So why is Midnight Oil’s Blue Sky Mining on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
Beyond my love and admiration for Midnight Oil – what they represent, their unique Aussie sound, their prolific career – Blue Sky Mining marks a turning point for me both as a music fan and, in a small but crucial way, as a human.
I almost wrote about how Blue Sky Mining is the album that “represented” my high school years the most, but that’s not quite right. While music will forever fuse with identity, especially for the young, I found my “home” in classic rock during my preadolescent years, in some ways as a reaction to the hair metal that was then at its zenith, and the youthful alienation I felt from the kids that were heavily into that stuff.
So for me it was Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and The Doors during those years. But then something happened, some light of new and fundamentally different music found its way into my pre-streaming, suburban Long Island life.
U2 and R.E.M. became my gateway drugs, so to speak, into different kinds of music where being hyper masculine wasn’t the most important thing but, importantly, rocking out and rocking hard were not at all necessarily frowned upon either. And then, lo and behold to my curious mind, real ideas and transcendent thoughts, poetic imagery and literary grace could even find their way through the mix as well.
“Beds Are Burning,” off of Diesel and Dust (#170 of best 1,000 albums ever), was Midnight Oil’s breakthrough single in the U.S., and that song slotted neatly into this new layer of intelligent and even thought-provoking rock that had entered my life.
Blue Sky Mining entered my life at a crucial age, 16 or so, when albums became friends, life rafts, pillars, priests. And indeed, look at me now, right? Decades later I’ve dedicated a chunk of my life to honoring, cataloging, and ranking 1,000 of them in loving and painstaking order.
Blue Sky Mining represents my tastes broadening into post-punk and college rock and, soon enough, punk and many other genres. All things I wouldn’t have been able to define, let alone articulate, at the time. It also marks an opening up of my worldview – to different perspectives, to thinking about politics and history differently, and even in whetting my appetite to travel (which I might have spoken about at the time in terms of getting the hell off of Long Island*).
* Long story short: I did. I write these words from Seattle, Washington, and am thinking how fortunate and grateful I am that just within the last year my wife and I traveled to Spain, Portugal, Italy, Japan, Taiwan, and several different regions of the U.S. that we’d not been to before.
More than anything though it’s the music on Blue Sky Mining that keeps me coming back. Here’s what I jotted down about it during the long research phase for this here best 1,000 albums project:
Oh hell yeah. I love everything here, from the big sounds of “Blue Sky Mine” and “King of the Mountain” to the quiet pleas of “One Country” and “Bedlam Bridge” to the ultra deep cut of “Shakers and Movers” (which I may or may not but probably am the universe’s number one fan of). An amazing and brilliant album.
Its ten tracks don’t waste or fumble a single second. Like “Beds Are Burning,” “Blue Sky Mine” – the opening track – is a showpiece rocker that turns its sights on an issue that activist and future Australian Parliament member Peter Garrett and crew find important. In this case, it’s the conditions of workers at “the Wittenoom asbestos mines who contracted various asbestos-related diseases,” via Wikipedia.
Catchy, driving rock with a post-punk Aussie flair that highlights working-class oppression by greedy corporations? That right there shows what a unique role Midnight Oil plays on the musical landscape.
And also, not for nothing as we used to say in New York back in the day: that message is more prescient and needed than ever in the mid-2020s.
And some have sailed from a distant shore
And the company takes what the company wants
And nothing’s as precious, as a hole in the ground
The importance of nature, the dangers of climate change, and a focus on indigenous peoples have long been themes in Midnight Oil’s music, and they come together beautifully on “Stars of Warburton.” It’s also one of the band’s flat out prettiest numbers, which is not a term you’ll hear applied to the Oil all that often.
Speaking of pretty, I note above that I’m a superfan of “Shakers and Movers,” a mid-tempo number packed with strange and evocative imagery that has one of my favorite choruses that Midnight Oil has ever produced.
I can shake, I can move, but I can’t live without your love
I can break over you, but I can’t live without your love
“King of the Mountain” is arguably the hardest rocking track on Blue Sky Mining and could have slotted in seamlessly to the fabulous 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 from 1982 (#55).
Midnight Oil would go on to produce one great album in 1993 (Earth and Sun and Moon, #346), but for me it’s Blue Sky Mining that represents the band at its very peak where musically, lyrically, and thematically everything is in perfectly unique sync.
Some stats & info about Midnight Oil – Blue Sky Mining
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Album Rock, Hard Rock, College Rock, Australian Bands
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4 out of 5 stars
- When was Blue Sky Mining released? 1990
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #31 out of 1,000
Midnight Oil’s Blue Sky Mining on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from Midnight Oil’s Blue Sky Mining that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
But if I work all day on the blue sky mine, there’ll be food on the table tonight.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.