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Top 5 Albums from the '80s

Duke graduate student Paul Swartzel is teaching a course on '80s music this semester and offers his five favorite albums from that decade.

Remember when this was the primary way to play music?
Remember when this was the primary way to play music?

Paul Swartzel is a classical composer who grew up listening to his sister's Snoop Dogg tapes.

Now he's a Duke graduate student teaching a class called "I Love the '80s," a comprehensive look at that decade's music, from classical compositions to the rise of hip/hop, the emergence of hair bands and the subsequent shift to grunge courtesy of Nirvana and other flannel-clad grunge rockers.

You can read more about the class here.

Choosing five favorite albums from a decade that gave us everything from Michael Jackson's hugely popular "Thriller" to "Appetite for Destruction," the astonishing first album from Guns 'N Roses, is no easy task, but here's what he came up with:

1. Gyorgy Ligeti: "Piano Etudes, Book 1" (1985) "The most compositionally interesting, technically challenging, and fun music I've ever heard."

2. Eazy-E: "Eazy-Duz-It" (1988)" "People can certainly criticize the lyrics, but they can't deny the charisma."

3. David Bowie and Trevor Jones: "Labyrinth Soundtrack" (1986) "David Bowie somehow sounds cool when he says, 'Nothing? Nothing!? Nothing Tra-la-la.'"

4. Martha Argerich: "Rachmaninoff- Third Piano Concerto" (1982). "Probably the most exciting live recording I've heard. I never thought someone could play as fast and powerful as Argerich."

5. Fugazi: "13 Songs," (1989). "The first cassette my sister ever made for me was also my soundrack while mowing lawns in middle school."