The Angry Robot's July 8, 2002 entry discusses music from the 80's that doesn't suck. It's a worthy subject given the current tendency for retro radio shows (and whole channels, such as Austin's 107.7) to consider stuff like Toni Basil and Rick Astley representative of the whole decade.

Here's my addition to (and partial recapitulation of) the Robot's list of Eighties Music That Doesn't Suck:

John Cale - Music For A New Society

After a frenzy of inspired post-Velvet Underground albums in the Seventies, Cale's Eighties output was mostly disappointing. This album, though, is among his best. The arrangements are sparse, understated, ambient, and perfectly suited to the songs they accompany. The songs have that mixed-up ring of truth that encompasses melancholy and joy, love and anger, peace and paranoia all at once.

Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden

Only six years after their inauspicious debut as a Duran Duran clone, Talk Talk had evolved into a completely different band. Polyrhythms, jazz textures, organic acoustic sounds, and wild textural and dynamic shifts abound on this cathartic, emotionally expressive album.

Cocteau Twins - Love's Easy Tears

The Angry Robot chose Treasure, but Love's Easy Tears was the EP that introduced me to the Cocteau Twins. I heard it by accident in a boring chain record store in a sad small-town mall, and I was transfixed. I thought it must be what the singing of angels sounds like. This and the other Cocteau EP releases of the Eighties are at the pinnacle of artistic accomplishment in the EP format.

XTC - Sylarking

Little known fact: "Dear God" was not originally on the album, and it was brilliant anyway. The addition of the incredibly catchy agnostic anthem after it became an unexpected B-side hit only punctuated the maturing brilliance the band already displayed on this record.

Marine Girls - Lazy Ways & Beach Party

Before Tracey Thorn joined Ben Watt to become Everything But The Girl, she was one-third of this gentle, minimalistically jazzy female trio. It's beach music, but melancholy beach music. Beach music for a quiet gray November day on a British beach tossed with salty spray, punctuated by gusts of icy wind.

Dif Juz - Extractions

Short of Vini Reilly's Durutti Column, there was nothing else in the Eighties quite like this album. Somehow it manages to synthesize all the best elements of fusion jazz, new age, goth instrumentals, and 4ADesque art-pop while avoiding the many pitfalls each of those genres presents. One of the finest instrumental albums of the Eighties. A bold, and sadly unrecapitulated statement.

Joy Division - Closer

Their last flash of brilliance before Ian Curtis chose to end his own life, and thereby the band's evolution. This album continued the restrained, melancholy sound of their preceding recordings, but added an extra emphasis to the post-punk sonic nose-thumbing at the musical establishment. Angular bridges are crossed and never retraversed, and songs end unresolved, as the band itself ended, here, at the peak of its brief but brilliant career.

10,000 Maniacs - In My Tribe

Soon after this, Natalie Merchant's pretentiousness would fly off the scale and the band would begin a long musical decline into uninspired non-cohesion. For this one shining moment, they had a near-perfect balance of earnestness, political concern, poetry, and melodic brilliance.

Dead Can Dance - Spleen and Ideal

Goths love Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun and the Robot picks The Serpent And The Egg, but I've always had a weakness for Spleen and Ideal. It's such a radical departure from their eponymous debut, and it's the record that first presented their signature sound in its fully realized glory. An album of reaching, yearning expansiveness.

Talking Heads - Remain In Light

Brian Eno's magic production touch fell benevolently on the Talking Heads in the late Seventies and early Eighties, as it had on David Bowie in his Seventies Berlin period. On this 1980 followup to the experimental 1979 opus Fear Of Music, the Eno influence finally achieves its full maturation. Elements of punk, polyrhythmic funk, world beat, electronic sounds, and ambient texturalism mingle incestuously on the large, quirky pop canvas of this album. Many of the songs here mark the apex of the band's inscrutability, yet some of them (e.g. "Once In A Lifetime") are also among their best and biggest hits.

Pixies - Doolittle

Influenced almost everything that was good about alternative rock in the Nineties. Demonstrates their impossibly wide range from sweet ballads to visceral hardcore rants to neo-surf-rock. Most bands never make an album this good. Enough said.

My Bloody Valentine - Isn't Anything

This was the album that launched a thousand shoegazer albums. More than just a sign marked "This way to Loveless", this is the album that refined MBV's pop roots into the nascent shoegazer sound. This is the album all of their contemporaries had been listening to for inspiration until 1991's Loveless emerged to surpass them all and effectively seal the fate of the genre in one towering blow. In the mangled, tortured pop of Isn't Anything are the delicious seeds of shoegazer rock's evolution, and its eventual delirious destruction.

My Angry Robot "Me, Too"s:

New Order - Power, Corruption, & Lies This Mortal Coil - Filigree & Shadow This Mortal Coil - It'll End In Tears Yazoo - Upstairs At Erics The Cure - The Head On The Door The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead Kate Bush - Hounds Of Love Cocteau Twins - Treasure Depeche Mode - Some Great Reward

More, In Brief:

Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones Tom Waits - Rain Dogs Nick Cave - Tender Prey They Might Be Giants - Lincoln Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses Bauhaus - In The Flat Field Galaxie 500 - On Fire Depeche Mode - Black Celebration Pretenders - Pretenders Joan Jett - Bad Reputation Frank Zappa - Jazz From Hell Orange Juice - You Can't Hide Your Love Forever The Pastels - Sittin' Pretty

In the interest of serving my small but loyal readership, I'm experimenting with targeted content: stories written specifically for frequent readers who I hope will find them interesting.

Anna is one of my loyal European readers, a savvy mathematician, and an aficionado of time travel writing.

So Anna, this link is for you. It's the Time Travel Fund. In a nutshell, it's a group trust fund intended to pay people of the future to retrieve you from the past when time travel becomes technically feasible.

The site goes out of its way to assure you that it's not a scam, and in fact I am inclined to believe that it is not, at least not entirely. However, I do think it's a great way to live free off the fanciful aspirations of others--portions of each $10 contribution are earmarked for "overhead in running the website, covering legal fees, paying for your certificate, and maintaining the database of members". Overhead in running the website could easily be inclusive of a nice salary for whoever is behind the website.

If you're really interested in this sort of thing, I dare say you'd be better off setting up your own fund and structuring any necessary provisions in your will. The site acknowledges that you could do this, but tries to dissuade you from it. On the contrary, I think if you believe this sort of thing is possible and likely to be feasible and legal, you might as well spend a couple thousand dollars to have a lawyer do your own fund and do it right, than trust someone else who might botch the job.

I will say this for schemes of this sort: I think that time travel is more technically feasible than post-mortem resuscitation of a cryogenically-preserved corpse. Modern physics is generally in agreement on the theoretical possibility of time travel.

Unfortunately, I'm inclined to agree with novelist Connie Willis and partially with Stephen Hawking on the point that the spacetime continuum will, to put it simply, have some serious checks and balances on time travel into the past, or potentially even contrive to prevent it completely. And even if those are circumventable, there will be some thorny ethical and legal issues to deal with, too.

If you're still interested, I don't blame you. $10 isn't much. Just remember that someone is probably living free off of the $10 of dreamers like you, even if the plan itself is perfectly legitimate.

As for myself, I'm actually somewhat considering working my own personal solution into my will.

Note: For a good introductory discussion of Hawking's "chronological protection conjecture" that the laws of physics disallow time travel, and a general overview of the basics of time travel, try Sagan on Time Travel. For a more in-depth discussion, here's an online paper discussing such conjectures and ways to discredit them. Finally, Connie Willis's time travel novels posit that time travel into the past will be possible, but governed by slippages of the time continuum that prevent time travellers from altering history or achieving personal gain. On a purely unscientific gut-feeling basis, this seems a very plausible and tidy solution to me. See The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing Of The Dog.

The rain started falling around 11pm, pounding so hard on the windows I was sure it must be hail, but it was only rain. Rapid, violent rain.

I snapped a few pictures out the window, most of which were completely blurred by the thick sheets of water trickling down the window.

After a while, it let up a bit, and I snapped this view of the courtyard below.

The lightning continued for a long while, and the cat was very restless, but eventually I fell asleep again.

In the morning, I woke before the alarm went off and went in the living room. I lay down on the floor and watched the dawn creep through the skylight. The rain was long past, and eventually a clear light spread across the ceiling.

Our strange, beautiful July continues, and more rain is on the way.