Various Artists – Rat Music for Rat People Volumes I, II, and III - Used CD

CD. COMPACT DISC. CD. COMPACT DISC. CD. 

some minor scuffing to disc, but nothing to affect playing--tested from start to finish.  (If it skips on you--I'm sure it won't--I'll refund.)

This clinched it for me: records that have the word rat in it are usually good.  The beginning of Good Rats debut in 1969...At the Rat Boston comp in 1976...this comp in 1982.  (This CD version actually houses the songs from all three "Rat Music..." comps from the 1980s.).  When I first heard the first one (I probably was introduced to this from Thrasher magazine but don't quote me on that), it was so NOW and forward looking to me, and now looking back, it's just as amazing. 

While now we can see this came out of a scene, but for me at the time, it kind of came out of nowhere...for me in Michigan, it appeared punk had clearly ended by the end of the 1970s and early 1980s so a magazine like Thrasher and comp like this...  (While now we tend to watch interviews with people in the scene, and while those are revealing...if you watch enough interviews with rock musicians--even in the UK--talking about punk, you'll hear that by circa 1979-1980, they talk about punk in the past tense...that's telling about how almost all people in the US felt.  Even if someone was part of the .01 percent of the population fascinated with punk in 1977, probably 99% of them soon thought of punk in the past tense.