My last installment of the Decades series came back in April, when I wrote about the albums of 1976. I had a hard time coming up with a list of my personal favorites from that year.
Today I’m jumping ahead a decade, diving into the releases of 1986, and I have the opposite problem. I had a hard time narrowing my list of personal faves down to ten, and my top five are all-time classics.
Continuing my look at the albums of 2005…
Now that I’ve counted down my favorite albums of 2005, I’m turning my attention to other notable albums from that year. Some of these I know a little bit or a lot, some I didn’t know at all. Each of them made a splash commercially or critically and helped shape the popular music landscape that year.
I wrote about Madonna’s Confessions On a Dance Floor back when I did a deep dive of all of her albums. This one was Madonna’s last Platinum album in the U.S., and the last real triumph of her career.
Throwing back to the week of June 11, 1994, we find All-4-One atop the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘I Swear.’ As I noted a few weeks ago, this song spent 11 straight weeks at #1, making it one of the longest-running chart-toppers in history.
Holding the #2 spot is Madonna with the ballad ‘I’ll Remember,’ a soundtrack cut from the forgettable film With Honors (do you remember a movie about a Harvard student played by Brendan Fraser befriending a homeless man played by Joe Pesci? Neither do I.).
Continuing my look at 1984, first by counting down my own top five albums of that year.
#4. Like a Virgin – Madonna
Here’s an album I paid no attention at the time of its release, and an artist I actively dismissed for most of the following four decades.
It took last summer’s Madonna deep dive for me to finally appreciate the game-changing greatness of one of the 80s defining artists. And though Like a Virgin landed at #5 on my Madonna album ranking, it’s a worthy enough collection to land at #4 on this list.
Three weeks, 14 studio albums, one icon… today concludes my Madonna deep dive!
As with my first two artist deep dives (Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne), this one limped to a close as Madonna’s last few albums didn’t approach the quality or impact of her early work.
I guess that’s the nature of the music industry, almost without exception. How many decades can you expect your muse to last?
Meet Me In Montauk 