Boxing decades The ’80s versus the ’90s BY MATT ASHARE

As a label dedicated to repackaging music’s past, Rhino has always had a keen interest in the box set. The box is the big kahuna of the nostalgia factory — the rare opportunity for the A&R folks to make a statement about an artist, a style of music, or, best of all, an entire era. And since 1998, when Rhino smelled a whole lot of ’70s kitsch in the air and reacted by compiling a seven-disc beast titled Have a Nice Decade: The ’70s Pop Culture Box, the label has made a cottage industry out of placing its stamp on arbitrary markers of the proverbial long and winding road leading away from Elvis and the Beatles. We used to joke that the ’60s started with Woodstock and ended with the Stones debacle at Altamont. Or maybe it started with "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and ended with "Sympathy for the Devil." Pick your poison: packaging decades is a tricky business. Pop culture doesn’t punch any clocks. Was it the death of disco or the birth of punk that brought the ’70s crashing to a close? Either way, the beautiful people were still dancing coke-fueled nights away at Studio 54 after Carter left the White House, and punk needed a full 12 years of Reagan/Bush here in the US before it would explode in force, leading Thurston Moore to christen 1991 "the year punk broke."

But back to the boxes. In ’98, Rhino had enough hindsight to do the ’70s justice. The cover of Have a Nice Decade is decked out in shag-style carpeting dotted with "have a nice day" smily faces. And it wasn’t hard for the label to get the rights to a big fat chunk of the singles that formed the fabric of pop culture in the ’70s, from the serious (the singer-songwriterly pop of America’s "Horse with No Name," a ’60s holdover cast in ’70s soft-sell production values, and Helen Reddy’s liberated anthem "I Am Woman") to the sublime (Stevie Wonder’s "Sir Duke" and David Bowie’s "Fame") to the ridiculous ("Convoy," "Kung-Fu Fighting"). Sure, punk and its prototypes get left out of the equation, but this is the ’70s of That ’70s Show, which also debuted in ’98.

Have a Nice Decade worked out so well that the label jumped the gun on the ’80s when, in 2002, Like, Omigod!: The ’80s Pop Culture Box (Totally) was born. The original seven-disc box had a rubber cover that I still haven’t figured out. (Was rubber really the shag of the ’80s?) But the cover is just the start of problems. It was just too soon to be canonizing the ’80s, even if ’90s icons like Courtney Love had already come out as closet Duran Duran fans. Of course, the first mistake was opening with Devo’s "Whip It" instead of the Buggles’ "Video Killed the Radio Star" when MTV was such a defining force in the ’80s and they could have easily flipped the two tracks.

The ’80s of Rhino’s box is the ’80s of MTV prime-time programming, minus Michael Jackson but including both Michael Sembello’s "Maniac" and Joe Jackson’s "Steppin’ Out." Conspicuously absent are the bands who would inspire the alternative uprising of the ’90s. There isn’t even an R.E.M. track here. Rhino captures the laughable ’80s of "Mr. Roboto," Toto, and "867-5309/Jenny," seeds it with a few genuine gems (The Cure’s "Let’s Go To Bed," "Back on the Chain Gang" by the Pretenders, the Devo tune), and offers a fairly bleak if playful picture of an entire decade. Real new wave — the new wave that grew out of punk — is largely overlooked, as are the post-punk sounds of what for lack of a better term we were once resigned to calling "college rock." You can almost hear Exene Cervenka and John Doe crooning "Will the last American band to get played on the radio please bring the flag" in homage to the overlooked American underground (from X’s 1983 tune "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts") as Sheila E. dances her way through "The Glamorous Life" and Kenny Loggins gets "Footloose." An entire spectrum of some of the decade’s most relevant music — the music that inspired a young Kurt Cobain to start a band — is missing. Doesn’t anyone remember 120 Minutes?

Rhino slyly tries to make up for the oversights on the new decade-defining seven-disc set Whatever: The ’90s Pop & Culture Box. With a clear plastic cover adorned with what appears to be a spray-painted stencil of its title (like, DIY, man) covering a layer of dark-roasted coffee beans, the set screams, "Seattle!" It even features a few of Seattle’s best — Mother Love Bone, Mudhoney, Supersuckers, Screaming Trees, uh, the Posies. That most of those bands did their best work in the ’80s only underscores how arbitrary decade markers are. Add Soul Asylum, the Lemonheads, Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould in his Sugar incarnation, Dinosaur Jr., and, at last, R.E.M. to the list of artists on the ’90s box whose roots are deep in the ’80s underground. Of course, there’s no Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, or Alice in Chains. And though the set does open with MC Hammer’s "U Can’t Touch This," hip-hop is largely ignored in favor of novelties like Right Said Fred’s "I’m Too Sexy" and dada’s "Dizz Knee Land." Well, not totally: Snow’s "Informer" gets its due, alongside Sir Mix-A-Lot’s "Baby Got Back" and Kris Kross’s "Jump." To Rhino’s credit, De La Soul, who like R.E.M. ought to have been on the ’80s box, also get a late-period nod.

That’s the problem with canonizing a decade before the dust has had a chance to settle: outside of the obvious (in this case, tracks by Pavement, Bikini Kill, Weezer, Jewel, Pantera, and, yeah, even Gin Blossoms), it can take a while before the real impact of an era is felt. Just imagine, in light of the current neo-new wave revival, what an Omigod! compiled today might look like. Well, there’s always the new two-disc New Order: Singles (London) set.

Better yet, there are two new boxes that offer an alternative and perhaps more-relevant look at the ’80s — or at least the ’80s I recall. Just Say Sire: The Sire Records Story (Rhino) is a three-CD/one-DVD set that documents the heyday of the label started by notorious music-biz mogul Seymore Stein in 1966. In 1975 he signed a distribution deal with Warner Bros., and Story began. Talking Heads were part of that story, and there’s also a new collection of all eight studio albums, The Complete Talking Heads, on DualDisc. (The Talking Heads box Once in a Lifetime, a three-CD/one-DVD collection in a deluxe hardcover book with extensive liner notes, photos, and other archival material, was released in 2003 by Sire/Warner Bros.)

Just Say Sire does include tracks recorded before the ’80s began. But that’s just another reminder that pop culture decades don’t obey the rules of the calendar. Indeed, Just Say Sire offers a remarkably representative cross section of the important music that defined the ’80s by bringing together tracks by a number of artists who remained below the commercial radar throughout most of their careers while still having an immense impact on tastemakers and serious musos — call it Velvet Underground Syndrome. There’s an æsthetic line that runs from the formative punk pop of the Undertones’ "Teenage Kicks" (December 1979), the Saints’ "I’m Stranded" (August 1977), and the Ramones’ "Blitzkrieg Bop" (April 1976) up through Throwing Muses’ "Counting Backwards" (February 1991), Primal Scream’s "Come Together" (September 1990), and My Bloody Valentine’s "Soon" (November 1991). It’s not easy to put your finger on it. That’s why Stein is said to have coined the term "new wave" as a marketing tool for all this eclectic music.

Stein and his A&R staff were adept at finding artists who didn’t fit any mold. That includes Madonna, whose "Everybody" kicks off disc one of the set, as well as Depeche Mode, the Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, the Replacements, and Throwing Muses. Talking Heads were one among the dozens who from the late ’70s onward created an alternative ’80s full of pleasant surprises. There are no new revelations in the new Talking Heads box — none, at least, that weren’t explored in that first box. But like Just Say Sire, it’s a reminder that the ’80s were every bit as alternative as the ’90s.