

Sometime in the 1950s, the mainstream saw its last great gasp of this habit. This was how we reckoned with our melting pot: crudely, obliviously, maybe with a nice tune and a beat you could dance to. And of course there were the minstrel shows, in which people with mocking, cork-painted faces sang what they pretended were the songs of Southern former slaves. Some were sung in a spirit of abuse others were written or performed by members of those groups themselves. Vaudeville acts, for instance, had tunes for just about every major immigrant group: the Italian number, the Yiddish number, the Irish one, the Chinese.
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+ Spit Out the Bone Metallica Full TrackĪ strange thing you learn about American popular music, if you look back far enough, is that for a long time it didn’t much have “genres” - it had ethnicities.24 Your Best American Girl Mitski Full Track.19 Trolley Song Cécile McLorin Salvant Full Track.17 Side to Side Ariana Grande Full Track.15 Copper Canteen James McMurtry Full Track.13 Hold My Mule Shirley Caesar Full Track.11 Barok Main Mica Levi & Oliver Coates Full Track.2 You Want It Darker Leonard Cohen Full Track.This feature was originally published in the Novemissue of Rolling Stone. The next revolution may be just around the corner. Looking at the best rock has had to offer in the Eighties, it’s clear that there’s plenty of life left in the old beast yet. But rock in the Eighties was like that - lively, varied, contentious and, to some degree, inconclusive. The embarrassment of riches on this list is all the more remarkable, since arthritic radio programming, corporate sponsorship and outbursts of racism and sexism in rap and metal have complicated rock’s present and raised fears for its future.īest-of lists such as this one are by nature subjective. kicked out some serious streetwise jams Metallica and Guns N’ Roses established new hard-rock beachheads and Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth and the Replacements offered definitive statements of postpunk angst. Further down the list, old-timers like Dylan, the Stones and Lou Reed hit new highs Public Enemy and Run-D.M.C. The first 10 entries here span the Clash’s polyglot punk, Prince’s crossover funkadelica, Afro-bop from Talking Heads and Paul Simon and hymns of innocence and experience by U2 and Tracy Chapman. And rap transformed the face - and voice - of popular music. Punks got older and more articulate in their frustration and rage, while many veteran artists responded to that movement’s challenge with their most vital work in years. The following survey of the 100 best albums of the Eighties, as selected by the editors of Rolling Stone, shows that the music and the values it stands for have been richer for the struggle. Musicians and audiences alike have struggled to come to terms with rock’s parameters and possibilities, its emotional resonance and often dormant social consciousness. But if the past 10 years haven’t exactly been the stuff of revolution, they have been a critical time of re-assessment and reconstruction. In comparison, the Eighties have been the decade of, among other things, synth pop, Michael Jackson, the compact disc, Sixties reunion tours, the Beastie Boys and a lot more heavy metal. The Seventies gave rise to David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, heavy metal, punk and New Wave. The Sixties were rocked by Beatlemania, Motown, Phil Spector, psychedelia and Bob Dylan. The Fifties witnessed nothing less than the birth of the music. This has been the first rock & roll decade without revolution, or true revolutionaries, to call its own.
