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I hail from Generation X while my fifteen-year-old daughter is a member of Generation Y. Yet while our generations are alphabetically close, there is a vast chasm between us musically. She's grown up in the American Idol-era of Kelly Clarkson, Chris Daugherty, and Carrie Underwood. To her, N'Sync is "old school" which makes the music of my high school years seem positively pre-historic.

Perhaps because of a lack of exposure, she isn't able to grasp the strange and subtle beauty of '80s music. So in order to refine her musical sensibilities, I'll need open her ears. Which raises a question that I will put to the collective wisdom of the blogosphere:

'What handful of essential but non-obvious albums would you recommend to a teen to persuade them that the 80's were not a musical wasteland?'

The key element is "non-obvious." Anything from REM, U2, The Clash, Springsteen, or the soundtracks of any John Hughes movie is automatically disqualified. Be prepared to defend your choices -- especially if your selection includes any hair/metal bands.

Also, if you're your list includes RATT, Culture Club, or Wham!, please close your browser and never, ever visit this blog again.

Here are a handful of my choices:

The Smiths The Queen is Dead & World Won't Listen -- The soundtracks for the lives of future meterosexuals.

The Tubes Outside/Inside -- 'She's a Beauty' was the most played song of my junior year though 'Wild Women of Wongo' came a close second.

Randy Travis Storms of Life -- This debut album marked both the birth of neo-traditional country and the peak of Travis' career.

A-ha Hunting High and Low -- But just the stuff that didn't make it on the radio (e.g., 'Sun Always Shines On T.V.').

The Lost Boys Original Soundtrack -- The coolest album of alternative music for alt-wannabes.

Peter Gabriel So -- The one with 'Big Time' and 'Sledgehammer'. 'Nuff said.

Kate Bush The Whole Story - The godmother of Lilith fair-type fem alt-rock.

George Strait Greatest Hits -- 50+ albums later, Strait has yet to top this collection from '86.

Luther Vandross The Best of Luther Vandross -- Vandross was Johnny Mathis for Generation-X.

James Ingram It's Your Night -- This one has been in my tape deck (well, CD player now) since 1986. It never gets old.

Steve Taylor I Predict 1990 -- The man who saved us from a lifetime of Amy Grant and Petra clones.

Dire Straits Brothers in Arms -- Mark Knopfler isn't a great singer (he sounds like a coherent Bob Dylan) but this album makes the cut solely because of "Your Latest Trick."

Garth Brooks Garth Brooks -- Difficult as it is to imagine now, Brooks was once a great artist. Sadly, he peaked with his debut album (indeed, peaked with his first single--Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)--his greatest song).

Honorable mentions:

Crowded House Crowded House

Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent d'Arby

White Heart Greatest Hits

Sade Stronger Than Pride

Duran Duran Rio

Level 42 World Machine

Squeeze Singles 45's and Under

Add your list on your blog or in the comments and I'll include the best entries to this post.

Since we Gen-Xers have a duty to pass on to the younger generations the best pop culture that was produced during the 1980s, I've decided to start an intermittent series that will introduce them to odds-and-ends that they might otherwise overlook.

The popularity of the musical genre known as funk was already on the wane in the early 80s when the Gap Band found success with their novelty funk single "I Don't Believe You Wanna Get Up and Dance (Oops Upside Your Head)". For the next several years they topped the R&B charts with some of the best funk music every produced.

Funk, a style of R&B that was popularized in the late 1970s, took its name for the slang term whose meaning was "transformed from the original one of a pungent odor to a re-defined meaning of a strong, distinctive groove." One of the most characteristic features of funk music is the dominant role played by the bass guitar. Today, hip-hop music is so bass heavy that it is difficult to imagine a time when bass was rare in R&B and Soul. But funk was the first popular genre to bring it to the fore and give it pride of place.

The Gap Band wasn’t the greatest funk band of all-time (that distinction belongs to Earth, Wind, and Fire) but they did have the greatest funk song. Early in the Morning is the pinnacle of funk. It is also the best song to ever incorporate a chicken.

The song is a mini-seminar in the genre of '80s-era funk. All of the key elements are represented: synth keyboards replacing the horn section; thumb-slapped bass guitar underpinning the wah-wah of a rhythm guitar; tight harmony between percussion and bass.

The song begins with a rooster crow, signaling that its time to turn it up (the song refuses to be played at low volumes). From there it unfolds into steady, driving beat that carries the listener for almost four minutes. At about the time most pop songs are winding down, Early detours into a jam session that lasts for another two minutes. The song structure itself is rather simple but the bassline provides a surprisingly complex backdrop for Charlie Wilson's distinctive vocals.

Another standout single is Yearning for Your Love. Younger listeners may not recognize the unfamiliar sound of a guitar being picked, something you don’t often hear in today's R&B slow-jams. Listen closer and they'll hear another guitar joining in with a bass, keyboard, and drum. Today, the only "hip-hop band" that plays their own instruments are The Roots. But back in the day, instruments played by humans, rather than beats produced by a computer, were quite common. The music from that era has a depth and fullness that's often missing from hip-hop songs produced by twiddling nobs on a console.

Sadly, the Wilson brothers hit their stride in 1980 with "Burn Rubber On Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)" but lost a step after the 1983 release of "Outstanding." They continued to have hit singles (24 from 1983-2004) but funk was being replaced by other genres. As Rod Dreher would say, "And then along came rap and ruined everything."

Essential Discography: The only album you really need is the 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection: The Best of The Gap Band. That disc contains the six essential singles (Burn Rubber, Outstanding, You Dropped A Bomb On Me, Early In The Morning, Yearning For Your Love, Season's No Reason To Change) along with some filler tracks.

Bonus video: Early in the Morning

Before you watch this video, be sure to listen to song a few times. The audio quality is substandard and causes the song to lose some of its flavor. However, the video itself is a pop art masterpiece.

The brilliance of this video, however, can be lost on a generation weaned on irony so let me point out why those of us who stayed up late hoping to catch it on Friday Night Videos found it transcendent. The beauty is in the details:

• The guy in the chicken costume is lame. Fortunately, everything else in the video is genius.
• Three words: Fire Stick Drummer
• The guy with the headset that says "Okay" is wearing a Members Only jacket with general stars on the epaulets.
• The Wilson brothers are dressed like a girl's high school drill team. And yet… they manage to totally pull off that look.
• The Tower of Power wannabes in the background that are too busy dancing to play their instruments.
• Two girls--who couldn't get a gig as Solid Gold Dancers--doing aerobics in the background.
• Everybody has a mustache (expect the girls, of course).
• The mysterious baby grand piano in the background that never gets played.
• A line-dancing bass player.
• The sideways dance that Charlie does at 3:27. Brilliant.

Next on OST: Steve Taylor

Girl Authority's sophomore release Road Trip may be targeted for tween girls (ages 8 to 12) but the real audience for the recently released CD is nostalgic Gen-X parents. Included on the generous (19 songs!) play list are covers by such '80s era icons as the Go-Go’s, Joan Jett, Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, and Madonna. Even some of the "new" songs are old. The first single is a previously unreleased Depeche Mode song rewritten by Erasure's Vince Clarke.

The nine girls comprising Girl Authority may be too young to have heard of Katrina and the Waves (they range from 10 to 15 years old) but they are all accomplished performers, having met while participating in a Massachusetts theater company. Indeed, the album sounds like the popular Kidz Bop series of CDs as sung by the cast of Annie. While each girl in the group has a distinct personality type ('Preppy Girl' Zoë, 'Fashion Girl' Alex, 'Country Girl' Crystal, etc.) they are all but indistinguishable as individual singers. Each sings lead on at least one song, though you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference.

What Road Trip lacks in individuality, though, it more than makes up for by its infectious "girls just wanna have fun" attitude. Parents will likely be so charmed they'll forget that kids who just a few years before were strapped in child-safety seats are singing such auto-centric tunes as Life is a Highway, Vacation, and Car Wash.

Recommended for: Girls age 8 to 12; Parents who can stomach Radio Disney-style tween-pop.

Trying to put together a list of the best music of 2004 is a daunting task. The increasing banality of commercial radio combined with the melding of all genres into a variation of hip-hop-pop (Tim McGraw and Nelly?) has made it difficult to find anything of enduring value. Even the bright spots are often rather lackluster when compared to an artist’s previous work.

Nevertheless, no year is complete until the annual “best of” list has been compiled. So in order to meet the requirement I offer the following worthy candidates for your consideration:

"I felt like I was in control," said Heather, a 16-year-old describing how it felt the time she had sex on the same day with two different boys, neither of which was her boyfriend. "I felt like a player."

Fourteen-year-old Mia proudly explains how she uses flirting and dating to extract money from multiple boys. "I've been pimping," she says. "I've got dudes who give me money every day."

In 2004, the “players” and “pimps” are as likely to be girls as they are boys:

A lot of adults may not want to believe it, but these and other teenage girls are adopting some stereotypical "male" attitudes toward sex, according to reports from a national research firm and interviews with girls and officials who work with them.

They're not only casual about having sex or "hooking up" with multiple partners; they're proud of it, referring to themselves as "pimps" and "players" and bragging about their exploits. These girls see themselves as using sex to assert their power over boys (and girls), while liberating their gender from the stereotypical categories of virgin and whore.

While they may be able to shake the “whore” label, these girls will find it more difficult to avoid the destructive impact of promiscuity. Recent studies show that sexually active teens ages 15 to 19 have the highest STD rates of any age group. Nearly half of the 18.9 million new STD cases in 2000 were among youths ages 15 to 24. Young women are more at risk than young men because the infections can "silently" hide in the female reproductive tract.

What has led to this change in roles? The player/pimp imagery has been popular in hip-hop culture for decades. But in recent years, female rappers, like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, and pop artists, such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, have applied the archetype to themselves as a form of “female empowerment.” More important than the artists, though, is the lyrical content, which has become increasingly more graphic in its presentation of casual sex.

The mainstream media is often criticized for having a political bias. Conservatives claim it’s a liberal bias. And they are right. Liberals claim it’s a conservative bias. They are right too. The fact is that there is no shortage of bias that can be found coming from either end of the political spectrum. Often its an unavoidable byproduct in the creation of news and public interest stories. The problem is not so much with the bias itself but with the way in which it’s passed off as objectivity.

When I worked as a newspaper editor I was open and honest with my readers that I had a conservative, Republican-leaning bias. My goal, of course, was to be as objective as possible. But I knew that an unconscious bias would slip thru from time to time and that my audience should be aware of that fact. Rather than being offended by the admission, my newspapers subscribers appreciated my candor and knew that they had to apply a bit of “Kentucky windage” to our reporting in order to correct for my inherent conservative slant.

On most issues I went out of my way to be fair, even adopting a policy where I would count the number of political stories to ensure that local Democratic political candidates received the same amount of coverage as their Republican opponents. I instituted the change after I became keenly aware that I was developing a “selection bias.” On every editorial page, for example, I would include three syndicated editorial cartoons. Not once, however, did I ever run a cartoon that was directly critical of the President (which drastically limited the number I was able to choose from each week). The fact that most readers would have never noticed this selection bias made it all the more insidious. What was left “unsaid” had a powerful way of framing a particular point of view.

Pepsi-Cola recently sent a press release announcing the commercials that will be run during this year’s Super Bowl. Included is one that makes light of online piracy:

Pepsi iTunes – “I Fought The Law”
This groundbreaking ad, featuring 16 real-life teenagers who were sued by the recording industry for illegally downloading music from the Internet, shows music fans a new way to freely and legally download music--the Pepsi iTunes 100 Million Song Giveaway. The commercial is set to Green Day's version of "I Fought the Law.”

Since the ethics of music downloading have always perplexed me, perhaps someone can explain it to me. If a teen steals music from a music store it’s considered shoplifting and can lead to a misdemeanor prosecution. Yet if a teen steals music via the Internet it “invigorates the democracy” and can land you a commercial during one of the most watched television events of the year. Am I the only one that is disturbed by this moral double standard?

Perhaps the RIAA should also produce a commercial. They could round up a group of teens who “fought the law” by stealing cases of Pepsi or Gatorade. No doubt Pepsico would find such a groundbreaking commercial invigorating.

(Link via: Mitch from Shot in the Dark, who disturbingly, doesn't seem to have a problem with online piracy. Shame on you, Mitch.)

Update: As it turns out I was wrong. Mitch does have a problem with online piracy ("Pirating is wrong, and it's stealing. Absolutely. No argument.") and criticizes my criticism ("Then you don't read my blog very much, Joe, do you?"). Um, well yeah I do but I have to admit that if I probably would have skipped over any posts that mentioned the RIAA. I shouldn't have, though, turns out the RIAA is, as Mitch calls them, "legal thieves" (read the whole post). Sorry about the misunderstanding, buddy. Now for the rest of you...

Brad from Infinite Monkeys was confronted by an 11th grader who expressed disdain for the music of the ‘80s. In order to form a proper rebuttal he has asked the blogosphere for help:

'What handful of albums would you recommend/lend to this teen to persuade him that the 80's were not a musical wastelend?”

That's a great question but it will inspire too many easy-in-retrospect answers (i.e., U2's 'Joshua Tree') So I'm curious to know what albums were essential but wouldn't be obvious (any soundtrack to a John Hughes movie is automatically disqualified). Be prepared to defend your choices -- especially if your selection includes any hair/metal bands.

Here are a handful of my choices:

Think about a political speech that was delivered in 1971. That should be an easy task. After all, it was the year of the Watergate break-in and the ratification of the 26th Amendment to the Constitution. Can you recite any of the words?

What's that? No particular oration from that year comes to mind?

What about the lyrics to John Lennon's Imagine? How many of these can you remember? I was three years old in '71 and have no great regard for the Beatles. Yet I can recite almost every line.

John Cole of Balloon Juice is one of my favorite bloggers. He's smart, funny, prolific, and almost always right on the mark. But his dismissal of the Weekly Standard's article on Lennon's "Imagine" is misguided:

If you ever wanted to know why Democrats make a lot of headway by labeling Republicans as foolish and spiteful, check out this idiotic 'fisking' of a John Lennon song that appeared in the Weekly Standard. Not some third rate blog, not the local indie rag, but a so called serious magazine.

Yes, Imagine was idiotic. But so was the Macarena. Your point, Mr. Engel?

Engel's point is that the sentiments behind the song are still presented as a viable political philosophy by a significant number of our fellow citizens. Plato understood the power of music and believed that it should be controlled by the Republic. Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher was even more bold in his claims, "If one were permitted to make all the ballads one need not care who should make the laws of a nation."

Imagine a world where Republicans take pop music as seriously as did the conservatives of the past. Imagine how effective we might be. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I hope I'm not the only one...

Update: Apparently, I'm not. While James from Outside the Beltway agrees with Cole's criticism, at least he understands that pop music can be used to further a political viewpoint.

Update 2: As usual, the Elder from Fraters Libertas was one step ahead of me:

I've always hated the John Lennon song 'Imagine'. My hatred stems not from its insipid lyrics, but rather how the song has become a rallying cry for those "concerned" with the state of the world. I have often wondered if these people actually ever sat down for a moment and pondered what kind of world it really would be if Lennon's dreams came true. In high school I recall hearing the song at a memorial service. At a CATHOLIC high school. What part of "no religion" don't you people understand?