But even an awards skeptic would have to be impressed by the nominees in the Album of the Year Category at the 27th Grammy Awards, held all the way back in 1985. The Album of the Year is usually a blah category even by Grammy standards, but for one magic year it was almost completely filled with albums that remain listenable decades later.
Take, for instance, Tina Turner’s Private Dancer. The Grammys have always loved to gin up a comeback narrative, but this is a rare case where the comeback album is good enough that people at Tina Turner shows in 1985 would have wanted to hear the new stuff. Private Dancer isn’t all-killer, no-filler, and “What’s Love Got to Do with It” is a little slower and less interesting than I remembered, but honestly, it doesn’t matter. When Turner hits the chorus she tears a hole through the damn thing, and reminds us that she, unlike everyone else on Earth, is Tina Turner. It would have been a perfectly acceptable winner, particularly relative to the history of the award.
Even bigger on the radio that year was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. There is obviously a fair amount of silliness here--”Glory Days” could profitably be cut by 2 minutes or possibly altogether, there’s synths on top of synths layered with synths, and Bruce and Courtney Cox set back the art of dance by fifteen years. But if you’re inclined to like Springsteen even a little, you’re likely to enjoy everything here, and it’s hard to imagine an album better constructed to play to the top row at the Meadowlands. There have only been a few times in pop history when music this white and this popular was also this good. All these years later, I’m still surprised it didn’t win.
Perhaps an even better pop assemblage was Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual. I’ve given it a few spins in recent weeks to refresh my memory, and side one is perfect--three heartbreak songs, each with a different approach to the theme, balanced against an explosion of pure joy (“Money Changes Everything”; “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”; “When You Were Mine”; “Time After Time”). Lauper delivers them in her trademark combination of New Wave theatricality, food court populism, and Northeastern girl group attitude. If I had a time machine which could be used only for the purpose of casting a ballot for the 1985 Grammys (“do not pass Go; do not kill baby Hitler”), it would pain me not to vote for She’s So Unusual. It’s still such a fun record.
But alas, I can’t cast a hypothetical vote for Lauper, because once upon a time a man named Prince glided across the earth. Purple Rain contains a killer opening track (“Let’s Go Crazy”), an epic closing track (“Purple Rain”), one of the greatest pop songs of all time (“When Doves Cry”), and the song that inspired Tipper Gore to found the PMRC (“Darling Nikki”). “When Doves Cry” somehow didn’t get nominated for Song of the Year, but that’s only a minor snub, because it should have earned Prince the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Purple Rain isn’t the consensus best Prince album, but that’s the nature of the Grammys (of the three people mentioned above, only Lauper was at her creative peak). Purple Rain is Prince at his most colossal. At every single moment he’s going for it. If awards are to be given to rock albums, surely this--almost entirely reaching the crazy ambition to write a genre-spanning album that is both deeply personal and yet somehow also aimed at everyone--is the thing to be crowned.
Anyway, they gave the award to Lionel Richie.
