This is a goofy spin on the “drifter comes to a small town cleans up the town” subgenre of American film, only with an ’80s twist. The ’80s twist is that weird idea that there are “stars” in rote, blue-collar jobs. It’s a little bit like Cocktail where we’re supposed to believe that there are …
Tag: 1989
Lonesome Dove (1989)
I was aware of the existence of this ever since it aired decades ago. But I wasn’t really sure what it was or who was in it. (I thought it starred someone other than Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, like Sam Elliott or somebody. I was not super aware that it was a traditional …
Lords of the Deep (1989, Mary Ann Fisher)
One of the innumerable 1989 underwater science fiction horror/thriller/mystery films that just exploded, this is probably the worst (that I’ve seen).
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II (1989, Charles B. Griffith)
If you thought Wizards of the Lost Kingdom was bad, well do I have a movie for you. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II, which has nothing at all to do with the original movie, has a far bigger actor attached to it than the original and somehow manages to be so much worse. This …
Steel Magnolias (1989, directed by Herbert Ross)
This is one of those “women’s movies” that I avoided like the plague when I was younger. (Not entirely true – when I was in my teens I would catch 10 minutes of one on TV and rate it without watching it, inevitably giving it a ridiculously low rating.) One of the many things I …
And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) by Nick Cave
Nick Cave is both one of my favourite songwriters and, I think, one of the great songwriters of the era. (He is in my 20th century songwriting canon.) But I don’t think too many would argue that he has greatly improved as a songwriter from when he first started out in the Boys Next Door …
Consuming Impulse (1989) by Pestilence
This is some excellent death metal. If you are looking for death metal, may I suggest this album.
Gutter Ballet (1989) by Savatage
I find myself stuck with a lot of progressive metal, especially ’90s progressive metal. I often find that it’s either too metal for the description – not a bad thing in and of itself – or too proggy and not metal enough. Apparently I’m nitpicky about this but I believe there is a happy medium …
Wrong (1989) by NoMeansNo
I had no idea what I was getting into with this band, assuming they were just yet another pop punk band. So I was very pleasantly surprised by this record, which really gets in my wheelhouse at times. But I can’t love the record, because, well, I’ve listened to too many of the bands that …
The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste (1989) by Ministry
“Thieves” gets things off to a pretty incredible start. Though this obviously isn’t the first industrial metal album, of even the first Ministry album to contain industrial metal, it still feels like this is pretty much as good as industrial metal got in the ’80s, with pummeling but mechanical-sounding guitars and all sorts of things …
Boomerang (1989) by The Creatures
Does the idea of a Siouxsie and the Banshees album with the music made up of almost entirely percussion sound appealing to you? Well, that’s probably the easiest way of explaining this Creatures record to someone who isn’t familiar with it (as I wasn’t). It’s got a similar vibe to their parent band except the …
On Fire (1989) by Galaxie 500
Having heard Luna a bunch before this band, I found their debut, Today, a bit of a deja vu experience (with a lot more grime and feedback) but I tried to put that aside due to when that album was recorded. Listening to this roughly a year later, I still don’t know enough about the …
The Sensual World (1989) by Kate Bush
Kate Bush, ever the iconoclast, finds a good balance on this record between contemporary art pop – and all of the obsession with technology that entails – and folk music influences. In the vaguest sense this one sort of reminds of Peter Gabriel’s work, only they are incorporating very different forms of folk music and …
Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989)
I’ll be honest. I have no idea what the state of R&B was in 1989, outside of Michael Jackson and Prince. (And, I guess, Whitney Houston’s early hits.) It’s a genre I never spent much time with once you get past the early ’70s. Well, until very recently, anyway. So I really don’t have the …
Paul’s Boutique (1989) by Beastie Boys
My understanding is that this is the Beastie Boys’ best record. But I have come at it a super weird way, having heard three other records of theirs first, completely out of chronological order. So whatever awe I might have experienced hearing this immediately after Licensed to Ill is just not happening because of this, …
Chameleon Street (1989, directed by Wendell B. Harris Jr)
This is a bonkers film about the a Detroit con man who successfully impersonated many people, which really serves as a vehicle for its director-star’s interpretation of the real person, rather than any kind of piece of docudrama. It’s a crazy story but that story is subsumed in a crazy art film.
The Stone Roses (1989)
Somehow in my mind I confused the Stone Roses with the Happy Mondays so my initial listen was kind of confusing. Anyway… I have read that this is the record that started Madchester/Baggy but listening to the first side of it it’s certainly hard to understand. You have to get to the second half before …
Street Fighting Years (1989) by Simple Minds
Simple Minds is one of those bands that put out an absolute ton of music but which I was only aware of due to their biggest hit. Until 2018 or 2019 I had never heard a single album of there’s. That one album sounded too much like U2 to me, but mostly because of Kerr. …
Disintegration (1989) by The Cure
“Disintegration is the best album ever!” says Kyle at the conclusion of “Mecha-Streisand” from the first season of South Park. I don’t know if I was even 17 yet when I first watched that episode and heard those words. I didn’t know much about the Cure, beyond the fact that Robert Smith could save the …
This Is the Day…This Is the Hour…This Is This! (1989) by Pop Will Eat Itself
One of the weirdest things to happen during the alternative era is that period of time when British rock bands started incorporating sampling into their music (and occasionally rap). The more of this music I stumble upon, the more I want to read a book about the whole scene because it’s kind of weird, right? …
Full Moon Fever (1989) by Tom Petty
For years, my only real experience of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was their 1993 Greatest Hits record. That record contained the three big hits everyone knows from this solo album, though I wasn’t too concerned that these were ostensibly solo singles on a record collecting the band’s hits. I also wasn’t particularly concerned, at …
Club Classics Vol. One (1989) by Soul II Soul
This is a review of a the original British album and British tradition dictates that the big single from the album is not released on that album, so that consumers have to buy both. So the song you know, “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” is only present here in an a cappella …
Like a Prayer (1989) by Madonna
Many years ago I was drinking at a bar in grad school, when the title track came on. A colleague of mine said it was a good song, I scoffed and we got in an argument, with everyone else siding with him and getting annoyed at me for being stupid. For my entire life I …
Oranges & Lemons (1989) by XTC
I don’t know anything about XTC really, just that one of their early ’80s albums has been on my “to listen” list for a very long time. I sort of assumed they were a post punk band but knew basically nothing else. Not knowing anything was good, as it often is, because I didn’t see …
Technique (1989) by New Order
The fusion of alternative and dance was such a big thing in the late 1980s in the UK. But it’s not something I really get because, well, I don’t like dance music. But I wish I could appreciate it more, because there are all these bands, with all these acclaimed albums, and I listen to …
Epitaph by Charles Mingus, conducted by Gunther Schuller, Live at Walt Disney Concert Hall, May 16, 2007
What the hell do we do with Epitaph?
Holst: A Winter Idyll (1993) by David Atherton et al.
This is a collection of short orchestral pieces and excerpts of longer ones, by Holst. It is not performed by the same group throughout (as it’s a compilation) though, as far as I can tell (listening to a digital copy), the conductor is the same throughout (David Atherton).
Green (1989) by REM
When I first got into REM, my friends who got me into REM told me Green was the worst album. And so I didn’t listen to it for over 20 years. (Makes sense, right?) I do know a few songs from a mixtape a friend made me, but that’s less than half of the tracks.
The Paris Symphonies (1989) by Joseph Haydn, performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Sigiswald Kuijken
This is a collection of all six of Haydn’s “Paris” symphonies and is probably as close as one can get to a definitive collection of Haydn’s music on two discs, as he wrote so many damn symphonies (104 I believe). The first symphony, No. 82 (aka “The Bear”), was apparently written last. And that seems …
Symphonies Nos. 44, 88 and 104 (1989) by Joseph Haydn, performed by Capella Istropolitana conducted by Barry Wordsworth
This is a pretty arbitrary collection of three of Haydn’s symphonies, one from the middle period, and two from the end of his career, including his famous final symphony, the “London.” I have heard both 88 and 104 before. The performances are fine. The “Trauer” is pretty good. The first movement doesn’t really fit the …