Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" [1985]

Here's how much you needed to suspend your disbelief listening to popular music in the mid-80s: hearing guest-vocalist Sting bleat plaintively that he wants his MTV was originally sold as some sort of anti-commercial statement on the condition of the industry at the time, when in reality (and especially in retrospect) it was nothing but one great big fat commercial. Mark Knopfler selling out his group of London jobber bar-band hacks was so egregious it made ZZ Top look earnest. Along with the homophobic, misogynistic, myopic viewpoint in "Money for Nothing" (naturally blamed on working stiffs -- classic class-warfare at work in plain view), the filler songs here bespeak of what mild fake Windham Hill yawnisms Knopfler would have released had his album not been hijacked by the Margaret Thatcher wing of the "Rah Rah Ronald Reagan" campaign, which was so bad it'd have made Mellencamp cough up a french fry. What a waste of a perfectly good faceless guitar talent who should have by all rights remained in obscurity.