The 200 Best Songs of The 1980s

Lighters up for the late great Biz Markie, one of the most beloved music heroes of the Eighties or any other decade. The Diabolical One. The Human Beatbox. The class clown of old-school hip-hop. “Just a Friend” is a classic that never fails, especially when it’s time to holler along, “Oh baby yooou! You got what I neeeed!” The Biz originally wrote it as a sob story. “But it came out funny,” he said. He tried it out on his friends Q-Tip and De La Soul, yet “when I sang the hook, they couldn’t stop laughing—they bugged out. Then I knew it was gonna be a good record.” A perfect song, and a perfect way to get this party started right.

A German girl sings about nuclear apocalypse, in a perky New Wave bop about the end of the world. Yet it’s also a doomy teen romance, at a time when half the hits on the radio were about the end of the world. The English version “99 Red Balloons” still rules the karaoke bars. But Nena sounds even harsher and cooler in German—oh, the way she snarls “Kriegminister.”

The dawn of the shoegaze era. My Bloody Valentine give an early taste of their power, from their debut album Isn’t Anything: Irish guitar madman Kevin Shields’ tremolo overdrive and feedback-loop noise, Belinda Butcher’s breathy vocals, awesome power-klutz drumming. It all adds up to a brain-obliterating noise that feels like rapture. 

The sound of New Jack Swing. Bobby Brown dishes the dirt on celebrity gossip, as the young Harlem prodigy Teddy Riley soups up a beat that would rule the radio for the next few years. Bobby’s complaints were so relatable, Britney used “My Prerogative” as the title of her 2004 greatest-hits album. 

The Fall cranked out a slew of post-punk gems in the 1980s, with Mark E. Smith presiding as the “Hip Priest,” the caustic Manchester git who took pride in terrorizing fans and bandmates alike. “People still cross the road from me; I’ve still got that,” he boasted near the end of his life. “I can clear a pub when I want to. It’s a talent.” “New Big Prinz” is a stomp full of glam-rock guitars and handclaps, with his California bride Brix Smith adding her pop smarts. He barks, “Check the record, check the record, check the guy’s track record! He is nuts!”

The California mod women come on tough, with snide wit filtered through their Rubber Soul harmonies and vintage Rickenbackers. “Hero Takes A Fall” was the breakout hit from their 1984 debut All Over the Place, when they were still L.A. rock & roll hipsters with a Sixties thrift-shop fashion fetish. This was the song that made Prince a Bangles fan, inspiring him to write “Manic Monday” for them. Susanna Hoffs and Vicky Peterson rave on guitar, with some choice words for male egos—a hint that Hoffs’ mean streak is one of her eternal flames.

The Norwegian pop trio won America’s heart with their cheekbones, their video, but most of all, Morten Harket’s falsetto. Harket can hold that killer high note for 18 seconds at a time, which is unreal. “Things you learn from the Norwegian tourist bureau” department: Harket holds the world record for the longest-held note in a pop song, making it for 20.2 seconds in his 2000 single “Summer Moved On,” breaking the Bill Withers “Lovely Day” record by two seconds. Bravo, Norway.

A Miami party girl scores a pioneering freestyle hit, with producer Pretty Tony Butler’s lethal DMX beats and the teenage Debbie Deb chanting, “Lookout weekend, ‘cause here I come / Because weekends were made for fun.” She transforms into a conquering goddess on the dance floor (“Jumping music! Slick DJs! Fog machines and laser rays!”), stepping into a disco where every one of her fellow party girls is a bomb waiting to explode.

Leonard Cohen takes over as the rock world’s elder statesman, a lust-crazed 53-year-old Jewish-Canadian poet murmuring about love and death and the lifelong torment of desire. Cohen’s 1988 album I’m Your Man made him more famous than ever, after years when he couldn’t even get his music released in the U.S. (Nobody even noticed “Hallelujah” until years later.) “Tower of Song” is his life story, especially when he rasps, “I was born like this/I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.”

The Native Tongues anthem, from the Jungle Brothers’ insanely underrated second album, Done By The Forces of Nature. It’s a utopian throwdown meant to unite the fractious hip-hop scene, with mystic visions of Afrocentric consciousness. As the JBs say, “Work by day, ritual by night, the vibe holds the tribe and it keeps it real tight.” But it’s not an exclusive, purist kind of tribe—it’s the kind with room for guitar solos sampled from the Bee Gees. The JBs shout out to their Strong Island friends—“We all are thinking on the same plateau, A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul”—over an incredible trippy headphone groove.

One of the most ridiculous Number One hits, in an era when ridiculousness was the most crucial pop virtue. Falco rapped in German about Mozart, in a noble effort to make powdered wigs an Eighties fashion trend. (Didn’t really catch on, which proves the Eighties did have some standards.) He slipped words like “superstar” and “punk” into the Teutonic babble, explaining, “If Mozart were alive today, he wouldn’t be making classical music; he’d be an international pop star. And I felt it was time to write a song about him.” (And if Mozart were alive, he DEFINITELY would’ve been writing songs about Falco.) American fans preferred the “Salieri Mix,” with a handy timeline of the composer’s life: “1784: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart becomes a Freemason. 1791: Mozart composes The Magic Flute. On December 5th of that same year, Mozart dies. 1985: Austrian rock singer Falco records, “Rock Me Amadeus!” 

An early proto-riot-grrrl pipe bomb. The only sound is the voice of punk poet Jean Smith, with the guitar of David Lester, about a woman walking by herself in a city and feeling like a target everywhere she goes. Every time she sings “I walk alone,” it hits deeper. A song designed to change the way you saw the world around you, and for many who heard it, it did and still does.

John Anderson helped start the New Traditionalist movement that rescued Eighties country radio. His voice in pure Florida backwoods in “Wild and Blue”—no pop fluff, no crossover slickness, just fiddle, banjo, and back-up vocals from his sister Donna. A damn sad cheatin’ song, especially when Anderson sings, “Somebody’s room on the far side of town/With your minds all made up and the shades all pulled down.”

The D.C. go-go scene had some of the era’s heaviest live-band funk, with legends like Rare Essence, E.U., and Chuck Brown’s Soul Searchers. Trouble Funk sum it up “Drop The Bomb”: congas, cowbell, cryptic party chants in the shadow of the White House. Trouble Funk drop the bomb on the Technicolor Crew, the Westside Crew, the White Boy Crew, the Freak Crew, the Potomac Crew, going strong to the break of dawn.

You ever hear this song and ask, “Why exactly do the wild dogs cry out in the night? Are they sad? Need a hug? Were they crying already when Toto got there? Is there a parallel universe where we are all just wild dogs crying in someone else’s Toto song?” You are not alone, friend.

Michael Hutchence, one of the decade’s great frontmen, makes wine from your tears in a passionate torch song that shows why he’s one of your kind. As he told Rolling Stone, “We don’t fit into the real normal, cleaned-up, corporate rock thing.” “Never Tear Us Apart” has one of his most Hutch moments ever: “We all have wings, but some of us don’t know whyyyyy!”

Joan Armatrading taught herself guitar growing up in a West Indian immigrant family in England. “There wasn’t a female playing the way I played, or singing the songs that I sang,” she told me in 2021. “And there certainly wasn’t a Black person doing it. So there was nothing for anybody to have a reference to.” “Me Myself I” is her tribute to the joys of being a loner. “I wanna have a boyfriend and a girl for laughs,” she sings. “But only on Saturday/Six days to be alone.”

“Riding in a bus down the boulevard and the place is pretty packed/Couldn’t find a seat so I had to stand with the perverts in the back.” Weird Al altered the course of accordion history with this song. He first blew up on the Dr. Demento radio show with “My Bologna,” but everyone figured he’d be a novelty one-shot like Tom “T-Bone” Stankus, Freddie Blassie, or Barnes & Barnes. Yet “Another One Rides The Bus” was his pivotal second hit, proving that Weird Al had an endless supply of these gags. It led to “Yoda,” “It’s Still Billy Joel To Me,” “(I Lost On) Jeopardy,” “Chicken Pot Pie,” and maybe his finest narrative achievement, “The Rye or the Kaiser (Theme Fom Rocky XIII).” By now, Weird Al’s career has outlasted almost any of the artists he’s parodied.

A classic of South African mbaqanga, from the compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, which opened the world’s ears to how township artists were creating beauty to defy the brutality of apartheid. Simon “Mahlathini” Nkabinde was “The Lion of Soweto,” the groaner with the deepest bass voice, teaming up with the Mahotella Queens. The Makgona Tshole Band were Johannesburg’s version of Motown’s Funk Brothers or L.A.’s Wrecking Crew—the house band who played on countless dance hits in the Sixties and Seventies. (Here’s to bassman Joseph Makwela, Africa’s James Jamerson.) Before Paul Simon’s Graceland, these artists were making the rhythm of resistance.

Depraved lysergic English boys in a psychedelic guitar trance, which they put on a compilation called Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To. Sonic Boom and Jason “Bassman” Pierce build a spidery loop of feedback and echo, zoned out between the Velvets and the Stooges, where absolutely nothing happens except a stoned dude staring into his amps mumbling “that’s just fiiiine” or “blows my miiind” for five, six, seven minutes, humming a delicate wisp of melody so beautiful it could be Brian Wilson. As romantic as “Surfer Girl,” in its way.

The story of Major Tom, revisited. German one-shot Peter Schilling does an unauthorized sequel to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and “Ashes To Ashes,” following Major Tom in his space capsule, as he floats lost through the cosmos. But “Major Tom” became a synth-pop classic in its own right—not bad for musical fan-fic.

Rush take on the radio, searching for signs of life amid all the glittering prizes and endless compromises. It’s a typically ingenious study of how pop music works, tuned into the timeless wavelength of rhythm, with a reggae break at the end. One of Geddy’s most indelible radio moments: “It’s really just a question of your honesty! Yeah! Your honesty!”

“Good tidings I bring you,” David Hinds sings on “Chant a Psalm,” from Steel Pulse’s True Democracy. It was a song of hope, at a time of personal and political conflict for the U.K. reggae stalwarts from Birmingham. Hinds takes comfort in Biblical tales, chanting the names of Moses, Daniel, Samson, and Solomon, telling the faithful, “Attract these angels in dreams and in your prayers.” 

A NYC underground boombox blast, with 808s in overdrive and the question, “Y’all want this party started right? Y’all want this party started quickly?” Not a radio hit, but a song you heard echoed in hits for the next couple decades. 

The bottle-blonde threesome scored so many iconic hits, yet even their deep cuts put on the red light, as in this fan fave from Zenyatta Mondatta. “It was a very difficult time,” Sting said. “There was a sense of urgency and quite a lot of drugs.” You can kinda tell. It’s a juicy groove about the banality of capitalist tedium, as Sting sings about a bored European hiding in his mansion, watching bootleg James Brown videos on his VCR and wondering why his expensive toys are no fun anymore. All that keeps him going is the mantra: “When the world is running down, you make the best of what’s still around.”