The 100 Greatest Pop Singles of the 1980s (20-6) Jun 29 '06 (Updated Jul 25 '06)    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Music The Dirtchamber Sessions, Vol. 1 by The Prodigy From $11 Jersey Boys [Original Broadway Cast Recording] by Original Broadway Cast From $8 The Bottom Line In which Author Say War! This is it! Make no mistake where you are. You have arrived at the Top 20 of Paul's 100 Greatest Pop Singles of the 1980s (at least 3 quarters of the Top 20). Oh yes. These are the best songs from somewhere back in my long ago. And that's Jake Ryan out there. And he got your undies back. But first... if you want to re-cap: 100-81 80-61 60-41 40-21 -20- Song: Hold Me Now Artist: Thompson Twins Album: Into the Gap Debuted February 1984 Peaked #3 You ask if I love you. What can I say? Speaking of Jake Ryan. It was in that last gorgeous scene of Sixteen Candles when many of us heard the voice of Tom Bailey and Thompson Twins for the first time, singing the woozy synth-ballad "If You Were Here" as we joked (and continue to) that Molly's dress was going to catch on fire. (You've gotta love John Hughes for constructing such touching and wholly unlikely scenes.) The following year, with the release of their third U.S. album Into the Gap, the Thompson Twins made a quantum leap in terms of songwriting and production (thanks, in large part, to Nile Rodgers), and, as a result, commercial success. The abrupt difference between the sound (and quality) of the band's previous Top 40 single, "Lies", and "Hold Me Now" is almost laughable. A magnificent complex of rhythms envelops Bailey's voice on the verses as he dramatically pleads for some sort of reconciliation - earning both our sympathy and our undying affection. The verses are wordy, full of elaborate declarations. Bailey alternately begs us to reconsider, reasons with us thoughtfully and confesses his faults (without entirely knowing what they are) before finally resorting to the simple command of the chorus. Hold. Me. Now. (ma-rim-ba, ma-rim-ba) Warm. My. Heart. (ma-rim-ba, ma-rim-ba). STAY! WITH! ME! And anyone who could refuse him that is just plain heartless. (I stole that "ma-rim-ba" stuff from bob_tomato) -19- Song: I Want Your Sex Pt. 1 Artist: George Michael Album: Faith Debuted June 1987 Peaked #2 Every man's got his patience and here's where mine ends... Do you remember a time when someone could release a song called "I Want Your Sex" and still cause an uproar? Can you imagine Nelly taping a prelude to his video "Hot in Herre" that extolled the many virtues of monogamous sex and stated explicitly that this song is not about casual sex? Can you imagine a Lil' Kim where someone writes the words "Explore Monogamy" in lipstick (with really nice penmanship) across her naked thighs? The first time I actually heard this song on the radio (as opposed to seeing it on MTV), I was on a road trip with my parents - mortified that the song could actually get played on the radio, and praying, praying, praying not for time, but that my parents wouldn't notice that a) I already knew the song and b) that I loved it. And how could you not? After a brief prelude as a boy-bander replicating the faux-innocence of 60s rock n' roll, George Michael shows up with the most lascivious electro-funk ever delivered by a white boy (you had to know that he loved the Gap Band, even a full decade before he sampled them on "Star People '97"). -18- Song: When Doves Cry Artist: Prince Album: Purple Rain Debuted June 1984 Peaked #1 (5 weeks) Dig, if you will, the picture... My sister Jill and I used to make up "in between" lyrics to fill the pregnant pauses in the chorus to this Prince masterwork. I don't remember them all, but to this day, I can't hear this song without singing "because we want to" in response to the line "why do we scream at each other" - and then screaming like a little girl when he announces "this is what it sounds like." Lately, I've passed this little tradition down to my son Stewart - many of our recent father-son bonding moments have involved shrieking at each other in the car. I love this song, though. It's a pop song embodiment of that Freudian (I think) principle that whenever you have sex with someone, you're simultaneously sexing the moms and dads. With all its moans and groans, the way it devolves into a wordless, orgasmic wail, topped of with a classically flavored slither of synth, the sweatiness of it all. It's a therapy session dressed up as a sweet scene of freak nasty supreme. -17- Song: Somebody's Baby Artist: Jackson Browne Album: Fast Times at Ridgemont High Soundtrack Debuted July 1982 Peaked #7 I know I'm gonna know her, but I gotta get over my fright... I was playing this song on my way home from work a couple weeks ago, and Stewart started singing along with the chorus saying something like "you're not gonna get her tonight, cuz you're a loser, all right" - something like that. And I thought, "well, how perceptive." This is, as far as I'm concerned, Jackson Browne's best song - ever. Here, he drops his confessional tendencies, he apparently forgets that he's an Artist, and he opts completely out of any kind of social comment. This is just a plain old pop song about a guy who sees a girl, and decides that she's really hot, and totally out of his (and apparently every other guy's) league - but ultimately figures, what the hell, what's the worst that can happen if I go up and talk to her. Browne plays the character with sympathetic warmth and emotional precision, sounding resigned to his own loser-dom on the early verses, but bursting into a sweet, almost adolescent falsetto when he finally gets his nerve at the end of the bridge. -16- Song: Wrapped Around Your Finger Artist: The Police Album: Synchronicity Debuted January 1984 Peaked #8 I will turn your flesh to alabaster... Everything I need to know about Greek mythology (especially as it relates to modern relationships), I learned from the Police. Who else but Sting could convincingly rhyme 'apprentice' with 'Charybdis', or start off a verse with a line like "Mephistopheles is not your name." The fourth single from the band's last (and most popular) album Synchronicity, this song continues in the vein of "Every Breath You Take" - it's a beautiful, emotionally stirring love song with a dark undercurrent of obsession. But where "Every Breath You Take" was all about one person "watching" another; "Wrapped Around Your Finger" is an ongoing struggle between Sting and some unnamed other for romantic domination. It's sexy, but the song has a bitter - and maybe even violent - edge to it in the final verse when the naive "apprentice" of earlier turns the tables. It may be a tale right out of Euripides, but Sting looked better on MTV. -15- Song: No One Is To Blame Artist: Howard Jones Album: Action Replay / One to One Debuted April 1986 Peaked #4 Doctor says you're cured, but you still feel the pain... I personally like the original, non-hit-single version of this song better - the strictly piano-and-voice take that appeared on the Dream Into Action album in 1985. I was 12 then, and though I had been aware of and sorta liked Howard Jones before I'd met her, it was really my first girlfriend Tanny who really introduced me to his (and the Thompson Twins') music. We would pass each other notes back and forth throughout the school day, always folded up into tiny white college-ruled triangles (like the way you fold a flag); and one day she gave me a note that consisted of nothing more than the lyrics to this song. Howard Jones had written it as a response to touring, and seeing all those beautiful girls around the world who would have done anything to get into his jeans, who he might also have obliged if, y'know, he wasn't married and stuff. It's the ultimate adolescent unrequited love song - about finding poetry in wanting the unattainable - being tempted by someone you could never have no matter how much both of you might have liked to try. I wonder if Tanny was on to something. -14- Song: With or Without You Artist: U2 Album: The Joshua Tree Debuted March 1987 Peaked #1 (3 weeks) You give it all, but I want more... Again, the power of MTV. Prior to this video, I regarded U2 as a fiesty, sorta-awkward, highly political monster of a band. Yes, of course, I had acknowledged the grandeur of the Edge's playing - and after the video for "Sunday Bloody Sunday", anyone could see that Bono had a flair for the theatrical gesture. But, still, there was something distant about the band - even collegiate. Certainly not sexy. But with their video for this song, U2 brought the sexy big time - and thereby hit the big time. Bono dissolves out of gray shadows, a faint glow on his arm, that leather vest - his hair, hitherto a swatch untamed new wave heather, slicked down and pony-tailed in the back, his voice a simmer of lust over Adam Clayton's forbidding bass undertow. What I find most amazing about the song is the second half of it; after Bono's final flame-out, the song goes on for almost two minutes with just that bassline and some light strumming from Edge. To this point, U2 was most often about taking it over the top with volume and release - here they attain pop nirvana with improbable (impossible?) restraint. -13- Song: Borderline Artist: Madonna Album: Madonna Debuted March 1984 Peaked #10 Something in the way you love me won't let me be... Again, the power of restraint. Madonna's earliest singles offered less in the way of music than in sheer pop star ambition. Songs like "Holiday", "Everybody" and "Burnin' Up" have a hungry quality to them that borders on desperation. Even as they exhort us to party party party, Madonna comes across as almost monomaniacal in her quest for world domination (an uncomfortable vibe she replicates on Confessions on the Dance Floor). On "Borderline", however, she's actually singing to us. The song has an adorable bassline, and a yearning synth hook. The tempo's slowed down. It's not really a ballad, but it's intimate enough that maybe we want to take a break from dancing and listen. And if we do, we find that she actually is speaking to us - telling us that she loves us but she doesn't want to be our prisoner. Not only is it the best (and least dated) of Madonna's early singles, but it offers us our first hints of the conceptual richness she would achieve later on. -12- Song: True Faith Artist: New Order Album: Substance (1987) Debuted October 1987 Peaked #32 I feel so extraordinary, something's got a hold on me... This is just one of those songs that makes me feel like I might levitate or something whenever I hear it. My body becomes lighter. I feel almost disturbingly disconnected from whatever else might be going on around me - construction on East Washington Ave., for instance - almost as if, for five minutes, I'm living inside the song rather than inside a human body. It's very strange. But even stranger still, the lyrics to the song seem to suggest that New Order knew exactly what I would be feeling when I heard this song before they even delivered it to me. It's totally cosmic, man! -11- Song: Let the Music Play Artist: Shannon Album: Let the Music Play Debuted November 1983 Peaked #8 He tried pretending our dance was just a dance, but I see, he's dancing his way back to me... So, the other day, I'm driving around listening to the 1990 album by the earnest-to-a-fault Chapel Hill band The Connells, One Simple Word. It's an album that, though I'd followed the band to that point, I never bought until very recently - and, I might add, it's probably their best album. Way better than I'd expected it to be. I'm actually bummed that I hadn't heard it sooner. But even more unexpected that just how good it is: I'd turned the volume down for a moment to take a phone call. When I got off the phone, I realized that whatever the guy was singing, it sounded a lot like the chorus to "Let the Music Play". In fact, after turning up the volume to inspect more closely, it was the chorus to "Let the Music Play"! No way, I thought. But yes way. Even sensitive neo-folksters dig Shannon's massive club hit. "Let the Music Play" is notable not just for its high-drama-on-the-dance-floor lyrics (I totally want HBO to do a series that takes place entirely on the dance floor of American Bandstand, circa 1982), but also for maybe being the first time we heard "scratching" (among a zillion other super-cool electro-sounds) on Top 40 radio. -10- Song: I Love You Artist: Climax Blues Band Album: Flying the Flag Debuted February 1981 Peaked #12 Since then, I never looked back - it's almost like living a dream... They say that the road is no place to start a family; and the rock canon is littered with treacly "I totally love my wife" moments like this. But, for some reason, Climax Blues Band's "I Love You" transcends the genre. I think it partially has to do with the un-poetic plainness of its confessional, girl-you've-totally-changed-my-life verses. They're so expository and wordy and clumsy, and then when they get to the chorus, the guy is just so at a loss, his affection so far beyond explanation that all he can do is "oooooooh, I love you." I love that. I love the repetition of the song. The feeling that some things just can't be communicated in clever words or intricate, exciting melodies. Even the guitar solos fall back on the same simple figures - never trying anything to fancy. These aren't the kinds of guys who would pull some elaborate proposal stunt. They'd just get down a knee, humbly present their ring, and hope for the best. -9- Song: A Little Respect Artist: Erasure Album: The Innocents Debuted December 1988 Peaked #14 What religion or reason would drive a man to forsake his lover... To quote myself (because I'm lazy): The bouncy synthesized guitar part, and that roller-coaster melody whirling up into the clouds and swooping down to the bottom of singer Andy Bell's range, the stuttering thatchagimmeno-thatchagimmeno-thatchagimmeno-thatchagimmeno revving up to the soaring sooooooooooooul of the chorus - I hear you caaaaaalling - and the climbing, climbing, climbing inexorably back up to the greatest falsetto hook in the history of mankind. (Well, the second greatest, next to Morten Harket's in "Take on Me".) "I'm so in love with you", Andy sang, his voice overflowing and ecstatically soulful, and I've sung it right back - to him, to the song, to the big, wide world, and to life in general (and whatnot) every time I've heard it since. For 18 years [in a row]. End quote. -8- Song: Tainted Love Artist: Soft Cell Album: Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Debuted January 1982 Peaked #8 Once I ran to you, now I run from you... Quite possibly the only cover song that truly matters, Soft Cell not only forge a lasting trans-generational (not to mention trans-sexual-orientational) connection between new wave synth pop and the R&B girl groups of the early 60s (even more so on the song's 12" single where they segue into a twin cover of the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go?" - which, incidentally, Adam Ant would perform live on the Motown 25 special the following year) - but also, unwittingly, hint at the tension between the 70s hedonism of gay culture and the more puritan post-AIDS 80s. Oh, and did I mention that it probably has the single most catchy synth hook ever created? -7- Song: Celebration Artist: Kool & the Gang Album: Celebrate! Debuted October 1980 Peaked #1 (2 weeks) Woo-hoo! "Celebration" is the great democratizer. It's the one song you are guaranteed to hear at a wedding - any wedding - and the one song that everyone at that wedding will dance to, or at least smile and drunkenly sing along to (at the very least the "woo-hoo" part), or whatever. It's almost too easy to dismiss "Celebration" because, well, it's so damn easy to love "Celebration". It is, after all, a sustained expression of unadulterated joy. We forget that sometimes, because the song is so ubiquitous. But if you need to be reminded, check out the song's video - I'm sure they've got it at VH-1 Classic's website - and watch the band performing it live. The vibe is utterly contagious. If you don't re-fall in love with the song before the first verse... well, I just feel really bad for you then. -6- Song: Relax Artist: Frankie Goes to Hollywood Album: Welcome to the Pleasuredome Debuted April 1984 Peaked #10 Come... huah! Frankie Goes to Hollywood's debut album was essentially one gigantic, Kublai Khan style orgie - equal parts sex and violence with little to no regard for, y'know, artistic redemption or anything. That said, my pre-teen mind had no idea how dirty the song was until I heard it from Tipper Gore. The fact is that the song just sounded terribly exciting, and even the video for it - the second, non-Gran Guignol version that merely featured the band playing the song while warding off clingy (and obviously misguided) girls rushing the stage - played to my adolescent sense of impending doom by nuclear war. (I always thought that the "Relax" was directed towards Reagan and Gorbachev - admittedly, a far less sexy image than was probably intended - as a kind of prequel to the following singles "Two Tribes" and "War"). These days, that stomping beat, the oceanic wooshes, and Holly Johnson's primal monosyllabic utterances (ow, ow, ow) rising and falling out of the mix, all still convey a doomsday edge of darkness, but then again, I'm far more likely to place it all in the context of the decadent churnings of a crowded dance floor at the height of a post-apocalyptic Gay Pride Festival. - - - - - Okay, I know I know I know... it's very cruel (and some might say cynical) for me to stop now. But I've got a lot to write about the Top 5, and I need to give you all (and myself) a break. No doubt, you're thinking at this point, Is Paul Lorentz that much of a hit slut that he's going to stretch this out to 6 installments (and hasn't it already taken him forever to deliver the first 5?) But hey, this is the 80s, and greed, remember, is good. This also gives you all an opportunity to contemplate just what those Top 5 songs will be. I'd love to hear you guesses, or your own personal Top 5's ahead of time. Go ahead and leave 'em in the comment section. Compare, contrast, discuss amongst yourselves.

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