The 30 Best Albums of 1988

Paste, March 15, 2018
by Josh Jackson

1988 was a great year for music, and not just because it’s when Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born in the Tottenham district of London and Robyn Rihanna Fenty was born 4,000 miles southwest in Barbados. The tail end of the post-punk and new-wave movements had given way to the a golden age of college radio and a budding alternative-rock scene. A new era of hip-hop was ascendent, with N.W.A. and Public Enemy unleashing socio-political rage on the coasts. And young African-American stars-in-the-making like Tracy Chapman and Living Colour were breaking barriers in folk and hard rock, bringing new perspective to fading American forms. Our favorite albums from 30 years ago also include recordings from England, Iceland, Australia and three from Ireland. They include metal, rap, folk, pop, funk and whatever you want to call They Might Be Giants.

28. They Might Be Giants - Lincoln

The beginning of our culture’s nerd revolution can be traced back to They Might Be Giants’ Dial-A-Song answering machine in the mid-1980s. John Flansburgh and John Linnell had developed a cult following with their geeky experimental music, beginning with performances on New York’s Lower East Side before a 1986 self-titled debut and the college-radio hit “Don’t Let’s Start.” The duo’s follow-up, Lincoln, earned them a bigger audience with lead track “Ana Ng” charting on modern-rock radio. There was everything from jazz to polka to funk-backed songs about purple toupees, friendships with cows beneath the sea and imaginary shoehorns with teeth. Every melody was immediate and undeniable. They rejoiced in the bizarre and nonsensical but disguised cleverness and poignancy in the seemingly random lyrics of songs like “They’ll Need a Crane.”

back