much. It’s oddly reminiscent of John Cale’s writing circa Paris 1919 — he implies a wide screen, but gives us only sketchy corners of the picture.

And it keeps me coming back, year after year, when I need a jacket in the morning and a walk with the dog leaves my shoes soaked and chilly. If a strange vignette like “Silium’s Hill” or “St. Ann’s Gold”(download) moves me, leaves me spooked or wistful or exalted, maybe I couldn’t tell you why. Or maybe it’s the same feeling I get when I see a flock of geese, their V-shape tangled in the turning of their course, cutting some cryptic rune across a cold and brilliant sky. It’s the feeling that signals are going out somewhere, for those who can hear them; a time for goodbyes, for journeys and the shifting o0f the seasons, when home is a memory of lighted windows and soup on the stove, a fire in the hearth and a gentle voice and a naïve melody in a corner of the kitchen, murmuring low, just there, at the edge of hearing. (Note: Lanois has reissued Acadie under his own Red Floor Records imprint, adding six new tracks and a 32-page booklet of “photographs and new inscriptions.” Order it here. –Ed.)

Sometimes it’s hard to reach into the dark, dank, spiderweb-glazed swamp of memory and grab something from 20 years ago, but this much I remember: In the 1970s through the early 1990s a few select artists like Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Def Leppard, Madonna, Metallica, and yes, Journey, could inspire such rabid devotion in rock fans that they’d flock to stores holding special midnight openings to sell a new record the first minute it was allowed.

Today, the music-biz is so fragmented, rock radio is so weakened, and leaked MP3s/digital streams make the concept of a “formal record release” a notion antiquated as the corset — or at least Valley Girl talk. People buy CDs not for the tactile experience but as a backup hardcopy. Hard to imagine staying up for a midnight record-release party for that.

While Popdose commenters might have their own recollections of when this particular Event-with-a-capital-E stuff died, my official day is March 31, 1992, the day Bruce Springsteen’s Human Touch and Lucky Town CDs hit stores. As a reporter for an indie record-store trade tab, ’twas my job to call a dozen stores and get the vibe for the turnout. While traffic was fairly steady during the first full day of release, store owners said, the midnight openings were lightly attended, and didn’t pay off for store owners.

Right below that top tier of 1980s “Event” artists was a fistful of all-stars who might not be worth camping out for, but we’d make time to get to a record store the day a new CD came out — or the next day, at the latest — so that we could rip it open, play it, and dig it.

John “Johnny Cougar” Mellencamp was one of those. 1989’s Big Daddy was the last in a string of five albums in which he dominated the charts. His success had come after he shed the pretty-boy rock star image shaped by his early manager Tony DeFries, followed his muse, and morphed into a midwestern poor-man’s Dylan. Once comfortable in his own skin, Mellencamp wrote lyrical themes and stories that hit home, served on a bed of tasty power chords with a side order of Kenny Aronoff’s never-too-intrusive precision drumming.

While some rock-ologists give much (deserved) credit to Uncle Tupelo and the Cowboy Junkies for advancing the alt-country movement in and around 1990, it could be argued that Mellencamp’s 1980s output at least provided some inspiration for it, with its folky leanings, featured fiddles and dobro, and its social conscience that stuck out — in the Reagan era, at least — like a milk bucket under a bull. The guy started Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and Neil Young in 1985, an annual event that’s bagged $33 million for family farmers to date.Big Daddy signaled a change in Mellencamp’s relationship with the charts, and with the record industry: It was less rockin’, more acoustic. The first single, “Pop Singer,” bit the hand that fed him. In it, he makes it official that he never wanted to be no pop singer. It wasn’t just the song; Mellencamp bucked the biz by electing to stay back home in Indiana to concentrate on painting and his liberal politics for a couple years.

While earlier albums might have had some serious protest songs, they also celebrated rock and youth and life — think “Jack and Diane,” “Play Guitar,” and “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to ’60s Rock)” — Big Daddy didn’t have none of that, save a rockin’ cover of the Hombres’ 1967 garage-rock classic “Let It All Hang Out” (download), unlisted on the original release. It was almost as if Mellencamp didn’t want to crack a smile, like some sort of corn-fed Indiana version of a stone-faced Buckingham Palace Royal Guard.

Still, the album featured some high points:

“Jackie Brown” does a great job of forcing us to walk in someone’s poverty-stricken shoes. If you’re not a total navel-gazing, greedy neocon boor, you can’t help but to look at the people around you differently after hearing this cut and start thinking about what you can do to be a better citizen and help out. We all know Jackie Brown types, and this is a game-changer if you have any conscience whatsoever. The video probably didn’t help sell many records, because it juxtaposed mostly Mellencamp and his fam with some parallel Jackie Brown family — we understand the concept — but comes off as a lot warmer and nicer than the song itself, in effect a non sequitir at odds with the message of the composition.

Other songs, like “Country Gentleman” and “J.M.’s Question” are subtle-as-a-churning-combine political diatribes that, whether you’re a chowdahead from the heart of Boston or a midwestern hayseed — like Larry Bird, the Hick from French Lick (Indiana) — you’ll nod your head in agreement. Unless of course, you align yourself with those who call our mostly centrist president things like “Muslim socialist.” In that case, you’ve probably participated in Mellencamp CD burnings outside your town library, so as to protect the children, and don’t particularly appreciate a jeans-and-T-shirt-clad rocker telling you how to live your life.

The seriousness of Big Daddy was a letdown for a lot of fans. Mellencamp did what his heart led him to, and during the Big Daddy era he went through an acrimonious divorce, which probably influenced his artistic output. Following his muse probably gained him more respect among his peers and in the rock pantheon, overall, but it was at this point the masses broke with Mellencamp.

Sure, there have been some hits and high points since — 1994’s “Wild Night” and 2007’s “Our Country” come to mind for radio songs we heard a lot of, and you just can’t leave out the title song of Cuttin’ Heads, with its awesome Chuck D rap — but for the most part Mellencamp’s flown under the radar since, at least commercially, compared to his ’80s heyday. On the road he’s done some cool things to keep it interesting, like playing with John Fogerty and Donovan on 2005’s Words and Music tour, in which Donovan played a set within Mellencamp’s, using his band. But Big Daddy was where Mellencamp started coming down the other side of the rock-star mountain, no doubt.

Big Daddy was listed as a John Cougar Mellencamp album, the last to carry the “Cougar” name. While anyone who’s followed the artist can understand how and why he evolved his stage name from Johnny Cougar to John Mellencamp — Tony DeFries was a mixed bag as a manager, as Stardust, the raunchy bio of original DeFries client David Bowie attests — it seems that a lot of the fun and joie de vivre that made him so appealing left the building along with the Cougar name. Big Daddy is a gorgeous, crisp, well-produced album that to this day sounds fantastic, but it’s one you’ve got to get up for playing — because it’s something of a downer. An abrasive one, at times.

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.

That they returned in 1989 with the album Sonic Temple is, then, some sort of miracle. That they were able to wrest some noteworthy rock anthems from the process is even more remarkable. Longtime bassist Jamie Stewart recorded on the album, but quit the band not long after completion. Guitarist Billy Duffy, having been stripped of his guitar pedals and sonic tricks by Rick Rubin, was relieved not only to have Sonic Temple’s producer Bob Rock reinstate the pedals, but add string sections, walls of reverb and Iggy Pop, essentially undoing all the retrofitting Rubin placed on the band previously.

And Ian Astbury? Well, this is the man who would be Jim Morrison’s successor, so certain things remain consistent in his ouevre. The shamanistic posturing, the biker-bar swagger, his ability to pad a short and sweet lyric with nonsensical ad-libs and attaching a “baybeh” to almost any sentiment: they’re all on the album, but don’t knock it, because for the most part, it works. The reason it works is because when added to the hard-rock kick that most of the songs possess, the two halves become a whole that logic can’t divide. For instance, the big single of the album, “Fire Woman,” is not so far removed from AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Astbury doesn’t really need to go into deep, psychological detail about why his junk is on fire. It just is; she’s just turning him on, and that’s all there needs to be said. Does that diminish the song in any way? Not really because, after all, this is prime stripper-approved rock ‘n’ roll, itself only a euphemism for mattress endurance testing.

The big problem with the album is that it runs out of steam halfway. Side one has the hot hits with “Sun King,” “Fire Woman” and possibly the best thing the band ever did, the tribute to Edie Sedgwick “Edie (Ciao Baby),” while side two has the primo ass-kicker “Soul Asylum.” That’s the first song on side two, though, and the rest of the album never gets back up to speed. You can argue that “Soul Asylum” is just that strong a track, and it is. It’s a thrilling chunk of thudding, powerful hard rock and gives Astbury what he needs the most: a wide canvas with which to strut, swoon and harmonize upon. The chorus of “Before the night is through, grant me one last wish, sweet soul asylum, an everlasting kiss” sounds almost epic with the volume up, as does the way he sings it. Where Rubin’s less-is-more approach freed up the band’s Steppenwolf tendencies, so does Rock’s more-is-more style blast these tracks from left to right and all points in between.

The next song, “New York City,” is the track featuring Iggy Pop and should have been a slam dunk. Instead, it’s repetitive and Pop’s involvement hardly seems worth the effort. Sure, “New York City” isn’t that far away from the structure of The Stooges but, in 1989, Pop was lightyears away from his former band, having already covered “Wild One” as a synth-popified “Real Wild Child” and continued to reinsert himself into the zeitgeist as something other than the shirtless punk. For the Cult, the rest of the record just sort of hangs there, unable to get it up the way the first section could.

No tears for Sonic Temple, though. In the intervening 20 years, “Fire Woman” and “Edie (Ciao Baby)” have become rock radio staples and the album itself has risen above Love and Electric as the most recognizable example of who the Cult were. It’s a level they haven’t been able to attain again, thanks in part to a succession of make-ups, break-ups and the weightiness of the ’90s grunge movement. They tried, as some of their ’90s output put on the airs of the distressed and emotive, yet never sounded authentic. At that moment, when Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder sang about pain, you went for the ride, whereas those sentiments coming from the shamanistic earth-child rang hollow. Worse for the band, hip-hop was co-opting hard rock’s swagger and bravado, misogyny and myth-crafting. The Notorious B.I.G. would create his persona in a parallel world to Astbury’s, yet the two were as far as polar opposites could be, and no, the Cult were not pliable enough to suddenly shift to booty-shaking club bangers.

But we’ll always have Sonic Temple nonetheless.

It was supposed to be a stopgap, a way to mark time between real records — a soundtrack project released ten months too late to support the movie (in this case, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ), its 22 wordless tracks of largely nonwestern rhythms and scales had zero chance for radio play. As a follow-up to the commercial juggernaut that was So, it was a disappointment. But in the arc of Peter Gabriel’s career, Passion is a high point and a milestone.

Gabriel’s previous soundtrack effort, Birdy, was more of a remix record, consisting mostly of reworkings of previously-released material. Passion, though, was all-new in a number of ways. It marked Gabriel’s first full-on foray into world music. Where African and Brazilian rhythms had underpinned much of his previous solo work, he had previously combined them with classic pop structures. Passion announces its break from this approach with the opening track, “The Feeling Begins.” An Armenian doudouk, playing a traditional lament, is answered by L. Shankar’s Indian violin; the conversation simmers until it explodes in a flurry of North African rhythms, punctuated by roaring rock guitar.

Too much so-called “world music” cops only the exotic surfaces, forcing them into tried-and-true pop contexts: Scottish fiddles with drum machines, Senegalese vocals with drum machines , Gypsy guitars with drum machines … you get the idea. But by building their compositions from the ground up with elements from different traditions, Gabriel and his collaborators create something entirely new — a world music that is truly global, partaking of many musics but ultimately tied to no single source. Passion paved the way for later experiments in the same vein by hybrid artists like Afro Celt Sound System and the late Hector Zazou.

Speaking of Afro Celt Sound System: Not so incidentally, they recorded for Gabriel’s label Real World Records, which he founded to provide mainstream distribution for nonwestern and traditional music. Real World has become one of the most important labels in world music circles, and Passion — the first disc released under the imprint — introduced the label’s distinctive graphic design, the now-familiar trade dress that unifies its diverse releases, as well as its unique aesthetic, simultaneously tradition-grounded and forward-looking. If only as a coming-out party for Real World, Passion is an enormously important record, using Gabriel’s artistic cachet to force the critical community to take world music seriously. (Radio, as always, was a different story.)

On wholly atmospheric pieces like “Zaar,” Gabriel brings his compositional method to its apex. The layers of loops rise and recede, a studio creation evolving as organically as any jam session, unfolding like a flower in a time-lapse film.

Gabriel had a lingering reputation for making music that was cold and cerebral. Whether that rep was deserved or not — and I would argue that it wasn’t — Passion achieves moments of tremendous emotional power, especially in the use of voices. There are no intelligible lyrics, but the disc is shot through with wails, wordlike chants, and gut-deep screams. The title track juxtaposes radically different vocal styles to devastating effect. In the film, it soundtracks the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus. Against Jon Hassell’s mournful trumpet we hear the moans of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; before his death in 1997, Khan was the most renowned Pakistani qawwal, or devotional singer, of the 20th Century, and Passion was for many Western listeners a first exposure to his enormous voice. He was legendary in the Islamic world for his explosive singing style and for the ecstatic quality of his performances, but Gabriel casts him against type here to give voice to the tormented Jesus, in a performance that builds from murmurs to cries. In the depths of despair, Khan’s anguish is answered by the pure tones of a choirboy — soothing, but also remote — and by the restless flutterings of Youssou N’Dour’s high tenor. It’s tempting to read the different vocal lines of “Passion” symbolically, as representing the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, or the global spread of Christianity, or the differing strains of post-Judaic monotheism; but whatever the schema behind the choices, it’s a brilliant, harrowing piece of work.

Nestled among the semi-improvised studio experiments is one of Gabriel’s most flat-out beautiful pieces, “With This Love,” present in both instrumental and choral versions. After years of working in rhythm-based compositional methods, it’s almost shocking o hear Gabriel operating in something close to classical mode. It ain’t Bach, surely — but it speaks of the sacred in a language that Bach would recognize.

Those who listened to Passion knew they were hearing something extraordinary. But at the time, it was not the record we had been waiting for. We were all eager for new pop music from Peter Gabriel, for a follow-up to So, and Passion’s compositional innovations and bold aesthetic seemed important mainly inasmuch as they hinted at the sound of the next record. But when Us finally emerged 1992, after six years in the making, it proved a critical disappointment. The blend of influences, so intoxicating on Passion, already seems mannered, and the layered percussion loops threaten to swamp the pop structures, rather than support them. Although he’s made some interesting music in the years since, and remains an influential figure, Gabriel has never fully recaptured either the artistic or commercial momentum of his late-80s heyday; his pop hooks have never again been quite as sharp, and his subsequent soundtrack and world-music experiments have lacked both the freshness of Passion and its ability to startle.

In retrospect, it’s easy to recognize Passion as a highlight of his catalog, the culmination and summation of his work. The sound of Passion is the sound of Peter Gabriel in all of his various roles — musician, producer, enthusiast, craftsman, improviser, collaborator, impresario, enabler, catalyst — inhabiting all of them fully, all simultaneously, all in perfect balance, all with their energies directed towards a project of tremendous worth and importance. I have no idea of his religious proclivities, if any — but whatever else he may be, Peter Gabriel is a devotee of the Church of Music, and Passion crackles with the energy of devotion.

I was living in Hong Kong when Cosmic Thing was released on these shores, June 27, 1989, to be exact. I bought a lot of CDs there (and laserdiscs, if anyone still remembers those), but lacked guidance. Britpop was the local flavor of the former Crown Colony’s few critics, and reviews weren’t easy to access from abroad back then, as U.S. magazines like Rolling Stone took two months to cross the Pacific and cost a pretty penny to obtain. I had an undisciplined collection. Thanks to my friends I caught the XTC bug, hard; that was the foundation of my taste for my expat years. Left to my own devices, though, I floundered. Did I really buy Aretha Franklin’s Through the Storm? Yes.

So I was untutored in Cosmic Thing. The B-52’s I knew from “Rock Lobster,” which, if you were of a certain age, you drank warm beer to, then maybe broke out with feebly spasmodic, avant-garde-ish “dance” moves at college as it went on. I didn’t hear the rapture that greeted their fifth album’s release, as I sifted through unsold piles of Millie Jackson’s Back to the Shit and Pia Zadora’s Pia Z. at the maze-like CD and knockoff computer emporium near my office. (Nor, for that matter, did I hear the noise surrounding that month’s Hollywood blockbuster, Batman. It didn’t open in Hong Kong till Chinese New Year, eight months later. But of course I bought the Prince songtrack right away—you know, the one the guys in Shaun of the Dead throw at a zombie to pierce its skull, after rejecting other, better Prince albums as projectiles.)

I didn’t catch up with Cosmic Thing until October 1989, when I took my first trip to Bangkok. I bought my Walkman (cassette tape variety) and needed something to play on it, so off I went to Patpong, the city’s notorious red-light district, which is fronted by dozens of hawker stands selling everything under the sun. Now, there were more, umm, enticing things to buy, or at least rent, in Patpong. But for about a quarter I picked up a tape of Cosmic Thing, and so, among the fleshpots, began a real relationship that has lasted two decades.

If XTC was the soul of my Hong Kong experience, then Cosmic Thing was its heart. It was love at first lyric—Fred Schneider’s exhorting you to “Gyrate it till you had your fill/Just like a pneumatic drill” commands you to have fun with your ears wide open, and sets a tone that never lets up. (It’s the joyous sound of a group rediscovering itself, following a period of paralysis after the death of guitarist Ricky Wilson in 1985.) In the downloadable world I rarely buy whole albums anymore, but I wouldn’t part with a single song on Cosmic Thing, which even at its most languorous maintains a brisk pace. I can listen to it all year round, but it’s a perfect summer album, with songs that take off like theme park rides, and others that are like waking up at 11am on a vacation Tuesday morning. I’ve never, to quote “Deadbeat Club,” danced in a garden in torn sheets in the rain. I feel I have, though. And it feels good.

The song that really hooked me, though, was “Roam.” If 20 people write about music here at Popdose, then I’m about No. 25 when it comes to knowledge. So I was pleased when “Roam,” my suggestion, made it onto our recent road trip mixtape. It’s a song with special resonance for me. There I was, in Thailand, on my own, alone—a liberating but also isolating feeling. Yet I was living the very song I was listening to, as if it had been written just for me at that very moment in my life. Everyone has a musical epiphany, and this, with Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson’s shimmery vocals as transport, was mine. And I swear to you, at the instant “Around the world/The trip begins with a kiss” played, a hooker walked up to me and said, “My pussy takes Visa card for you.” Alas, no “Love Shack” for me: I only had Amex, but my night in Patpong was made.

The B-52’s next album, Good Stuff, appeared in 1992, when I was living in San Jose, CA. It didn’t make it to my next and thus far last move eastward, at the end of 1993, and was dropped off somewhere on the road, along with Aretha’s dud and other Hong Kong-era musical mistakes I had made. It’s not that there wasn’t enough good stuff on it (though consensus was there wasn’t); it’s just that it wasn’t Cosmic Thing.

The group pops up here and there on my cultural radar, notably in The Flintstones movie, as “The BC-52’s.” Today the B-52’s are no longer the B-52’s; they’re the B-52s. They record music like Stanley Kubrick made movies, with Funplex showing up in 2008—a millennium after its predecessor. I haven’t heard it. The B-52’s, as they’ll always “B” to me, had a time and a place in my life, and my eternal gratitude for Cosmic Thing, an album that remains a favorite traveling companion.

Let’s get a couple things straight: Terence Trent Howard, a.k.a Terence Trent D’Arby, a.k.a. his latest name–which came to him in a dream–Sananda Francesco Maitreya, is a certifiable nut. He also doesn’t seem to have someone in his entourage who can reel in his nutty musical impulses, which leads to peculiar interludes, asides, giggling, and soliloquies in his recordings. He likes making weird concept albums, rock-opera things that sound like what might happen if Wilson Pickett were fronting Styx.

Yet his voice is beautiful, powerful, and rough. His grasp of soul singing is extraordinary; he can effortlessly flit from gospel to jazz to hard funk to pop to Memphis-style soul shouting, and even pull off late-’60s psychedelic soul, which was pretty weird to begin with but yet he makes it sound cool. He’s kind of like Prince, except more flawed in a Sun Ra kind of loony way (both D’Arby and Ra had issues with U.S. Army service, so they have that in common).

But anyone who rips Sananda Terence Trent Howard Francesco D’Arby Maitreya for being unoriginal because he comes too close to Prince at times also must contend with the counter-argument that both based their acts a little too closely on James Brown’s. In my world, that’s a virtue. As for the concept albums, well, at least he’s got a composing, arranging, and production game plan and sticks to it, and isn’t dashing off a bunch of featherweight singles in hopes that some remix genius will turn them into radio hits.

With that out of the way, we move to 1989: A couple years after his debut album Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby went platinum in its first three days of release amid some kind of hype tidal wave reminiscent of KISS albums in the late 1970s (it’s sold 12 million and counting), he followed it up with an insane left-turn of a record, Neither Fish Nor Flesh: A Soundtrack of Love, Faith, Hope & Destruction. It sold a couple million copies before the confused music-buying public checked out of the cult of D’Arby in droves.

Truth be told, D’Arby’s artistic vision of love, faith, hope, and destruction was a bit too much to process back then. Looking back over the decades, however, it contained some pretty hot stuff, some of which stands up to time a lot better than the crap the public actually did buy in larger quantities back in the day, such as Milli Vanilli. Exhibit 1: “This Side of Love,” one of the best cuts on any of his records.

He approaches Prince’s funky-preachy-James-Brown-heh! best in “You Will Pay Tomorrow,” and does a fantastic Curtis Mayfield thing in “I’ll Be Alright”. How can you not like this stuff?

And you can’t forget the song “Billy Don’t Fall”–and its video–which probably alienated a lot of strait-laced, uptight folks. God bless him for teaching tolerance for our gay friends and fighting the good fight. D’Arby might have lost some record sales with that one, but the more I learn about the ways of the world over time, the more he earns my respect for having done it.

If you missed Fish/Flesh, it’s understandable. A lot of people did, despite Rolling Stone’s spot-on perfect evaluation of this eccentric little record, which is probably the first and last time that ever happened in that mag. Four stars, yet cataloging its faults well.

The good thing? This record is available everywhere fine used CDs are sold in stores and online. I had a choice of a dozen at my favorite disc-swap site, so I didn’t pay a dime for it myself. Even at this late date he’s worth checking out; the guy’s a great soul singer, period.

Manchester boasts arguably the most fertile British rock soil, having birthed a million bands from John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers to 10cc to the Buzzcocks and the Smiths. In my lifetime, the scene was never hotter than in the mid-to-late 1980s, when it was dubbed “Madchester” and gave rise to a bunch of bands that all quickly came and went. One of the first, and the hottest, was the Stone Roses, whose self-titled debut hit American shores in 1989.

Not a lot of Americans hipped themselves to The Stone Roses, which is a shame, because it contained some rockin’, melodic tuneage that provided an antidote to the synth-y tripe, hair-metal power ballads, and teenybopper nymphs like Tiffany and Debbie Gibson polluting the charts at the time. These guys shut up and played their funky guitar lines that took their cues straight from James Brown and Parliament as much as they did their 1960s English pop forebears.

As both a music fan and a critical listener, I’m not one to be swept away by fads or the popular-at-the-moment stuff. I either like it or I don’t, and I don’t need New Musical Express fawning and gushing over the Roses as if Reni, Mani, John Squire and Ian Brown were the second coming of John, Paul, George, and Ringo to determine whether or not they’re cool. Despite the constant promotion of the Madchester scene by the likes of NME and my pal/musical muse Bryan, I didn’t really dig the scene that much. It sounded like every song was just another remix of “Funky Drummer,” some more cleverly disguised than others. Which pretty much echoed half the dance mixes going on stateside, too.

That being said, NME was partly right: These Stone Roses guys were something different. Maybe not Beatles good, but pretty innovative and energetic and one in mission, playing together. The arrangements were sometimes artfully complex: Check out the slow build of “Waterfall,” its bassline mimicking water cascading over rocks. Or the elegant pop of “(Song for My) Sugar Spun Sister,” which also takes its time getting to the hook yet comes in at an economical 3:27. Listening to the record in iTunes, I see how “Bye Bye Badman” and the epic, Stairway-to-Heaven-long closing track “I Am the Resurrection” take even longer to get to the point, but oddly I’ve never noticed. They’ve always seemed, just, perfect as played.

Fans hung with the Stone Roses’ sometimes complicated songs because the hooks would always come, sooner or later, and they were always worth the wait. My personal favorite, “She Bangs the Drums,” gets to the hook right off. The album’s material was all killer, no filler, and referenced painter Jackson Pollock as an inspiration in its lyrics and album cover to boot. No wonder the American record-buying public passed on The Stone Roses.

As for me, I was smitten. I put Bryan, who was a graphic design student, on to the project of painting my jacket like the cover (”Can’t be hard, right, buddy? Just splatter some paint and throw down some letters!”) He’d just come off the smashing success of painting an arm-in-arm punk Bert & Ernie (decked out in lots and lots of spikes, with big goofy grins) on the back panel of his leather biker jacket.

He did the best he could on mine, with acrylics and some other stuff. Painting that lemon slice would prove to be a bear, but what did I know? Word people think painting’s pretty simple. The jacket turned out great. Wearing it  instantly made me–on the entertainment staff for the newspaper catering to the 15,000-student campus–one of the coolest, most recognizeable dudes around, if you weren’t counting those dudes who could dunk basketballs. No one knew who The Stone Roses were, or where I got that jacket!

About that time, The Stone Roses went to war with its label, Silvertone, and took years to follow up its debut with Second Coming on Geffen, a muddled affair that neither measured up to the debut nor stood on its own–which it needed to, because by then most of the other Madchester bands had dissipated into the smoggy industrial rubble of the city. There was no scene left. Soon after, The Stone Roses’ inevitable breakup left a vacuum in British rock royalty into which Oasis stepped, dropping some catchy tunes of their own along the way.

Twenty years on, NME still pipes off embarrassingly about how the Roses were equals to the Beatles, breathlessly covering every weak rumor of a reunion. There’s a super-deluxe retrospective box on its way late this summer celebrating that myth. It includes everything Roses that money can buy, including an over-the-top thumb drive of artwork.

For this critic’s money, looking back with crystal-clear, 20-20 hindsight, the Charlatans U.K. turned out to be the most stable, substantive, and enduring of the Madchester acts. Their songs best stand the test of time; I still play their many records today, including the less well-known but much more satisfying 1990s output. Happy Mondays had the hands-down best hit with “Step On” and its catchy “Ya twistin’ my melon, man!” line. Clint Boon and the Inspiral Carpets had the sound most authentic and loyal to the 1960s Britpop invaders.

But it was the Stone Roses who were my first love. Put on “She Bangs the Drums,” and I can literally smell my college’s green again. I start fumbling around for an unfiltered Camel, even though I haven’t carried a pack regularly since my early 20s. Few records enrapture me once, let alone every time they’re played over a two-decade span. Like most of us, I’m just too fickle, jaded, and have too short of an attention span to be captivated by a single pop record. The Stone Roses did—and continues to.

And whatever became of Bryan? We’ve maintained our friendship, and stood up at each other’s weddings. The jacket’s still with me, at least in spirit. At some point I picked up a seam-ripper and disassembled it. Too many nights in clubs and engaging in other nefarious enterprises had frayed its stone-washed sleeves and—despite repeated handwashings and sun-bleachings—the thing downright reeked. So the sleeves and collar and waist went in the trash, and I saved the back panel featuring Bryan’s artwork and mounted it in a shadow box. It hangs on my office wall, on and off. Right now, it’s in the attic, and that’s where I photographed it for this essay, among the spider webs and insulation. Old Bryan did a fine job, didn’t he, for 3-4 hours’ work with just a little tracing-paper sketch and laser print type to guide his paint-dipped brush?

It’s been forever and a day since I felt like this
I want a fifth of Wild Turkey and one little kiss
And I don’t miss that girl; if I did, I wouldn’t let it show
I might go to the moon, might wind up dead
Wake up in morning in a stranger’s bed
Well, I’m not concerned with any of that no more — “Six Years Gone” (download)

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 fabulous rack.)

Like a dream that’s fading you can’t catch when it’s gone
Like a perfect night that’s broken by dawn
Like everything you wanted out of reach from now on
Six out of seven still leaves you one shy
You can look to forever and never know why
And it’s time, it’s time, and the bottle just ran dry — “Days Gone By” (download)

The band’s second album, 1988’s Open All Night, basically upheld the old saw that says a band gets its whole life to work on the first album, and two weeks to work on the follow-up. The band toured the world behind Georgia Satellites, and their label wanted a new release in a hurry. Hence this muddled affair, which suffered from cover artwork that was confusingly similar to the first album, not to mention Jeff Glixman’s flat production. When I interviewed him in 1992, singer/guitarist Dan Baird told me he would “take that one back if I could” — he hadn’t been altogether pleased with Glixman’s work on the first album, and wanted to try someone new, but was overruled by the label and the rest of the band. The best song on Open All Night is a barnstorming cover of “Don’t Pass Me By,” a middling Ringo Starr contribution to the Beatles’ White Album. As the Satellites’ commercial fortunes declined, dissension in the ranks grew. Elektra clearly had no idea how to market the band, and there was little room on the radio dial for twelve-bar blues. It was make-or-break time.

I would ride bareback on a six-foot monkey
Do it with grace and style
Just to get your attention
Baby, just to see you smile
Well, I’d wave every flag you put in my hand
If you was in Baghdad
I’d cross the Arab sand
Oscar Wilde and Rimbaud
Would have changed their minds if they
Knew what I know — “Crazy”

For the Georgia Satellites’ third album, Baird got his new producer in the form of Joe Hardy, a traditionalist whose previous production credits included albums by ZZ Top and Steve Earle. The band convened in Memphis’ historic Ardent Studios, home to classic recordings by artists such as Leon Russell, Al Green, and Alex Chilton; there, with the aid of erstwhile Faces (and sometime Stones) keyboardist Ian McLagan, they got down to the business of recording what would be their best (and final) album, In the Land of Salvation and Sin. At fourteen songs, Salvation manages to be at once sprawling and compact, drawing on rock & roll touchstones without resorting to slavish imitation. From the first seconds of the album’s opener, “I Dunno” (download), and its barreling barroom piano, the band’s intention is clear: to, as Baird spits out, “rock your ass, bash your skull.”

Salvation upholds another fine rock tradition: the Divorce Album. The dissolution of Baird’s marriage is writ large across the entire album—from the bitter resignation of “All Over But the Cryin’” to the drunken rage of “Bottle O’ Tears” to the exhilaration and terror of “Dan Takes Five,” Baird’s heartbreak, however tragically, gives the music added weight and heft. It’s here that the band crosses over from skilled two-tone homage to a three-dimensional, Technicolor extension of the roots of rock & roll. They no longer resemble a band trying to sound like the Faces—they sound like the Faces, or early ’70s Stones, somehow recording an album in 1989. “Another Chance,” in particular, draws on these influences, echoing shades of the Faces classic “Ooh La La.” On “Shake That Thing” (download), a fond look back at a stripper, Baird and Rick Richards evoke the winking leer of Exile on Main Street-era Stones.

Well I’m flyin through Dothan with the radio
Taylor’s Ole Time Opry’s playin’ Hank Snow
He sings my nightmares in his song
I say, “I’m with ya, man, I’m just movin on”
Look out baby, your wish came true
You got your freedom, the house, and the whole canoe
I got the things that I need
I took the car, my pride, and three pairs of jeans

In the Land of Salvation and Sin captures the peak powers of a band making music for all the right reasons. Even at 14 songs, there is no filler; even as rough around the edges as these performances are, there are no wasted notes. It’s a true rock classic, unjustly consigned to the cut-out bin mere months after its release. It killed the band, in a way — having done the best they could do, and reaped so little in return, they managed to record only a few songs for the soundtrack of a movie that was never released before, as Baird put it, “I looked at myself in the mirror one morning and said “You’re fired.’” Baird’s subsequent releases, both on his own and with the Yayhoos, have been solid and entertaining. But they haven’t approached Salvation, either in terms of overall songwriting quality or sheer rock & roll joy.

Love her or hate her, Madonna defined popular music – screw that, she defined popular culture – like no one else during the 1980s. Her 16 straight Top-5 singles (from “Lucky Star” to “Cherish”) are unmatched by any act in history; her clothing choices defined tween fashion for much of the decade; and her penchant for simultaneously generating controversy and commerce has served as a template for spotlight-hogging celebs ever since. And let’s not get started on her film career …

Anyway, with her last album of the decade Madonna took it all to a new level, and cemented her status as the biggest star of the ’80s. After all, how many artists can piss off Pepsi and the pope in one fell swoop?

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.

The early buzz around the making of Like a Prayer was overshadowed during late 1988 and early ‘89 by a cultural controversy that had been brewing – make that bubbling – for a few years. The nation’s leading soft-drink companies had made pop stars an important part of their competition for market share, a development that (figuratively speaking) set many rock purists’ hair on fire. They accused artists like Michael, Whitney Houston and Jackson (whose hair had proved quite literally flammable) of selling out the music in pursuit of the almighty dollar; they howled once more when Madonna was given the then-enormous sum of $5 million to debut the “Like a Prayer” single in a commercial for Pepsi, which also bought sponsorship rights to her 1990 tour.

Knowing it had scored a huge coup in the Cola Wars, Pepsi even saw fit to preview the ad during the Grammy telecast:

A week later, the two-minute “Like a Prayer” ad aired in 40 countries – and in the U.S. during The Cosby Show:

That was March 2. On March 3, MTV debuted the “Like a Prayer” video, directed by Mary Lambert, which featured … well, if you’re reading this column and you don’t already know what’s in that clip, I can only congratulate you for emerging from under that rock and suggest you click on the window below.

The outrage generated by the “Like a Prayer” video extended from the usual American suspects, like Jerry Falwell and the American Family Association, all the way to the Vatican, which expressly condemned its (ab)use of Catholic imagery. Boycott threats quickly ended Madonna’s relationship with Pepsi – she was relieved of her obligation to make three more commercials, but got to keep the $5 mil. Gospel superstar Andrae Crouch made a big deal of his refusal to allow his choir to participate in the video, though it had appeared in the Pepsi ad and he was listed as co-arranger of the single.

The controversy only fueled demand for the Like a Prayer album, of course; released March 22, it quickly topped the Billboard chart and stayed there for much of the spring. A funny thing happened, though, on the way to all this stigmata-wound-deep controversy and chart success: Like a Prayer turned out to be a huge creative leap forward for Madonna, and quickly established itself as a pop classic.

It wasn’t just because of the universal impact of the album’s singles, three more of which would reach the Top 10: the #2 hits “Express Yourself” and “Cherish,” as well as “Keep It Together,” which became the closing production number on her “Blonde Ambition” tour. For the first time, Madonna gave listeners a window into her personal life, with songs discussing her lost mother (“Promise to Try”), her distant father (the Top 20 single “Oh Father”) and her failed marriage (“Til Death Do Us Part”).

Then there was her unusual duet with Prince on “Love Song,” which instead of the anticipated blockbuster turned out to be a quirky aural experiment along the lines of the Purple One’s mid-’80s B-sides. Its lyric, too, defied expectations, and the singing partners sounded absolutely nothing like Peter Cetera and Amy Grant as they icily intoned, “This is not a love song.” (Prince’s easily identifiable guitar parts on “Keep It Together” and “Like a Prayer,” as well as the latter song’s interpolation on the album-closing “Act of Contrition,” went unacknowledged by either artist for years.)

Still, beyond the controversy surrounding its leadoff video, Like a Prayer is best remembered for the single and video “Express Yourself.” Taking more than a little inspiration from the Staple Singers’ anthem “Respect Yourself,” the song was Madonna’s most explicit female-empowerment statement to date, finally putting into lyrical form what her music and image-making had achieved for years – the inversion of sexual exploitation into its own form of control.

The video, directed by David Fincher in what arguably remains his finest moment in any medium, reinforces her message using imagery (some of it borrowed from Fritz Lang’s seminal silent film Metropolis) that plays with sexual politics in remarkably sophisticated – and provocative – ways. One moment she’s chained to a bed (though the chains are awfully long), the next she’s literally prowling on all fours like a cat in heat. The combination of semi-nudity and bondage was enough to give MTV pause and keep “Express Yourself” off broadcast television; in later years, MTV (as well as Rolling Stone) would recognize it as one of the 10 finest music videos in history.

Empowered herself by her success with Like a Prayer and particularly its videos, Madonna would continue to push religious and sexual buttons in the years to come – most prominently with the video for “Justify My Love,” so racy that it was played only after midnight on MTV, and with her next studio album Erotica and its accompanying book, Sex. Most observers agreed that those projects (as well as a series of peculiar and risqué acting turns) took her too far out of the cultural mainstream, and soon she would back off their extreme provocations and return her focus to more universal concerns.

But such humbling developments seemed far away in 1989, when Madonna shocked the world – just enough – with the controversy and the artistry of Like a Prayer. The amount of shit she got away with that year must have made her feel she could do anything. She was wrong — but it must have been a heady feeling nonetheless, and for a while to come she would drag the culture giddily along for the ride.