Thinking Inside the Box

Our nostalgia for the 1980s tends toward the rose-colored. Cable TV shows, movies, books, and web sites catalog that decade’s every pop-cultural burp, from neon socks and parachute pants to Boy George’s transvestitism to Michael Jackson’s sequined glove. The term “yuppie” becomes a punchline, and Wall Street avarice is excused as a social trend.

In a sense, this approach to an era consigns it to capital-H History, where textbooks can untangle its uglier knots, like AIDS, Reaganomics, the Iran Contra Affair, and too many others. In fact, the 00s are beginning to resemble the 80s with its greed-is-good ethos fueling a real estate boom, albeit out in suburbia, and with the Bush Administration securing a second term. All of which makes our blinkered nostalgia for the 80s not just a little disconcerting, but perhaps even disturbing.

Rhino Entertainment, the record label that has managed to make its mark putting everyone from Ornette Coleman to Alice Cooper to Peter Paul and Mary in a box, is doing its part to balance this one-sided view of the 80s: its new, four-disk box set, Left of the Dial: Dispatches from the 80s Underground, collects 82 tracks from some of the decade’s lesser-known, but independent-minded and influential, artists. Featuring the likes of Minor Threat, Bauhaus, Green on Red, and the Lyres alongside more recognizable artists like R.E.M., the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Kate Bush, it offers a corrective to so many compilations that dutifully repackage obvious hits from Cyndi Lauper, Duran Duran, Culture Club, and – if they’re either desperate or risky – Taco and Kajagoogoo. Such hits aren’t sold as music necessarily, but as reminders of our collective past, when we daily rediscovered the Best! Song! Ever!

Perhaps that’s why this collection proves so compelling and why so many of these bands have prospered when their mainstream counterparts have struggled. Both the Pixies and the Cure have launched massive comeback tours and played to thousands of avid fans, while Duran Duran’s recent album Astronaut barely made a ripple and George Michael is on his second or third sub-Rod Stewart standards album. We can still think of the Pixies and the Cure, not to mention Echo & the Bunnymen, Bad Brains, the Church, and Beat Happening, as music.

In one of two introductory essays, music critic Karen Schoemer writes, “Part of the mystique of underground music was that it was personal and allowed the listener to feel like an individual, instead of a number in a scanner.” That’s the philosophy of the left-of-the-dial rock, and it has its roots in the origins of the form, from the raw rock of the late 50s to the rambunctious psychedelic pop of the 60s and the rough-and-tumble punk of the 70s. Unsurprisingly, Rhino has box-setted all of these eras in four similarly packaged, four-disk collections – Loud, Fast & Out of Control: The Wild Sounds of 50s Rock; Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968; Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964–1969; and the supremely successful No Thanks! The 70s Punk Rebellion. Together, these five volumes covering four decades form an unofficial and utterly compelling secret history of rock and roll.

While it includes one song and several bands featured on No Thanks!, Left of the Dial, which refers to the FM frequency location of most college stations – the home of alternative music – diverges from its predecessors’ similar storyline in at least one crucial way: there is no aesthetic or genre commonality among all these bands. They represent various and varying scenes, such as L.A.’s Paisley Underground, Minneapolis’ Longhorn-centered roots rock explosion, Manchester’s Factory Records, San Francisco and D.C.’s hardcore constituencies, and Boston’s college-rock resurgence. Conceivably, Rhino could have included many more, such as Seattle’s nascent grunge scene (Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden), the Midwestern alt-country upstarts (Uncle Tupelo, the Jayhawks), Britain’s shoegazer brigade (Lush, Slowdive), and especially hip-hop’s Native Tongue posse (Jungle Brothers, De La Soul). What makes the 80s underground so fascinating is its diversity; in a sense, it mirrored the diversity of the mainstream, giving discerning listeners alternatives to MTV’s heavy rotation bands, radio mainstays, and aging legends.