Welcome to our list of the 200 best songs of the 1980s.
A great deal of today's music looks to the '80s for inspiration, but there are so many different ideas of what "'80s" as a descriptor can mean. Here we return to the source material.
As we did for the 1960s, the 1990s, and the 2000s, as well as our 2010-2014 list, we polled our staff and contributing writers for their favorite songs of the era and tabulated the results. Every time we do one of these lists we learn something about how perceptions of decades change over time, and how the musical ideas from a given era filter through to later generations. For many selections, we provide some of our favorite related tracks for further exploration. Thanks for reading and listening.
Listen to a Playlist with our '80s selections on Apple Music
Egyptian Lover: “I Cry (Night After Night)” (1984)
The original 808s and heartbreak. "I Cry (Night After Night)" might not be Egyptian Lover's most famous anthem (that would be "Egypt Egypt"), but it remains one of Greg Broussard's most influential. Absent is the Egyptian iconography that situated the Californian DJ/producer/rapper/electro pioneer's early-'80s output squarely in the realm of Afrofuturism while also giving it the faintest whiff of novelty; in its place is the musical equivalent of crying into your pillow after eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's. With "I Cry (Night After Night)", Egyptian Lover not only paved the way for the sad robot music that the likes of Kanye West and Future would go on to push farther and into weirder territory, he also helped establish a trope that rappers still employ to this day: the sad-sack confessional that humanizes their bulletproof tough-guy persona, or in Lover's case, his gift-to-womankind lothario status. True to form, he manages to retain a sliver of his egomania even in his darkest hour, claiming his "Egyptian voice will hypnotize." After three decades of being entranced by he of the magnificent bouffant, maybe it's time we concede the point. —Renato Pagnani
Tom Zé: “Nave Maria” (1984)
In the late '60s, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil invited Tom Zé to join the Tropicálistas and light a fire under Brazil’s military dictatorship. Often, the movement’s musical element wed exuberant, traditionally Brazilian sounds with a rock'n'roll pose and jarring descriptions of political violence and social unrest; Zé, a firebrand among revolutionaries, was particularly concerned with the folly of "globarbarization." When Tropicália lost the war, Zé sojourned into experimentalism, and in 1984, six years after his previous full-length, he released a revelatory electric opus called Nave Maria. It sold like cold cakes, and the 48-year-old, either too broke or heartbroken to continue, made plans to work at his brother’s gas station.
Later that decade, David Byrne chanced upon Zé’s music and released a compilation on his Luaka Bop label. A spiky, wonderfully avant-garde highlight, Nave Maria’s title track makes literal Zé’s claim that he’s "a composer of only one piece." The components had already appeared on his 1976 album Estudando O Samba, but the recycled tune–rendered here with a serrated, quasi-metal guitar line–shows Zé’s deep yen to perfect his most madcap compositions, which other artists, were they bright enough to write them, would likely shelve in a moment of unwelcome sanity.
Anyone nonplussed need not translate the lyrics, which are pure dada. Gleefully lampooning the state’s Catholic orthodoxy, the tortured narrator embodies a foetal Jesus and dramatizes his birth as a gory, first-person womb bust-out. From that "inverted orgasm," Christ emerges with dismay into an unjust world. Thankfully, though that horror is keenly felt in Zé’s music, he harnesses it with such a manic sense of invention it feels like its own kind of deliverance. —Jazz Monroe
A Certain Ratio: “Shack Up” (1980)
Manchester’s A Certain Ratio followed the post-punk dictum of finding common ground between contrasting styles. On "Shack Up", they landed on a magnetic three-way split between funk, old soul, and the long-raincoat gloom of their hometown labelmates Joy Division. Originally released on the Factory Benelux offshoot partly formed by Ian Curtis’s girlfriend Annik Honoré, "Shack Up" came out in the same year (1980) as Dexys Midnight Runners’ "Geno" and resembles the bloodless flip side to Kevin Rowland’s unwavering passion. ACR singer Simon Topping emotes in a gray monotone, similar to Ian Curtis, while drummer Donald Johnson, who had arrived the previous year, brings a funky danceability to the song that Factory would explore even further with the emergence of the Happy Mondays later in the decade. But what makes "Shack Up" a classic is its ultra-sparse atmosphere, making it feel like ACR were stripping something to its core principles, in the process burrowing to the very core of what makes certain styles tick. —Nick Neyland
See also: Liquid Liquid: "Cavern"
Donald Byrd / 125th Street, N.Y.C.: “Love Has Come Around” (1981)
Arriving after the disco bubble had already popped, Donald Byrd & 125th Street, N.Y.C.’s "Love Has Come Around" is as optimistic as they come. By the '80s, Byrd, an accomplished jazz/funk trumpeter who also taught at North Carolina Central University, had moved to Elektra after a long run on Blue Note and formed a new band that included students from his classes. The group’s second album, 1981’s Love Byrd, saw them teaming up with producer Isaac Hayes, who offered slick production chops as well as his quartet of backup singers, Hot Buttered Soul Unlimited. Hayes turned the band’s well-oiled grooves into one of the loveliest singles of the late-disco period, building a plush arrangement of piano, layered harmonies, moody bass, and Byrd’s own effervescent trumpet detailing. Decried at the time by jazz purists as a cheap bid for popular relevance, "Love Has Come Around" today sounds like a perfect bridge between classic soul and the last gasps of lavishly arranged dance music, soon to be eclipsed by house’s love affair with turntables and drum machines. —Abigail Garnett
See also: David Joseph: "You Can't Hide Your Love" / Imagination: "Music and Lights"
Dinosaur L: “Go Bang! #5 (Francois K Mix)” (1986)
Arthur Russell saw no reason to erect a barrier between the music he performed on his cello at the Kitchen, an artsy downtown performance space, and his records that got played at discotheques like the Gallery and the Paradise Garage. He was hardly alone in wanting to eradicate the boundaries between fine art and pop art; that was a principal belief in the 1980s, particularly within New York's avant-garde milieu of musicians and video artists and graffiti writers and experimental poets. But while noise and classical minimalism were deemed acceptable bedfellows, few downtown types extended that open-mindedness to the city's discotheques, where a mostly gay crowd, many of them black and Latino, were conducting their own experiments in repetition, extreme duration, and altered states.
It says something about the open-mindedness of those dancers that Russell got away with some truly weird shit on his "disco" records. "Go Bang! #5", recorded in June, 1979 and released in 1981 on the album 24→24 Music, under his Dinosaur L alias, is proof of just how far out he could go. Assembling a wide array of musicians from the funk, jazz, and avant-garde scenes, Russell crafted a rippling funk cut driven by liquid bass and some of the hissingest hi-hats that have ever been put to tape, stretched into four dimensions by Julius Eastman and Jimmy Ingram's dueling organ and electric piano. But it was François Kevorkian, a French immigrant and former progressive-rock DJ who learned about disco from playing live percussion alongside Walter Gibbons at the Galaxy 21 nightclub, who would deliver the coup de grace. Kevorkian's mix, released on 12-inch in 1982, used dub delay like a wedge, opening up the track's guts and letting all the pieces fall out to land where they may. The results were as radical as anything to touch vinyl that year; a technically complex amalgam of sound absolutely soaked in pleasure. —Philip Sherburne
Jungle Brothers: “Straight Out the Jungle” (1988)
By the late '80s, rap was thinking big, entering a golden age that produced maximalist, sample-dense classics like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 3 Feet High and Rising, Paul’s Boutique, and Tougher Than Leather. Each of those records was risky and expensive, the product of artists not only with ambitious visions but also the budget to realize them. The Jungle Brothers didn’t have those kinds of resources, though, when they recorded their debut Straight Out the Jungle, released in 1988 on the no-profile independent label Warlock Records. It was the first true masterpiece of the jazz-rap movement, but compared to some of the more sophisticated albums that followed in its footsteps, it’s almost crude.
Thankfully, music this kinetic doesn’t need polish. All the elements that would drive the Native Tongues movement were laid out on the opening title track, which stitches samples on top of samples. A stark James Brown groove gives way to jazzy horns that sound like they’ve been dubbed onto the track by a cassette deck; the bridge pastes harmonies from African funk great Manu Dibango’s "Weya" over the chorus of "The Message", the Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five classic that lent the Jungle Brothers their name. Of course, the JBs’ urban jungle was even more merciless than Flash’s. "The animals, the cannibals will do you in," Mike G raps. "Cut your throat, stab you in the back/ The untamed animal just don't know how to act." The Jungle Brothers hit on the same truth that gangsta rappers on the other side of the country were discovering at the same time: Sometimes the rawer the music, the higher the stakes. —Evan Rytlewski
See also: Jungle Brothers: "What 'U' Waitin' 4"
Too $hort: “Freaky Tales” (1987)
For a supposedly delicate art form, people get haiku poetry confused. It’s not all dragonflies on blades of grass: many of the earliest haikus were dick puns and otherwise crude wandering-poet bro humor. It was juvenile, maybe, but not for its own sake—it complemented the reality-grounded, borderline mundane writing style. All the power lies within the extreme, barely-editorialized brevity, capturing and presenting a real life moment with the purest, most direct translation possible. On "Freaky Tales", the centerpiece of East Bay icon Too $hort’s major label debut Born to Mack, the 22-year-old coasted through the nearly 10-minute marathon powered by the same plainspoken and often vulgar realism. He leisurely pimp-steps into the pocket of the stripped-down funk loop; it’s an exercise in minimalism, aside from the litany of 38 women Too $hort summarily bangs with varying degrees of misadventure. But these brief, unfiltered snapshots, delivered with purposeful directness, had an elegance to them, despite the twin-sister threesomes and ill-advised bus sex—entire stories condensed into two simple, vivid lines, delivered with unmistakable confidence. It wasn’t that Too $hort wasn’t capable of going deep; he knew he didn’t need to. —Meaghan Garvey
See also: Ice-T: "Girls L.G.B.N.A.F."
Kano: “I'm Ready” (1980)
Not so much a band as a production outfit, the Italian trio Kano were formative to the emergence of Italo Disco, which added a mechanical pulse to dance music via the use of drum machines and synthesizers. Released in 1980, their song "I’m Ready" splices a human rhythm section and a pulsing sequenced bassline. The singers trade verses with heavily vocoded vocals, creating a sort of man vs. machine call and response. Even if you don’t recognize the song by name, you’ve probably heard it. A minor hit at the time, a sample of "I’m Ready" also forms the backbone of an even more ubiquitous tune: Tag Team’s 1993 hit, "Whoomp! (There It Is)".
From a commercial standpoint Kano were not a smash, but the group's work has had an enduring presence in underground dance music. And as dance music has returned to the mainstream, Kano's sound has become even more present. When Daft Punk released Random Access Memories in 2013, the French duo praised the dance music of the '70s and early '80s for its use of session players, who added an un-gridded feel and tangible humanity that would later be expunged as pop music came to rely more heavily on programmed and extensive computer editing. "I’m Ready" is a perfect example of that sound—organic, yet futuristic. Music that maintains a steady trance-like pulse, but still swings. —Aaron Leitko
See also: Casco: "Cybernetic Love" / Visage: "Fade to Grey"
William Onyeabor: “Good Name” (1983)
There’s a tense moment in the 2014 William Onyeabor documentary, Fantastic Man, when the Nigerian musician’s former distributor Obinna Obi reluctantly discloses "an incident that made people get scared of him." In the story, a boy visits the enigmatic superstar to chase royalties; Onyeabor responds by chasing him off his property with a pistol. When the kid returns with police they fail to find evidence, and he’s arrested for false accusation. "That image, and air of a bully, was floating in the air," says Obi.
The dubious status of Onyeabor’s good name lends a shade of mystique to this 12”, released at the peak of his ascension from Afrobeat bandleader to pioneering, one-man funk magician. The song’s mantra–"I have a good name, I have a good name/ And no money, no money, no money, no money, no money can buy good name"–is complicated by his backstory; Onyeabor was known for extravagant displays of wealth (notably his cutting-edge studio, pictured on the Atomic Bomb sleeve), and in his exaltation of reputability there's a note of remorse, a hint of desperation. That the music is so anthemic, propelled by a party groove that throws together P-Funk, Kraftwerk and Afrika Bambaataa, makes the song's conflicts all the more compelling. —Jazz Monroe
See also: William Onyeabor: "Body and Soul" / William Onyeabor: "Atomic Bomb"
Alice Coltrane: “Jagadishwar” (1982)
Beginning in the late '60s, Alice Coltrane released a brilliant run of spiritually rich records that blended Eastern instrumentation with experimental jazz. But by the end of the next decade, Coltrane—a harpist, pianist, composer and widow to jazz legend John Coltrane—had mostly gone quiet. Rather than performing or recording, she withdrew from the secular world, taking the name Turiyasangitananda and concentrating fully on spiritual life.
"Jagdishwar" comes from Turiya Sings, a cassette that Coltrane released via her Ashram’s Avatar Book Institute imprint in 1982, four years after her last major label recording. The song has a very different character from her full band work on Impulse! Where that music was often dense, percussive, and alive with improvisational interplay, "Jagdishwar" is more stripped down and solemn. Coltrane’s trademark harp runs are replaced by a wall of luminous synthesizer pads and moody strings. Over top, she chants devotional verses and the shaky, naked sound of her voice pairs strangely with the song’s woozy analog gospel chords.
Turiya Sings was not particularly well known or well distributed at the time of its release. However, in recent years the music has found another life and a larger audience through YouTube bootlegs, blogs, and file sharing services. In 1982, "Jagdishwar" might have been written off as new age glop. Heard now, it sounds weirdly in harmony with any number of contemporary artists—from R&B singers to experimental musicians. Much like Arthur Russell's World of Echo, it's music that sounds like it was beamed in from a private universe, an artifact that's from the past, but not of it. Written yesterday, but meant for our ears. —Aaron Leitko
Gregory Isaacs: “Night Nurse” (1982)
If there was an award for most creative metaphor for marijuana then Gregory Isaacs would take it for his soulful lament, "Night Nurse". It’s a rootsy interpolation of American R&B, guised as a vulnerable lover’s rock anthem ostensibly about a doting romantic partner. A closer read would suggest that "Night Nurse" alludes to the prolific Jamaican singer’s dependency to herb. "I don’t want to see no doc/ I need attendance from my nurse 'round the clock/ 'Cause there is no prescription for me." Isaacs’ relatively edgy repose stood in contrast to the peppy glam of countryman Bob Marley, garnering him the nickname the Cool Ruler. There’s a direct line between Isaacs’ addled troubadour and the Weeknd’s anesthetized analogies. Drug narratives in pop culture are often demonized for glamorizing usage, but Isaacs and his transcendent, lonely howl convey how complex, and necessary, stories of dependency and addiction can be in the right hands. —Anupa Mistry
See also: Gregory Isaacs: "Cool Down the Pace" / John Holt: "Police in Helicopter"
EPMD: “You Gots to Chill” (1988)
EPMD weren't the first group to sample Zapp's "More Bounce to the Ounce", but they certainly helped usher it into the hip-hop mainstream. Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and Biggie (famously on "Going Back to Cali") are among the many artist who followed Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith's lead in lifting from the 1980 funk track. The futuristic, laidback sound (Zapp's robotic vocals sound like proto-Daft Punk) lent itself well to EPMD's early, unhurried swagger rap. "You Gots to Chill" stands out for the coolness of its insistence on its own greatness. Other rappers could claim their spot as the best, but lines like, "To the average MC, I'm known as the Terminator/ Funky beat maker, new jack exterminator," delivered without heat, demonstrated the duo were more than capable—not just a couple of cocky rappers. Sermon and Smith didn't have time for any biting sucker MC's, calmly instructing them to step off: "You gots to chill." —Matthew Strauss
Carly Simon: “Why” (1982)
In Nile Rodgers’ excellent 2011 memoir Le Freak, the Chic producer shares the golden rule that made him such a prolific songwriter: "Every song had to have Deep Hidden Meaning… We felt that audiences would be more receptive to multilevel messages, just as long as they liked the groove." The formula has legs, as the recent success of Daft Punk’s "Get Lucky", which Rodgers co-wrote with Pharrell, suggests. But in 1982, Rodgers and his partner Bernard Edwards used it to develop a post-disco pop song performed by Carly Simon, "Why". The cheery, memorable "La-di-da-di-da" on the pre-chorus stood in contrast to Simon’s sensual, melancholy thesis: "Why does your love hurt so much?" This was the two-pronged message Rodgers and Edwards delivered over delicate percussion and a sticky, guitar-led dub groove; DHM at work. "Why" did well on the charts, particularly overseas, but the song’s slinky gait meant that its legacy was secured in the club. Simon’s name is on the track but Rodgers and Edwards’ finesse has kept production nerds agog for decades: the extended mix was remastered and reissued as a 12'' in 2011. —Anupa Mistry
See also: Chic: "Soup for One" / Nile Rodgers: "Yum-Yum"
Mtume: “Juicy Fruit” (1983)
Long before the Notorious B.I.G. sampled "Juicy Fruit" for his debut single, it was the lead track off the New York R&B group Mtume’s 1983 third album, Juicy Fruit. It’s since been sampled by everyone from Warren G to Montell Jordan, but when it was released, "Juicy Fruit" was a hit that made its way to roller skating rinks and nightclubs courtesy of a nocturnal groove tailored for summertime cookouts. The group’s bandleader James Mtume was the son of jazz saxophonist Jimmy Heath and had played and toured with Miles Davis for a few years in the '70s. "I was experimenting with how to take less and make it sound more," he explained of the track. "If you listen to something like ‘Juicy Fruit’, there’s only four or five instruments played. And that was a whole new thing. Also, there was no reverb on nothing. So it sounded like you could have played it in your basement." Mtume has also said the label didn’t want to release the song because it was too slow; instead, they serviced it to nighttime radio, and it became a daytime hit. —Marcus J. Moore
The Clash: “Rock the Casbah” (1982)
The Clash had pissed off the punks by going hard rock, stymied the rockers by embracing folk and reggae tradition, alienated traditionalists by turning into dub-funk experimentalists, and then, in 1982, shocked everyone by becoming pop stars. The band’s lone stateside Top 10 single, "Rock the Casbah" is the Clash’s entire conflicted, contradictory history streamlined into three minutes and 43 seconds, retrofitting the anti-authoritarian protest of their incendiary early singles for the discotheque, sculpting the genre-blurring sprawl of Sandinista! into military trim and upgrading their tommy guns to jet-fired laserbeams.
But on top of being their most popular song, "Rock the Casbah" is—true to its power-to-the-people message—also the Clash’s most audibly democratic. In contrast to Joe Strummer and Mick Jones’ traditionally stratified vocal turns, "Rock the Casbah" complements Strummer’s on-the-ground reporting with Jones’ and Paul Simonon's broadcasted chorus; and, even while in the throes of a heroin addiction that would soon get him ousted from the band, drummer Topper Headon supplies the song’s signature piano hook and its proto-house pulse. Even if Middle Eastern geopolitics have become way too complicated over the ensuing three decades for anyone to suggest that Western rock music could topple caliphates, the unifying potential of "Rock the Casbah" remains undiminished. —Stuart Berman
See also: The Clash: "Should I Stay or Should I Go"
Class Action: “Weekend” (1983)
The brains behind Class Action didn’t constitute a band so much as a single idea, and "Weekend" was its perfect distillation. So perfect, in fact, that although it became its makers’ only hit together, it did so twice–once in 1978, and again five years later. Driving both conquests was Larry Levan, who'd made Phreek’s original a fixture of his disco temple Paradise Garage. By 1983, the meticulous arrangement had finally exhausted itself, so engineer Bob Blank hustled the old lineup back to the studio to record a post-disco revamp.
The sonic overhaul was revelatory, a glimmering network of teasing bass pops, crisp programmed beats, deep-freeze synth zaps. Where the original was all groove, riding a low-key funk bounce, the revamp surges like a chemical rush. It’s a classic in the genre of dancefloor hits that venerate the pre-dancefloor anticipation, thus opening a feedback loop between the desire and its gratification. To boot, it’s a sublime document of sexual liberation. Christine Wiltshire delivers a fiery, taunting sermon on the topic of how to leave one’s man, seasoned with some deliciously cruel scene-setting: As he’s left at home with the kids, Wiltshire steps into the night for a no-strings fling in paradise. —Jazz Monroe
See also: Thelma Houston: "You Used to Hold Me So Tight" / NYC Peech Boys: "Don't Make Me Wait"
Wayne Smith: “Under Me Sleng Teng” (1985)
In much the same way that New Orleans R&B transmitted across the Caribbean to influence Jamaican music in the '50s and '60s, it’s fitting that "Under Me Sleng Teng", the seismic 1985 single from Wayne Smith, also had roots in old American rock’n’roll. In late 1984, Smith and a friend had gotten hold of a Casiotone MT40 keyboard and played around with the machine’s rock’n’roll preset, which sputtered out a fast and dinky version of Eddie Cochran’s 1959 rockabilly song, "Somethin’ Else". Over the delirious beat, Smith voiced his love for spliffs and his distrust of cocaine, taking lines from Barrington Levy's "Under Mi Sensi" and Yellowman's "Under Me Fat Ting".
They took it to producer Prince Jammy, who slowed the synthesized track down to a more acceptable reggae tempo. A few days later, he deployed it at a soundclash against the Black Scorpio Soundsystem and crushed them with the track. Like an earthquake, the revolutionary "Sleng Teng" riddim changed the Jamaican music industry overnight, introducing dancehall to the world. Going forward, riddims would be rendered via keyboards and drum machines rather than session musicians and "Sleng Teng" became the most ubiquitous riddim, manifesting nearly 400 times to date. Jammy’s digital productions became ascendant on the isle, and when King Tubby was tragically murdered a few years on, Jammy was crowned King. And Smith’s track also pushed Jamaica’s sound closer to that of early hip-hop, starting a cross-fertilization that continues to this day. —Andy Beta
See also: Black Uhuru: "Sponji Reggae"
Loose Joints: “Is It All Over My Face” (1980)
The transformation of Arthur Russell from cult favorite into widely praised figurehead is one of the great upsets of pop music history. Russell, a polyglot composer who made odd, personal music, was far likelier to end up a footnote, or sample fodder, than as the subject of documentaries and biographies, to see his archives mined for scraps of magic. But Russell's pensive solo works have always appealed to underground music fans, and a renewed interest in disco and post-disco—spearheaded by labels like DFA—has helped keep his dance productions in rotation. "Is It All Over My Face", produced with Steve D'Aquisto under his and Russell's Loose Joints alias, is the finest of those tracks, a collision of disco's pop and exploratory impulses.
Featuring famed Philadelphia session musicians the Ingram brothers and released on disco stalwart West End Records, "Is It All Over My Face" was not a homespun lark. Still, it was not aimed at the charts, recorded with amateur vocalists exclusively under full moons. The track was meant to encompass the flowing, friendly vibes of David Mancuso's Loft parties, though it never became a mainstay there. "Is It All Over My Face" exists in two wildly different forms. Russell's own cut is jammier and features a cadre of mumbling male vocalists; it sold poorly. Paradise Garage resident Larry Levan's more celebrated version highlights Melvina Woods' warbly, off-key vocals; it was a Garage smash and did time on the Billboard dance chart.
The track is about dancing, or guilt, or—covertly, funnily—blowjobs. Russell was a gay man attending largely gay dance parties—he served the base, so to speak. But the unusual singsong cadences in which Woods et al. enunciate the song's little koans leave room for interpretation; it's like a group of non-English speakers singing the phrases off of flash cards. Russell compulsively injected oddities like this into his disco. That he made it all work was his genius; that we're still dancing to and celebrating these songs is a triumph of strange. —Andrew Gaerig
See also: Shirley Lites: "Heat You Up (Melt You Down)"
Strafe: “Set It Off” (1984)
Nominally, Chris Rock’s Top Five is about a cocktail party topic: who are your five favorite rappers? And while the soundtrack featured old school tracks from Slick Rick and LL Cool J, one pivotal scene features the boom-tick of an 808 and the shout: "Y’all want this party started, right? Y’all want this party started quickly, right?" At the time of its release in 1984, Strafe’s "Set It Off" was at the nexus of New York City’s underground street musics: hip-hop, electro, and boogie, when the borders separating each genre were permeable. The work of Steve Standard (who as legend has it, borrowed the 808 from his friend Cozmo D of Newcleus, who had recently deployed the drum machine for "Jam on It"), it came to the attention of retired disco DJ Walter Gibbons. Gibbons had remixed the likes of Gladys Knight and the Salsoul Orchestra (and would soon make iconic work with Arthur Russell) and started his own label so as to put out the song. It soon became the hottest track in New York, soundtracking moves by Paradise Garage dancers and breaking b-boys alike. That shout continues to be echoed by everyone from C+C Music Factory to 50 Cent, an old-school party-starter nearly three decades later. —Andy Beta
See also: A Number of Names: "Shari Vari" / B.W.H.: "Stop"
Womack & Womack: “Teardrops” (1988)
Four years on from Wham!’s "Careless Whisper", 1988’s "Teardrops" provided not only the decade’s other, superior take on the pitfalls of infidelity, but also its best argument for pop powered by restraint rather than excess. The underlying message may be the same—guilty feet ain’t got no rhythm—but "Teardrops" swaps desperation for quiet resignation, and impassioned chest-beating for melancholy understatement and resilience; the music may no longer feel the same, but Linda Womack tries to keep dancing. "Nothing that I do or feel ever feels like I felt it with you," she announces with such understated dignity that her sadness feels more real, more intimate than almost any other vision of heartbreak in pop’s archives.
Womack & Womack had already proved themselves expert in mining these spaces in between breakups and make-ups, intermingling love and loss so expertly and so effortlessly that the sadness becomes soothing, a crutch you can’t throw away, a lover you can’t leave no matter how badly you fight. If 1983’s Love Wars is the duo’s finest album-length expression of this mission, then "Teardrops" is the ultimate single-shot, a simmering soul number of such polite, warm accommodation that it raises the notion of "background music" to the level of art, demanding not to be turned up, but that we turn the sound of life down in order to hear it better.
Linda takes care to fill only so much space as she needs to vocalize her bittersweet nostalgia, while the arrangement shrugs off her despond with a brisk yet comfortable groove that remembers the ease and familiarity of romance lost in the moment, taking for granted the spontaneous joy now forever denied to its singer. In wistful instrumental stretches the song slides into an extended keyboard solo of unexpected (even for Womack & Womack) minimalism and economy, a slow jazzstep in zero gravity. Its radical uneventfulness captures better than words the song’s fond evocation of love’s smallest scenes of domestic harmony: burnt toast or unmade beds or footsteps on the dancefloor. —Tim Finney
See also: Womack & Womack: "Baby I'm Scared of You"
Patrice Rushen: “Forget Me Nots” (1982)
In the crowded field that was early '80s R&B soul—with Diana Ross, Chaka Khan, Patti LaBelle, Donna Summer, and Stephanie Mills, among others—Patrice Rushen emerged as a surprise. In the '70s, Rushen was primarily a jazz vocalist and musician who had already produced enough notable material to release a Best Of compilation. When her rhythmic, pop-leaning self-titled album arrived in 1978, Rushen quickly came under fire from the jazz community, which deemed her a sellout. Seeming to prove their point, Patrice earned Rushen her first charting single with "Hang It Up". 1979’s Pizazz was even less jazzy, and received similar criticism. After scoring three Top 5 hits on the U.S. dance charts from 1980 to 1981, she finally hit big with the funky "Forget Me Nots", a crossover smash about forlorned romance.
A prominent sample (and an interpolation) of the song would later be repurposed for Will Smith’s even bigger hit, "Men in Black", the Grammy-winning single for the 1997 film of the same name. That shouldn’t count against it: Accompanied by a particularly elastic bassline from noted R&B bassist Freddie Washington, who worked with artists like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, Elton John, and B.B. King, Patrice Rushen’s "Forget Me Nots" reeks of a longing to rekindle lost love. The memories of forgotten romance refract through the clarity and transparency of her tone. She spirals through a dizzying head rush of emotions with a composure that’s gripping. "Forget Me Nots" is imbued with something its platinum successor could never recapture: the slow-burning desire exuded by Rushen’s poised vocal performance. —Sheldon Pearce
See also: Patrice Rushen: "Remind Me"
The Joubert Singers: “Stand on the Word” (1985)
For those inclined to believe that music's power can be as uncanny as it is transcendent, here’s definitive proof. In 1982, Phyliss McKoy Joubert was minister of music at the First Baptist Church of Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Her song "Stand on the Word", with the artist credited as the Celestial Choir, was part of a privately pressed compilation album recorded live at the church that spring. A rousing, piano-centered gospel number with a youthful lead vocal and funk underpinnings, the track caught the ear of Walter Gibbons, a disco pioneer who’d more recently become a born-again Christian—and whose studios were nearby.
From there, "Stand on the Word" eventually spread to such NYC dance-music holy sites as the Loft and Paradise Garage. Gibbons died from AIDS-related symptoms in 1994, so he never got to hear the record’s ongoing diaspora, whether it was providing a climactic moment on Glasgow club night via Optimo’s towering 2004 mix How to Kill the DJ Part 2, inspiring Justice’s joyful "D.A.N.C.E." a few years later, or in this decade cracking the French charts via a reissued cover version. A 1985 overhaul, credited to the Joubert Singers, adds some dated-sounding production flourishes, but the original remains untouchable, as certain to lift up a crowd as many far better-known songs from the era.
There has been some confusion about this record’s origins—it’s often listed as a remix by the Paradise’s legendary Larry Levan—but disco scholar Tim Lawrence convincingly documents the proper history on his website. Anyway, that murky path from church-pew fervor to dancefloor rapture is appropriate for a tune that can have even avowed atheists belting out, "That’s how the good Lord works." As for Joubert, she has remained active as founder of the Glory Gospel Singers; a website lists plans for a "Stand on the Word" tour this year. Mysterious ways, for sure. —Marc Hogan
Nina Simone: “Fodder in Her Wings” (1982)
Fodder on My Wings was arguably the most honest record Nina released in the period when she seemed to have all but disappeared from music. In the near-decade that she escaped the States to live abroad, the only other studio album she recorded was 1978’s Baltimore, a record she says in her autobiography was made mostly to move her career along. Fodder on My Wings by contrast was a deeply personal, sometimes even playful, compendium of her time in the mid-'70s to mid-'80s spent flitting between Barbados, Liberia, and various European cities.
The title track explains everything: "A bird fell to earth, reincarnated from her birth/ She had fodder in her brain/ Dust inside her wings." And the dust inside Simone’s wings was thick—an accumulation of years of marital abuse, a falling out with her record label, an unfinished Civil Rights Movement and dear friends who’d died fighting; a lifetime of being misunderstood. Yet despite all of that, like dust, she'd rise.
Nina had long called Africa her "spiritual home," and she had been wanting to get back to the Western classical music she was raised on. "Fodder in Her Wings" allowed her to make good on both. The track opens with marimba and shekere sounds, before Simone herself enters on a Baroque-sounding harpsichord and classical piano. In a few years, she would remake this song, and she would put it in an album called Nina’s Back. —Minna Zhou
The Pretenders: “Brass in Pocket” (1980)
In 1973, Chrissie Hynde wanted to get the hell out of Akron, Ohio, the town where she was born and raised, so she cobbled together some money working odd jobs and set off for England. She managed to get a gig writing for NME, and eventually, she set out to put her own band together. It took a few tries, but she eventually found three guys from Hereford: bassist Pete Farndon, guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, and drummer Martin Chambers. The Pretenders could do breakneck songs in uncommon time signatures (Honeyman-Scott rips on "Tattooed Love Boys"), but 1980’s "Brass in Pocket" was comparably delicate.
It’s often thought that Hynde sings from the perspective of someone getting ready for a sexual encounter—the music video where she portrays a pining waitress certainly pushes that narrative—but it’s equally possible that it’s about performing. Regardless, Hynde is her own biggest advocate, doing everything she can to get the attention she knows she deserves. "I’m special," she sings, and her bandmates all concur.
Hynde is special, and not just because of her iconic powerhouse alto. She’s an uncompromising and bold figure, the Midwestern badass among Brits who spoke candidly to Kurt Loder in 1980 about consent, fucking "like a man", and the realities of touring while on your period. In interviews, Hynde has distanced herself from this song, but it’s easy to hear an origin story here: an Akron girl moves to the UK, picks up some local phrases ("got bottle," "it’s so reet"), and knows that it’s time to elbow her way into the spotlight by any means necessary. —Evan Minsker
Schoolly D: “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?” (1985)
The Philly rapper Schoolly D’s "P.S.K. What Does It Mean?" is rightfully famous for being one of the first gangsta rap records, an early break from recorded hip-hop’s more polite sing-song genesis that incorporated the crude and raunchy language of the street. In that respect it’s been highly influential, inspiring MCs to spin long and detailed and often filthy tales of sex, drugs, and violence (see Ice-T’s "6 ‘N the Mornin’", among many others). But before you take in the specifics of Schoolly D’s narrative, "P.S.K." is experienced as a sonic assault, with a booming low end and clattering snares that sound like they’re echoing around the guts of an empty oil tanker. You feel it first and parse it later. There’s no harmonic information, nothing in the way of melody, just the relentless 808 and DJ Code Money’s insectile scratching, and it’s not remotely pop, standing miles from the disco and funk grooves that inspired rappers just a few years before (and unlike Run-D.M.C., Schoolly D did not care for rock’n’roll). When someone in 1985 said that rap wasn’t music, that it was just a bunch of noise with someone yelling nonsense over the top, they were imagining something very much like this, a record that dared you to hear sound in a new way. —Mark Richardson
See also: MC Shan & Marley Marl: "The Bridge" / Schoolly D: "Parkside 5-2"
K-Rob / Rammellzee: “Beat Bop” (1983)
"Beat Bop"—part sound collage, part straight-up B-Boying-ready freestyle session—is most widely noted for being produced by Jean-Michel Basquiat, making it the artist’s most significant musical contribution outside of his no wave group Gray (though we shouldn’t forget his cameo in the "Rapture" video). The single was to be Basquiat’s great tribute to hip-hop culture, including all his own lyrics and was even to feature him as an additional MC. Instead, he was pushed into an ineffectual overseer position. Refusing to read the artist’s lyrics, Rammellzee—in the graffiti world, a rival of Basquiat’s, and sometimes-masked Renaissance man and mystic—and unknown 15-year-old street rapper K-Rob followed their own muse. Their labyrinthine verses are as full of contradictions and "Did that just happen?" curiosities as the erratic backing track. The more verbose Rammellzee's haunting, echoing delivery of phrases like "Just freak that, yeah baba-y" and "Rock on to the break of dawn" make him some Faustian answer to the Sugarhill Gang’s Master Gee. He plays pusherman and pimp, his voice shifting into nasal tones in abstract moments of jubilation; meanwhile, K-Rob, the golden heart, slinks through back alleys, relaying sharp images of poverty and systemic injustice.
The record has all the disorderly, miraculous atmosphere of an art happening, the chaos resulting at least partially from the fact that this was the work of a group of strong personalities, who either didn’t know or like each other that well, crammed into a studio making a record with no guidelines. From a production perspective, it is proud too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen music: Legendary artist, hip-hop experimentalist, and future MTV icon Fab Five Freddy and Basquiat tried their hand at dialing in heavy echo and delay effects while Basquiat’s friends—free improvisers and non-musicians alike—jammed on instruments they might or might not be able to play (fiddles, chimes and beyond) and were faded into the mix at random. The result is what Ramm aptly calls a beat from the "depths of hell."
The "Beat Bop" 12” was too small of a pressing to have a substantial influence on the hip-hop mainstream, but it became a minor downtown club hit during its moment, and later a boon for record collectors and alt-rap enthusiasts. Whatever else it is, Basquiat’s happy accident is among the best work done in the vein of "avant-rap," and one of the great cult rap records of its decade. —Winston Cook-Wilson
See also: Newcleus: "Jam on It"
Suicidal Tendencies: “Institutionalized” (1983)
"Institutionalized" was the first thrash video aired on MTV, putting a couple of SoCal punks in flannels and baseball caps in the same airspace as Prince, Michael Jackson, and Journey. But the clip was more about staying on message rather than to expanding the channel's range—their pervasive "I Want My MTV" campaign was an overt means of mobilizing teens to yell at their parents until the parents yelled at cable providers. And no song outlines the mechanics of 11th-grade rage more clearly than Suicidal Tendencies’ "Institutionalized": 1) identify the problem; 2) recognize the problem is not identifiable; 3) get real frustrated; 4) have frustration compounded by the misunderstanding of parents, teachers, churches, schools, etc.; 5) work up the nervous energy to circle pit for about 15 seconds until you collapse and collect yourself to do it all over again. Like most displays of teen angst, it’s a little petty, somewhat aware of its own ridiculousness, pretty funny, and above all a cry for attention—whatever teen spirit may smell like, it’ll always taste like that Pepsi you just can’t have. —Ian Cohen
See also: Dicks: "Dicks Hate the Police" / MDC: "I Remember"
Wipers: “Youth of America” (1981)
It was the dawn of MTV and one of the best bands in America would abstain entirely from the music video boom. Greg Sage didn’t want mass appeal publicity for Wipers; he valued mystique. His initial plan was to release a ton of music but refuse to give interviews or share photos. He just wanted to hand over the records and let listeners react without expectation or context—he thought it would encourage thoughtful listening. It was a vision that failed to bring Wipers any commercial success, instead earning them cult hero status. Due to label pressure, Sage eased up on his self-imposed restrictions (except music videos, which he never made), but it’s easy to understand his logic.
"Youth of America", the quintessential Wipers song, pushes the boundaries of punk, operating with a regimented krautrock-reminiscent rhythm section for over 10 sprawling, unpredictable minutes. Sage’s reputation as a studio wizard is locked with his guitar sound alone—it gradually weaves back and forth between the song’s primary riff and an ominous, psychedelic vortex. This was music unconcerned with its contemporaries—Sage has said he tried to write "in a futuristic way." The future portended in "Youth of America" was a bleak one—a quasi-apocalyptic nation of oppression via wealth disparity and middle class complacency. Ambitious and disorienting, its theme is still relevant, a hypnotic call to action and a warning that if you don’t participate, things could keep getting worse. —Evan Minsker
See also: Wipers: "Telepathic Love" / X: "Los Angeles"
The Sugarcubes: “Birthday” (1987)
By the time Björk Guðmundsdóttir turned 21, she had already led several musical lives: covering the Beatles and Stevie Wonder in Icelandic on a novelty record released when she was just 12 and then going on to wail in restless teenage bands like the herky-jerky Tappi Tíkarrass (translation: Cork the Bitch's Ass) and the goth-tinged post-punk group Kukl. And then, for a laugh, the singer and her subversive friends decided to start a straight-up pop band. The Sugarcubes’ debut single came out on November 21, 1986—Björk’s 21st birthday—and featured a song called "Ammæli". It sold a few hundred copies. But over the course of the next year, they re-recorded the track in English, released it in the UK, and, largely thanks to a rave review in Melody Maker, quickly became the biggest Icelandic pop band in history.
Despite the song’s international success, though, "Birthday" was hardly anyone’s idea of a typical chart smash. "We started to play pop songs that we thought were similar to what other people were playing," keyboardist Einar Melax has said. "It was a total surprise to us that nobody else thought this was pop." Instead, it wafts like a swaying and strange post-punk exhale, an easing of muscles after so many guitar shards and stuttering beats. Björk displays the same characteristics that would keep her career going for decades: the sensuous whisper, the guttural yelp, the surreal imagery. She has said the lyrics of "Birthday" involve "a story about a love affair between a 5-year-old girl, a secret, and a man who lives next door" as well as how children process erotic feelings without knowing what they mean. It’s trying to translate the unexplainable through song and, really, what could be more pop than that? —Ryan Dombal
King Sunny Ade and His African Beats: “Ja Funmi” (1982)
When King Sunny Ade (real name Sunday Adeniyi) dropped Juju Music in 1982, leading with "Ja Funmi", he popularized jùjú music to Western audiences. Jùjú is a Nigerian popular music derived from Yoruba praise singing, and is a cousin to highlife. What King Sunny Ade did with it was help modernize it. He expanded the band section, added Hawaiian steel guitar, and incorporated influences from more contemporary styles like rock and funk. It made him a big star in Nigeria long before his first international release ever happened.
That landmark record, Juju Music, happened when Island Records approached Sunny Ade and, in the aftermath of Bob Marley’s death, hoped to bill him as "the African Bob Marley" (even though he didn’t make reggae, and Marley had long maintained ties to the continent...). Around that same time, the term "world music" was coined as a way to group together all non-English-language music from outside the UK and U.S. These were problematic marketing moves for sure. Yet they succeeded in piquing wider public interest in Ade’s polyrhythmic, anodyne tunes. "World music" as an industry started taking off.
It's too bad then—or maybe it was a good thing—that Island decided to drop their African Marley a few years later when it turned out he was not their African Marley in record sales. The mighty African Beats dissolved shortly thereafter, and the king of jùjú returned to work, with success, in Nigeria. He would release material internationally years later, but in the meantime, "Ja Funmi" had already made its mark. —Minna Zhou
Cybotron: “Clear” (1983)
There's no tiptoeing around it: "Clear" is here primarily because it makes one really fucking cool sound. The skipping, phosphorescent synth melody that defines the track is one of those moments where early techno delivered on its promise of futurism, offering up a thrill that no rock or new wave or funk band could duplicate, a thrill still potent enough for hip-hop's most adventurous producer two decades later. Producers all over the world have been trying for more than 30 years, and few have made a sound as indelible and brain-tickling as what "Clear" offers.
"Clear" hails from that period in techno's incubation when most of the music still felt a little too indebted to Kraftwerk, but "Clear" sounds more psychedelic and unhinged than other formative Cybotron tracks ("Alleys of Your Mind", "Cosmic Cars"). The legacy of "Clear", and of Cybotron, is easy to suss out. Entire discographies, like those of Detroit legends Drexciya, were built on top of it, and the stylish electro-punk of bands like Ladytron and LCD Soundsystem owe a debt as well. —Andrew Gaerig
See also: Model 500: "No UFOs" / Phuture: "Acid Tracks"
The Chills: “Pink Frost” (1988)
There is a loneliness in Chills singer Martin Phillipps’ voice that’s clearly driven by some dark places. "Pink Frost" is one of the best songs to capture his malaise, released just as Phillipps and his band were emerging as part of the thriving scene in Dunedin, New Zealand, most of which was being documented by the lauded Flying Nun label. Many members of fellow Flying Nun bands passed through the Chills’ ranks over the years, but Phillipps was always the driving force, apparently in possession of an infinite array of addictive melodies and a huge well of melancholy from which to divine inspiration.
At first glance "Pink Frost" doesn’t bear many '80s trappings, instead sounding like something from the indie rock scene that blew up around 10 years after its release. Artists such as Pavement and Sebadoh owe a debt to its frayed-around-the-edges presentation, which still has the ability to devastate more than 30 years later. The ultra-thin guitar lines feel like ropes pulling you in with Phillipps offloading a ton of impossible sadness once you’re inside—a place his small but ardent audience have found perpetually enthralling. —Nick Neyland
See also: Cleaners From Venus: "Only a Shadow" / Feelies: "Loveless Love"
LL Cool J: “I Can't Live Without My Radio” (1985)
"I Can't Live Without My Radio", the opener from Queens rapper LL Cool J’s 1985 debut Radio, is theoretically a love song to ghetto blaster culture, though it ended up being a lot more than that. Rick Rubin’s minimalist production; LL’s bold, bragging lyrics with their references to b-boy style, his prowess, his neighborhood, and responsible boombox maintenance (buying batteries, "terrorizing my neighbors with the heavy bass")—it all helped usher in the new school of hip-hop. This intense, immediate song pulled more from rock in length and sound (Radio's "Rock the Bells" sampled AC/DC) versus the meandering disco-inspired old-school typified by something like Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper’s Delight". The track was included in the 1985 movie Krush Groove, a film that looked at the rise of new school hip-hop groups like LL Cool J, Run-D.M.C., and the Fat Boys. In turn, it helped influence the "golden age" of hip-hop, embodied by the likes of Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy. When it was released, though, it was just a song about a dude and the music that literally soundtracked his life. —Brandon Stosuy
Yoko Ono: “Walking on Thin Ice” (1981)
Yoko Ono was always ahead of her time. "Walking on Thin Ice" made it official. She and John Lennon had left the song off of their 1980 album together, Double Fantasy. That album’s biggest A-sides, such as "(Just Like) Starting Over" and "Woman", successfully matched Lennon’s longstanding melodic directness with a mature perspective and contemporary production sheen. But it was a B-side, the Ono-led "Kiss Kiss Kiss", that, as Lennon told an interviewer, was "getting a lot of rock club, new wave, disco exposure." The emerging new-wave underground’s debt to Ono’s previous work was real—the B-52’s have acknowledged the influence the avant-garde artist’s shrill screams had on the iconic Athens, Ga. band’s late-'70s breakthrough "Rock Lobster"—and the six-minute "Walking on Thin Ice" would be a "special kind of disc for them."
Everything changed when, the night after they finished mixing the record, Lennon was murdered. Everything except for the song’s ability to reach an audience now primed for Ono’s vocal eccentricities. With clangorous guitar from Lennon over a murky low-end groove, "Walking on Thin Ice" frames Ono’s ominous narrative about life’s uncertainties, punctuated with shrieks. Beyond the new-wavers of the time and the alternative-era iconoclasts who would follow, the influence of Ono—and this song in particular—resonates across the chilly, nocturnal grooves of Johnny Jewel’s Italians Do It Better acts and the unfettered vocal styles of bands from Life Without Buildings to Ponytail and tUnE-yArDs. "Walking on Thin Ice" finally lived up Lennon’s pronouncement that it would be Ono’s first No. 1 (on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart, anyway) in 2003, with a remix-packed reissue; an expansive 2007 reworking with Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce further shows the song’s mutability. The ultimate version, though, might be the sleekly sprawling "1981 re-edit" compiled on 2000’s influential Disco (Not Disco) compilation.
"The family who laughs together stays together," Ono writes in the liner notes for the 7” single, issued two months after her husband’s death, recounting a personal anecdote about their lives together. Despite a reputation for highbrow seriousness, perhaps one of her most foresighted ideas was one that rock’s misguided anti-Yoko axis had long since forgotten: Great art can make young people dance. As Ono intones dryly on the track, "That's a hell of a thing to do, you know." —Marc Hogan
See also: John Lennon: "Watching the Wheels" / Paul McCartney: "Temporary Secretary"
George Benson: “Give Me the Night” (1980)
For those who first hear Quincy Jones through Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and Thriller, it’s a thrill discovering Jones' prolific output from this era outside of Michael. The tight horns, swooping strings, and instrumental precision all remain in play; only a new character takes center stage. There's Jones' own solo album The Dude, and its can't-miss Chaz Jankel cover "Ai No Corrida"; his work with Brothers Johnson, especially "Stomp"; there's Chaka Khan and Rufus' "Do You Love What You Feel". But George Benson—a jazz guitarist who had few qualms about dipping into the pop world—was the lucky recipient of one of Jones' best records with the Rod Temperton-penned "Give Me the Night". Temperton, a songwriter and member of the band Heatwave, was responsible for Michael Jackson's "Rock With You", "Off the Wall", and "Thriller", and collaborated frequently with Jones. On "Give Me the Night," the ineffable elements of a Temperton record is in place: the assured swagger that offsets its unapologetic sweetness, the sugary euphoria packaged at the song's heart. Meanwhile, the rest of the record dances around it: background vocals scatting, an especially active bassline, those mellow guitar tones with his vocals echoing behind them, strings sweeping through the background. It's an idealistic song, one that envisions every evening as ideal as in memory, a celebration of celebration. —David Drake
See also: Brothers Johnson: "Stomp" / Quincy Jones: "Ai No Corrida"
Inner City: “Good Life” (1988)
Inner City was essentially an accident—a collision of Chicago and Detroit sprouted from an instrumental that techno forefather Kevin Saunderson didn't know how to finish. Vocalist Paris Grey helped Saunderson combine his club-ready sound with bona fide pop hooks, and it was an instant smash. "Good Life" was Inner City's peak and a reminder that even techno's sacredest cows—the guys who invented the genre itself—weren't averse to a bit of chart-baiting (something that today's dance music snobs could stand to remember). And chart it did: "Good Life" hit #4 on the UK pop charts at the beginning of 1989, a time when Britain couldn't get enough of American dance music. In the U.S., it reached a more modest #73, though it remains an enduring favorite in house DJ sets to this day. "Good Life" proved irresistible for heads and dilettantes alike, reinforcing a surge of interest in house music that has echoes of today's EDM explosion. And while there's a long lineage to be traced from Inner City—from classic MK dubs in the '90s to Duke Dumont's hits of the past few years—as often is the case with classic dance music, it's tough to beat the original. —Andrew Ryce
Hüsker Dü: “Pink Turns to Blue” (1984)
Just as they rose to prominence in the '80s, Hüsker Dü found themselves on the precipice of a breakup due to creative conflicts between principal songwriters Bob Mould and Grant Hart. Mould was the razor-witted go-getter, and Grant was the dark hippie whose continued drug abuse threatened to rip the band apart. As unrest spread through the ranks, Hüsker Dü grew more vulnerable, casting shadows on sunny pop punk and confronting their demons directly. No song embodied the existential shroud as poignantly as Grant’s "Pink Turns to Blue", a hardcore rumination on death, transience, and uncertainty. In a subtle act of juxtaposition, the specter of death takes on dual guises: a mournful entity built from slashing guitar chords, and a poetic form conjured through soft, euphemistic language. As Grant desperately attempts to stifle his sorrow through images of fading hues and pacing angels, the churning void refuses to abate. The Zen Arcade standout reiterated Hüsker Dü’s greatest strength: capturing the feelings behind the fury without being torn asunder. —Zoe Camp
Peter Gabriel: “In Your Eyes” (1986)
The first video for a single from Peter Gabriel’s 1986 album So was a creative masterstroke, combining then-revolutionary claymation (provided by the creators of "Wallace & Gromit"), stop-motion, and pixilation technology to successfully rebrand an art-rock outsider as a cutting-edge multimedia pop artist. But the most enduring visual—and the one that made it Gabriel’s most enduring song—is just a single shot of a dude holding up a damn boombox.
Say Anything premiered in 1989—closer to the release of Nevermind than "In Your Eyes". Still, artists exploring an '80s aesthetic in the 25 years since often let that one scene and its defining song speak for the entire decade that came before it—cosmic stardust emanating from the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, panoramic production, and the transmutation of teenage feelings into adulthood, yearning vocals that exert an unquenchable thirst to love you like no one could possibly fathom… but in a non-threatening way.
While Gabriel may have intended Yossou N’dour’s guest appearance (singing in his native Wolof) to make a point about love breaking down barriers of language and race, the song’s history of covers has relegated it to freshman dorms: Sum-41, the dude from Staind, Jeffrey Gaines, 95% of college students who owned an acoustic guitar in the '90s, all of them doing so because they want to be Lloyd Dobler, not Peter Gabriel. The obvious rejoinder to Chuck Klosterman’s claim that, "countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack" is that even more men were in love with the idea of being John Cusack. While "In Your Eyes" might be one of the most influential musical '80s archetypes, Cameron Crowe made Gabriel an accomplice in creating the most influential "'80s" personality archetype. —Ian Cohen
Orchestra Baobab: “Mouhamadou Bamba” (1984)
From the moment the opening clouds of guitar descend to the moment it ends with an odd, sudden fade, "Mouhamadou Bamba" pulses with dark energy. In 1980, Orchestra Baobab were coming off a full decade as one of Senegal’s dominant musical forces, a role they were about to lose to Youssou N’Dour and the mbalax wave, but here they were still at the peak of their power and popularity.
This song is vocalist Thione Seck’s tribute to Amadou Bamba, a 19th-century Sufi mystic who founded the Mouride brotherhood that is today one of the most influential strains of Islamic thought in Senegal and Gambia. Seck’s lead brims with passion—his melody careens around the stable choruses of the backing singers, so syncopated that at times it seems to come in from somewhere outside the music. The other singers repeat the name of the spiritual leader and reference the city of Touba, where the Mouride order is headquartered.
Seck’s fire is matched by the dazzling lead guitar of Barthelemy Attisso, who originally came to Dakar from his homeland of Togo as a law student and taught himself to play by listening to the radio (he returned to Togo to practice law when the band broke up in 1987). As impressive as it is, his solo isn’t flashy. Rather it seems to converse with the mystical in its own language, deepening the song’s otherworldly essence. It’s hard to make music this funky so mysterious, but Baobab managed the feat. —Joe Tangari
See also: Youssou N'Dour & Étoile de Dakar: "Wadiour"
U2: “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1983)
Any skeptic who needs to be reminded that U2 were once a convincingly impassioned group of politically-inflamed upstarts should revisit "Sunday Bloody Sunday". Written as a public condemnation of the massacre by British soldiers of unarmed protesters in Derry, Ireland, it does what a great protest song should do, which is demand that it be played as loudly and recklessly as possible. It lurches like a train, opening the band’s third album, War, with a powerful declaration of collective drive—not just towards political justice, but towards a harshly angular, aggressive sound that could only have come from a foursome of very young musicians. It wasn’t the last time they would engage in political grandstanding, but it was the last time they sounded like they were willing to punch you in the face over it. In between the rolling snares and attack-ready guitars are seeds of the theatricality (see Bono’s howling exhortation to "wipe your tears away") that would later germinate into the palatial production and grand emotions of The Unforgettable Fire. "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is a burning call to revolt with the added bite of youthful ambition, a potent message even now that its urgency has dulled. —Abigail Garnett
See also: U2: "I Will Follow" / U2: "New Year's Day"
Sheila E.: “The Glamorous Life” (1984)
One version of history: Prince’s genius is such that it trickles down to everyone he works with, elevating the ordinary and the non-notable of the world. Actual version of history: Prince had—still has—an uncanny knack for spotting (and frequently dating, but still) talented female artists, and giving them world-class platforms. While "The Glamorous Life" is undeniably a Prince song, from the worldly would-be celebutante who’s saved from independence by "the seventh wave" of making love to the horns that nudge-nudge all the lyrics, it’s a song that went to the right person. Prince’s lyric might’ve come off mocking delivered by someone else, but with Sheila it’s just there, a vessel for her to fill with a star’s worth of potential energy—much of it via percussion solo, deployed live like a sudden tornado. It’s the rare recording that sounds star-making on its own, without the confirmation bias of history, and it’s the rare producer who knows exactly what to do with a star when he hears one. —Katherine St. Asaph
See also: Apollonia 6: "Sex Shooter" / Vanity 6: "Nasty Girl"
George Clinton: “Atomic Dog” (1982)
George Clinton had been partying the night he recorded "Atomic Dog"; then again, he'd been partying quite a bit in those days. George—Dr. Funkenstein, the Starchild himself, mad genius of Parliament-Funkadelic—arrived at the studio fresh from the club; Garry Shider and David Spradley, longtime P-Funk associates who laid down most of what would become "Atomic Dog", remember flanking him while he recorded his vocal so he wouldn't start listing to the side. He'd arrived with nothing prepared; it's unclear whether he'd even heard the track before. High as he was, George took one listen to that panting synth, and inspiration struck: A dog. Something about a dog.
At the dawn of the '80s, funk got sleeker, sparser, more reliant on synths, less caught up in the cosmos. By 1982, Clinton was a man out of time: beaten at his own game by that skinny motherfucker with a high voice, rocked by a nasty freebase habit, and deeply in debt to any number of ex-bandmates. That "Atomic Dog" came together at all is a minor miracle; that it's every bit the equal of his '70s classics is something else entirely. George growls, barks, whinnies, and yawps his way through Shider and Spradley's futuristic bow-wow, offhandedly unloading one slobbery hook after another. It's a gloriously unhinged performance, silly and strange, a kind of alchemical lightning-strike. After years as a favored sample for West Coast hip-hop producers (it appears in no less than 7 Ice Cube songs), nowadays you're most likely to hear "Atomic Dog" in commercial spots for kids' movies and pet chow. Woof. —Paul Thompson
See also: Zapp: "More Bounce to the Ounce"
808 State: “Pacific State” (1989)
Giving the acid-drenched Madchester rave sound one of its first significant chart boosts by reaching the top 10 in the UK, Graham Massey and Martin Price’s "Pacific State" was the perfect cocktail of new age naturalism and club drugs. The sour synths and dry drum programming sounded distinctly North American, while its soothing chord progression and liberally-deployed loon calls evoked some kind of extraterrestrial paradise. One of their last tracks to feature contributions from Gerald Simpson, who would soon depart the group and release his own groundbreaking single as A Guy Called Gerald, "Pacific State" was the populist slow burner 808 State needed to cement their commercial appeal. Possibly in ironic rejection, the duo went on to release myriad versions of the track. But its hazy atmosphere, equally evocative of a warm beach with a cool breeze and a club with a packed-in crowd, proved an enduring influence on a new generation of techno producers (Aphex Twin, Autechre, Lone) and bleary-eyed ravers alike. —Abigail Garnett
See also: Orbital: "Chime"
Orange Juice: “Rip It Up” (1982)
Come 1982, Edwyn Collins had a strong sense of his dues. Fed up with shambling along while charlatans like Haircut 100 commercialized Orange Juice's shtick, he fired his unambitious bandmates and signed up a sharper cohort. His bold move paid off: "Rip It Up", the title track of their second album, spent seven weeks climbing the UK singles chart to peak at #8, although it betrayed the fact that Collins was probably bluffing his pop chops rather than making a safe bet at longevity.
The conceit of "Rip It Up" has been interpreted and perpetuated as a demand for the overhaul of stagnant culture—which in essence, it was. In immediate, intimate terms, though, Collins swaggers his way through the introvert's dream of ripping off their trembling skin and "arms stuck like glue to my sides." His character emerges as confidently charismatic as the spirits that strut through the song: Chic's taut guitars, the novel Roland TB-303's playful burble, the uninhibited violence of J.G. Thirlwell on sax, a nod to Pete Shelley's iconoclasm. ("My favorite song's entitled 'Boredom'..."). Funk as liberator trouncing funk as fear. —Laura Snapes
See also: Orange Juice: "Blue Boy" / Television Personalities: "This Angry Silence"
Siouxsie and the Banshees: “Cities in Dust” (1985)
Pompeii is filled with ghosts. The point in visiting is to try and understand what it must have been like the day the city was engulfed by pumice and volcanic ash. There are petrified bodies—frozen in place at the moment of their death—on display in glass cases. The scene left an impact on Siouxsie Sioux. With "Cities in Dust", she imagines the final moments of these people, picturing them running, praying, and ultimately having their lungs and nostrils choked with lava. As an artist and songwriter, Siouxsie has empathy for the marginalized and doomed. In 1981, she wrote "Arabian Knights" about women being kept as "baby machines." Here, she’s singing to those people eternally stuck in display cases—their city left in dust and their bodies unearthed centuries later. It’s a shimmering bit of black magic pop, her voice howling through the bitter truth that all their stories, triumphs, and cherished memories are long gone even though tourists still stare into the hollow sockets where there used to be eyes. Right, people don’t just call her "goth" because of her makeup and color palate. —Evan Minsker
See also: Sinéad O'Connor: "Troy" / Siouxsie and the Banshees: "Christine"
A Guy Called Gerald: “Voodoo Ray” (1988)
"Acid house" is so named for the slippery, speaker-melting bass burbles produced by the Roland TB-303 synthesizer. But the name also evokes the mind-altering vibe of much of the '80s Chicago house that epitomized the style, evident in titles like Sleezy D.’s "I’ve Lost Control" and Adonis’s "No Way Back". Chicago acid house captured a specifically urban version of psychological dislocation, but UK groups like 808 State and its erstwhile member Gerald Simpson took the style and explored how it allowed you to get truly lost in the metaphysical sense, wandering free in the jungle of the mind.
The great trick of Gerald’s "Voodoo Ray" is to marry the two strands, stumbling upon a new brand of mysticism in the process. The merger is so flawless it was unrepeatable: Nicola Collier’s wordless coos and sighs, the bass riffs suggesting the tribal percussion of an alien planet, and a 303 bassline attempting to disintegrate the beat from behind. "Voodoo voodoo voodoo voodoo ray…" intones a mysterious voice in the background, a message without meaning but heavy with portent. It suggest an ambiguous religious ceremony, and it’s not clear whether the spirit being awakened is friendly or hostile.
"Voodoo Ray" was one of the earliest dance music tracks to raise such questions of intention and then keep them suspended; as long as the music is so intoxicating it doesn’t need to evoke clearly defined emotions of joy or dread; indeed, the co-existence of joy and dread becomes the point. After this startling debut, Gerald Simpson all but disappeared from public view, re-emerging several years later as a practitioner of the densest, most exotic-sounding jungle. The transition makes sense: having pushed house so far into the lost zone, where else could he go? —Tim Finney
Tangerine Dream: “Love on a Real Train” (1985)
When they weren’t busy laying the groundwork for entire genres of ambient music and breaking ground with their innovative use of sequencers and digital instruments, Tangerine Dream kept up a fruitful sideline soundtracking films. They scored more than 60, covering everything from raunchy comedies to documentaries, horror films, thrillers, and science fiction. Their score for Paul Brickman’s 1983 satire of capitalism and suburban privilege, Risky Business, is comprised of tense, haunting soundscapes that are emotionally a world away from the raucous Bob Seger song that tracks the movie’s iconic solo dance scene.
Tangerine Dream’s job in the film’s sound world is to remind us of the feeling of being a physical person moving through the life and caught up in events only marginally under your control; their soundscapes are blood rushing through veins, skin contracting in cold air, and the pounding in your head when you know you screwed up and you’re not sure you can fix it. "Love on a Real Train" scores a scene where Tom Cruise and Rebecca de Mornay do it on an empty Chicago ‘L’ Train, and the vivid physicality of the music’s burbling rhythm delivers a thrill every bit as electric as the danger of the situation. —Joe Tangari
Joe Jackson: “Steppin' Out” (1982)
From all accounts, New York City was a total shithole in 1982: broken glass everywhere, the crack and AIDS epidemics, more than 2,000 murders in that year alone. Meanwhile, the upper tax brackets were busy fomenting the spiritual rot that would inspire Wall Street, American Psycho, and Bright Lights, Big City. And yet, on this 1982 hit, Joe Jackson vows that he and his date will be fearless like children, certain that New York City solely exists to cater to their night on the town (and that all of the bad stuff is happening to somebody else). It’s the same belief in New York’s invincibility espoused by proud capitalists (Frank Sinatra, Jay Z, Taylor Swift), shrewd miserablists (Ryan Adams, Interpol), and every incoming class at NYU. Jackson is none of the above, which makes "Steppin’ Out" sound particularly of its time, snowblinded by a Me Decade tunnel vision. Its perky, Kraftwerk-ian bassline and gilded keyboards offer a wide-eyed view of the world—either the result of naivety or a hit of the purest coke. Inevitably, the song served as the most memorable and fitting inclusion in 2002’s infamously amoral video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City: The perfect soundtrack for oblivious optimism in a hopelessly corrupt sewer. —Ian Cohen
Galaxie 500: “Tugboat” (1988)
There is a low-budget video for "Tugboat" that is as purely impressionistic as a punk Rothko. Frayed at the edges like the fanzines of the era, it was shot in 1988 on a borrowed Super 8 camera, its grainy abstractions all muted sea-blues, with a vaguely apocalyptic twist at the end. If the "Tugboat" video were projected to a wall, and you stared at it alone, the tones might just make you cry. "Tugboat" became the final track on an album called Today that really was so sad.
Galaxie 500 were not the greatest rock'n'roll band of all time, but they were surely among the most graceful. A Harvard-via-NYC dream pop trio born 10 years after punk coalesced and gone by the year it broke, they ripped rock up with wisdom and cool restraint. There could be no better band to comfort anxiety—in 1988 or 2015—than this. "Tugboat" was their debut and essence, an ode to an entire way of life that was disguised as a love song. Damon Krukowski stretched the canvas with his atmospheric drumming, a primitive painter who chose sticks not a brush; Naomi Yang’s crucial bass throbbed as naturally as a passing cloud; singer-guitarist Dean Wareham’s expressive and devastatingly simple lines belied a cerebral slackerism, as did his incantatory straight-talk. "I don’t wanna stay at your party/ I don’t wanna talk with your friends," he wearily intoned, "I don’t wanna vote for your president/ I just wanna be your tugboat captain." This sentiment, of wanting to get far away from civilization with the only person who matters, is gorgeous, ridiculous, and sublime. The symbol of the tugboat—slow, antiquated, romantic—perfectly underscored how out-of-time Galaxie 500 were, and are. If this is what Liz Phair meant when she sang, “I was pretending that I was in a Galaxie 500 video,” then the notion is utterly timeless, like the quiet exaltation and mystique of feeling just barely outside society, inhabiting a psychic world of your own creation. —Jenn Pelly
Dead Kennedys: “Holiday in Cambodia” (1980)
The Internet did not invent entitled college students adopting social justice-related pet projects: it’s as considerable a cornerstone of higher academia as crushing debt. On their classic, caustic callout "Holiday in Cambodia", the Dead Kennedys behold this figure and deliver one of the most satisfyingly petty screeds in all of punk. Jello Biafra's gruesome, sardonic vacation pitch—"Slave for soldiers till you starve/ Then your head is skewered on a stake!"—and East Bay Ray’s cheery, ascendant riffs render the song the aural equivalent of a travel brochure from hell, as performed by a bunch of travel agents who could be considered clinically insane. The subject provides an easy, universal target: most of us have met someone who’s "been to school for a year or two and [they] know they’ve seen it all"—lending the Kennedys’ aggro punk framework a universality relatable to punks and non-punks alike. Schadenfreude never felt so satisfying. —Zoe Camp
Beastie Boys: “Paul Revere” (1986)
Here is an incomplete list of people who have sampled the vwoop-vwoop, vwoop vwooop-boop from Beastie Boys’ "Paul Revere": N.W.A, Cat Power, Gang Starr, Das Racist, EPMD, Erykah Badu, E-40 (twice!), the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Public Enemy, and Rick Ross. It is clearly the most iconic vwoop-vwoop, vwoop vwooop-boop in pop history. Adam Yauch made it by running a tape backwards, and then everyone fell backward in the studio, laughing. Or so the story goes.
Out of all the songs on Licensed to Ill, "Paul Revere" is the only one that doesn’t feel like a time capsule. Its storytelling rhymes, written with Reverend Run, and goofy Western theme introduced many rap-ignorant suburban kids to the narrative possibilities of hip-hop, but it’s that vwoop-vwoop, vwoop vwooop-boop, in all its rubbery warmth, that has reverberated the furthest. It might still be the Beasties’ most elemental contribution to rap music. —Jayson Greene
See also: Beastie Boys: "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" / Beastie Boys: “The New Style”
Shannon: “Let the Music Play” (1984)
In the liner notes to Madonna’s Immaculate Collection, writer Gene Sculatti singles out two tracks as the foundations of dance-pop: "Holiday" (naturally, given the source) and "Let the Music Play". Foundational the latter certainly was; it more or less invented the Latin-derived, still-venue-packing freestyle scene, and for a while the genre was synonymous with "the Shannon sound." Producer Chris Barbosa’s working title was "Fire and Ice", which is descriptive if nothing else: gloomy synth pads, acid squiggles, percussion flickering in and out, everything setting off everything else. Any one of these could carry a song on its own, but Barbosa throws them all in; it’s a Rube Goldberg machine that dances, too.
Much writing about freestyle makes a lot of the fact that the vocalists tended to be ordinary, often untrained women—perhaps college students, as Shannon was—and ultimately casts them as ciphers. But Shannon carries the emotional core of the record. Over a melody that winds its way down into mental anguish (much like, in a nice coincidence, Bananarama’s "Cruel Summer", which peaked around the same time), Shannon plays the everywoman caught in one of the condensed romances that play out on the dance floor, the sort someone like Katy B would inhabit today. She finds love, loses love, then pleads, with zero irony: "What does love want me to do?" And the chorus offers a summation of decades of pop and escapism: "let the music play, he won’t get away." She plays it deadly seriously; she’s not after fun but destiny. (The Madonna song "Let the Music Play" should be paired with is "Into the Groove", with its talk of revelations.) And if she weren’t an everywoman it wouldn’t work; listeners couldn’t imagine themselves in. If Barbosa captures the body, Shannon captures the heart. And neither quite gets away. —Katherine St. Asaph
See also: Chemise: "She Can't Love You" / Nu Shooz: "I Can't Wait"
Al B. Sure!: “Nite and Day” (1988)
The term "New Jack Swing" was coined by Barry Michael Cooper in the Village Voice as an offhand joke, meant to describe Teddy Riley’s bleeding together of hip-hop and R&B. The style may have burned briefly—it peaked in late '80s and faded away into the '90s—but it was the beginning of a momentous relationship. Hip-hop, still the music of troubled Black youth, represented a risk for producers who wished to combine it with the increasingly aging R&B. The merger didn’t exactly ease tensions on all sides ("You can new jack swing on my nuts," Ice Cube rapped on 1991’s Death Certificate), but by injecting the swagger of hip-hop, new jack swing established the bridge between two styles that previously kept their distance.
Al B. Sure!, a former high school football player, ended up with one of the finest cuts from the style with his debut single "Nite and Day". It was more R&B than his other work—Al held off rapping here—but that was the malleability of new jack swing, which didn’t have clear boundaries. The name was sparked by producers crushing genre lines, so of course "Nite and Day" could include an electric guitar solo. Into the '90s, Al B. Sure! would work with Jodeci, who led the next wave of R&B singers further into hip-hop. The lines between rap and R&B continue to blur nearly 30 years later, but "Nite and Day" showed the early possibilities one could go. —David Turner
See also: Anita Baker: "Sweet Love" / Bernard Wright: "Who Do You Love"
Michael McDonald: “I Keep Forgettin' (Every Time You're Near)” (1982)
Michael McDonald’s "I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near)" is a quiet storm classic whose liquid groove has buttressed other great songs through the years (ask Warren G and Madlib), but its sneaky triumph, beneath the durability of the hook and message, is compositional. It’s a breakup song actually shaped like a breakup. Starting at denial, "I Keep Forgettin’" cycles woozily through yearning, regret, and all the other irrational emotions that bubble to the surface in the wake of a grueling split. McDonald’s numb, phantom longing is matched to music (featuring "Rosanna"-era Toto players) that comes in stormy but slowly clears up, only to drop back into the murky dark again exactly as he comes to the realization that he’s clinging to the apparition of a closeness long since departed. It’s a sad song that refuses to accept that it’s a sad one. Guiding us through it all is The Voice. People say it’s garbled, but what they’re really hearing is wounded tenderness punching through the confines of both register and diction to commute a feeling you don’t need to know the words to get caught up by. —Craig Jenkins
See also: Steely Dan: "Hey Nineteen"
David Bowie: “Modern Love” (1983)
Fed up with what he called the "rock’n’roll circus," David Bowie seemed to abandon music altogether in the early '80s; fans accustomed to an artist who released 11 albums in 11 years didn’t hear much of anything in the three years following 1980's Scary Monsters. When he did come back, it was with a new label, a new backing band, and his most cleaned up, least self-consciously artistic persona to date. Though Let’s Dance was perceived by many to be slick, pre-packaged pop, Bowie’s nihilistic musings on "Modern Love" act as a subversive force against the track’s smiling rockabilly-meets-Motown bounce. Its feeling is captured beautifully in a cult-iconic scene from Noah Baumbach’s 2012 film Frances Ha: Even as Greta Gerwig’s title character sees her life slowly going to shit, her dash through New York to “Modern Love” is an expression of pure joy—a reminder of the musical spirit that marked Bowie’s return in 1983. —Jonah Bromwich
Liquid Liquid: “Optimo” (1983)
"Optimo" is a rare moment in music that remains unscuffed by time, anointed as a benchmark across multiple generations. It’s got a life of its own at this point, stretching far beyond its origins on an ultra-rare EP from New York’s 99 Records—a release that also spawned the Grandmaster Flash-sampled "Cavern". "Optimo" has found favor in hip-hop, dance, house, and indie rock because it successfully occupies space in between all those styles, gloriously vacuuming up huge portions of music history into its batucada-influenced stride.
The first wave of rediscovery for the song came in the late 1990s, when tastemakers on both sides of the Atlantic reissued the band’s songs (on trip-hop label Mo Wax in the UK, and the Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal in the U.S.). Its influence was exemplified by the formation of the influential Optimo club in Glasgow, whose grab-bag approach to DJing reflected the joyful canter through styles on "Optimo". James Murphy gave it further exposure by inviting Liquid Liquid to open the final LCD Soundsystem show at Madison Square Garden, lending the story another twist as it continues to cycle in perpetual motion. —Nick Neyland
Big Daddy Kane: “Ain’t No Half-Steppin’” (1988)
The summer of 1988 marked the roiling peak of hip-hop’s golden age. Between May and August of that year, practically every week saw the release of a future classic, albums that bridged the gap between the genre’s early days and its commercial explosion in the '90s: Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, EPMD’s Strictly Business, The Great Adventures of Slick Rick, BDP’s By All Means Necessary, Eric B. and Rakim’s Follow the Leader, N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton. According to legendary beatmaker Marley Marl, though, there was one song that trumped the rest. "‘Ain’t No Half-Steppin’ was rocking that summer," he told VIBE in 2003. "After Kane came, nothing else mattered."
Granted, Marl might be a little bit biased: He produced Big Daddy Kane’s signature track, which doubled as the centerpiece of the rapper’s debut album, Long Live the Kane. Though the smooth and relatively carefree Kane didn’t have the same gravitas as his understood rival Rakim, he ultimately may be more influential. "Ain’t No Half-Steppin’" rolls on a beat that uses its '70s soul sample to soothe rather than stun, predicting future flips by the likes of Q-Tip and Kanye West. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn rapper, who was one of Jay Z’s early mentors, is smart, lyrical, technically deft, and hilarious while stating his dominance: "I grab the mic and make MCs evaporate/ The party people say ‘Damn, that rapper's great!’" The song contains all the beatific innocence of '80s hip-hop but doesn’t sound like a relic—a summer jam of the highest order. —Ryan Dombal
Anthony Red Rose: “Tempo” (1985)
By 1985, the immersive dub productions that King Tubby had perfected on reggae B-sides smacked of overfamiliarity, and Jamaican sound systems pulsed with digital, a more rigid dub offshoot based on preset Casio keyboard rhythms. Legend has it that Tubby, upstaged by King Jammy’s work on digital smash "Under Me Sleng Teng", swiftly sidelined his Firehouse label, built the all-digital Waterhouse studio, and enlisted Kingston singjay Anthony Red Rose, all in a bid to outdo his protegé. (Red Rose claims, somewhat improbably, that "Tempo" actually came first.)
The resulting track is a little unnerving, Red Rose’s conspiratorial, reverb-heavy vocal threatened by a slithering bassline that diffuses dread into the spacious production. It’s also, somehow, inescapably pop, filtering its alien sonics into something hauntingly anthemic. That factor secured "Tempo" an illustrious afterlife: After helping midwife ragga in Jamaica, it became something like a standard for UK junglists, with MCs and DJs adopting Red Rose’s vocal as a de facto motif of the genre. But Tubby’s original, all impending doom and spaced minimalism, still feels like the one. —Jazz Monroe
Tears for Fears: “Head Over Heels” (1985)
Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko helped introduce a whole new generation to some of the more morose musical touchstones of the 1980s (a handful of the soundtrack’s highlights made this very list). While "The Killing Moon" or "Love Will Tear Us Apart" seem far more suitable to help encourage a young goth’s budding disaffection, it’s "Head Over Heels", the fourth single from Tears for Fears’ commercial smash of a sophomore album Songs from the Big Chair, that really defines the film. Scoring one of its most memorable sequences, the song builds and eventually tumbles into its effortless stride, gliding along with the camera through the hallways of Donnie’s high school like a slyly winsome but ultimately grim specter.
But to hear it from from the band, that would register as an awfully strange characterization of the song. Writer and vocalist Roland Orzabal has described "Head Over Heels" as "a big love song" and "one of the most simple tracks that Tears for Fears have ever recorded." Which it of course is, an open-hearted, big-tent new romantic sing-along that's loyal to both new wave's insularity and pop radio's unapologetic earnestness. But the fact that it can be translated so differently depending on context, as either an inclusive love song or a cheekily macabre one (but a first class karaoke pick no matter what), its fluid applications speak volumes about Tears for Fears’ universal appeal. In the 30 years since the song’s release, everyone from Billy Corgan to D’Angelo have cited the band as an influence, and revisiting "Head Over Heels" in 2015, both of those reference points make total sense. Funny how time flies, indeed. —Zach Kelly
See also: Tears for Fears: "Mad World"
Beat Happening: “Indian Summer” (1988)
Most of the appeal of Beat Happening lay in its unvarnished simplicity. Relative to the mid-1980s music industry—the gloss of pop, the pomp of rock, the palpable angst of punk—the Olympia, Wash., trio trafficked in DIY directness. By example, Calvin Johnson, Bret Lunsford, and Heather Lewis insisted that the actualization of self-expression needn’t be Rubik’s Cube complex: all one needed was a voice, an idea, a tape recorder, some friends, and a passion for music for its own sake. There was no need to possess Category Whitney Houston pipes or be a virtuoso shredder or have CAA representing you; you didn’t need anyone’s expressed permission. This notion never stopped reverberating outward, and went on to influence artists of varying stripes and disciplines—many of whom never even heard "Indian Summer". Revered in underground circles and covered by everyone from the Vaselines to Luna to R.E.M., "Indian Summer" both embodies this ethos and upends it. While the frisson between Johnson’s unstudied baritone and the chiming, seesaw guitar offers contrasting delights in its own right, the song’s rich lyrical potpourri—evoking autumn beauty or the fall of industry, childhood reverie or the loss of innocence, the collapse of camaraderie or harvest season—puts the lie to dismissal of this aesthetic as slight or insubstantial. "Indian Summer" fits well in any weather, and means something slightly different every time it’s heard. —Raymond Cummings
See also: Daniel Johnston: "Chord Organ Blues"
Bronski Beat: “Smalltown Boy” (1984)
Bronski Beat had the option to sign to ZTT and get the full treatment—Trevor Horn production and t-shirts screaming "QUEER" and "POOF"—that would be transferred to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but they said no. Instead, their subdued debut single radically normalized the idea that a young gay man might run away from the ostracization of his hometown—"the love that you need will never be found at home"—allowing for private revelations in front of the TV as your parents read Jeffrey Archer novels on the sofa. At a time when striking miners found allies in the queer community and Britain had its first openly gay politician, the domestic transgression of "Smalltown Boy" is an enduring emblem of the times. Its rain-beaten take on disco's enlightened metropolitan whirl retains its sense of subtle subversion—that Jimmy Somerville's rapture sounds a little parochial now is testament to the tides it helped turn. —Laura Snapes
See also: Associates: "Party Fears Two" / B-52's: "Private Idaho"
Spacemen 3: “Walkin’ With Jesus” (1988)
When Spacemen 3 emerged from Rugby, England, in the early '80s, their Velvet Underground-influenced post-punk wasn’t completely unique; Jesus and Mary Chain, for one, were mining a similar territory. But few other bands were just as interested in the soar of gospel music as the drone of the Velvets, and certainly none grafted the dreamy intoxication of drugs onto the higher-ground spirituality of religion as powerfully as Spacemen 3. One of their first songs, "Walkin’ With Jesus", struck this God/dope fusion with remarkable simplicity. Over an unwavering two-chord organ swing that sounds like it was played while laying down, Jason Pierce hears Jesus promise an eternity in Hell as punishment for indulging in Heaven on Earth. It doesn’t exactly shake him from his drift; once he realizes he should probably take some action, he’s too blissed-out to do anything besides ask Jesus for an extension.
Pierce has since insisted the song wasn’t literally about religion, and certainly "walking with Jesus" could be taken as a euphemism for shooting heroin (recall how that drug made Lou Reed "feel just like Jesus’ son.") Either way, "Walkin’ With Jesus" is a sweetly beatific way to frame an addict’s internal struggle—as a gentle conversation with a higher power—and it’s a convincing one, especially because the music harnesses the intoxication of the blues (a later version converted the organ sway into a slow, almost raunchy-sounding guitar riff). Pierce would eventually take the tune into straight-up gospel territory with his chorus-laden group Spiritualized. But the hypnotic power of Spacemen 3’s original persists, the kind of fix you could spend a lifetime hoping to capture again. —Marc Masters
See also: Spacemen 3: "Revolution"
Rob Base / DJ E-Z Rock: “It Takes Two” (1988)
Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s "It Takes Two" went supernova in 1988: The song broke big in dance clubs, in rock clubs. It was popular with older, gay house audiences and with mainstream pop audiences. It sold a million copies, and entered the tiny rarefied circle of songs that regularly received name-checks on big MTV countdowns of Greatest Rock Songs. Predictably, it provoked suspicious glances in the hip-hop community, which only a few years away from the twin takeovers of Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. But "It Takes Two" endures where dated pop-house tracks from the era didn’t. It is rap crossover in its Platonic form —hardcore, quicksilver rhymes, up-to-the minute with the clean technicality and tricky rhythms, laid over a beat so universal that it felt like kid’s music. At the time, it felt like the last gasp of party rap, a song about nothing more than dancing, getting loose, and being fresh on the microphone as hip-hop grew increasingly militarized. Where hip-hop was being pulled into the crack wars, New Jack Swing was smooth, clean-cut, and full of smiles; it channeled an older generation Harlem, that of Frankie Crocker and WBLS. Rob Base’s brief mention of a "bulletproof vest" is his sole acknowledgement of the grim realities of the War on Drugs.
But the song was no kind of farewell, it was a template. Years later, Harlem rapper Ma$e would skate over colorful Saturday-morning-cartoon beats programmed by Puff Daddy, packing more ear-tickling wordplay into his verses than any fat pop hit requires. These songs would grudgingly impress heads; they would make everyone’s grandmas smile; they would endure for a generation’s worth of party soundtracks. He was balancing on an axis that few people had danced on so nimbly; it is impossible that Rob Base, mugging in the video for "It Takes Two" next to Biz Markie, was not in his mind. —Jayson Greene
See also: T La Rock: "It's Yours"
Mission of Burma: “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver” (1981)
Many of Mission of Burma’s heroic-but-pensive songs lived in the overlap between political anthem and self-reflection, and "That’s When I Reach for My Revolver" hangs on the precipice between slogan and introspection. Lines about heroes, dreams, and "the spirit fight[ing] to find its way" make it sound like a battle hymn, especially during its all-for-one-and-one-for-all chorus. But there’s also an undercurrent of bleakness running through the song, which ends with a resigned portrait of an "empty sky" whose "dead eyes...tell me we’re nothing but slaves."
Mission of Burma’s blurred lyrical line between attack and retreat finds a perfect analog in the music, which seems to step back and regroup every time it crosses a hurdle. Clint Conley’s bass is the centerpiece—he even gets a solo in between verses—and its downbeat tone makes "That’s When I Reach for My Revolver" feel somber even as it rises. Such poignant ambivalence actually infused the story behind the song’s title: Conley found it in an essay by Henry Miller, only to discover later that it had origins in a Nazi play. But Mission of Burma never disowned the phrase—and they didn’t have to, because their music transformed it into something more ambiguous, and more powerful. —Marc Masters
See also: Wire: "Ahead" / Mission of Burma: "Academy Fight Song"
Motörhead: “Ace of Spades” (1980)
In the face of rock music’s gorgeous gods with their Jesus hair and bare chests, Lemmy’s greasy allure was clear. With his iconic handlebar mustache and facial warts, he was the underdog—the guy that got kicked out of Hawkwind because most of the band’s members flat-out didn’t like him. His excommunication was a blessing; he could start Motörhead in his own gnarly image. They got some traction on the charts with their 1978 cover of "Louie Louie", but "Ace of Spades" was an aesthetic-cementing moment. In 1979, Lemmy got an ace of spades tattooed on his forearm surrounded by the words "born to lose, live to win". That symbol became a mantra of sorts; Motörhead were bad luck incarnate—a trio of cackling hooligans up to no good. Lemmy insists there’s no allegory in the lyrics of "Ace of Spades", but even if it’s just a song about gambling, the emphasis is fearlessness. "You win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me," he sings in a throaty gargle over his dive-bombing bassline. The song packed a punch and made a huge impression on headbangers listening across the world (notably: Metallica, Slash, Dave Grohl, Triple H). Motörhead had punk’s ferocity and speed with metal’s guitar heroics and heft. On the album cover, they dressed up as gunslingers—a gig that requires staring down the threat of obliteration. "But that’s the way I like it, baby, I don’t want to live forever." —Evan Minsker
See also: Misfits: "Skulls"
Pixies: “Gigantic” (1988)
The Pixies’ debut single cemented the loud-quiet-loud template that would characterize so many of their best songs. National treasure Kim Deal has gone on record saying that the song was inspired by a 1986 film adaptation of Beth Henley’s "Crimes of the Heart", in which a married Sissy Spacek falls in love with a black teenage boy. The taboo origin story is certainly interesting—"what a big black mess, what a hunk of love"—but it’s the song’s outrageous catchiness and joie de vivre that makes it unforgettable. "Gigantic" is a perfect marriage of iconic bassline, magnificently rendered vocals (Deal’s signature coo was made for the lines, "And this I know, his teeth as white as snow, what a gas it was to see him"), and a rip-roaring chorus that sounds as appropriately enormous as the song title implies. A perfect amalgam of loud guitars and euphoric lust, "Gigantic" is everything you want it to be—a big, big love. —T. Cole Rachel
See also: Pixies: "Vamos" / Throwing Muses: "Hate My Way"
Queen & David Bowie: “Under Pressure” (1981)
"This is our last dance!," David Bowie declares during the chandelier-rattling climax of "Under Pressure", and the man is nothing if not a master of faking his own imminent demise. If anything, "Under Pressure" was something of a victory lap for a pair of '70s glam-rock veterans coming off of successful incursions into the post-disco, new-waved landscape of '80s pop—Bowie with Scary Monsters, Queen with The Game. But while its foundational, Vanilla Ice-spawning bassline heeds the most valuable lesson of the latter album—i.e., that John Deacon is Queen’s secret weapon—"Under Pressure" feels all the more like a special, lightning-in-a-bottle moment for sounding very little like anything Bowie was producing at the time, nor like much else on Hot Space, the funk-influenced Queen album where this one-off single eventually took up residence.
Coming from two entities synonymous with outsized extravagance and conceptual grandeur, "Under Pressure" is surprisingly spartan. It’s an anthem designed for empty arenas, powered by handclaps and fingersnaps, a two-note piano chime and a dry, vacuum-sealed groove. Brian May assumes a respectful background presence, his glimmering guitar lines providing more candlelight than fireworks, while even Bowie and Freddie Mercury sound more humble and human than usual, descending from their godly realm to empathically address problems—domestic unrest, homelessness—that plague mere mortals. And despite the potential for two of the most flamboyant singers in rock to engage in histrionic warfare, they seem less interested in trying to overpower one another than provide mutual emotional support. Still, even with relatively modest means, Queen and Bowie erect a towering spiral staircase of a song, with each discrete melodic motif ratcheting up the song’s mounting intensity and thrusting the track to dizzying new heights. But its grand finale is ultimately a show of false optimism: as "Under Pressure" comes crashing down in its dying moments, that persistent bassline re-emerges from the rubble, underscoring the cruelly cyclical nature of anxiety and release, and hitting reset on the time-bomb that’s ticking inside us all. —Stuart Berman
See also: Queen: "Another One Bites the Dust" / Queen: "I Want to Break Free"
Fleetwood Mac: “Everywhere” (1987)
While Stevie Nicks might be the most widely known member of Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie, to many fans, is the hero. McVie penned many of the band’s biggest hits, and 1987’s "Everywhere" stands out, not only as one of the band’s most commercial singles, but also as one of McVie’s strongest. It’s is carefully crafted, spare, and meticulously produced. McVie approaches the vocals with a light touch, and the contrast between that lightness and the songs sweeping sentiment—not only does she want to be with her lover, but she wants "to be with [them] everywhere"—is reflective of the time in which it was written. In the '80s, bigness, whether it be of sound, or wealth, or hair, was a given, and didn’t have to mean anything serious; McVie tempered this outsized lyrical message with an arrangement that was refreshingly minimal for the time. "Everywhere" wasn’t the biggest hit on Tango in the Night—"Little Lies" and "Big Love" charted higher, reaching #4 and #5 respectively—but it’s one of the quintessential songs of the '80s, and an elegant example of Fleetwood Mac’s nimbleness and adaptability. —Maud Deitch
Fleetwood Mac: "Little Lies" / Fleetwood Mac: "Big Love"
Godley & Creme: “Cry” (1985)
If this list was about '80s music videos, the work of Kevin Godley and Lol Crème would surely dominate—the former pair of 10cc musicians worked on innovative promos for the Police, Duran Duran, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Herbie Hancock’s "Rockit" among others. "Cry" had a similarly impressive (for the time) visual counterpart, highlighting how important music videos were to breaking songs in this era. Indeed, Godley & Creme’s words on the art of '80s video making in Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s I Want My MTV form some of the most entertaining and outlandish anecdotes of the era.
As such, the idea of hearing "Cry" without seeing the video is vaguely unconscionable, even though an entire generation of gamers found the song via the Grand Theft Auto IV soundtrack. Perhaps it needs a visual medium in which to flourish. It wasn’t Godley & Creme’s most outlandish idea (see the magnificently deranged 1977 triple album Consequences for that), but its vaguely operatic leanings and strange, pitch-shifted vocals make it an '80s hit like no other. Godley & Creme were masters at pushing boundaries in music and video—their clip for Duran Duran’s "Girls on Film" was banned for its adult content—and "Cry" is their best example of both those worlds dovetailing in curious harmony. —Nick Neyland
See also: Spandau Ballet: "True" / Police: "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" / Split Enz: "I Got You"
Yellowman: “Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt” (1984)
The popularity of the Jamaican vocalist Yellowman helped signal the shift from roots reggae to dancehall, a shift almost as radical as the one that turned funk breaks into early rap. Roots was deep, spiritual music that compressed social ideals into grave, sometimes mystical ballads; dancehall was better known for sentiments that were "Icky All Over". Musical values were different, too: Where roots was lush and soulful, dancehall used stiff Casio presets and turned the vocalist into an MC—someone who doesn’t sing over the track so much as inhabit it with one-liners, nursery rhymes, and other bits of half-music.
Yellowman was an albino, an orphan, a social outcast—what in patois might be called dundus, a term not just for albinos but for someone who, in the words of F.G. Cassidy and Brock Le Page’s Dictionary of Jamaican English, "is not up to the mark of normality." In 1983 he was misdiagnosed with cancer and told he had three years to live; the following year he released "Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt", a spare but celebratory piece of music about getting pulled over in his new (yellow) BMW and generally not caring. "64-46, that’s a BMW!" he crows, a reference to Toots & the Maytals’ early reggae hit "54-46 Was My Number", about a guy who actually does end up in jail. Some people use music to explore their pain. Yellowman used it to set his pain aside for a while. —Mike Powell
See also: Benjamin Zephaniah: "Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death" / Willie Williams: "Armagideon Time"
Phil Collins: “In the Air Tonight” (1981)
Few cultural artifacts scream, "Ah yes, the 1980s," louder than Phil Collins’ "In the Air Tonight". It might as well be a demo of the trends that were to dominate popular music in the decade following its 1981 release, while managing to sound like no other extant piece of recorded music. People remember Collins’ breakout single for many different reasons: for the urban legend surrounding its writing (a brutal kiss-off to an ex-lover or an elegy to a dead friend?), for Collins’ washed-out face staring out from the hit video’s digital void, for its tortured, choked vocals, or for that incomparable drum fill. The ballad was also, of course, the bold announcement of Phil Collins the solo artist, who later would go on to have the most prolific run of UK Top 40 singles of any artist of that decade.
Perhaps more than anything else, though, "In the Air Tonight"—written around four space-age synth chords and a thin drip of a drum machine loop—documents Collins’ fervent love affair with the aspirational music technology of his time. The brutish drum sound in the song’s second half was created through a jerry-rigged prototype of the technique that would later become known as gated reverb—which, prior to current imitations, served as a reliable watermark to date pop recordings made between 1982—1991. Vocoder technology was used to create shadowy underarmor for Collins’ main vocal, which in itself was processed into a jagged shadow of itself, drowned in some futuristic outgrowth of the slap-back echo which once sheathed Elvis’ croon. On top of this there are harsh, distorted digital storm clouds—from a synthesizer? guitar? some Frankensteinian combination?—that loom, presaging doom. It’s an exercise in mood like no other: The rare song whose production overshadows (or perhaps exalts) how little there is going on in the songwriting. —Winston Cook-Wilson
See also: Peter Gabriel: "Games Without Frontiers"
This Mortal Coil: “Song to the Siren” (1983)
Tim Buckley’s "Song to the Siren" is impossible to ruin—the folk ballad’s self-evidently beautiful melody and resonant extended metaphor transcend pretty much any arrangement (even if no one has figured out what "as puzzled as the oyster" is supposed to mean). But while there are many wonderful covers out there, let’s be real: This song was created so that it could be sung by Elizabeth Fraser over Robin Guthrie’s barely-there guitar strum. No other version can touch it.
This Mortal Coil was an unusual endeavor, a loose collective that was ultimately a vehicle for 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell to turn his favorite obscure songs from the '60s and '70s into impossibly dark goth masterpieces. "Song to the Siren" defined the project, and most of that is due to Fraser. In Cocteau Twins, she was known for singing in an indecipherable language that nonetheless communicated; here she’s given real lyrics but she knows all the feeling is in the sound. The way she stretches the phrase "waiting to hold you" to its breaking point makes the sense of longing palpable beyond words. —Mark Richardson
See also: Felt: "Primitive Painters"
R.E.M.: “Radio Free Europe” (1983)
It's hard to imagine R.E.M. existing as part of the American underground, given how long they've been embedded in the cultural mainstream. Think about "Losing My Religion" making every VH1 list of the Greatest Videos ever, or "Everybody Hurts" scoring every sensitive moment spent staring out of a moving car during some sappy melodrama. They made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on their first ballot, which is as establishment as it gets.
Before they were big, there was "Radio Free Europe". The first single off their first album, Murmur, is as sexy as the summer heat, as ominous as the kudzu creeping on the LP's cover. The music is sinewy, mysterious, entrancing; the lyrics, once deciphered, sound halfway improvised. It's a magnetic single, one that sounds like the invention of indie rock. They played "Radio Free Europe" on "Late Night With David Letterman" in 1983 and presented the whole package in one shot. Michael Stipe, chiseled face covered in flowing hair, broods over his microphone. Next to him, Peter Buck and Mike Mills are exuberantly dorky, garage rats playing at being rock stars. Afterwards, Stipe is too shy to talk to Letterman. The performance says: Come in, but don’t expect to learn much. It's enough to transport me to some imagined '80s dorm room, the TV on, wondering who these guys were. They'd become more successful, but they'd never sound as hypnotizing. —Jeremy Gordon
See also: R.E.M.: "The One I Love" / R.E.M.: "So. Central Rain"
Cyndi Lauper: “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” (1983)
A moment's reverence, please, for the once-proven dream of unproblematic female pop solidarity. When Lauper left her Queens home at age 17, she took with her a paper bag containing a toothbrush, clean underwear, an apple, and a copy of Yoko Ono's Grapefruit. Thirteen years later, one of Ono's gnomic instructions might have served as the ethos behind Lauper's solo career: "A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality." In 2015, Lauper's debut single feels like a fantasy: a globally famous, totally inclusive feminist anthem that preaches pleasure, recognition, and autonomy, and eschews societal expectations. Sure, it achieves that through defiantly simple lyrics that were originally written by a man—Robert Hazard demoed it, Springsteen-style, in '79—but Cyndi Lauper's neat tweaks skewed it from a song that trivialized female desire to one that runs and runs on it.
"Girls Just Want to Have Fun" is one of those songs you've heard so many times that the actual music is as invisible as the color of your front door, that insouciant riff as instantly recognizable as golden arches on a highway. Blanking out its brutally insistent dazzle—which, like a 24-hour charity cheerleading marathon, does not quit—may be an act of self-preservation. But that's the point: "Girls" digs in, stubborn as glitter, Lauper's piercing voice scoring your spine. She and her backing singers are bratty and full of want, refusing prettiness and permission. That pointillist synth that dots the mid-section might as well be a chorus of Dubble Bubble orbs popping in the faces of anyone who would deny them these simple, profound joys. —Laura Snapes
See also: Altered Images: "Happy Birthday" / Bananarama: "Cruel Summer"
Janet Jackson: “Control” (1986)
At this point, it seems as if Janet Jackson and her longtime studio accomplices Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were always the model for artist-producer synergy, twin forces forever meant to exist in tandem. Like most matters of pop, songwriting, and the industry, though, this theory appears to unravel with a bit with research. In fact, much of Janet’s breakthrough 1986 album Control was originally written for R&B singer Sharon Bryant, but she decided they were too "rambunctious." Yet Jackson, who was trying to put her bubblegum teenage years behind her, took charge of Control as no one else could. She wrote the toplines and arranged the complex vocals, which mix spoken-word, nonchalant rap-singing, and little iconic GIF-bursts of ad-libs. She helped with keyboards and synths. She reached into the Jam & Lewis machine and bent every part of it to her will, rearranging all the gears into a coat of armor. "Control" is the sound of Janet Jackson underlining her career moves, her decisions, her identity. —Katherine St. Asaph
See also: Janet Jackson: "What Have You Done for Me Lately" / Jody Watley: "Real Love"
The Replacements: “Bastards of Young” (1985)
In his entertaining 2007 oral history of the Replacements, All Over But the Shouting, writer Jim Walsh recounts one of the band’s early gigs at the Sons of Norway building in Minneapolis. Walsh suggests that it’s a short leap from there to imagine a young Paul Westerberg transforming the name of the fraternal organization Sons of Norway into the dispossessed "We are the sons of no one" chorus on the group’s raucous anti-generational anthem, "Bastards of Young". For people listening to the Replacements’ Tim on vinyl (or cassette) in 1985, "Bastards of Young" was the opening song of side two, arguably the single strongest album side in the group’s entire discography.
Even alongside other such signature gems as "Left of the Dial" and "Here Comes a Regular", however, "Bastards of Young" stands as perhaps the definitive Replacements track. It’s the song that best embodies the general character of Westerberg’s songwriting through its wry mixture of bemusement and exasperation. He sings as one unsure of where he’s headed, yet confident enough in his own instincts to recognize that the directions he’s been given are hopelessly flawed. In typical Westerberg fashion he’ll balance a line of casual brilliance ("The ones that love us least are the ones we’ll die to please") with another so fudged ("something something something beer tonight"?) that there’s never been total consensus about what he’s actually singing. As was often their habit at the time, the rest of Westerberg’s bandmates join him by speeding the song’s tempo slightly beyond they seem capable to sustain. The result is a song that seems destined to collapse in a heap at any moment, yet somehow manages to stagger a steady path between defiance and self-deprecation, shrugging resignation and pure raw-throated passion. —Matthew Murphy
See also: The Replacements: "Can't Hardly Wait" / The Replacements: "Kiss Me on the Bus"
De La Soul: “Eye Know” (1989)
One of the most innovative rap albums of all time, De La Soul's debut 3 Feet High and Rising changed the way hip-hop approached sampling, but the album wouldn't have resonated so widely if it were merely a playground for producer Prince Paul. De La Soul had the songs to back up their inventive production, and none of them better captured the trio’s good-natured disposition than "Eye Know". It's a straightforward love song, with rappers Posdnous and Trugoy the Dove each attempting to woo the objects of their affection with old-fashioned chivalry. "Sex is a mere molecule in this world of love that I have for you," Trugoy promises with geeky sincerity. Though the rappers sound too much like blushing teenagers to expect a return on their overtures, the song made it clear that women were welcome in their D.A.I.S.Y. revolution—a refreshing assurance at a time when sexism was beginning to sour rap music.
"Eye Know" also has the distinction of being the most feel-good song on what might be the most feel-good rap album of all time. Every sound seems to have been selected for maximum merriment, from the strutting guitar riff and horn licks piped in from "Peg", the one Steely Dan song you can play at a party, to the reassuring whistle from Otis Redding’s "Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay". From the start, De La Soul were fascinated by expression in its purest form, and it doesn’t get any purer than this expression of sheer happiness. —Evan Rytlewski
Run-D.M.C.: “It's Like That” (1984)
You can divide hip-hop into before and after "It’s Like That". The old school died as soon as the drum machines kicked in. By the time Run roared about "unemployment at a record high," another 30 MCs filed for food stamps.
Larry Smith laid down the beat, an echoing ricochet of flying sparks, shrapnel, and meteor-slamming boom. Disco and electro-funk replays previously defined the genre. No more. Bambaataa and Busy Bee, Kurtis Blow and Cold Crush had ruled the "on and on to the break of dawn" era. But the new school suddenly made 24-year-old elders extinct as an Allosaurus. The newly anointed giants were a leather-clad Hollis trio managed by Russell Simmons, originally named Runde-MC.
"It’s like that and that’s the way it is." A fatalist credo that became the "So It Goes" for the gestating hip-hop generation. Those lines stuck in Profile boss Cory Robbins’ head, immediately after Rush brought him the demo cassette. So he gave the group $2,000 to re-record it at Greene Street Studios in SoHo. It sold 250,000 copies. A slightly remixed Jason Nevins version came out in 1997. It felt timeless enough to snap the Spice Girls’ streak of consecutive number one UK Singles.
A half-dozen archetypes sprang from the torso of "It’s Like That" and its B-side ("Sucka MCs"). It’s simultaneously a complaint lodged at chronic joblessness, a love letter to getting money, a party record telling you to stay young and play, a rebuke to foreign policy war mongering, an existential lament, a Christian affirmation, and an aesthetic attack. It’s stripped down and minimalist punk, rawness as response and weapon. There was no way to go back and an entirely new path stretched forward. —Jeff Weiss
See also: Run-D.M.C.: "King of Rock" / Run-D.M.C.: "Peter Piper"
Grandmaster & Melle Mel: “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)” (1984)
Hip-hop had been party music for most of its first few recorded years, but there's such a thing as too much partying, and "White Lines" is a snapshot of the moment when drug-fueled fun is just about to crash. (There was a lot of powder floating around at the time—1983 was also the year of Laid Back's "White Horse", for instance.) Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five had made the first major political hip-hop single the year before with "The Message", but even by then they were already disintegrating. So "White Lines", more or less a solo record by the group's MC Melle Mel, was credited on release to "Grandmaster & Melle Mel". Flash, their original DJ, was the name everyone knew, but he was long since out of the group at that point; he first heard "White Lines" while on his way to buy coke.
"White Lines" is a record about an intractable problem, from which Melle Mel refused even to exonerate himself ("Now I'm broke and it's no joke/ It's hard as hell to fight it DON'T BUY IT!"; see also the sly double negative in the title). It's also a problematic record itself, not least because its music is lifted wholesale from the New York art-funk band Liquid Liquid's "Cavern", released earlier in 1983. (Even Melle Mel's "something like a phenomenon" is inspired by a half-audible line from Liquid Liquid vocalist Salvatore Principato.) But the "Cavern" grooves are crisped up by the Sugar Hill Records house band (who would soon go on to become Tackhead) and a little "Twist & Shout"-style vocal figure, and hurled over the top by the horn section that storms in for the song's bridge. And the masterstroke of Melle Mel's performance is that as bitter as it is—the way he sneers the word "baby" makes icicles drop every time—it's also funny and even playful: the party, he knows, is going to keep raging until everyone drops, no matter what, so he might as well keep it hopping. —Douglas Wolk
See also: Cash Crew: "On the Radio" / Funky 4+1: "That's the Joint"
Slick Rick / Doug E. Fresh: “La Di Da Di” (1985)
The line on Slick Rick is that he’s one of hip-hop’s great storytellers, a guy who realized the narrative possibilities of the medium and constructed songs with plots where one action followed from the next. And "La Di Da Di", his breakthrough song with human beatbox Doug E. Fresh, is without question a fine example of his writerly talent. He tells of a day in the life in which he wakes up, falls out of bed, puts his Kangol upon his head, and ultimately watches a mother beat the living crap out of her daughter because they’re both hopelessly in love with him. But while the blow-by-blow of the story and Rick’s running commentary have their charms, the real genius of "La Di Da Di" is in the delivery. With this song, he invented a kind of tuneful rapping in which a spoken phrase could become a melodic hook at any moment. The simple melodies found in "La Di Da Di" have become part of rap’s DNA, and the song has been repeatedly stripped for parts by the likes of Biggie, N.W.A, and Snoop. To listen to "La Di Da Di" now is to trace three decades of history in under five minutes, all of it leading back to Rick’s place. —Mark Richardson
See also: Audio Two: "Top Billin'" / Doug E. Fresh: "The Show" [ft. Slick Rick]
Rick James: “Give It to Me Baby” (1981)
Rick James met Salvador Dalí once, at a dinner party in Hawaii. Dalí was supposedly so taken with Rick's appearance—he was one beautiful motherfucker back then—he insisted he draw him. We'll never see the thing; Rick pocketed Dalí's sketch, got stoned, went for a swim, and ruined it. To say the least, Rick James led a colorful life: a draft dodger, a failed pimp (too lenient, by his own admission), ex-bandmate of Neil Young and ex-lover of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Rick picked up the cup of life and proceeded to spill it all over the carpet.
"Give It to Me Baby" is a song about Rick James' fundamental incompatibility with the non-Rick James lifestyle. James returns from a night out, half in the bag and looking to party, only to find his beloved half-asleep and fully annoyed. He just wants to love her, he pleads, but she's not having one bit of it. Undeterred, James cajoles, hectors, begs; all it seems to get him is a "say whaaaat?" Rick's persistence in the face of so much resistance verges on the predatory, but he makes enough show of being turned down, you get the sense he's poking a little fun at himself: the would-be lothario who can't seem to get the timing right. While the sweat-soaked horns and pulse-quickening bassline of "Give It to Me Baby" feel a tad out of step with the mechanized precision of most early '80s funk, Rick was never the type to change with the times. Rick was who he was, unapologetically crass, defiantly crude, and—back then, anyway—as alive as anybody ever was. —Paul Thompson
See also: Mary Jane Girls: "All Night Long" / Eddie Murphy: "Party All the Time"
Soul II Soul: “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” (1989)
A remix of an a capella track at the end of Soul II Soul’s first LP Club Classics Vol. One (re-titled Keep on Movin’ in the U.S.), "Back to Life" is built around two mesmerizing vocal phrases from Caron Wheeler: "Back to life/ Back to reality" and "However do you want me/ However do you need me," which (as anyone who's been to a club or party over the last 25 years can tell you) take turns functioning as the song’s central hook. Wheeler, a veteran of London’s lover’s rock scene since the late 1970s, had more than a decade of experience projecting soul not through volume, but via shading and tone, and she doesn’t sing those hooks as much as chant them like mantras. Jazzie B and Nellee Hooper’s production work burnishes her voice with a slight digital sheen, rendering Wheeler's passion slightly paranormal.
Wheeler’s vocal is perfect enough on its own, but B and Hooper surrounding it with elements from the past and present to predict the future turn the track into a classic. B, a veteran of London’s sound system scene who’d been dabbling in hip-hop (not nearly a household phrase in the late 1980s, especially in the UK), flipped a Larry Graham drum fill into a proto-jungle rhythm track, incorporated string stabs nodding to Chic and Gamble & Huff, and topped it off with rich piano chords and stop/start squelches owing to London’s quickly boiling-over house music craze. Oddly enough, though, what binds the song together is the amount of open space that B and Hooper leave in the track. "Back to Life" is a marvel of elegant restraint—the strings and piano buoy Wheeler above the breakbeat, a serene specter looking down from the top of the block. Five years later, Hooper would take these lessons two hours west to Bristol, where he produced Massive Attack’s sophomore album Protection.
In what felt like an act of subcultural diplomacy, "Back to Life" soared to #1 in the UK for four weeks during the house-crazed Second Summer of Love (and in the U.S., aided by a video that cut between the group flinging their dreads around Epping Forest and a generic urban rooftop dance party, crossed-over to MTV ubiquity and a Grammy win). The mainstream got a taste of house music that was stately and groovy, not dripping with acid, and which sounded fantastic amid clubbish contemporaries like Black Box’s "Ride on Time", Technotronic’s "Pump Up the Jam", Janet Jackson’s "Miss You Much", and Lisa Stansfield’s "All Around the World". "Back to Life" was diplomatic in a more meaningful way, too. The song's ubiquity also meant B (whose parents emigrated from Antigua) and Wheeler (a second-generation Jamaican) were representing London’s substantial Caribbean-derived population from the absolute peak of the pop music world. —Eric Harvey
See also: Oran "Juice" Jones: "The Rain" / Black Box: "Ride on Time"
Minutemen: “History Lesson – Part II” (1984)
Though San Pedro punk band Minutemen were a trio, with each member contributing an essential part of their uncompromising and efficient sound, much of their energy derived from the long-term friendship between guitarist D. Boon and bassist Mike Watt. "History Lesson – Part II" is the story of that friendship. It chronicles the band’s pure love for music (and punk in particular) and their philosophy of "jamming econo"—or keeping their operation as a band, from songwriting to touring, simple and low-cost—in just over two minutes. This song, and the double album it appears on, Double Nickels on the Dime, influenced countless artists, paved the way for the '90s alternative rock countercultural shift, and helped establish punk firmly as an enduring philosophy rather than a set of aesthetic boundaries. The Boon quote that became a nearly-ubiquitous '90s sticker is, "Punk is whatever we made it to be," and there’s no other Minutemen song that so clearly exemplifies this attitude. Though Boon was tragically killed in a van accident in late 1985, his influence is just as present today as it was in '84, through his recorded work, through his bandmates’ continuation of his legacy, and through anyone who ever heard the line "Punk rock changed our lives," and felt it in their bones. —Jes Skolnik
See also: Minutemen: "Viet Nam" / Minutemen: "This Ain't No Picnic"
Rhythim Is Rhythim: “Strings of Life” (1987)
In 1988, if you wanted a comprehensive survey of the mutant strains of robotic funk that had risen up in the wake of disco, you couldn't have done much better than to get your hands on The History of the House Sound of Chicago, a mammoth, 15-disc compilation put out by Germany's BCM Records. The box set had it all. Discs one and two, "The Tracks That Built the House", focused on the disco and Italo sounds that Frankie Knuckles had been playing at the Power Plant and the Warehouse. Disc three focused on the D.J. International label's roster—artists like J.M. Silk and Fingers Inc.—while disc six, "Trax Classix", compiled now-classic tunes from Trax artists like Adonis and Marshall Jefferson.
Despite the box set's title, it didn't focus exclusively on Chicago artists; Detroit's Derrick May (aka Rhythim Is Rhythim) and Kevin Saunderson (Inner City) were both included, along with artists from New York, New Jersey, and the UK. That same year, you could find May and Saunderson, along with their Belleville Three colleague Juan Atkins and other Motor City producers like Blake Baxter and Eddie "Flashin'" Fowlkes, on another comp, Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, released by a Virgin subsidiary. Over the years, techno and house have assumed a binary opposition in the popular imagination: house and techno, Chicago and Detroit, yin and yang. (Meanwhile, New York and New Jersey get left out of the origin story.) But the coexistence of those two comps offers a useful reminder of the way that, at the time, stylistic divisions were hardly so clear-cut as they seem now. The names of the subgenres were, in large part, a matter of marketing. Both styles were part of the lineage of African-American disco and European synth pop; both balanced a dreamer's brand of techno-futurism with the sweaty business of the right-here-right-now.
A visit to Chicago, in fact, had a major impact on a young Derrick May. In Dan Sicko's Techno Rebels, he describes his first experience hearing Frankie Knuckles at the city's Power Plant nightclub. "Frankie was really a turning point in my life…. When I heard him play, and I saw the way people reacted, danced, and sang to the song—and fall in love with each other [to the music]—I knew this was something special." He continued, "This vision of making a moment this euphoric… it changed me."
Of all the possible descriptions for "Strings of Life", "euphoric" couldn't be more apt. All of the song's elements contribute to that giddy, heart-in-mouth, eyes-wide feeling: the pistoning piano chords, played by his friend Michael James, that never resolve quite as you expect them to; the rushing TR-909 drum programming, pushed dangerously into the red; and, above all, the sandpapered string stabs, harsh and percussive, their timing dangerously uneven. Today, you'll hear people who encountered the song for the first time in a field or a hangar in the late '80s or early '90s describe the experience in rapturous terms, and the same goes for people who heard it a decade later. Surely, the song's almost elemental title hasn't hurt its renown. There are people who, pre-YouTube, knew only of the existence of the song until, one fateful night, they heard a DJ play it and thought to themselves, "So this must be 'Strings of Life'," only to discover that they were right.
In the Chicago box set, "Strings of Life" is included on a disc subtitled "House – The Future". (This was hardly the only place you could get May's 1987 single, which was the fourth 12'' single on his Transmat label; it turns up on scads of contemporaneous compilations with names like Jack Trax and Warehouse Raves.) Twenty-seven years later, and 28 since the single itself, it still sounds like the future. Not space ships and hovercars, maybe, not the teleportation devices that May's Transmat label was named after—but utopia, rapture, deliverance. Every time it is played on a packed dance floor, all these years later, it offers a brief, transcendent glimpse of the promised land. —Philip Sherburne
See also: Virgo: "Never Want to Lose You"
Sade: “Is It a Crime” (1985)
British jazz&B group Sade’s sophomore far-from-slump Promise catapulted them to indisputable superstardom in 1985. "Smooth Operator" had made their debut Diamond Life an international hit the previous year, but Promise was an instant #1, popular enough that, in addition to the three singles, DJs had begun to spin album tracks by '86, the first being the expansive opener "Is It a Crime". The six-and-a-half-minute, winding epic is a masterclass in dramatic dynamic shifts. The chorus strips everything away rather than building it up; it’s a near-whisper, the fallout after a wild-eyed, horn-bolstered escalation ("My love is wider than Victoria Lake/ Taller than the Empire state…"). It’s a song about self-doubt and forced emotional restraint, and musically, too, it's all seething indecision. Sade belts as intensely as she ever has, pushing past her normal sheen of breathiness.
But the song is really a showcase for why Sade is a band, and not just the first name of its singer. Promise was recorded largely live, with Adu recording vocals with the full ensemble as a guide for rerecording and perfecting later. Somehow, in her retakes, she’s able to respond to and mirror the group's constant tectonic shifts. The band also gets an opportunity to detour off into some straight-ahead jamming: A walking bassline drops in to relieve Adu for a minute, and saxophonist Stuart Matthewman flutters in and out of comfortable tonality. Half after-hours R&B, half rapturous torch song, "Is It a Crime" sets the tone for Promise—all dark hues and obsessive sonic detail—and provides one of the best arguments in Sade’s catalog that the group should be viewed as much more than a dispensary for stock-sensual lounge grooves. In fact, they were the most nuanced pop arrangers and performers of their cultural moment. —Winston Cook-Wilson
See also: Sade: "War of the Hearts" / Sade: "Love Is Stronger Than Pride"
INXS: “Never Tear Us Apart” (1988)
The fourth single from INXS' world-conquering Kick, "Never Tear Us Apart" has often shouldered the burden of tragedy; it was never intended to play at frontman Michael Hutchence’s funeral in 1997 or to lend an all-too-apt title to the band’s postmortem documentary last year. It’s hard to hear the song outside of that undesired context, but at its heart "Never Tear Us Apart" is a surprisingly straightforward declaration of love, caught somewhere between American soul and a European waltz, between Motown and Prague. It contains one of the most satisfying moments in '80s pop, a moment so curious, so inventive, so unexpected that it becomes endlessly replayable: As Hutchence concludes the second chorus, his words lingering in the cold air, an expectant drumroll gives way to—a saxophone solo. In another context, that instrument might sound lascivious, adding a sexual layer to a sensual song, but here it sounds stately, even monumental, as INXS shed the weight of the world just so it can savor this one present moment. —Stephen M. Deusner
See also: INXS: "New Sensation" / INXS: "Need You Tonight"
Talk Talk: “Life's What You Make It” (1985)
"The label didn't hear a single." When that phrase is thrown at a gestating album, it usually turns out to be a thorn in the band's side—even more often when it's a demonstrably pop-friendly group with auteurist aspirations. Yet Talk Talk, who were riding off expectations set by earlier trans-Atlantic new wave-simpatico hits like "It's My Life" and "Such a Shame", found an ingenious end run around what could've been a deadening compromise. All they had to do was center their label-pleasing song around a simple, hooky sentiment—"Life's what you make it"—around which they could build interrogating phrases ("Yesterday's favorite/ Don't you hate it"; "Don't try to shade it/ Beauty is naked") that got more enigmatic the deeper you went. From there, all that was left was to set the words over a slow-motion piano-driven Lee Harris march that was closer to a gothic Sade than anything It's My Life even hinted at, lace it with a recurring guitar wail that sounded like arena rock melting from catharsis, and let Mark Hollis belt out an impassioned lead that built from crescendo to crescendo—there's your hit. "Life's What You Make It" was their last brush with mainstream success before the more ambitious, experimental records Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, albums that jettisoned Talk Talk from the ranks of arty pop and into the realm of cult genius, and this particular transition between the two phases is priceless. —Nate Patrin
See also: ABC: "Be Near Me" / Talk Talk: "It's My Life"
The Isley Brothers: “Between the Sheets” (1983)
After the commercial failure of 1982's The Real Deal—an awkward attempt to update their traditional-leaning blend of R&B and funk with the synthesizer-heavy sounds of artists like Rick James and Prince—the Isley Brothers returned less than a year later with "Between the Sheets", one of their plushest tracks ever. It's 1,200-thread-count music that doesn't abandon the group's knack for marrying melody to groove. Incorporating the emerging sounds of electro-funk on the Isleys’ own terms this time, "Between the Sheets" also benefits from Ronald's unrushed, virtuosic vocals, which set a new benchmark for sensuality. "Enough of this singing; let's make love," Ronald urges as the track darkens thrillingly, pulsing with carnal tension. Rarely has wanting to get it on sounded this life-or-death urgent, or joyous. —Renato Pagnani
See also: Earth, Wind & Fire: "Let's Groove" / The System: "You Are in My System"
Nirvana: “About a Girl” (1989)
Then as now, the Nirvana of 1989 debut Bleach has much to recommend and set it apart from contemporaries like the Melvins and Mudhoney: Kurt Cobain’s wounded caterwaul, garrote-wire riffs, a heavy, dynamic melodicism, and a bleak sardonic sense that the album’s production positions front and center. But it was "About a Girl"—sharp, perceptive, well-constructed, and almost Beatles-esque—that demonstrated a potential beyond grunge’s ghetto. When Tracy Marander, Cobain’s girlfriend at the time, complained that he’d never written a song about her, this was his sweet'n'sour riposte, a winning, winsome plaint of woe from an unemployed layabout whose significant other supported him. "Girl", like so many of Nirvana’s best songs, places beautiful songwriting into mortal conflict with bitingly cynical lyricism: Love’s a mystery and romantic cohabitation is bullshit, but at least getting laid demands minimal travel and effort. —Raymond Cummings
See also: Mudhoney: "Touch Me I'm Sick" / Nirvana: "Blew"
The Clash: “The Magnificent Seven” / ”The Magnificent Dance” (1981)
The Clash came to New York to record in early 1980, just as the Sugarhill Gang’s "Rapper’s Delight" was peaking on the charts, and they were fascinated by this new style that suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Guitarist Mick Jones was especially inspired, buying into hip-hop so fully, the story goes, that his bandmates started calling him "Whack Attack"—a detail that sounds like it must have been made up, until you remember his subsequent run with Big Audio Dynamite. Never shy about exploring outside genres, the band gave this very young one a stab, too.
Like most songs on the Clash’s triple-LP triumph Sandinsta!, "Magnificent Seven" was made quickly, with Joe Strummer improvising his verses over a militantly funky bassline from Norman Watt-Ray of the Blockheads, who’d been sitting in with the band while bassist Paul Simonon filmed a movie. Strummer’s lyrics play like a freestyled Noam Chomsky essay, detailing a day in the life of a typical, consumer-addled working stiff and growing more allegorical by the verse. Even when he’s rhyming just for the sake of it, it’s amazing how confident Strummer sounds, given how little precedent there was at the time. Blondie’s "Rapture" was still a half year away, and Grandmaster Flash wouldn’t release "The Message" for another two years. He was running with his gut.
The song wasn’t the hit the band hoped it’d be, but it made a mark regardless after the New York R&B station WBLS began spinning Jones’ instrumental remix of the track, "The Magnificent Dance", essentially a showcase for the original’s almighty bass riff. "It was playing all over New York," Jones later recalled, "but they didn’t know at the time it was the Clash, or what the Clash was." In the scheme of things, the Clash’s contribution to rap is just a footnote, but even 35 years later, that’s still more than all but a tiny handful of rock bands can claim. —Evan Rytlewski
See also: The Slits: "In The Beginning There Was Rhythm" / The Jam: "A Town Called Malice"
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: “The Mercy Seat” (1988)
We’re used to hearing people die in Nick Cave songs; the man can wipe out entire towns in a single stanza. But even as it graphically details an executed inmate’s final moments (melting flesh and all), "The Mercy Seat" is not a song about death—it’s a plea to our basic humanity.
More than simply tell the story of a man being burned alive on the electric chair, "The Mercy Seat" is designed to make you feel like you’re the one being strapped in. Over the song’s calamitous extended outro, Cave sings its eight-line chorus no fewer than 14 times in succession, a process that consumes roughly two thirds of this seven-minute behemoth’s running time. But that relentless repetition is as crucial to the song as its narrative detail, with each incantation of the chorus—and the Bad Seeds’ intensifying squall—compounding the agony of an imminent but torturously slow death. Each time Cave’s narrator claims he’s "not afraid to die," it feels less like a hardened con’s final show of bravado than a psychological coping mechanism.
Johnny Cash famously covered "The Mercy Seat" on 2000’s American III: Solitary Man, embracing it as a critique of capital punishment. And it’s an interpretation supported by the fact that Cave’s subject is not your typical wrongly accused martyr, boasting "my kill hand is called E.V.I.L." and facing judgment for crimes "of which I am nearly wholly innocent." As that harrowing climax finally simmers down in the song’s final seconds, there’s no sense of resolution: Cave’s narrator may be dead, but the Bad Seeds still tremble and screech like an unsated angry mob, reinforcing the notion that trading an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is the ultimate zero-sum game. —Stuart Berman
See also: Leonard Cohen: "First We Take Manhattan" / The Pogues: "Fairytale of New York" / Tom Waits: "Jockey Full of Bourbon"
The Smiths: “This Charming Man” (1983)
"This Charming Man" is the story of the serendipitous meeting between a young man stranded by the side of the road and a dashing bon vivant in a pristine automobile who comes to his rescue. It’s a scene so quintessentially Steven Patrick Morrissey it would border on parody if it weren’t for the fact that "This Charming Man" was the second-ever single released by the Smiths. There are references to, subtly and overtly, English modernist author Henry Green’s Loving, the 1972 Laurence Oliver film Sleuth, and avant-garde filmmaker Jean Cocteau (the Moz-designed single sleeve features a still from 1950’s Orphée). The song itself was initially written out of jealousy for Rough Trade labelmates Aztec Camera by guitarist Johnny Marr, and was the band’s first bid for a "hit"—"something upbeat and in a major key," according to Marr. It was a modest success upon release in 1983, but hit number eight on the UK charts in 1992 when it was reissued, becoming the Smiths' highest chart placement ever. It features one of the most beloved guitar tones of the decade, one of Morrissey’s most honeyed and obtuse vocal takes, and one of the most memorable romantic exchanges in pop music history.
But I’ve always wondered: On what side of the car door is Morrissey in this story? He’d no doubt tell you he’s not even in the picture, but we know that can’t be entirely true. From a narrative standpoint, he’s the boy with the flat bicycle tire, and in 1983, that made sense. Vulnerable, a little lost but not completely naive, he’s the iconic outsider that made the Smiths a beacon of light for so many lonely young people. But listening today, it’s impossible not to hear him as the driver, a smug and cocksure yet wholly irresistible old rake. "We all want to grow up and move on and appear to be different to people. And we want people to see us in a different way," he said in 1997, bearing down on his forties. "But, I don't know, I think the personality is very, very strongly cemented, and we just bear whatever shortcomings we have and learn to live with it." He, of all people, should know so much about these things. So perhaps it’s best to just call "This Charming Man" exactly what it is: A perfect song by a perfect band. —Zach Kelly
See also: The Smiths: "Hand in Glove" / The Smiths: "Panic"
Frankie Knuckles: “Baby Wants to Ride” (1987)
The dance floor often gets called a safe space, a welcoming, un-judging womb where the unaccepted can find acceptance, or at least release. You can imagine house music filling this role in Chicago clubs like the Warehouse and The Power Plant in the early and mid-'80s. There you had DJs—primarily gay Latinos and blacks—spinning to largely Latino and black audiences from Chicago's South and West sides, and moreover spinning music produced largely by gay Latinos and blacks. If the weirdness of the music—early Trax Records alongside various and sundry local labels—contrasted a little with the party vibes, that made sense too: life was not easy for these musicians and dancers, so even their parties weren't going to always sound like other people’s parties.
Even in this context, Frankie Knuckles "Baby Wants to Ride" is terrifying. A jaunty vamp featuring unabashed Prince fetishist Jamie Principle on vocals, the song is a psycho-sexual nightmare full of come-ons that consistently sound more threatening than sexy. The aggressive sexual politics of a gay nightclub can explain the song's content, but not Principle's deranged sneer, or the way the synth chords get all queasy as Knuckles presses them down, a little too long, every time. Who is baby? What else does baby want?
There can be no doubt about the song's meaning, as it contains the lyric "I wanna fuck you/ All night long," but Principle also chants "Na na, na na, naa, naaa, you can't hurt me" and "Remember Ethiopia/ Feed the poor"; in the end he comes across as someone who indeed reveres the Purple One but finds him too lucid and prudish. The music—one of the least groovy classic house tracks—does not help matters, constantly egging Principle on, its tingling lead melody a wordless translation of "Na na, na na, naa, naaa."
It's harrowing stuff, and a stark reminder of just how polite house music has become. And not just because very few modern house songs want to fuck us, but because few producers are as committed to making us feel as uneasy as Knuckles and Principle. The track stands in stark contrast to the smiling, party-rocking superstar Knuckles we said goodbye to last year; the man had many ways to upset a dance floor. —Andrew Gaerig
See also: Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk: "Love Can't Turn Around" / Sleezy D: "I've Lost Control"
Alan Parsons Project: “Eye in the Sky” (1982)
Never mind that the song's spacey instrumental intro ("Sirius") later became the badass theme music for the Chicago Bulls: "Eye in the Sky" was the moment that the Alan Parsons Project escaped from the residual bloat of the prog rock era and became a legitimate pop act. They had already hinted in this direction with tracks like "Games People Play", but even then, the music took a backseat to the conceptual trappings of their albums. But "Eye in the Sky" didn't need an entire album's worth of context to make sense—this one was all about songcraft.
The secret ingredient to "Eye in the Sky" had been under Alan Parsons' nose the entire time: Eric Woolfson. Woolfson was Parsons' chief co-writer, but he didn't sing on an APP track until "Time" (from the LP preceding Eye in the Sky). Soft, gentle, and capable of more nuance than other vocalists imparted to buffoonish older songs like "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You", Woolfson's delivery is what sells "Eye in the Sky". It's part jealous-boyfriend schtick and part harbinger of the coming technological Big Brother dystopia (a typical Alan Parsons duality), all sung in a croon that sounds like someone breathing heavy on the back of your neck. The album's success would lead Parsons and Woolfson to greater fame and cheesier songs, and the band completely nosedived in the mid-'80s before disbanding altogether. But with "Eye in the Sky," this former progressive rock band mustered up one of the best soft rock songs ever. —Andrew Ryce
See also: Don Henley: "Boys of Summer" / Til Tuesday: "Voices Carry"
Madonna: “Borderline” (1984)
Released in 1983, "Borderline" is one of the first laid bricks in the cathedral of Madonna’s mythology, four minutes of emotional helium that became her first Top 10 hit on the heels of an iconic music video. In the clip, Madonna closes the gap between the club kid she was and the glamorous star she’d become as she plays her two beaux—a Latino tough boy and a snobby British photographer—off each other. Ironically, while lyrics refer to the gnawing desolation one might feel while navigating a relationship in which they don’t have any power, Madonna has total control in the video. She makes the tough boy miss his shot at the pool table by simply standing in the doorway; she spray paints the photographer’s car, causing him to flip out. She takes the energy from the song—a bubblegum instrumental given weight by her legible vocal performance—and uses it to dispel all the lingering demons from that bad relationship. There’s so much charisma, it’s easy to see why this was the song that catapulted her toward being the biggest pop star in the world. —Jeremy Gordon
See also: Madonna: "Holiday" / Madonna: "Lucky Star"
The Cure: “Pictures of You” (1989)
The liner notes of the Cure’s Disintegration made one simple demand: turn it up, loud. This request actually asked lot of the listener. Disintegration’s fourth single "Pictures of You" is overwhelming, even for a fanbase that prides itself on feeling way too much. "I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you/ That I almost believe that they’re real," Robert Smith wails as guitars layer infinity pools over him for seven minutes—by the end, you might actually believe that "we kissed as the sky fell in," "[screaming] at the make believe" and "crying for the death of your heart" are real things couples go through. Tally the time Robert Smith has pined for a lost love over the past 40 years and you’ll have hours, if not entire days worth of music. But "Pictures of You" is the logical extreme of Smith’s thwarted desires—to completely submerge in the memory of someone else. —Ian Cohen
See also: The Cure: "Fascination Street" / The Cure: "Lovesong"
AC/DC: “Back in Black” (1980)
Along with Kiss and Ozzy, AC/DC were scourges on the forces of respectability: a convenient villain for the church, the school, the town hall, and the PMRC. Rumors abounded about the band. The name was an acronym for Anti-Christ/Devil Child (not true). Their first singer drank himself to death (true). Their music reportedly inspired serial killer Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker (true). The band only grew more and more popular during the 1980s, even after the death of founding member Bon Scott, perhaps because they somehow became blunter, harder, simpler, and more primal—and they were already all three when they started. "Back in Black" remains monolithically perfect, a brick through a window that doesn't sound any less brutal today. New hire Brian Johnson has a formidable set of pipes and sings like he’s peeling off a layer of skin, and Malcolm Young’s rhythm guitar emerges as the rudest element, selling the song’s lewdness as something glorious and unique. That staccato brump! brump-a-bump! sounds like a stifled laugh, Nelson Muntz kicking a baby down the stairs. No wonder teachers and parents were scared. —Stephen M. Deusner
See also: Van Halen: "Panama"
Whitney Houston: “How Will I Know” (1985)
It feels like sacrilege to imagine an alternate timeline where "How Will I Know", the third single from 22-year old Whitney Houston’s 1985 debut, ended up a Janet Jackson song, as originally intended. For Jackson, control was freaky and liberating, something you wielded by choice. But for Houston, control was a lifestyle, a guiding principle—forever maintaining the perfect temporary balance between unthinkable technical precision and unchecked emotional release. Later, with Bobby Brown, it was something darker. Control, and its absence, was the core of "How Will I Know" beyond mere infatuation, and why it’s gotten so much more affecting with time: the terrifying rush of losing yourself. It was the album’s poppiest, most danceable track, but its persistent reputation as "lighthearted" never completely fit a song whose pre-chorus advocates, "Don’t trust your feelings."
"Diva" suggests the immortal, the untouchable; in Latin and Italian, it translates to "goddess." But what made Houston such an important one, voice aside, was that she wasn’t fearless or invincible. She’d initially wanted her mother to sing back-up on "How Will I Know"; early live performances of the song came off as almost shy, not immediately at home on the stage. But the sheer elation from the act of singing was obvious: realizing her own power in real time, letting it charge her up until she was completely electrified. Everything was hard, except for the music. That part was simple.
That question—how will I know?—re-emerges in the infamous 2002 Diane Sawyer interview. "I’m 5’7” and thin," Houston swears, responding to Sawyer’s questions about her jarring weight loss. "That’s not just thin," Sawyer persists. Houston looks her dead in the eyes: "No? What is it, Diane, tell me? Do you know?" The circumstances have changed, but the issue is the same: fear of the unmanageable void, just outside the jurisdiction of control. Later in the interview, Houston talks of losing the thrill of singing: "It’s just not fun anymore." That lost spark is unmistakable on "How Will I Know", so pure you want to preserve it forever, and you almost can. —Meaghan Garvey
See also: Lionel Richie: "All Night Long (All Night)" / Pointer Sisters: "Jump (For My Love)"
Michael Jackson: “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” (1983)
When it was released as Thriller’s penultimate single in the fall of '83, "P.Y.T." seemed fated for a life in Michael Jackson’s singles graveyard. Panned by the press as "fluff," the flirty pop-funk confection came at the tail end of the Thriller era and quickly became the lowest charting of the record’s seven singles (though, this being Michael Jackson, that still involves breaking into the Billboard Top 10). It never got the high-profile video treatment Jackson had gained a reputation for, and he didn’t even perform the song live in his lifetime, putting it in league with fellow Thriller back burner "The Lady in My Life". Even with a bit of star power, courtesy of Grammy-winning singer James Ingram who co-wrote alongside Quincy Jones, "P.Y.T." just couldn’t ever find the launching pad.
Even so, the single persisted as a fan favorite, for good reason: "P.Y.T." is one of Jackson’s most well-executed pop songs ever, from its irresistibly plush synth pads and rubbery bassline to the bridge’s famous call-and-response with a background chorus of P.Y.T.s (later revealed to be Jackson’s sisters, LaToya and Janet). It’s also the fastest song in Jackson’s catalog, perhaps providing a clue as to why he didn’t perform it, and other physically demanding songs, onstage. Yet in a 2009 interview with NPR, in which Ingram elaborated on the song’s recording sessions, he said Jackson danced furiously as he recorded, something he hadn’t seen an artist do before. "Michael came out of the studio sweating," he described. "There’s nobody that could do what he does." And he’s right: "P.Y.T." remains one of the best examples of Jackson’s irrepressible talent, capable of spinning even his filler tracks into gold. —Eric Torres