The 100 Greatest Pop Singles of the 1980s (100-81)
Apr 24 '06 (Updated May 31 '06)
The Bottom Line In which the author didn't mean to turn you on.
What I did for love...
This list started with a Randy Meisner song from 1982. I remember hearing it once or twice on Casey Kasem's American Top 40 back when I thought Casey Kasem was the greatest man on earth. The song didn't go very far on the charts - I remember only hearing it a couple of times on his show, and it got virtually no airplay on my local radio station. Nevertheless I loved it, but I never really caught the name of the song - its chorus was something along the lines of you make me feel like I've never been in love before - nor the name of the artist.
This has been bothering me for close to 25 years now. I don't remember ever hearing that song again, but I've always wanted to. But without artist or title, I was having a hard time tracking it down. And for a guy like me who is known to friends, relatives, co-workers, gas station attendants, and other various acquaintances as the go-to guy for artist/song title info for just about anything, it was doubly frustrating.
A few years back, I bought a copy of Joel Whitburn's Billboard's Top 100 Hits 1955-1999, and occasionally, I would take a look around for it in there. But then, in March, James took Stewart on a trip down to Kansas City to visit his folks, leaving me alone (I had play rehearsals that weekend) with a lot of time on my hands, a brand new computer with beaucoups de memory, and a peer-to-peer download set-up (totally legal of course). I spent that Saturday night when Joel Whitburn's meticulous chart research. I determined to start at Aaliyah and go straight through to ZZ Top, scanning each line of his data for that song whose artist and title I didn't know but whose chorus went something like you make me feel like I've never been in love before, and charted not very high up in the Top 40 somewheres around 1982 to 1983.
I found my answer in the M's. A song by Mr. Randy Meisner, formerly (and briefly) of the Eagles, called "Never Been In Love" - a #28 hit single from 1982. I was successful in finding an .mp3 of it on Soulseek (a crackly vinyl transfer), and after hearing it decided that I still totally loved it, and determined to find a copy on CD. (Wounded Bird Records happens to have reissued the self-titled album it came from on CD in 2003. I ordered it immediately, and I've been blasting it in my car every day since.)
But having discovered a bunch of other downloadable gems on my way to finding Randy Meisner, I couldn't just close the Whitburn book and call it night, so I kept on, scanning and downloading, scanning and downloading - so many songs I'd forgotten about. My long suffering partner had no idea there were that many songs from the 80s that I loved that I didn't already have in my collection of way-too-damn-many CDs. I had a veritable jukebox of obscure 80s singles on the computer, and yet, I hadn't yet made a dent in the machine's memory, so I went through that way-too-damn-big CD collection and ripped my favorite 80s songs from the collection onto the computer as well. Approximately 5000 .mp3's later (not in my "Shared" folder - sorry), I got the idea of sifting through them and coming up with this list of the greatest among them.
I've always shied away from coming up with my own "100 Greatest" lists - far preferring something more modest, something along the lines of "My 100 Favorites", mainly due to the fact that I never felt I'd heard enough to have the authority to declare 100 songs or albums or artists "the greatest". But after that weekend in March, my all-night tryst with Joel Whitburn et al, I feel I'm up to making that judgment call now. So here it is: My list of the 100 Greatest Pop Singles of the 1980s.
A couple of pointers about the list before I get started. I have deliberately qualified this list as a list of Pop singles from the 1980s. As such, I have chosen to list only singles that charted on Billboard's Hot 100 and whose chart debuts fell between January 1, 1980 and December 31, 1989. There are plenty of singles that were released during that period of time that I would consider among the greatest singles of the 80s, but to keep things "pop", I have omitted them. Thus no Smiths. No Echo & the Bunnymen. No Husker Du. Sigh.
My criterion and methodology in coming up with this list has been appropriately geeky and amateurish. I've basically gotten back in touch with my Inner Casey Kasem Wannabe, the 9-year-old boy sitting in his very messy bedroom compiling weekly top 40 lists of his own favorite songs, and "counting them down" by playing the ones he actually had on 45, with little Kasem-esque introductions about how many "notches" the songs moved up or down on any particular week. I used to record these lists in wide-ruled Mead notebooks that I purchased with lawn-mowing money from Tobin's Drug Store. This time around, the 45's are .mp3's, the turntable is a WinAmp jukebox, and the wide-ruled Mead notebook is an Excel spreadsheet.
I collected candidates from the collection of .mp3s I'd amassed, and moved them into a special file folder on my computer. The initial bunch was a discouragingly high number - just under 600 songs. From there, I whittled it down to a "short" list of about 200. From there, I entered the songs into the spreadsheet, adjusting their placement on the list as I went along, at times reinstating songs I'd previously eliminated, or eliminating songs I'd kept that were sort of sacred cows (Randy Meisner's "Never Been In Love" for instance). I'd hoped to convey with the list the greatest, most enduring pop hits of the 1980s, and as I ranked the songs I considered, among other less tangible things, the following: their enduring (and possibly growing) popularity today, their artistic and commercial impact at the time of release, general historical significance (i.e. their "eightiesness") and - well - how much I personally love them.
I have made a great effort not to be willfully contrarian or obscurist, though some of my rankings may, no doubt, be construed as such. Approximately one quarter of these songs were #1 hits. A vast majority hit the Top 40. Two artists are represented on the list by four songs each. A handful of others are represented by two. A few albums are represented twice on the list, but in general, I tried to pick "representative" singles. (In its purest, most objective form, the Top 10 would be as full of Madonna as Rolling Stone's lists are of the Beatles.)
Though my "shortlist" had about a dozen rap songs on it, only one made the Top 100 - and even that one is sort of a genre crossover - mainly because much of the rap that came out in the 1980s hasn't aged well. I wanted to get Salt-N-Pepa on here. Run DMC too. But alas no. There's no country here at all, because the country music of the 1980s has aged even worse than the rap. No metal either, mainly because the songs that I liked most were the ones that I had the hardest time justifying as "pop" enough for the list; and the ones that were "pop" enough were invariably less exciting.
I will admit to a disproportionately large number of synth/new wave songs. This is partly personal preference; but then also, I think these new wave (and early alternative) recordings generally went a long way towards defining the sound of a lot of what was in the mainstream. For instance, it's hard to hear Hall & Oates' early 80s records without hearing the punk and new wave records that Hall & Oates were, no doubt, listening to at the time (and in 1982, there was no one more mainstream than Hall & Oates). Not just that, but more than most of their peers, these are the songs that have come to define what we think of 80s music today, and many, though low charters at the time, are more popular now than they were when they were first released. In fact, I found myself surprised at how high some of my more obscure choices (to my way of thinking) actually charted - and how lackluster the chart performance of some widely acknowledged classics.
So here goes. Everybody Wang Chung tonight.
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THE LIST
-100-
Song: Catch Me I'm Falling
Artist: Real Life
Album: Heartland
Debuted March 1984
Peaked #40
I know it's a dream, but just the same...
You've had these dreams before, where, for whatever reason, you're rolling - downed timber style - down the roof of your house and just as you're about to impale yourself on that shepherd's hook where a basket of petunias has been slowly withering for the last two weeks, you snap awake, and find yourself alone in the shadows of 1:17 a.m. feeling sweaty, dizzy and disoriented. That's what this song is all about. Australia's Real Life are generally regarded (at least here in the U.S.) as a one-hit wonder. And this isn't the hit they're generally regarded for. (That would be "Send Me An Angel", which charted - not much higher than this, despite its greater notoriety - in two different versions in the 80s). But this follow-up to their "only" hit is compelling and majestic (and very, very dancable), full of science fiction laser shots, synthesized back-up vocals - wake up, don't sleep! -
-99-
Song: The Salt In My Tears
Artist: Martin Briley
Album: A Night With a Stranger
Debuted May 1983
Peaked #36
I saw you laugh when the knife was twisted...
Unlike Real Life, singer-songwriter Martin Briley is a one-hit wonder in the truest sense. And most unjustifiably so. Over the course of three studio albums in the early 80s, he proved himself a master of the melodic, power-pop kiss-off. This is only the most popular example of his venomous (but totally lovable) craft. He gets meaner. Wittier. Better. (And thanks to Hip-O Select for re-issuing those three albums last fall!)
-98-
Song: Overkill
Artist: Men At Work
Album: Cargo
Debuted April 1983
Peaked #3
Ghosts appear and fade away...
Another chunk of nocturnal malaise by an Australian band. As a youngster, Men At Work appealed to my sense of humor and novelty with more well-known singles like the paranoid "Who Can It Be Now?", the frenetic "Be Good Johnny", and their joyous exhortations to beer and vegimite in "Down Under". "Overkill" was the lead single from their second album, and presents an edgier, nervier vision. The beat is still brisk, and the guitar parts are as crisp as an urban chill, but lead singer Colin Hay takes the song over the edge with his dynamic vocals - singing the up-and-down melodies of the early verses with a shivery, sharp reserve - as if his breathing were quick and shallow - only to come totally unhinged for the last verse after a soaring, desolate sax solo by Greg Ham. Men at Work's finest four minutes.
-97-
Song: Break My Stride
Artist: Matthew Wilder
Album: I Don't Speak the Language
Debuted September 1983
Peaked #5
I sailed away to China in a little row boat to find ya, and you said you had to get your laundry clean...
Ten years before Matthew Wilder scored his greatest success as the producer of No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom, he gave us this quirky reggae-inflected synth-pop gem. Pure bliss on a 45 rpm.
-96-
Song: Crush on You
Artist: The Jets
Album: The Jets
Debuted April 1986
Peaked #3
How did you know, cuz I never told...
The Jets were one of those groups that my sister listened to - a Tonganese family band of 7 brothers and sisters (they had ten more siblings at home) based out of Minneapolis whose sound alternated between beat-heavy, hook-driven Minneapolis electro-funk lite ("Private Number") and corny karaoke-bait balladry ("You Got It All").
My sister was always into music too, but not in the possessive-obsessive way that I was. She liked whatever was on the radio. She knew the words, but none of the data I found so important - artist name, title, album, label, etc. She liked Tears for Fears, but only when "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" was on the radio. I tried - how I tried - to get her to listen to The Hurting (it's by the same band!), but no. My sister liked the Jets. They were one of the only groups she could identify; and that mainly because she somehow acquired a cassette of their first album. I hated The Jets...
...until I liked them. And then I really really liked them. And I liked them so much that my sister sorta stopped liking them. (This recently happened with James and me and the Backstreet Boys, too.) Though I prefer their debut single "Curiosity", it didn't make the pop charts (it went top ten R&B), "Crush on You" - their pop debut - is no slouch. A supple Latin groove, and a charming, teenybopper lyric: intrigue in the halls of junior high.
-95-
Song: Let My Love Open the Door
Artist: Pete Townshend
Album: Empty Glass
Debuted June 1980
Peaked #9
When people keep repeating that you'll never fall in love...
Pete Townshend arrives like a nervous knight (hey, isn't that a song by the Hooters?) in shining armor with an endearingly gawky hybrid of doowop and technopop. The only thing that could make this song cooler is if he smashed a Fairlight at the end.
-94-
Song: If She Knew What She Wants
Artist: The Bangles
Album: Different Light
Debuted May 1986
Peaked #29
No sense thinking I could rehabilitate her when she's fine, fine, fine...
As her latest album with Matthew Sweet (Under the Covers Vol. 1) demonstrates, Susanna Hoffs is at her best singing other people's songs - especially other people's songs that she really really likes. "If She Knew What She Wants", written and originally recorded by Jules Shear (who also wrote Cyndi Lauper's hit "All Through the Night"), was the follow-up single to the Bangles' breakthrough hit "Manic Monday". "Manic Monday" was famously credited to Prince (at the time, the hottest thing going), but you can tell by the way she sings it that Susanna likes Shear's song better. And how could she not? It's got The Mamas and the Papas written all over it. (Where have you gone, Denny Doherty?)
-93-
Song: Little Jackie Wants to be a Star
Artist: Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam
Album: Straight to the Sky
Debuted April 1989
Peaked #29
Smack dab in the middle of growin' up...
Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam released a cluster of really good Latin-flavored R&B singles in the late 80s - "Lost in Emotion", "Head to Toe", and the soap opera ballad "All Cried Out" - under the watchful gaze of pioneering NYC hip-hop producers Full Force; but this latter-day single (the group's second-to-last chart entry) finds the band doing a faithful (and totally authentic) impression of Gladys Knight & the Pips, telling the story of a girl who follows her dreams a little too blindly.
-92-
Song: New Moon on Monday
Artist: Duran Duran
Album: Seven and the Ragged Tiger
Debuted January 1984
Peaked #10
Shake up the picture, the lizard mixture, with your dance on the Eventide...
My mom always thought that Simon LeBon was singing "I ate my toejam" on the chorus, but I loved the song for its understated (well, relatively speaking) exotica - the dancing under torchlight, and lonely satellites, LeBon's oily baritone croon on the verses - all that stuff. It's an alluringly pagan sex song. What's not to groove to?
-91-
Song: The Ghost in You
Artist: Psychedelic Furs
Album: Mirror Moves
Debuted May 1984
Peaked #59
Angels fall like rain, and love is all of heaven away...
Not the band's most popular song, but then again, John Hughes couldn't really make a movie called "The Ghost in You." (On the other hand, it baffles me that Douglas Coupland hasn't picked this up for the title of a novel.) Synthesized flutes take the place of the gnarled guitars of the Furs' earliest records, and the resulting is a haunted (sorry) swirl of a ballad. Absolutely gorgeous stuff.
-90-
Song: Every Time You Cry
Artist: The Outfield
Album: Play Deep
Debuted September 1986
Peaked #66
I know it's late. I guess I should've called today...
It was easy to hate on The Outfield - they essentially filled in a power-pop sex-symbol vacuum created by Rick Springfield's absence in the mid-to-late 80s - but their debut album is like a cache of fool's gold. Shiny, exciting, and endearingly insubstantial. And light on ballads. However, when the band set their mind to a ballad - as they do here - the results are gorgeous, and even a little soul-baring.
-89-
Song: What Is Love?
Artist: Howard Jones
Album: Human's Lib
Debuted April 1984
Peaked #33
I love you whether or not you love me, I love you even if you think that I don't...
The Flaming Lips are huge right now at least partially because of a penchant for questioning, secular humanist lyrics set to grand arrangements. He'll never get the respect Wayne Coyne enjoys now, but Howard Jones has basically been doing exactly that - albeit with a much greater chirpy pop sensibility - since the early 1980s. This song, his second single from his first album, wouldn't have been my first choice, but then, "Hide and Seek" didn't chart here.
-88-
Song: Space Age Love Song
Artist: A Flock of Seagulls
Album: A Flock of Seagulls
Debuted November 1982
Peaked #30
I saw your eyes and it made me smile and for a little while, I was falling in love...
A Flock of Seagulls make for an easy punchline, but if you could get past their hair, they produced some of the early 80s' greatest music. Like many of their singles, "Space Age Love Song" is entrancingly minimalist in its structure. Simple words conveying a tension between affection and disconnection, set to an incredibly simple, repetitive melody - each verse bookended by an extended instrumental passage basically echoing and affirming the that tension. I can't imagine that the sheet music looks all that exciting, but on record, it's brilliant.
-87-
Song: Left to my Own Devices
Artist: Pet Shop Boys
Album: Introspective
Debuted January 1989
Peaked #84
Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat...
I don't think I'd be overstating it to say that Pet Shop Boys practically invented rap as a British form with their hit single "West End Girls". I might have included that song - the group's biggest hit - if this one didn't have a much better chorus, a greater sense of fun (I phone up a friend who's a party animal), and a better, clearer narrative.
-86-
Song: Smooth Operator
Artist: Sade
Album: Diamond Life
Debuted March 1985
Peaked #5
Coast to coast, L.A. to Chicago...
It's elegant. It's seductive. It's "love in seven languages." And that sax makes me feel sleazy. Perfect music for a strip tease. Or an Epinions towel dance. Only without the towel. (Oh yes, I'm totally naked right now.)
-85-
Song: Let Me Go
Artist: Heaven 17
Album: The Luxury Gap
Debuted March 1983
Peaked #74
A change of heart, a change of mind, and heaven fell that night...
I think one of the things that attracted me to synth-pop at an early age was just the sheer variety of sounds that synthesizers could produce. I mean, dude - listen to Naked Eyes' "Always Something There To Remind Me". It's like whoah! They got that all out of a keyboard? Awesome! Heaven 17 were one of the most reliable bands when it came to producing really memorable synthesizer sounds, and the weird bass note the signals the beginning of each of this song like a capital letter is one of the coolest synthesizer sounds ever. The fact that this strange break-up-but-not-quite-broken-up song is totally hooky and wonderful is just gravy as far as I'm concerned.
-84-
Song: Tonight
Artist: Kool & the Gang
Album: In the Heart
Debuted February 1984
Peaked #13
My 16th birthday, I was so shy: not yet a man, but ready to try...
Teenager loses virginity at birthday party. Falsetto ensues.
Actually, my favorite part of this song is the vocal break with those galloping bass triplets and the high, harmonized exhortations: tonight, you will finally see the light. It's like peer pressure (or is it performance anxiety?), musicalized.
-83-
Song: Automatic
Artist: The Pointer Sisters
Album: Breakout
Debuted January 1984
Peaked #5
Every word I intended to speak winds up locked in the circuitry...
I love "Automatic" for a number of reasons. First, it's just a really good, really clever pop song. Second, well, there's the novelty of Ruth Pointer singing this whole song in this weird, monotone bass voice. But finally, "Automatic" is quintessentially 80s in the way it compares being totally in love with someone to being "a robot at [their] command". It speaks to the general paranoia of the time that eventually everything was going to be computerized and that machines were taking over the world. And sure, Ultravox were basically exploring the same themes in their music 5 years earlier, but the Pointer Sisters were doing it in a way that got them airplay. (And next up for them was "Neutron Dance". I'm just burnin'...)
-82-
Song: She Works Hard for the Money
Artist: Donna Summer
Album: She Works Hard for the Money
Debuted May 1983
Peaked #3
So you better treat her right...
Okay. We have Donna Summer. On her knees. Scrubbing a floor. Maybe it was symbolic of disco's sudden fall from grace. If Duran Duran stole disco music, re-claiming it for the new wave, this is Donna Summer stealing it back. And how.
-81-
Song: I Didn't Mean to Turn You On
Artist: Robert Palmer
Album: Riptide
Debuted August 1986
Peaked #2
I told you twice I was only trying to be nice...
There are few men in the history of pop music who have made their appreciation of the opposite sex more plain. From the oh-so-suggestive covers of his albums Double Fun and Pressure Drop to his debonair interpretation of International Playboyhood - always appearing suited, business-like, smart and reserved while women (flocks of women! flocks of clones of women!) undulated to his grinding rock grooves.
Thus the scenario behind this song is as hilarious as it is unlikely. I confess, part of the thrill of this song for me is trying to imagine the woman he's turning down. I mean, is she a total dog? Does she have a mustache and really bad b.o.? Could Robert Palmer really have been as chaste and prudent as he comes across here? Can we really see Palmer refusing a one-night stand? I don't know. But his innocent act proves even more enticing and sexy than any of his more lascivious numbers. The thrill of a challenge, perhaps?
80-61
60-41
40-21
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Member: Paul Lorentz
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Somebody turn the lights on...
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