Sonic Youth, They Might Be Giants, and Ice-T livened up a numb 1986

AV Club, June 25, 2018
by Gwen Ihnat

What the hell was wrong with everyone in 1986? What, was it the Challenger explosion? The Chernobyl disaster? And that weird thing in Cameroon where a lake suddenly emitted a large, suffocating cloud of carbon dioxide and killed thousands of people and animals all at once? And all the car bombs and plane bombs and plane hijackings, and that post office shooter in Oklahoma, and the Lebanon hostage crisis, and the failed deescalation talks between Reagan and Gorbachev and—all right. So maybe it makes sense that America was mostly just looking for a soft groove to which it could hold its knees and rock in front of very slowly. “That’s What Friends Are For” urging you to keep smiling and/or shining your way right into the similar greeting card platitudes of “I Miss You” and the gentle babble of “Say You Say Me”? It’s aural Xanax. We get it. Although, it still doesn’t explain Prince’s “Kiss” landing a good 12 slots behind Eddie Murphy and Rick James’ coke bender. No world is that messed up.

In 1986’s defense, beyond that whole living-in-a-perpetual-state-of-fear-and-trauma thing, there were some less benumbing things happening the lower down the charts you went—and not just the fact that apparently Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” The Bangles’ “Manic Monday,” Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love A Bad Name,” OMD’s “If You Leave,” Janet Jackson’s “Nasty,” and Run DMC and Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” among other vaunted ’80s classics, were all deemed pretty great that year, but not, y’know, “Party All The Time” great. Indeed, many of them even ranked well below El Debarge’s romantic ode to robot-fucking. But we digress.

Beyond that, even, there were actually some mildly revolutionary incursions being made onto the Billboard 200 from the less commercial worlds of thrash metal, punk, and what was only then starting to be called “alternative rock” (something that spurred Billboard to adopt its first Alternative Songs chart two years later). Albums by acts who were as opposite-of-Mr. Mister as Siouxsie And The Banshees, Public Image Ltd., Ministry, New Order, The Jesus And Mary Chain, and Hüsker Dü also made their way into Billboard’s lower echelons that year. And thanks to MTV and the just-launched Spin Magazine, the country’s rapidly spreading patches of cool kids were getting turned on to The Queen Is Dead and Life’s Rich Pageant, or Master Of Puppets and Peace Sells... But Who’s Buying? out in suburbia, where they could sneer at all the sheep blaring the Top Gun soundtrack.

In fact, you have to dig relatively deep to find great tracks that Billboard’s charts didn’t record this year: to the fringes of noise rock and dream pop; down to Senegal and Melbourne; over to the U.K.’s taste-making label 4AD; out to the progenitors of gangsta rap in Crenshaw and the Bronx, and of house music in Chicago. All of the songs below also wanted to party in 1986—if not all the time, then, at least, at the same time.

They Might Be Giants, "Don't Let's Start" (November 1986)

They Might Be Giants’ lengthy career began, funny enough, with “Don’t Let’s Start,” a college radio and MTV hit that helped the band stand out from the increasingly crowded alterna-pack thanks to its tremendous amounts of quirk. All of the elements that TMBG fans revere were already in place on its first single for Bar/None: John Linnell’s nasally vocals, John Flansburgh’s feisty guitar, odd time signatures, and even odder lyrics: Here, they urge, “Wake up and smell the cat food in your bank account,” among other surreal things. It’s weird yet also weirdly relatable, with unexpected moments of profundity like “No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful” (though the two Johns would later admit to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that they didn’t really mean anything by it). And its cult success kicked off a prolific, 30-plus-year run where “Don’t Let’s Start” remains a cornerstone of They Might Be Giants’ live sets and sensibility.

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