Like, Omigod! The '80s Pop Culture Box (Totally) By David Plotz and David Wild

I'm with Wild on this one, I like Hall and Oates. But then, I'm a huge wuss.

When David Tepper was putting together his list of albums for the eighties, I was thinking what we really needed was something like the Rhino collection being discussed here. Like most Rhino collections, it's a bunch of "one hit-wonders and also-rans", but while the eighties had their share of stars (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Springsteen, Prince, U2, REM, Sting with and without the Police, etc.) it was those people, the also-rans, who gave the decade its character. What character it had, at any rate. Eighties music is as much "Cars" and "Come On Eileen" as it is "Billie Jean" and "Every Breath You Take". I think there were more of those guys then than before or since, for some reason. Maybe because the Springsteens and the Princes would take three or four years to produce an album.