'85 to '88 What happened?

My brother's two daughters celebrated their twenty first and eighteenth birthday in late September. early October. I'll sometimes get the list of songs in the chart during the month of someones birth, download the best of them and make a CD as a present. I did this for my two beautiful nieces and disovered an interesting thing. The charts in September/October 1985 had some great songs, the inimitable Grace Jones - Slave to the Rhythm, Simple Minds - Alive and Kicking, Mick Jagger and David Bowie - Dancing in the Streets, Talking Heads - Road to Nowhere, Siouxsie and the Banchees - Cities in Dust, Cameo - Single Life, The Cure - Close to Me, The Smiths - Boy with the Thorn in his Side, UB40 - Don't Break My Heart, King - Taste of your Tears, Marillion - Lavender, Kate Bush - Cloudbusting, Dire Straits - Brother in Arms.

Something for all tastes and at least the first few are dancable (in modern parlance). No one, no matter what their taste, can deny that they're not good songs well played. Perhaps it's nostalgia but I also feel some kind of warmth and humanity coming through as well. Now here's some of the very best from from September/October 1988 and I'm really scraping the barell here. The Pasadenas - Riding on a Train (reissue, notice!), Bill Withers - Lovely Day (Another Reissue remixed), Michael Jackson - Another Part of Me, U2 - Desire, Salt 'n' Pepper - Shake Your Thang (cover). The rest is early and shit Acid/Rave/House, Pet Shop Boys's cynical and fake impression of dance music and Rick Astley, Enya and Phill Collins.

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED! I was depressed, I tell you honestly. Like watching a plane with your family on it in a slowmotion tailspin...well not that bad, but you know what I mean. What happened to music in those three years putting us in a kind of fug of pretentious, formulaic, sad and I'll say it again, cynical attitude to music that continues to this day.

Anyway, a good sight for chart hits through the years is www.everyhit.com