It was a rule that a grad student party had to have the heads on the turntable (if you didn't own a cd player yet).
The Pretenders made their return with Learning to Crawl. Petty and Springsteen were doing the American thing, while the evil legacy of David Bowie lived on in the UK.
Laurie Anderson was big? I recall she only was heard by a small subset of the Talking Heads group.