The Eighties
Thirteen records, ten of our rankings, ten years. The decade cheap machines and cheap pressings reached people with no access to a record industry, told through the labels they had to start instead.
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Joy Division / Love Will Tear Us Apart
Factory gave its bands the copyrights and had no contracts to speak of, which was ruinous as a business and is the reason this record sounds like nobody was consulted. The decade's most covered song, released by a Manchester club with a design habit.
Black Flag / Rise Above
Greg Ginn ran SST out of his own electronics business and put out the records nobody would touch. American hardcore did not get signed; it built a distribution network out of vans and mail order, and this is the record at the front of it.
Minor Threat / Straight Edge
Forty-six seconds, on a label the band started to release it, which still caps its record prices four decades later. The clearest case here of the economics and the content being the same argument.
Klein + M.B.O. / Dirty Talk
Milan working out what to do with a drum machine two years before anyone called it Italo. Made cheaply for clubs, exported by accident, and played in New York and Chicago by DJs who had no idea where it came from.
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Alexander Robotnick / Problèmes d'Amour
A one-man record on a tiny Florentine imprint that outlasted most of the decade's budgets. Italo is the purest example of the criterion: no industry behind it at all, and it ended up under half of house music.
Cocteau Twins / Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops
4AD was Ivo Watts-Russell's shop-front operation and it let a band invent a vocabulary — no lyrics anyone can transcribe, a guitar treated as weather. No A&R department in 1984 would have commissioned this and none had to.
Tenor Saw / Ring the Alarm
Winston Riley's own Kingston label, a rhythm reused for the next thirty years, and no multinational anywhere near it. Jamaica had been running the model this whole list describes since long before the decade started.
2 Live Crew / Throw the D
Luke Campbell named the label after himself because there was no other way to release it, and later took its obscenity case to a federal appeals court. The most literal instance here of a scene having to build its own way out.
Mr. Fingers / Can You Feel It
Trax pressed on recycled vinyl and paid almost nobody, which is a real part of the story and not a footnote. It also put out the record that defines house, made by one man in an apartment on borrowed equipment.
Rhythim Is Rhythim / Strings of Life
Derrick May's own label again, and the record the rest of the decade gets measured against. No chorus, no bassline for most of it, and no committee anywhere that would have let it out at that length.
Mudhoney / Touch Me I'm Sick
Sub Pop was two men, a loan and a singles club, and this is the record that made the subscription worth having. Everything the next decade sold by the million was worked out here for the price of a session.
Forgemasters / Track With No Name
Funded by an enterprise grant, named after a steelworks, released by a Sheffield record shop. The decade ends with a public body accidentally paying for the first Warp single, which is as good a summary of the whole argument as exists.