By the early 90s, Brian Eno’s cachet was at its apex. I caught up to him the year he did more than produce U2’s best album, Zooropa: I discovered Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger, found a Nice Price cassette version of Another Green World, and bought James’ Laid. Then Roxy Music beckoned. Eno was right, as usual: Roxy recorded its best music upon his departure. Through four wonderful vocal albums—unmatched in their admixture of formal invention and gonzo humor—and a beguiling series of collaborations with Robert Fripp, Cluster, Harold Budd, John Cale, and others, Eno has approached rock with a dilettante’s amateurish glee and a sophisticate’s subtlety, bound only by the limits of his curiosity.So vast as to seem forbidding, his catalog is full of unexpected diversions, uneven by definition. I rank his 1990 Cale collaborationWrong Way Up with Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Before and After Science but find the Jon Hassell co-recording Fourth World, Volume 1: Possible Musics a vaporous bore, while Discreet Music and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks are never far away from my stereo, notably around bedtime.I’m happy with my list: a compulsive miscellany. The songs include the collaborations mentioned above, plus a couple excellent ones from David Bowie’s Outside and a standout from his second Karl Hyde project. The differences between “songs” and “collaborations” is elastic though.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Here’s the thing with jukebox heroes acquainted with Greatest Hits: as much as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, with whom he has little else in common, Al Green recorded albums. Modest about issuing statements in the post-sixties sense of the word, concerned with the space between sticks and snare, attentive to the percussive effect of a single electric guitar strum, they did not reinvent so much as return rhythm and blues to its base: a relationship between the singer and the Divine as intimate as pillow talk.The way in which Green and producer Willie Mitchell repeated their strategic use of strings and vocal moues reminded listeners of their debt to hymns and liturgies; for Green writing and singing a couplet like “Full of fire/You’re my one desire” was an affirmation, not a prayer. He sang from a place of confidence. Not for him Gaye and Curtis Mayfield’s anguish. Even Aretha Franklin’s melismatic evocation of joy as a secular speaking in tongues was beyond his interest. No wonder he covered Willie Nelson — I can think of no other singer from the era who trusted stillness, whose pose was emulating God moving over the face of the waters. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he sang in “Jesus is Waiting.” Although a few years from becoming a reverend, he had the swagger of a man who had found grace but sang as if he had to persuade, one listener at a time; this hushed breath-on-the-neck fervor gives “You Ought to Be With Me” and “Your Love is Like the Morning Sun” their power. The suggestion that he was assuming the omnipotence of the God he loved would have appalled him. I’ll take it further: how else to account for a grinning assurance unknown to any godhead who has tangled with mortals?Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

Many years ago I heard “Precious” and “The Phone Call” side by side and thought I’d discovered the secret of what rock ‘n’ roll singing should sound like. Although she hasn’t recorded an album I care about since the first Clinton was in the White House, I like to say Chrissie Hynde is my favorite vocalist. Most comfortable with a talk-sing meter indifferent to iambs but so intuitive about listener expectations that she understood when to sustain a phrase, Hynde has been imitated by few. Like many first-rate vocalists who write, her stresses come at the beckoning of her melodies. Her band followed nobody — until the deaths of Pete Farndon and James Honeyman-Scott. Even so she recorded Learning to Crawl, one of the great roaring-backs in rock and one of 1984’s quiet blockbusters. With the exception of 1986’s Get Close, produced by Jimmy Iovine and Bob Clearmountain and sounding like it, she recorded no duds, and before you say Packed!, know that this quiet, modest collection addresses (the fear of) commitment without the verities of adult contemporary. That would come with “I’ll Stand By You.”Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

What a relief to hear “Eminence Front” in car commercials: the heretofore forgotten 1982 track, distinguished by a burbling synthesizer loop and a steady Kenney Jones drum track that’s like a metronome and for once doesn’t make me miss Keith Moon, now is among The Who’s most streamed and downloaded songs. “Eminence Front” also redeems the group’s ignoble final chapter, during which Pete Townshend, realizing he was no longer young, couldn’t write for an imagined audience of twentysomethings and pretend he still understood them. Who Are You, Face Dances, and especially It’s Hard were among the first signs of the menace represented by the boomer generation as it aged. When Roger Daltrey rasps, “You came to me with open arms/and open legs” in 1981’s “You Better You Bet,” I want to hide in a fallout shelter. And it got MTV play.But for a decade Townshend did understand. The kids weren’t just alright; sexually confused, struggling with a rage incommensurate with the parents they had no say in choosing or the schools to which they were sent, they were fucked up and willing to get more fucked up. Townshend offered no answers save release.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

I add not a letter to the obituary that The Quietus published almost four years ago. These days I’m kinder towards Transformer and listen to Ecstasy a couple times a year (listen to the widescreen canvas given to “Big Sky” by Hal Willner).Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Although I don’t believe homo sapiens as species has improved, in this century we expect hotels to offer attractive bars serving cocktails with fresh ingredients and restaurants that can properly bake Brussels sprouts. We also expect boy bands to offer decent material. I don’t think my memory is playing tricks on me when I claim New Kids on the Block offered terrible songs: slovenly written and indifferently produced. Matters improved during the Backstreet Boys and NSync days, thanks to Max Martin and Kristian Lundin, among others.By the time the English quintet One Direction released “What Makes You Beautiful,” the boys were thinking in terms of sharp middle eights and crazy harmonies. For a while I was on SPIN’s unofficial1D beat even though it took me a while to get their voices and faces straight; I never would have figured Harry Styles to be the star but there you go (I also thought The Wanted had the career; I still prefer “Glad You Came” to “What Makes You Beautiful”). Brad Nelson’s rumination on how the loss of Zayn Malik crippled the band helped.In the meantime, we have songs, good ones. At an academic year-end banquet in April, students manning the smartphone playlist slipped “No Control” into the mix; these college radio devotees went crazy.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

A hopeless list, especially if you lived in South Florida. Using crossover hits as guides for drawing hard, bold, lines, it’s difficult to distinguish hi-NRG (Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round”) and Italo disco (Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy”) from fellow travelers like Stacey Q, early Taylor Dayne, and Lisa Lisa + Cult Jam, not to mention Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait” and “Point of No Return.” Matters got more complicated went house hit American clubs; its pop crossover coincided with freestyle’s, therefore listeners had to deal with a bunch of Black Box singles and The Adventures of Stevie V, and CeCe Peniston’s “Finally” sharing space with Lisette Melendez’s “Together Forever” and Corina’s “Temptation” at the same time that Stevie B, Timmy T, and the Cover Girls followed the Lisa Lisa (“All Cried Out”) and Expose (“Seasons Change”) template by scoring their biggest hits with slush. To add to the confusion, on WPOW 96.5 I’d hear what in 1987 and 1988 we called bass, which wedded orchestral blasts and the Roland TB-303 to Triassic Era declamatory rap: Dimples T’s “Jealous Fellas,” JJ Fad’s “Supersonic,” early Six Mix-a-lot (“Rippin”), and anything — anything — by 2 Live Crew. Meanwhile the Stock-Aiken-Waterman remix of Debbie Harry’s “In Love with Love” and Samantha Fox’s “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)” insisted on airplay.“You can listen to this record as many times as you want and still not have any strong impressions that human beings actually made it. In other words, it’s the perfect disco record,” the great John Leland rhapsodized about Nu Shooz in SPIN. The perspicacity of this insight, however, doesn’t include most of the tracks below, sung by amateurs who could no more suppress their humanity than they could the swelling of their hair (assume this phenomenon was limited to the women and please goggle at Google Images’ supply of Stevie B photos circa 1988). There’s a reason why “Let the Music Play,” the urtext of freestyle and eighties disco, tops this list: the fluidity with which Shannon ducks from hysteria to detachment. I’ve written about dance floors as spaces where desire and fantasy call a delighted truce — until the next hunk of hotness ponies up at the bar.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

I wish I had recorded a version of “I’m Going Bananas” at the peak of my career too; it’s what I expect from artists in their imperial phases. Dipping into her work after 2005’s acknowledged Good Album Confessions on a Dance Floor is an enervating affair, though, so I refrained from listing post-2008 options except for inescapable stinkers. Her last acknowledged mega hit “4 Seconds,” for example, tops my list: a compendium of exhausted Timbaland sounds (synth horns), Justin cameos (Madonna would’ve been less desperate if she’d coaxed a writing credit out of him in 2000), and party-over-oops-out-of-time twaddle.It’s a testament to Madonna’s quality control that ninety percent of her singles would pass federal guidelines: attractive melodies, strong hooks, identifiable and charismatic vocal performance. I don’t care about “Material Girl,” “True Blue,” “Express Yourself,” “Rain,” or “Causing a Commotion,” but they don’t offend me. The worst of her big hits remains “Who’s That Girl,” on which she and co-writer Patrick Leonard, gasping for air, reprised the “Oriental” presets first deployed on “La Isla Bonita” and the three other Spanish words that Ms. Ciccone didn’t whisper on that same track. “American Pie” was gruesome when Don McLean sang it in the Nixon era; when Madonna invests its stale pieties with more commitment than is her wont it feels like a betrayal; she’s too smart, too modern, to believe in long-long-time-ago (whatever else she keeps Justin and Avicii’s numbers on her phone). A similar investment in superannuated melodrama sinks the early “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.”Now for the surprises. I won’t tolerate no votes for Like a Virgin‘s “Shoo Be Doo” and “Stay.” I’ll defend 2015’s Rebel Heart as her most cohesive album since 2005; many tracks give the impression that she actually sat around a room with co-writers the old fashioned way and tossed melodies and lyrical ideas around. Finally, dig past American Life‘s first two singles and what emerges is an album of murmured weirdness unlike anything in her catalog to date. I want a sequel.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

I know Morrissey is stupid, but it’s a particular kind of stupidity that understands how to use semicolons to mitigate verbosity with racism. That’s a talent I don’t sneeze at. Please note how obvious these titles are. Piers Morgan could have structured a show around them.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

It should surprise no one that I included a quarter of Pop, released twenty years ago to a reception less derisive than received wisdom would suggest. “Last Night on Earth” remains their direst single — four minutes of nothing. But Rattle and Hum boasts “Angel of Harlem,” Bono’s most embarrassing attempt to connect with a songwriting conceit that is supposed to be a person (don’t ever try personification again, Bono). Also, “Hawkmoon 269,” with more heavy breathing than a telephone stalker and terrible contributions from esteemed organist Bob Dylan.