Hey folks!

I think I’ll be opening up nominations for the Best Album of 1988 next week, so to prepare for that, I’d like to get everybody eased into a 1988 mindset. Please continue to listen to 1988 albums, going as deep as you can into unknown territories, before committing your faves to a nomination list. (Of course, you will, as always, be able to go back and change your list while nominations are open.) Yes, there are number of “gimmes” for this year, but if you can, find some really terrific obscure stuff, and post about it on Bluesky. A more diverse Best Album slate is a better Best Album slate.

But first… the opposite of that. Best Album Bracketeer BIRCH has posted on Bluesky his personal 1988 recommendations, and generally speaking, this is about a good an introductory list to 1988 as one could hope. It wasn’t threaded, so I will take the liberty of reposting the entire list here. This isn’t complete reckoning of 1988, and I wouldn’t say you should necessarily automatically nominate everything on this list, but as a snapshot of the year, it’s excellent, and you should probably be at least familiar with these titles:

Al B Sure - "In Effect Mode"
Anthrax - "State Of Euphoria"
Audio Two - "What More Can I Say?"
Bad Religion - "Suffer"
Big Daddy Kane - "Long Live The Kane"

Biz Markie - "Goin Off"
Bobby Brown - "Don't Be Cruel"
Boogie Down Productions - "By All Means Necessary"
Butthole Surfers - "Hairway To Steven"
Cowboy Junkies - "The Trinity Session"
Danzig - "Danzig"

Dead Can Dance - "The Serpent's Egg"
The Dead Milkmen - "Beelzebubba"
Death - "Leprosy"
"Colors (Original Soundtrack)"
Dinosaur Jr. - "Bug"
DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince - "He's The DJ, I'm The Rapper"

Doug E Fresh & The Get Fresh Crew - "The World's Greatest Entertainer"
Eazy-E - "Eazy Duz It"
Edie Brickell & New Bohemians - "Shooting Rubberbands At The Stars"
Enya - "Watermark"
EPMD - "Strictly Business"

Eric B & Rakim - "Follow The Leader"
The Frogs - "The Frogs"
Herbie Hancock - "Perfect Machine"
Ice-T - "Power"
J.J. Fad - "Supersonic"
Jane's Addiction - "Nothing's Shocking"
Judas Priest - "Ram It Down"

Jungle Brothers - "Straight Out The Jungle"
Kid N Play - "2 Hype"
Killing Joke - "Outside The Gate"
L7 - "L7"
Lakim Shabazz - "Pure Righteousness"
Leonard Cohen - "I'm Your Man"
MC Lyte - "Lyte As A Rock"

Megadeth - "So Far, So Good... So What!"
Metallica - "And Justice For All"
Ministry - "The Land Of Rape & Honey"
Napalm Death - "From Enslavement To Obliteration"
New Edition - "Heart Break"
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Tender Prey"

Ornette Coleman & Prime Time - "Virgin Beauty"
Pixies - "Surfer Rosa"
Prince - "Lovesexy"
Public Enemy - "It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back"
R.E.M. - "Green"
The Residents - "God In Three Persons"

Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock - "It Takes Two"
Run-DMC - "Tougher Than Leather"
Sade - "Stronger Than Pride"
Salt N Pepa - "A Salt With A Deadly Pepa"
Siouxsie & The Banshees - "Peepshow"
Sir Mix A Lot - "Swass"
Slayer - "South Of Heaven"

Sonic Youth - "Daydream Nation"
Steady B - "Let The Hustlers Play"
Stetsasonic - "In Full Gear"
Steve Earle - "Copperhead Road"
Suicidal Tendencies - "How Will I Laugh Tomorrow... When I Can't Even Smile Today"

Testament - "The New Order"
They Might Be Giants - "Lincoln"
Too Short - "Life Is... Too Short"
Tracy Chapman - "Tracy Chapman"
Tuff Crew - "Danger Zone"
Ultramagnetic MC's - "Critical Beatdown"

Voivod - "Dimension Hatross"
Weird Al Yankovic - "Even Worse"
Ziggy Marley & The Melody Makers - "Conscious Party"
The 2 Live Crew - "Move Somethin"

Thank you, Birch!

Also, if you’ve been with us for the past few years, you know One True Poster, who has been stumping for various hard rock and extreme metal albums throughout the tournaments, with varying degrees of success. Here are his thoughts on Mudhoney, Slayer, Queensrÿche, Metallica, Living Colour, Jane’s Addiction, Iron Maiden, Helloween, Death, and Danzig. But I want to take a moment and reprint the entirety of his cheerleading for Manowar’s KINGS OF METAL, the one album here that’s closest to his heart (other than maybe Helloween’s KEEPER OF THE SEVEN KEYS PART II). Please listen to it and consider nominating it!

Manowar was forged in the alliance of the guitarist from pseudosatirical punk-metal band The Dictators and a Sabbath roadie, a fact which sets the stage for most of what you need to know about them. Manowar has confounded metal fans and haters alike for 40 years with their absurdity, bombast, and dedication to either true metal in its purest form, or the bit. But before then, they were taken seriously. In the early days of proper heavy metal as a mainstream concern, and metal fandom as an organized, self-directed entity, Manowar called attention to themselves with their brusque delineations of true and false metal and stunts like including metal oaths in their album packaging, signing record deals in their own blood, and being photographed as greased-up, fur-
clad beefcakes, and when you read histories of the genre and the fandom they come up surprisingly often for a group that didn't have commercial success until later. Magazines and fanzines alike latched onto Manowar as something like a metal mascot, a north star showing where all dedicated to true metal must go, instead of following the sellout path of wimps and posers.

The thing you have to understand about Manowar is they were, unquestionably, an important band. Did they start metal's fascination with fantasy and war? No. Did they start metal's weird, exaggerated, drag-like performance of masculinity? No. Did they set a new standard for heaviness at any point in their history? No. But the energy they brought to all these things, their ethos, the
way they combined them, I think it's undeniable that their particular flavor of metal resonates in all kinds of stuff, and that they codified a lot of the signifiers that are indelibly associated with metal to this day. They're an underrated influence on black metal—their early records had a scuzzy, lo-fi grandeur to them that's been replicated almost nowhere but doubtless contributed to the dungeon-dwelling sound of early black metal, however much Quorthon protested, and they certainly got to "viking metal" before he did. On some of their songs, Manowar explored a type of doom metal that did not sound like mere Sabbath homage, helping to broaden that scene's sonic pallette. They basically invented symphonic metal along with Celtic Frost.

They might be the single biggest force in power metal actually being considered its own definable genre and scene, even if their quite old-school sound doesn't sound much like where it would eventually go. And for a brief time, even if they were outclassed in heaviness by early thrash, I do think Manowar represented about the heaviest any traditional heavy metal band were going to get, in songs like "Kill with Power" and "Thor (The Powerhead)". In their early years, Manowar were anything but a joke, even if they were decidedly ridiculous. And then....they signed to Atlantic Records. The truest of all metal bands, wielding torch and hammer and guarding the sacred halls before the onslaught of hairspray and sleaze....they sold out. They released "Blow Your Speakers", an honest attempt at a commercial single that tried to square the circle by being about the fact they were too heavy to get airplay. I'm not sure if Fighting the World was precisely seen this way at the time, but considering how sharply Manowar is now divided between their first four records and everything else, it's come to be the perception.

Their 1988 album, KINGS OF METAL, was an attempt to do several things: reclaim their heavy metal swagger, establish themselves on firmer ground commercially, and fully revamp Manowar's music into a more sleek and self-aware package, a consistent brand. And, it succeeded, somewhat at the cost of Manowar's ability to be taken seriously by all walks of metal. Because every single thing on this album, all the things that make them Manowar, are turned up to, well, 11, without tact or shame. The production is bright and flashy, the fantasy/history-inflected lyrics are more broad and vague, and the band sounds ridiculous and campy in all the places where before they might have managed to come across dark and menacing. KINGS OF METAL is an act of self-flanderization so extreme it rewrote the perception of Manowar entirely, and created a love-hate relationship with metal fans who saw the band as by turns true-believers, jokes, or jokers. To this day there are those who can't quite believe Manowar is an entirely-serious proposition, despite half a century of rigorous commitment.

This perception of Manowar comes down to the version presented on KINGS OF METAL, and maintained ever since—a ridiculous band making absurd pronouncements of their own mastery on songs that could be self-parody if the band ever winked. Manowar, as a concept, an ethos, a representation of metal, is such a big part of the genre's psychic real estate that I think the album that captures them at their most Manowar is simply an essential for consideration. And it must be said: there are those who will argue this is their best. As a collection of songs, it's probably their strongest. With some fine-tuning and adjustment, KINGS OF METAL very well could have been the kind of commercial breakthrough they were hoping for: the kind that'd help them crack America. But truth be told, I think they'd already given up on that. FIGHTING THE WORLD was their big swing for the States, and it failed. And I don't think Manowar has ever forgiven us. When you hear bassist and bandleader Joey DeMaio talk in interviews, he talks about Manowar as an Iron Maiden level institution; he's practically in denial about the humbler reality.

They almost never tour here. The one show they've played in America since 1 became a Manowarrior sold out quicker than I could log on. Forsaking Americans, KINGS OF METAL embraces a high-flown Euro-metal that sets it apart from their earlier, earthier sound. Many of Manowar's biggest and most-beloved tracks are found here: the anthemic title track, the hyper-kitsch ballad "Heart of Steel", and the two epic behemoths that close it out, "Hail and Kill" and "Blood of the Kings". It's a mighty album, haughty and regal, demanding you acknowledge its glory. A tall order, because despite the craftsmanship, it really is ridiculous. You've got "Sting of the Bumblebee", a bass solo adaptation of the Rimsky-Korsakov classical standard. You've got "Pleasure Slave", their BDSM doom metal song which is the only time in their entire discography in which sex with a woman (or a woman at all for that matter) is the focal point. And you've got "The Warrior's Prayer", a four minute spoken word interlude in which granddad regales a child of the feats of the Metal Kings. So, Kings of Metal, a land of contrasts, a fine example of metal craft and an album that could easily be taken as a biting parody.

Now, a Content Warning: Manowar are a tasteless band. Where most metal bands, singing of war and battle, choose to elide the discomfiting reality of how women fare in such, Manowar...do not. To be blunt, the otherwise stellar "Hail and Kill" features during its climax the following set of lyrics: "Rip their flesh, burn their hearts, stab them in the eye/rape their women as they cry/kill their servants, burn their homes, until there's no blood left to spill/Hail and Kill!". I don't see any choice but to be up front about this; I wouldn't want somebody to listen to this unsuspecting. I fully intend on writing a DC should this make the tournament and I will expand on my thoughts wrt the overall aesthetic project of Manowar there but for now I will say, after being immersed in a CD of Manowar Mindset, hearing the ludicrous bits pile atop one another, you may find these lyrics less jarring than you'd think. Take it as a wrestling heel song, willful edgelordism, or simple unvarnished misogyny, Manowar is a band that runs so counter to being taken seriously that by the time you hear that you might have a hard time being all that offended by it. But if you will, you probably already know!

Thank you, One True Poster!

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about more albums you should consider hearing and maybe nominating for the Best Album of 1988.

Thanks,

Kent