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I love Pitchforkmedia.com. I really do. It's my favorite webzine. A few
months ago they produced a feature piece on what they called the best records
of the 1980s. It was one of those lists that gets passed around on the internet
and everyone gets to have at it, whining about how they think they blew this
ranking or that. Most of the fun of such lists are trying to find holes where
you can exert your own superior musical knowledge over the writers. It's all
in fun, though (unless the lists are from the pages of Rolling Stone or Spin,
and then it's WAR).
 I also love
KCPR. KCPR was the college radio station that I joined as a student at Cal Poly
in San Luis Obispo, CA (right above the line of where California really starts
to go bad.) I was there from 1987-1990. It was the first time in my life that
I met a bunch of misfits just like me (irony intended). I call it the Golden
Age of College Radio . . . mainly because that's when I was in
college radio, and college radio DJs always declare their years as the
best. But I'm right, of course.
A few years ago I started a yahoo newsgroup for KCPR DJ alums. A bunch of us
oldies are now on there and we talk about the Glory Days. In late November of
last year one of the alums, Mara, threw up the link to the Pitchfork list and 5
1/2 minutes later we had our first reponse, from Spence D, complaining about
how the folks at Pitchfork flubbed their review of a Talk Talk album at #83.
("Well their review of the Talk Talk album (#83) shows that they don't
know their music history worth shit.")
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 We didn't talk about
Talk Talk for long, though, because we noticed that they placed Sonic Youth's
Daydream Nation at #1? Number one? Daydream-freakin' Nation? Hello? Ever
heard the Sister LP? All of us muttered "the kids these days"
under our breath at the same time and then decided that we, college DJs that
were actually DJing in the 80s, were going to make our own list. The past few
months then have been about us mulling over choices, developing a voting system
and writing reviews of the albums. I think we did pretty good for rookies (even
if some of my choices, like the Descendents Milo Goes to College somehow
got pushed out of the Top 100). At the very least we fixed the Sonic Youth
problem. Oh, and This Heat didn't get a single vote. Nyah.
Below you will find the rankings as they actually were
spit out of our voting system along with a bunch of comments that probably owe
more to our personal experiences than some encyclopedic regurgitation of
musical history (not that Pitchfork did this. In fact, their comments were
quite interesting to read.) So, as is usual for a Fresh Dirt piece, if you hate
articles written in the first person that are self-absorbed and speak about
many people and places you aren't familiar with, you've come to the wrong
place. If you want to know how we, admittedly a bunch of strangers to you, feel
about 100 of our most favorite albums of the 1980s, then you've come to the
right place.
Have at it. At the very least we've given you a lot to pick at. In fact, I've already started drafting my own rant.
Steve Gardner
Fresh Dirt Editor
KCPR 1987-1990
(2003)
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