26. Midnight Oil, Diesel and Dust (1987)

The first seed that would turn into the fertile garden Diesel and Dust was cast in 1984, when members of the Australian rock band Midnight Oil spent a couple days at an Aboriginal community located on the northern coast of their home country. It was a jarring experience for the musicians who fancied themselves as highly attuned to the politics and history of Australia. They immediate realized they had far more to learn about those who were indigenous to the continent and had their land stolen from them as just one part of a cascade of criminal indignities. Just as Midnight Oil were starting to experience global success with their music, they committed themselves to better understand the place they came from.

Two years after their eye-opening trip, Midnight Oil mounted a tour alongside indigenous music groups Warumpi Band and Gondwanaland. The musical caravan journeyed to remote parts of the Outback. They played shows in villages that had populations numbering only the hundreds, often calibrating their material to suit the more intimate locales and the cultural norms that honored storytelling over thunderous bombast. All the while, Midnight Oil listened and learned, often spending entire days with community elders who shared cultural touchstones and their own interpretation of the the history they lived. The entirety of the experience was drawn into the songwriting process, especially as the members of the group group processed the disconnect of a place that was gearing up to herald a momentous anniversary that many residents saw as a far more solemn occasion.

“Australia is celebrating our bicentennial this year, and the Aboriginal people are making a strong claim of their rights now because of all the attention that’s focused on us,” Peter Garrett, the frontman of Midnight Oil, said in 1988. “We’ve provided a soundtrack for our support if you like. We’re simply trying to say, ‘Look, we went there, this is what we saw.'”

In recounting their travels, Midnight Oil made nothing less that the most powerful rock music of their career. Working for the first time with producer Warne Livesey, who was coming off slick albums by Julian Cope and The The, the band hurled themselves into intense performances clearly meant to express the rage they felt on behalf of an entire people who had been brutally wronged. Punching like a prize fighter, “Beds Are Burning” lays out the historical theft plainly and with stern authority: “The time has come to say fair’s fair/ To pay the rent, to pay our share/ The time has come, a fact’s a fact/ It belongs to them, let’s give it back.”

The opening track of the album, “Beds Are Burning” is literally only the beginning.Midnight Oil careens through a set of tracks that wield rock ‘n’ roll as a blunt but effective tool. The band often eschews elusive metaphor in a quest for clarity. “Warakurna,” which unfolds with mesmerizing steadiness in its contained intensity, directly names an Aboriginal community in Western Australia, and the lean, wiry “Bullroarer” is named after the rudimentary, ingenious instrument that had been used in rituals by Aborigines for centuries. Originally written for a documentary about the return of the majestic natural landmark Uluru to the Aboriginal people, “The Dead Heart” is ferocious, its sharp drum hits underscoring both indictment (“We don’t serve your country/ Don’t serve your king/ Know your custom, don’t speak your tongue/ White man came took everyone”) and celebration of endurance in the face of persecution (“We carry in our hearts the true country/ And that cannot be stolen/ We follow in the steps of our ancestry/ And that cannot be broken”). The specific topical focus might have been new, but roaring out their dissatisfaction was standard Midnight Oil practice.

“We grew up parallel with punk, and we absorbed two aspects of the attitude” Garrett explained at the time. “The energy of punk, for one, which we had before we ever heard of the Sex Pistols. The other one would have been the idea that you’re not presenting the music to get mansions with high walls, but because it is important.”

Garrett’s assertion of importance might be a little tough to take if the overall quality of Diesel and Dust didn’t back his argument. The sense of a deeper value emanates off the assembled tracks like heat that seems to warp the air radiating from a wrenched open kiln. “Put Down That Weapon” has an almost ghostly intensity, “Dreamworld” races along, and “Sometimes” is plays like a resounding rallying cry (“Sometimes you’re beaten to the call, sometimes/ Sometimes you’re taken to the wall/ Sometimes you’re shaken to the core, sometimes/ Sometimes the face is gonna fall, but you don’t give in”). There’s a feeling of real, resonant purpose to everything on the album.

Making an album that so specifically attuned to issues in Australia seemed like an invitation to to slow their momentum in growing audiences elsewhere. Instead, the opposite was true. Diesel and Dust was a significant hit worldwide. In the U.S., it made Midnight Oil into MTV mainstays, carried them into the Billboard Top 40, and moved enough units to earn a platinum record designation. The injustice called out on the album might have been specific to Australia, but the core colonialist cruelty was hardly an isolated phenomenon.

“It did do pretty well, and it surprised us, especially as the record was about Aboriginal land rights in Australia,” guitarist Jim Moginie reflected many years later. “We sort of thought, ‘Well, no one’s going to want to know about that,’ but in fact it struck a chord because there’s always been battles in all the different parts of the world where there’s indigenous people.”

25. David Bowie, Let’s Dance (1983)

David Bowie wanted to convey the sound he hoped to capture for his new record to Nile Rodgers. He might have simply said he wanted something that was more commercial than what he’d done previously. Indisputably an icon, Bowie’s singles achieved only limited success in the U.S. He topped the chart with the 1975 single “Fame,” but only three other solo singles (and one notable collaboration with Queen) had graced the Billboard Top 40 in the fifteen years or so since he’d properly broken through with his 1969 self-titled album. Bowie felt he had really clicked with Rodgers, though. An impromptu conversation struck up at a nightclub led to a later meeting at a museum; in both instances, Bowie and Rodgers talked at length about the music and art that inspired them. Surely two fast friends were simpatico enough that Bowie could find a different manner of defining his aspirations when he asked Rodgers to help produce a new album.

“He came to my apartment one day, and he had a picture of Little Richard in a red suit getting into a red Cadillac,” Rodgers told Rolling Stone many years later. “And he said to me, ‘Nile, darling, the record should sound like this!’ And he showed me the picture. And I knew exactly — think of how crazy this was — what he meant. He didn’t mean he wanted his record to sound like a Little Richard record. He said, ‘This visual thing is what we want to achieve aurally in every sense of the word.'”

In many way, Bowie was starting anew. A couple of years had gone by since his last studio album, Scary Monsters, during which Bowie mostly occupied himself with acting gig and other outside projects. More importantly, he’d extricated himself from his contract with longtime label RCA Records and signed a new, lucrative pact with EMI. He’d already been courting the mainstream, but now he had additional incentive to deliver some hits. Bowie wanted to both prove that the investment EMI had made in him was worthwhile and take advantage of the more generous ownership stake in his own success that the new contract provided. At the time, Bowie insisted there was an purely artistic motivation intertwined with the chart chasing inherent in the sonic shift towards approachability.

“It occurred to me that a lot of things that I’ve done, though I wouldn’t deny them, have been pretty much in a direction of singularity and isolationist and quite cold,” Bowie told MTV (during an interview when he famously criticized the cable network for ignoring Black music artists). “And I just felt that having been two years since I’ve been away from the recording studio, it occurred to me in listening back to my own music and listening to what’s happening in modern music at that moment that I wanted to do something with the kind of warmth that I feel missing from music generally and from society.”

In every way he could think of, Bowie pushed himself to create in a different way. In addition to stepping away from longtime producing collaborator Tony Visconti to work with Rodgers, Bowie assembled a studio band comprised of musicians he hadn’t worked with previously. Rodgers chose most of them, but it was Bowie’s idea to bring in twenty-nine-year-old, largely unknown guitar wizard named Stevie Ray Vaughan, who had wowed him in live performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The tone was really set when Bowie presented Rodgers with a lilting tune playing acoustically on a twelve-string guitar, and Rodgers believed so forcefully that there was a mismatch between the song’s title and its sound that he reworked it entirely. “Let’s Dance” became funky, flirty, and irresistibly propulsive. Serving as the album’s title cut and lead single, it topped the charts in both the U.S. and the U.K, the only Bowie song to notch that particular double.

Every bit of Let’s Dance reverberates with the go-for-broke appeal of its title cut, even when individual songs arguably aren’t that strong. There are unabashed winners on the album, to be sure. Most notably, “Modern Love” is as vibrant and intoxicating as anything in Bowie’s formidable catalog. But there’s a grab bag quality to tracks assembled here. “China Girl” is nicked from Iggy Pop’s 1977 solo debut, The Idiot, which Bowie co-wrote, produced, and played on, and “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” is a new take on a soundtrack contribution from the preceding year that Bowie found unsatisfactory in its earlier iteration. The neo-soul track “Criminal World” is a cover of a song first recorded by the British pop act Metro, in 1977, that’s mainly interesting for the way that Bowie completely shirks his provocateur ways to scrub away the gay innuendo and lewd references that got the original single banned by the BBC. Of the other originals, only the spidery synth ballad “Without You” stands out. Examining its tracks one-by-one, it’s hard to deny that there’s an odds-and-sods quality to Let’s Dance. Bowie sort of felt that way, too.

“I’ve never admitted this before—because it’s never been true before—but this album is kind of tentative,” he said of Let’s Dance in a 1983 Rolling Stone interview. “I mean, I only kind of touched the edge of what I really want to do.”

Then again, Let’s Dance doesn’t invite analysis of the tracks in detachment from one another. The album holds together as a proclamation of pop mastery. The bloke who made his name with arty, esoteric records wanted to show the world he could command the charts, too. Let’s Dance is spinning proof.

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.