Tracy Chapman "Tracy Chapman" [1988]

When the 60s counterculture was emphatically celebrated in the 80s by baby boomers being sold their youth via nostalgia, there were plenty of seriously terrible outcomes. Topping the list was the re-emergence of talentless hippie drug-addict hacks Grateful Dead, but not far behind was this idea that protest-folk rock could and should make a comeback. So A&R reps scoured coffee shops the nation over and emerged with Tracy Chapman, a sort of hybrid between Joan Armatrading and a nanny goat. They put her in the studio right away with an utterly boring group of session musicians; they let her ramble on with rhymeless "poetry" that comes off like reciting newspaper headlines from the Metro section when she's not advocating some vague and idealistic call to action. That was enough for both the boomers and their kids -- "Talking About a Revolution" is a helluva lot less messy than actually starting one. And like clockwork, Chapman soon found herself at the top of the charts. Faceless production qualities that can only manage to crib cheap tricks from Daniel Lanois and Peter Gabriel when they bother helping out her sound at all at all is the final piece to this incredibly cynical music industry puzzle. Shoot, if anybody knew Tracy Chapman wasn't really going to spearhead a new movement of leftist activism, it was the ghouls who signed her.