214. Modern English, “I Melt with You” After the Snow, the second album from Modern English, represented a very deliberate stab at creating big pop hits. The band’s debut full-length, Mesh & Lace, released one year earlier, was very much in the gloomy, agitated post-punk mode perfected by Joy Division. When it came time to follow it up, they wanted to do something markedly different. At the time, lead singer Robbie Grey explained, “We could have easily carried on with the Mesh & Lace formula. We could have played the barren landscape, the heavy drumming, distorted guitars, and wailing vocals game … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 214 – 212

217. New Order, “Love Vigilantes” “Love Vigilantes” was widely considered a significant departure for New Order and something of a statement of purpose, or at least against reflexive pigeonholing, when it notably led off the band’s 1985 album, Low-Life. Though there are familiar sonic signatures throughout the track, it is distinctively lean and even a touch twangy. More strikingly, the lyrics actually tell a story, which was rarely the case with the jagged merging of words and music on earlier New Order songs. According to Bernard Sumner, the song’s lineage begins with a U.K. tour undertaken with the Buzzcocks in the … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 217 – 215

220. fIREHOSE, “Brave Captain” “Brave Captain” was the ideal opening salvo from fIREHOSE. Recorded in October, 1986 at Radio Tokyo studios, in Venice, California, Mike Watt and George Hurley put the song to tape less than a year after the tragic death of D. Boon brought an end to their prior band, the Minutemen. Inspired punk rockers still reveling in acclaim showered on the recent double album masterpiece Double Nickels on the Dime (though the now rarely invoked 3-Way Tie for Last was the band’s true final statement) at the time of the van accident that claimed the life of their lead singer, … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 220 – 218

223. Lou Reed, “No Money Down” By the mid-nineteen-eighties, there were two surefire ways to stir up extra interest in a single: make a attention-getting video that MTV couldn’t resist playing, or make an attention-getting video that MTV rejected from their cable-waves for one squeamishness-based reason or another. When Lou Reed released his 1986 album, Mistrial, he was in a strange, unsettled place professionally. Thanks to his creative leadership in the Velvet Underground and a edgy nineteen-seventies solo career that could be used as a shorthand introduction to that decade’s drug-addled grittiness, Reed was approaching the status of legend, albeit one … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 223 – 221

226. 10,000 Maniacs, “Peace Train” Ahead of recording In My Tribe, 10,000 Maniacs was noticeably struggling to get a foothold on commercial success, enough so that guitarist Robert Buck reported it stirred somewhat unique worries among his family: “My uncle Charlie read somewhere that we were a cult band so he thought we were playing for the Moonies. He even confronted me with it; he said, ‘Are you giving your money to the Moonies? Is that why you don’t have any money?’” The band’s label, Elektra Records, wasn’t worried about that particular problem, but they were anxious enough to see their … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 226 – 224

229. Van Halen, “Jump” Eddie Van Halen wrote “Jump” on the synthesizer. Famously and even a bit notoriously, the song was a significant departure for the band the bore his name, a group that forged a fervent fan base largely through their vaunted lead guitarist’s six-string heroics. When “Jump” arrived as the lead single from Van Halen’s 1984, the divergence from the band’s typical sound was all anyone could talk about, a flurry of chatter which served the song well. Interest in the track was high, and it quickly became the most successful single the band ever released, cruising to the top … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 229 – 227

232. Gary Numan, “Cars” Officially, “Cars” is the debut single of Gary Numan. Born Gary Anthony James Webb, the musician took his stage name as the leader and chief creative force of the U.K. band Tubeway Army. According to Numan, he wanted to formally transition to a solo act fairly early on, but the label felt a band was more likely to crack the charts. Though bassist Paul Gardiner was also part of the Tubeway Army lineup through it’s entire existence, by the time they were making records in the late nineteen-seventies, it was realistically Numan under a different name. … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 232 – 230

235. U2, “Gloria” What hardly at risk of being relegated to the stations on the left end of the dial that stick with songs that praise Jesus, U2 tapped into their shared religious devotion significantly when working on their sophomore album, October. Really, it’s more accurate to describe it as largely shared devotion, since one quarter of the band’s roster wasn’t nearly as sanguine about filling their grooves with spiritually inclined material. Bassist Adam Clayton was reportedly uncomfortable with the new tack the group was taking, holding up “Gloria” as the prime example of the undesirable artistic drift. By some … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 235 – 233

238. The Jam, “Absolute Beginners” Paul Weller reclaimed the title for the The Jam’s 1981 single “Absolute Beginners” from the Colin MacInnes novel of the same name. The second book in the British author’s London Trilogy, Absolute Beginners was first published in 1958. Though already a revered work, it was experiencing a bit of a revival around the time the nineteen-seventies slipped tumultuously into the eighties, partially tied to the nostalgic interest in mod culture that followed the release of the film version of Quadrophenia, in 1979. Most of Weller’s cultural compatriots had read the book. Funny enough, Weller himself … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 238 – 236

241. The Jesus and Mary Chain, “April Skies” “April Skies” stands as a little surprise within the Jesus and Mary Chain discography. This is not because of its sound, which is right in line with the chiming pop coated in light gothy, industrial buzz that the band had established on their debut album, Psychocandy. Instead, the unexpected element was the swell of chart success that greeted it, at least in the U.K. In the broader homeland of the Scottish group, “April Skies” was their first Top 10 song, indeed one of only two singles in the band’s career (to date, … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 241 – 239