Like the Decades series, my posts on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame classes have allowed me to look back through time to celebrate artists I love and discover ones I don’t know very well.
The Rock Hall is certainly a flawed institution weighed down by biases and inconsistencies, but if nothing else, it’s an excuse to recognize the contributions of a wide range of talented musicians.
Continuing a countdown of my favorite albums of 1986…
#2 – The Queen is Dead – The Smiths
If you’d told me The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead wouldn’t be my #1 album of the year it came out, I would have called you crazy. And yet, that’s where we stand, with one of my all-time favorite albums serving as salutatorian.
I’ve sung this album’s praises so much on the blog that all ten of its tracks have already been featured, requiring me to post a live version today. But I’ll scribble down a few more words of praise.
Earlier this summer, I posted a list of the “most forgotten” musical artists of the 60s and 70s, based on an analysis by Chris Dalla Riva on his Can’t Get Much Higher substack. Well, Dalla Riva has proved to be a gift that keeps on giving, because another of his recent analyses has inspired my posts for the next two weeks.
This time he set out to compile a list of the most underrated songs of the 80s, defining “underrated” as high quality mixed with relatively low popularity. To gauge quality, he aggregated critics lists of the best 80s songs to come up with a master list. To gauge present-day popularity, he used Spotify streams.
I like to close out the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame weeks by highlighting artists I love who haven’t (yet) been inducted.
I’ve named The Smiths as the most egregious oversight before and I see no reason not to continue beating that drum today. The English rock band has been eligible since 2009 and nominated twice (in 2015 and 2016) but has yet to make the cut.
Sophia’s final Smiths song comes from the band’s final studio album, 1987’s Strangeways, Here We Come. This album was released months after the band had already broken up.
‘A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours’ is the album’s opening track, and it’s a stunner. Johnny Marr challenged himself to write a song without using guitar, so this one rocks along quite deliciously on piano, drums and a wicked bass (shades of Ben Folds Five).
Meet Me In Montauk 