The 200 Best Songs of The 1980s

Metallica triumphed in the Eighties by doing everything their own way, for the metal audience they knew was out there waiting for this band. They turned the New Wave of British Heavy Metal into all-American thrash, with the radio-free success of Kill ‘Em All and Ride The Lightning. “Master of Puppets” was their most ambitious psychodrama, stretching out for over 8 minutes, while warning of the perils of drug addiction—right at the moment when the industry could no longer ignore that Metallica were huge on their own terms. 

The Queen of Funk, riding tall after her solo smash “I’m Every Woman,” gets even sultrier in this bittersweet, jazzy R&B reverie, showing off with torrid vocal flurries that nobody but Chaka Khan could even touch. She mourns a lost romance, singing, “There was a time when foxy was the dance.” She also gets background vocals from a young hype man named Luther Vandross. Good question, Chaka: “Can you tell me how a life that’s so fine could have climaxed in a single afternoon?”

The Human League made one of the Eighties’ most Eighties albums with Dare, full of high-gloss electro-beats and romantic angst. So much to savor here: “Love Action,” “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of,” “Open Your Heart.” But “Don’t You Want Me” is a soap-opera duet: a boy and a girl tell two sides of the same tragic romance. Phil Oakey recruited Susanne Sulley and Joanne Catherall at his local disco. As Sulley said, “He wanted a tall Black singer and he got two short white girls who couldn’t sing.” That much is true. But the power of “Don’t You Want Me” is the emotion in those all-too-human voices.

The 13-minute capper to the Beasties’ landmark second album Paul’s Boutique—three jerks telling the story of their long, strange hip-hop friendship, with the Dust Brothers weaving countless samples into a broader-than-Broadway epic. It’s one of the most loving musical portraits of New York ever made, all the more poignant for coming from homesick exiles stranded in Los Angeles. “B-Boy Bouillabaisse” filters a 1970s funk vibe through a 1980s rap prism, with more flavor than Fruit Stripe Gum: the dusted bass of “Hello Brooklyn,” the late-night subway party of “Stop That Train,” the scratched-up Ernie Isley guitar that anchors MCA’s fuzzed-out grandeur in “A Year and a Day.” The Eighties’ answer to Side Two of Abbey Road. Best moment: “I play my stereo loud! I disturb my neighbor! I want to enjoy the fruits of my labor!”

The master of Nigerian juju already had over 40 African albums to his name. But King Sunny Ade scored his international breakthrough with Juju Music. “Ja Fumni” was a mind-blower for listeners around the world: talking drums doing call-and-response, trippy pedal-steel twang, Ade’s polyrhythmic guitar and hypnotic Yoruba vocals. His 17-piece African Beats were famed for their 8-hour live shows. No artist from Africa had ever made such a splash in the U.S., influencing bands from Talking Heads to Phish. The King opened the door for the 1980s world-music boom; his best sampler is The Best of the Classic Years. And his influence still grows: when WizKid shared a stage with Ade in Nigeria, he famously bowed to the ground in respect. 

Wait a minute—this dance ain’t for everybody, only the sexy people.  Salt and Papa, two Queens girls who met playing spades in the school lunchroom, raised the game with their rap sisterhood. “We were just doing us,” Pepa told me in 2017. “We brought fun, fashion, and femininity to hip hop. Before us the style was hardcore—even the ladies were in baggy jeans. Then here comes Salt N Pepa in the spandex!”

Enter Jim and William Reid, two pasty Scottish brothers who haven’t seen the daylight since they started this band. “Just Like Honey” is a classic girl-group nugget drenched in noisy guitar feedback, turning the “Be My Baby” beat into a shockingly unsarcastic love song to a bold girl who lives in a honey-dripping beehive. “Just Like Honey” became Scarlett Johansen’s memorable theme song in Lost In Translation.

Sonic Youth were already a great NYC noise band before they learned how to write songs, on Evol and Sister. But they kick off their epochal 1988 double-album trip Daydream Nation with “Teen Age Riot,” one of the great opening songs in the history of vinyl. The Youth welcome you in with Kim Gordon chanting her witchy incarnations. (“Spirit desire! We will fall!”) Then the guitars of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo kick in, Steve Shelley hits the drums, and before you know it, you’re zooming down the fast track into the unknown. So many Nineties futures begin in this song.

The New York freestyle shot heard around the world. No electro-disco song had come on so loud, so aggressive, so in your face, with every beat delivering a full-body slam. Shannon Green sings about love on the dance floor, making eye contact with a hot stranger, praying to the DJ for a sign, pleading, “What does love want me to do?” Then the 808s kick in and love puts her into a groove.

There’s been a lot of talk about this next song. Maybe, maybe too much talk. But U2 had one of the craziest decades any rock stars have ever had, in their strange journey from “big-hair Dublin boys singing about Jesus in Latin” to “play the blues, Edge.” They never soared higher than in “Bad,” the 8-minute live epic from Wide Awake in America. (The feeble studio draft isn’t really even canon.) Desperation, isolation, desolation—but a hopeful ending if you want to hear it that way, especially in Bono’s plea to “come on down,” which translates as “Joy Division stole this song from David Bowie, we’re stealin’ it back.” This is a rebel song, and it turned everyone else at Live Aid into a footnote (yes including Queen, sorry).

Marvin Gaye hit rock bottom in the late 1970s, when drugs and divorce left him living in a van in Maui. But he started over in his music, playing with new toys like the Jupiter-8 and TR-808, inspired by the synth-pop he was hearing on the radio. In “Sexual Healing” he turns all the heavenly sounds in his head into electronic whispers and sighs, for a wake-up wake-up wake-up moment of redemption. Nobody would have guessed it was the end.

Here’s why there was only one Clash. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones sing a powerfully urgent lament for the Spanish Civil War, the toughest kind of war to sing about—the kind where the good guys lost. “Spanish Bombs” is full of grief, but not resignation. With right-wing regimes on the rise in 1980, just as they are now, it’s a song about revolutionary strength in the face of defeat. And it hits home now, in these days of evil presidentes. “Spanish Bombs” might be music from another time, further away now than the Civil War was then, but it’s a reminder that the future is unwritten.

The king of “punk funk” with an ode to the kind of freaky girls you read about in New Wave magazines, and how he yearns to taste them every time they meet. This lady has an appetite for the Rick James lifestyle—incense, wine, candles, limousines, drugs, girlfriends, the works. As he said in 1983 “I wanted a silly song that had a bit of New Wave texture to it.” “Super Freak” was just one hit from his 1981 opus Street Songs, but it never goes out of style. Rick James will always be the poet laureate of Very Kinky Girls. 

The Very Kinky Boys would like a word. Boy George and crew deliver a classic ode to peace, love, and understanding, but with the Boy’s own bitchy wit.

One of the decade’s finest lyrics: “Wearing padded bras, drinking beer through straws.” A longtime London punk scenester with an avant-jazz heritage scores a saucy global dance-floor hit about sex and money, co-produced by Tim Simenon, who racked up acid house hits as Bomb The Bass. Neneh Cherry makes a great joke out of her flimsy rap flow, with her real English accent sounding even more awesomely fake than her fake American accent. But no way is she letting that stop her from talking her shit. “It’s something that sends tingles up your spine,” she said. “It’s the sex in my voice.” Love when Neneh calls out to her DJ, “Bomb the Bass, rock this place”—the “rock me, Joe” of 1989 Club MTV culture. 

The Thin White Duke steps into the Eighties with one of his greatest and eeriest songs. With a young generation of New Romantics imitating him, Bowie wanted to prove he could out-New and out-Romantic them all. In “Ashes to Ashes” he revisits the most famous character he ever created: Major Tom, the lost astronaut from “Space Oddity.” As he said, it’s about “spacemen becoming junkies.” But it’s definitely David Bowie who feels stranded in outer space, looking down at the wreckage of his life, disconnected from reality, over the spooky synths. By the end, he’s pleading, “Want an axe to break the ice/Wanna come down right now!”

Three punk corndogs from San Pedro, California, coming from the hardcore scene but still in love with the Creedence and Blue Oyster Cult riffs of their youth. The Minutemen’s double-vinyl sprawl Double Nickels on the Dime is one of the all-time great American punk statements, home of their famous proverb, “Our band could be your life,” a celebration of solidarity and brotherhood as well as a fuck-you to the powers that be. “This Ain’t No Picnic” is the masterstroke: a two-minute blast of blue-collar rage, with childhood best friends D. Boon and Mike Watt slamming it all into your ribs.

A Harlem teen named Rob Base steps to the mic and declares “I wanna rock right NOW,” over the most iconic break of the hip-hop golden age, that James Brown/Lyn Collins “whooo! yeah! whooo!” looping into eternity. “‘It Takes Two’ went everywhere,” Rob Base told me in 2017. “When me and E-Z made the record, we made it for the neighborhood. We didn’t think it would do what it did. We made it for the neighborhood skating rink. It was called Rooftops—that’s where everybody used to go skating at.” But their street beats went global. “When it started traveling around the world, we were shocked. Different genres of music was even taking it in, freestyle—we did rock clubs doing that record. We wanted a nice good party record with a street feel to it.”

Cyndi Lauper sings the word “girl” several million times here, yet each time she digs a little deeper, sticking up for every girl who wants to be the one to walk in the sun. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” explodes with pop feminist bravado, with her all-inclusive demand for fun on her own terms, so tough behind her deceptively gaudy comic image. There’s so much power in all her Buddy Holly-via-Poly Styrene hiccups and chirps. And putting her mom in the video was such a radical statement in itself. Just another perfect song on her perfect debut She’s So Unusual—how could you live without “She Bop”? “Money Changes Everything”? Her version of Prince’s “When You Were Mine”? Hell, the whole thing?

What’s love got to do, got to do with it? What’s love but a second-hand emotion? 

Love, love will tear us apart. Again.

Meet Axl. Meet Slash. Do not let them take your credit card to the liquor store.

A love song from the last place anyone expected: the mind of David Byrne. “This Must Be The Place” is the Talking Heads’ warmest, most passionate peak, transcending the alienation of Fear of Music and Remain In Light. Byrne sings, “I’m just an animal looking for a home/Or share the same space for a minute or two,” over the swamp bass and quasi-Hawaiian synth sighs. In the 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, Byrne turns it into a romantic dance with a living-room lamp, and somehow makes the song feel even sadder.

Nobody could step to Big Daddy Kane. Hip-Hop’s golden age was peaking in the legendary summer of ’88, but Kane was the champ—a one-two punch of virtuoso poetics and smooth-operator charisma. He made his name with the Juice Crew in Queensbridge, alongside his high-school friend Biz Markie. But “Ain’t No Half Steppin’” is the battle rhyme where he claims his crown, over Marley Marl’s jazzy rump-shaker sample. He goes Friday the 13th on any sucker MC fool enough to challenge him on the mic, warning, “Up on the stage is where I’m-a getcha at / You think I’m losing? Pssssh, picture that.” Only Big Daddy could get so ill on his creative process: “Brain cells are lit, ideas start to hit/Next the formation of words that fit/At the table I sit making it legit / And when my pen hits the paper … aaaaw shiiit!” Forever the Kane, forever the King. 

The Motown queen wanted a song to tell the world how she felt about heading into her 40s, a divorced single mom ready to start over. The Chic masterminds Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards gave her a disco hit that doubled as a tribute to gay men they saw in the clubs dressed up as Diana Ross. As Rodgers says in his excellent memoir Le Freak, “It would be be a cool idea to have Diana talk to her gay fans in slightly coded language.” But it wasn’t so coded, lyrically or musically. “I’m Coming Out” remains a pride anthem that’s also a tribute to a monster drummer—Tony Thompson, damn—and a Nile guitar riff worthy of Biggie. Miss Ross still opens her live show with it. 

The definitive synth-pop dance cut. Vince Clarke quit the Mode soon after writing “Just Can’t Get Enough,” after their all-killer no-filler debut Speak and Spell, but carried on his noble career Yaz and Erasure. Martin Gore took over the songwriting for Depeche Mode, and took them to a whole other level of artistic and commercial success, right up to their great new Memento Mori. You could call this the most successful break-up of all time, since we got twice as much great music out of it. “Just Can’t Get Enough” will always evoke sideways haircuts, bouncy Casio beats, mesh-and-leather tops, the entire ethos of the Martha Quinn era.

“A rock & roll band needs to be able to get under people’s skin,” Paul Westerberg told Rolling Stone, right before Tim came out. “You should be able to clear a room at the drop of a hat.” The Replacements never had any trouble with that. But they evolved from Minneapolis punk brats to the great American rock band of the Eighties, with the rugged confessions of Let It Be and Tim. “Left of the Dial” is a heart-on-fire guitar rager about growing older, missing your friends, getting your heart ripped out by that song playing on the radio. It sounds better than ever now on the new Tim (Let It Bleed) remix—the way it was always meant to sound.

“Planet Rock” was the electro-hop 12-inch that totally transformed how this planet rocks. DJ Afrika Bambaataa from the South Bronx hooked up with producer Arthur Baker and synth wizard John Robie, with a beat from German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk. “Planet Rock” is a sci-fi tribal vision of Mother Earth as one big starship, full of universal people looking for the perfect beat. This song was more than a giant hit—it was the mothership that gave us Miami bass, Detroit techno, Latin freestyle, Memphis crunk, ATLien rap.

A very Eighties romance: “You always wanted a lover, I only wanted a job.” The greatest of English synth-pop duos team up with a Sixties gay icon they’ve worshiped all their lives, for a lavishly witty and mega-bitchy breakup song. “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” is full of ironic melancholy, especially when Neil Tennant asks, “Now I can do what I want to? Forever? How’m I gonna get through?” The way the Divine Dusty bats her eyes and glances off that last chorus with “a-ha-haaaa” is a whole career’s worth of jaded cool in three seconds. The Pet Shop Boys were Cardi B’s favorite group as a child—pray we get a duet on this with Megan.

Woooof! George Clinton already had a lifetime of funk genius behind him when he dropped “Atomic Dog”—after the rise and fall of his Parliament-Funkadelic collective, some fools even thought he was finished. But Dr. Funkenstein just got back to the lab and devised his biggest bomb ever. George was partying hard the night he freestyled “Atomic Dog” (“I was out of my head,” he recalled), barking and growling “bow wow wow, yippy-oh yippy-yay” over that monster bass. But it inspired countless hip-hop producers, especially on the West Coast—Dr. Dre built an empire on this bassline.

The ultimate Eighties band: four antisocial post-punk twits from Manchester accidentally turn into disco visionaries. New Order were still shell-shocked from the death of Ian Curtis when they began dabbling in low-budget synth beats. Yet “Temptation” sent them on their way to defining 1980s club sounds, one oblique 12-inch at a time. They kept tinkering with “Temptation” over the years, but they got it right the first time—the original 9-minute single from the Factus 8 1981-1982 EP. “Temptation” proves Bernard Sumner could be a brilliant poet of dance-floor social anxiety (“Confusion,” “Weirdo,” “The Perfect Kiss,” “All The Way”) when he wasn’t hilariously awful at it. (Like, they actually released “1963”?) But when they chant “Up, down, turn around, please don’t let me hit the ground,” they sound like they’re having fun for the first time in their lives.

Grace Jones spent the 1970s making the scene at Studio 54, but the Eighties is when she blew up into an artist. She had her own massively influential funk/reggae club sound, her butch flat-top haircut, and her Caribbean band starring Sly and Robbie. As she said, “When I sing a song I need to get into character, because it is all theater for me.” When Madonna started in 1982, she told the U.K. press she wanted to make music for “the kind of people who might like Grace Jones.” “Nipple to the Bottle” was her ultimate rage-queen feminist anthem, snarling like the ultimate New Wave cyborg dominatrix. The bass-heavy 12-inch mix is the killer, as she chants, “I won’t give in and I won’t feel guilty/You rant and rave to manipulate me!” Everyone dreamed of being as cool as Grace Jones. But nobody is.

Goth demon queen reinvents rock & roll. John McGeoch plays his flanged-to-heaven guitar over Budgie’s power-stumble drums, while black-lipstick goddess Siouxsie Sioux testifies about psychological disintegration and why it’s fun. She chants “It sends you spinning, you have no choice,” in the voice that launched a million cobweb-gathering twirlers to make each other dizzy on the dance floor. 

The Georgia boys in R.E.M. changed the rock game in the early Eighties. You could pick any song off their classic debut Murmur for this list. (Well, not “We Walk” or “9-9.”) You could pick “So. Central Rain” or “Fall On Me” or “Wolves, Lower” or “Good Advices.” Who else had songs like this? Nobody. (Wait, “Harborcoat”? “Catapult”?) R.E.M. had their own high-energy, low-budget DIY sound—loads of guitar, but no solos, no keyboards, no spandex. They were audibly Southern, from some town nobody’d heard of, like they had no idea bands were required to move to New York or L.A. (“Gardening at Night”? “Green Grow The Rushes”?) Michael Stipe’s voice surges in “Sitting Still” with urgent emotion, without any clue what the lyrics mean. (Maybe Stipe does not believe this song goes “sit on top of the big hill” but I do.) Eighties R.E.M. were one of the best bands who ever existed—except they got twice as great in the Nineties. 

Eric B. & Rakim not only changed the future of music, but changed the past, turning James Brown into a brand new groove. Eric B slices up a dusty groove from 1971—“I Know You Got Soul,” from JB’s sidekick Bobby Byrd—reducing it to the hardest guitar lick, while Rakim grabs the mic like he’s on Soul Train, with his most fiercely complex poetics. The group Stetsasonic called it right and exact in their pro-sampling polemic “Talkin’ All That Jazz”: “Tell the truth, James Brown was old, till Eric and Rak came out with ‘I Got Soul.’” (Or as Greg Tate wrote in 1988: “Hip-hop is ancestor worship.”) Like everything else Eric B and Rakim did in the Eighties, “I Know You Got Soul” is a radically prophetic move, claiming the future in the name of hip-hop.  

Sade Adu makes her elegant entrance—as if she’d make any other kind. The Nigerian-born fashion student turned chanteuse in the U.K. New Romantic scene, adding some Nina Simone to the Bowie/Ferry diamond-life aesthetic for her own unique world-conquering style. Her whole mystique is right there in “Smooth Operator,” where she’s the worldly bon vivant with too much of her own past to care about beginners or sensitive hearts. In the video, she sings with tears pouring down her cheeks, but nobody’s ever been in less danger of blowing their cool. Part of her discreet aura: Sade-the-singer has kept Sade-the-band together for over 40 years, without most fans noticing or even caring. No need to ask—it’s Sade.

Run-D.M.C’s bombshell debut single flipped hip-hop from club music to street music. As Jam Master Jay said, “There never was a B-boy record made until we made ‘Sucker M.C.’s.” It’s two rappers from Hollis, Queens, boasting about their wild style—“I cold chill at the party in a B-boy stance”—over the toughest stripped-down DMX beats. “Sucker MC” was made from the streets, for the streets, designed to blast out of boomboxes on the corner. The Golden Age of Hip-Hop was about to begin, with Run, Daryl, and Jay leading the way.

Robert Smith’s most wildly romantic song. “Just Like Heaven” spins on the dizzy edge, showing why none of his many imitators could match his flair for lipstick-meltingly mournful melodrama. The Cure began the Eighties as the miserabilist goth puppets of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography, yet somehow became bona fide pop stars. “I remember on the Kiss Me tour we were in Los Angeles,” Smith told Rolling Stone in 2004, “and there were girls taking their clothes off and lying down in front of the bus to stop us from driving away. And I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t really what I imagined I would be doing with this band.’”