The 10 Best Albums of 1987

In my introduction to Slant’s list of the 100 Best Albums of the 1980s, I noted that, while ’80s pop culture is largely remembered for its frivolity, the social unrest that stirred beneath the decade’s brightly colored gloss and greed resulted in not just the guilt-driven good intentions of enterprises like the star-studded USA for Africa, but a generation of artists whose music genuinely reflected the state of the world. From political violence across the pond and the struggles and dreams of the American working class, to race relations, sexuality, and gender, no topic was left unexcavated by the pop, rock, and hip-hop artists of the Reagan era. As we enter the 2020s, an entire generation removed from the ’80s, it seems as good a time as any to once again look back and reflect on the music that defined one of the most definable of decades. Sal Cinquemani

Honorable Mention: Depeche Mode, Music for the Masses; Pet Shop Boys, Actually; Dinosaur Jr., You’re Living All Over Me; Big Black, Songs About Fucking; Boogie Down Productions, Criminal Minded; Public Enemy, Yo! Bum Rush the Show; Pixies, Come On Pilgrim; 10,000 Maniacs, In My Tribe; INXS, Kick; Jody Watley, Jody Watley

10. The Smiths, Strangeways, Here We Come

Whether or not Strangeways, Here We Come ended the Smiths’s brief career with their best album has been the subject of considerable debate for nearly a quarter century, but it definitively stands as the band’s most lush, richest work. Johnny Marr’s signature guitar work is at its most varied and widest-ranging here, and, thanks to producer Stephen Street, the contributions of Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce’s rhythm section are actually given the chance to shine, which was rarely the case on the band’s first three albums. Morrissey, for his part, contributes lyrics that are dense and heady, steeped in imagery of death that reflects the demise of one of modern rock’s most influential bands. Jonathan Keefe

9. Sonic Youth, Sister

Overshadowed both critically and commercially by its successor, Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth’s Sister is the last great punk album of the Reagan era and the first great pop album to emerge from the American underground. The chiming, bending guitars of “Schizophrenia” interject a gorgeous haze into a sad, understated song about a friend’s crazy sister that immediately signaled a new era in the band’s development. Across the album, tightly interwoven textures of machine noise, feedback, and distortion are balanced out by shimmering harmonics and unprecedented warmth. Sure, the album still seethes with disaffection, but the avant garde never sounded so inviting. Matthew Cole

8. George Michael, Faith

Written, arranged, composed, and produced by George Michael almost entirely by himself, Faith put the former Wham! singer in the same league, if not on the same team, as Prince, and its blockbuster status and franchise of hits gave the King of Pop a run for his money in the late ’80s. The album fuses pop and R&B with funk and jazz elements (the three-part “I Want Your Sex” alone traverses no less than four or five different styles), and just as the tracks are composed of a mix of canned Synclavier loops and live instruments, Michael himself is presented as one part slick lothario and one part socially conscious crusader. When he wasn’t luring some young thing into his bed with gin and tonic and pleas of “c-c-c-come on,” the middle stretch of the album found him sounding off on such patented ’80s signposts as materialism and heroin addiction. Cinquemani

7. Michael Jackson, Bad

Michael Jackson’s Bad, perhaps the most highly anticipated album of all time, took the multi-format approach of 1982’s Thriller and magnified it to larger-than-life proportions. The pop was poppier, the rock was rockier, the dance was dancier. (Notably, R&B took the form of carefully placed elements as opposed to the bedrock of the songs.) The album was sonically more adventurous than its predecessor, resulting in more missteps but perhaps even more rewards. Bad found Jackson taking more creative control, composing the majority of the songs on his own, making the breadth of album’s variety all the more impressive and solidifying many of the artistic and personal quirks and preoccupations that would come to define him in the last two decades of his life. Cinquemani

6. Sinead O’Connor, The Lion and the Cobra

The title of Sinéad O’Connor’s debut was culled from Psalm 91, in which God promises to protect his people from the lion and the snake—symbols of bold and sly danger, respectively. O’Connor is more lion than snake, of course; she purrs like a kitten you’re fully aware is capable of lunging for your throat at any moment, and she often does—shrieking at dead lovers, admonishing her country’s leaders. The Lion and the Cobra is regal, majestic, and allegorical, an album rife with images of war, slain dragons, and ghosts, and it’s one of the most electrifying debuts in rock history. Cinquemani

5. Eric B & Rakim, Paid in Full

Many would argue that the late ’80s was the absolute pinnacle for hip-hop, and it’s difficult to argue against Paid in Full being a benchmark of the era. Rakim’s methodical and meticulous approach to his delivery provides a stark contrast to that of his contemporaries, while his mastery of internal rhymes underlines his status as a superbly technical wordsmith. For his part, Rakim didn’t need to rely on macho jargon and trite gangsterisms for his self-aggrandizing sermons; he would simply reel off line after line of spellbinding wordplay, influencing an entire decade of tongue-twisting MCs in the process. Huw Jones

4. Guns N’ Roses, Appetite for Destruction

The Sunset Strip didn’t spew the decade’s noisiest music. It just produced the most popular noise. In some cases, the sound disguised an iffy supply of fury. Despite initially boasting what would’ve been one of the most nasty-as-we-wanna-be covers ever attached to a diamond-selling blockbuster (Robert Williams’s comic-strip panel depicting the aftermath of robot rape) before caving into retailer pressure, and beyond such liquor-soaked speed-metal anthems as “You’re Crazy” and “Welcome to the Jungle,” the bleeding heart at the center of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” proves Axl Rose was always one good bender away from getting all “November Rain” on us. Eric Henderson

3. U2, The Joshua Tree

Never has an album synthesized angst, spirituality, love, and politics in just its first three tracks as well as The Joshua Tree, the only U2 album that seriously threatens Achtung Baby as the band’s greatest accomplishment. With “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and “With or Without You,” three of the band’s most aching, impassioned songs back to back to back, the band became lords and emperors of anthemic ’80s rock. Perhaps on a more meaningful level, though, the universality of The Joshua Tree completed U2’s evolution from Irish ruffians to globe-straddling rock heroes. “Outside is America,” Bono sings on “Bullet the Blue Sky,” prescient to the fact that with the album’s astounding success, U2 no longer belonged to Dublin, but the world. Kevin Liedel

2. R.E.M., Document

Michael Stipe has said he knew he wanted to play in a rock band when he heard Patti Smith’s Horses at the age of 15. I have to think that Document, made 12 years later, is the R.E.M. album that Smith would be most proud to have inspired. Stipe’s lyrics had never been as political, though with the exception of “Exhuming McCarthy,” he avoids making accusations, instead using desolate midtempo numbers like “Welcome to the Occupation” and “King of Birds,” which paraphrases Reagan’s State of the Union address from the same year in its chorus, to evoke the confusion and frustration of the era. Ironically, it was by rediscovering the power in the original outsider stance, reflected sonically in their step back from the crisp production of Lifes Rich Pageant, that R.E.M. made their breakthrough, not so much crossing over into the mainstream as piercing it with their most focused and intelligent work to date. Cole

1. Prince, Sign ‘o’ the Times

Finding Prince at an all-time high of musical creativity and an all-time low of horniness, Sign ‘o’ the Times is Prince’s most varied album and his most self-consciously auteurish. It collects tracks from a few years’ worth of shelved experiments, which means it lacks the coherent sound of a Purple Rain. But what chance does aesthetic unity stand against such gleefully generative pluralism? The psychedelic stomp of “Play in the Sunshine” and the nervy, obsessive sexuality of “If I Was Your Girlfriend” could be spun off into whole albums. The truth is, 1999 and Purple Rain have been the blueprint for more than a handful of R&B careers, but no one’s quite figured out how to follow Prince’s trail this far. For all of the new musical possibilities that Sign ‘o’ the Times opens up, it also prompts the sobering realization that most of them will only ever be possibilities for one musician. Cole