Music That Mattered In A Decade That Didn't

An Ear Candy Update podcast about music that mattered in a decade that didn't. Clearly, this must be the 1980s. 

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Jason Thompson · Music that Mattered in a Decade that Didn't

This edition of the Ear Candy Update is dedicated to the 1980s, and I mean not the 1980s that drive people into Retro Night at their local bar dressed in neon Spandex and screaming Come On, Eileen while sporting Sky High Bangs.
 
I’m talking about the songs that fucking mattered. The songs are reflective of an ignorant paranoia about AIDS and a completely valid Cold War paranoia. Songs that reflected seething homophobia. Songs about the kids and families in the street because Trickle-Down Economics never actually trickled down. We lived in an information desert and the politics were more toxic than the sand near an A-Bomb testing site.
 
The last time the suicide rate was this high was 1986 and Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Nancy Reagan invited an astrologer into the White House to advise them. The National Dept tripled. Sorry to spoil your Stranger Things fantasy, but we were just seconds away from species-wide annihilation on multiple occasions. The unemployment rate was higher, jobs paid less no matter how you adjust for the era.  
 
We had intense bullying, hair metal - a fucking crime against humanity - and our best movies were dystopian nightmares filmed in technicolor.
 
So, this edition of the Ear Candy Update is called Songs That Mattered in a Decade that Didn’t. We’re going to plunge headlong into the music that reflected that paranoia, that finger-biting anxiety, and that terrifying geopolitical landscape.
 
Leave your legwarmers at home. We’re disappearing headlong into the death of the American Dream.

The tracks:

• People Who Died - The Jim Carroll Band
• Sign o' the Times - Prince
• Rise - Public Image Limited
• Turn on the News - Hüsker Dü
• Bonzo Goes to Bitburg - The Ramones
• Town Called Malice - The Jam
• It's My Life - Talk Talk
• I Want to Break Free - Queen
• Why? - Bronksi Beat
• Sex Beat - The Gun Club
• Johnny Hit and Run Paulene - X
• Bastards of Young - The Replacements
• Totally Wired - The Fall
• Touch Me, I'm Sick - Mudhoney
• Pay to Cum - Bad Brains
• Wave of Mutilation (UK Sub) - The Pixies
• Just Like Honey - Jesus and Mary Chain
• Suburban Home - The Descendents
• Welcome to the Jungle - Guns 'n' Roses
• Straight Outta Compton - N.W.A.
• Prophets of Rage - Public Enemy
• Rise Above - Black Flag
• Magnificent Seven - The Clash
• That's When I Reach for My Revolver - Mission of Burma
• Son of a Gun - The Vaselines
• Holiday in Cambodia - The Dead Kennedys
• Teen Age Riot - Sonic Youth
• Tell Me When It's Over - Dream Syndicate