Nineteen eighty-eight was devoid of any overarching theme, trend, or happening, rockwise; the vacuum itself has to be seen as the year’s big news. We did have a sales winner: George Michael, whose solo debut, Faith, and its five singles gave him the biggest blanket on the Billboard year-end charts to be seen in nearly 20 years. But who cares? Other acts that have raked in similar bucks earned our attention as well in additional ways–by creating a compelling image (Michael Jackson), or at least by riding the crest of a cultural wave (the Bee Gees and the Saturday Night Fever dance revival). Whereas George Michael–like, oh, say, Whitney Houston–walks tall but doesn’t leave footprints; he’s a big star but an unimportant artist.
A vacuum, of course, is another name for a place where angels fear to tread, and a lot of fools rushed around in 1988. Where were our stars from seasons past? U2 tried to live down the not entirely undeserved success of last year’s Joshua Tree with a new, “humble” approach that just made Bono, particularly, look sillier and sillier. At year’s end, the ingenuous lead singer revealed–in Rolling Stone’s tribute to Roy Orbison, no less–that his own introduction to Orbison came when his guitarist, the Edge, gave him a copy of the Blue Velvet sound track, way back in late 1986. In Rattle and Hum, their movie-book-record extravaganza, the band let America in on other of their newfound influences: Billie Holiday, Elvis, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, thus assuring that the attentive U2 fan would share the same rough cultural background of an average suburban preteen. As the year ended, all of America waited for the effects that Bono’s latest acquisition–a remaindered copy of More of the Monkees, picked up at a Kansas City Walgreen’s–would have on Ireland’s biggest band.
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Meanwhile, two Stings stalked the land. The first performed concerts, solidifying the ex-Police-man’s rep as the single most pretentious rock act since Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. The other followed close behind, addressing logorrheic, scatological, infantile, and borderline incoherent letters to any local rock critic who dared to hail his royal poseurness as anything but genuine. The net effect of his efforts, of course, was merely to give the local critics, a dull breed who are rarely noticed, dinner-table repartee for life. Sting took consolation from Rolling Stone’s David Fricke, who commented on “how painful such criticisms must be for you.” Sting, clearly caught off guard, could only confirm that they were.
Elvis Costello was silent, for the second year in a row. He’s allegedly been writing songs with Paul McCartney, and recording for a new label, Warners, but nothing came out in 1988.
Workers Playtime, Billy Bragg: Bragg’s fourth relatively full-length American album contains undeniable flaws–a rather dreary a cappella testament to the lovelike bond formed by foxhole comrades, another political construct about being held without bail. No one will deny that Bragg occasionally indulges in wishfulness. But these wrong turns leave the memory quickly as the record’s major theme–the redemptive wrack and ruin wrought by love–is formed in song after song after song. And as a bonus, you get “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards,” giddily presumptuous in its equating of stardom and a Western political awakening, but heroic and epic all the same.
Copperhead Road, Steve Earle: Earle makes a definitive break with his country origins in his third album, a somewhat inconsistent but straightforward articulation of a populist romanticism. He might remind an unsympathetic ear of John Cougar Mellencamp, but that is to slur Earle; he preaches not at all, and he never looks for issues. He seems, rather, to find issues in front of him and just pick them up. He then wraps them in a cold inevitability (the title track) and folkloric tradition (the morality play of “The Devil’s Right Hand,” which features cadenced, almost antique line repetitions). A surprising success.
