Yeah, I know, most of my contemporaries have shelves full of "best of the eighties" compilations, and the coolest of 'em actually have the original albums. Me, I never liked most of that stuff; it's as if the surrounding culture just didn't have much impact on me until late in that particular decade. Except that I know it did, because there's a part of my brain which contains the lyrics to all the earwormy eighties songs that I most strongly dislike.

There was some rock, I guess -- Ozzy, Van Halen -- but in retrospect I think I only listened to that because it was better than the pop. And there was the Art of Noise, one of the best musical experiments ever -- but nobody else ever sounded like them, then or since.

Last March, Salon's Audiofile featured a song by Billy Bragg (whom I'd never heard of before), with the chorus:

I don't want to change the world
I'm not looking for a new England
I'm just looking for another girl

And, after a few listenings, that song really got to me -- the simplicity and beauty of it, Bragg himself singing unashamedly with an accent that's never been popular in recordings -- it quickly became a favorite.

Turns out he sang that in 1983. There's no way I would've heard it back then; I was seven years old and living in Skokie, Illinois, listening to my parents' cassette recordings of Beatles albums -- in mono! But listening to Bragg's "Back to Basics" CD, which compiles a couple of his early eighties albums, I find an inescapable familiarity of subject and tone.

So, I have to wonder...what else was going on in that decade, especially the early part? What else didn't make it into the Time Life compilations of horrible schlock? And, why has it been so effectively overshadowed?