The 200 Best Songs of The 1980s

You want it, baby, you got it. “Bust a Move” sums up that brief moment in the late Eighties when hip-hop was taking over the pop world, and absolutely nobody was mad about it—The Source loved “Bust a Move” as much as Downtown Julie Brown did. Young M.C.’s rhymes like “you say neato, take your libido, go to the church in your new tuxedo” were too clever to resist, over a slamming Delicious Vinyl beat as Flea wilds out on his bass. Anybody know how long his best friend Harry’s brother Larry’s marriage lasted?

“A love letter to John, written very shortly after he died,” Paul calls this ballad. Macca could have turned his Lennon farewell into a big Number One hit, but he took pains to make “Here Today” feel tiny and intimate. He still does it live every night, as a tribute to his old friend, telling the crowd, “If you’ve got something nice to tell someone, get it said.” But 40 years later, the Paul-and-John love story keeps expanding, with Paul turning the call-and-response between them into “Now and Then,” proving that nobody hears these two boys like they hear each other.

Miami freestyle hits the Long Island bar mitzvah circuit to conquer Middle America. Result: a permanent disco floor-filler. We all owe Taylor Dayne so much. Don’t even get me started about “Love Will Lead You Back.”

Andrew Eldritch and Patricia Morrison, goth’s most fun no-fun couple, hook up with the king of mega-pop bombast, Jim Steinman, for the most magnificently sleazy of decadent power-perv disco bangers. Steinman’s over-the-top aesthetic was perfect for the Sisters of Mercy, with Eldritch huffing and puffing as if he just crawled out of the coffin. He leads the children of the night chanting, “Sing this corrosion to me!” “‘This Corrosion’ is ridiculous,” Eldritch said. “It’s supposed to be ridiculous. It’s a song about ridiculousness. So I called Steinman and explained that we needed something that sounded like a disco party run by the Borgias. And that’s what we got.”

Imagine: after years of synth-pop hits where the queer subtext is hidden or denied or played for giggles, suddenly a song like this exists. One of the most radical things about “A Little Respect” is how it’s a gay couple having such boring problems, though the song resonates on every political level. It arguably isn’t even the most exquisite Erasure song (“Oh, L’Amour”? “Blue Savannah”? Maybe “Drama!” Or “Victim of Love”?) but it still deserves to be the most famous, especially when Andy Bell knocks that final “I hear you CAAAALL-ing” over the fence.

Shane MacGowan’s greatest tale, raising hell with accordions and pipes and tin whistle, the same year the Pogues released their rebel Celtic folk-punk classic Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. “The Body of an American” might be slightly diminished by all those scenes in The Wire with Irish dudes dancing, but this is one of the realest songs ever written about immigration, also one of the best funeral songs, also one of the best drinking songs. But it’s also the realest song about leaving home and laughing it off, when you know in your heart you’ll never return and you’ll never get over the true love you left behind and you’ll never truly have a home again.

After Lionel Richie went off to fiesta forever as a solo star, the Commodores could have given up. Instead, they surprised everyone by coming back stronger than ever in “Nightshift.” It’s a tribute to the fallen R&B pioneers Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, who both died in 1984. The Commodores raise a toast to their real-life friends and heroes, keeping their names alive on pop radio forevermore, listening to those sweet sounds coming down on the nightshift.

Lou Reed celebrates the tender love between a man and a motorcycle, making poetry out of the most ordinary details: “I rode to Pennsylvania near the Delaware Gap/Sometimes I got lost and had to check the map.” (The epitome of what Lester Bangs called “the Lou Reed ‘I walked to the chair/Then I sat in it’ school of lyrics.”) But he gets real emotion out of the cheapshit synthesizers—it figures Lou would make such a great imitation Depeche Mode record, right when Depeche Mode (and everybody else) just wanted to be Lou Reed. Weird revelation from the new Lou bio by Will Hermes: he chose the producer because he loved the drum sound on Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing At All.” 

“What in the world can make a brown-eyed girl turn blue?” For the answer to this and other questions, let us turn to a Swedish New Wave boy-girl duo with gooey hair, dubious English fluency (“Her loving is a wild dog”?) and a burning desire to rap about a sex-robot girl who’s a miracle man and a juvenile scam — but she’s got the look.

Lightning strikes—maybe once, maybe twice. Stevie Nicks had a fabulously witchy Eighties run, both solo and with Fleetwood Mac, from “Bella Donna” to “Stand Back” to “Ooh My Love.” But “Gypsy” is her most touching autobiography, especially when she sings about how her wild heart “faces freedom with a little fear.” The way she hits the word “fear”—twice—is a seminar in everything that makes her Stevie Nicks.

Kenny and Dolly always had chemistry. They duet on “Islands in the Stream” like a pair of sassy seniors in a lavender haze, drawling every “ah-haaaa” with a sensual post-coital glow. They were never a real-life couple, but as Kenny told Rolling Stone in 2014, “We just flirted with each other and loved every minute of it.”

J Mascis proves himself the true Eighties guitar god, with an axe that yearns and searches amid all the emotional feedback, a huge inspiration for Nirvana, Pavement, and all that followed. So many greats in his early songbook: “In A Jar,” “Repulsion,” “Little Fury Things,” “Severed Lips.” “Freak Scene” is Dinosaur’s Jr’s most beloved tune, with cleverly self-mocking angst, as J drawls, “Sometimes I don’t thrill you/Sometimes I think I’ll kill you/Just don’t let me fuck up, will you/‘Cause when I need a friend it’s still you.” Then his guitar fucks up. It all ends with the truest final line of any Eighties love song: “What a mess!”

Kim Carnes spent 9 weeks at Number One with this proto-indie-sleaze ode to sexual espionage, featuring one of the decade’s pithiest similes: “She’s pure as New York snow.” The song came from Jackie DeShannon, the L.A. folk-rock legend who sang it in the 1970s, but Kim’s hit brings the creepy synth ambience, especially when she rasps, “All the boys think she’s a spy! She’s got Bette Davis eyesssss!” Bette wrote her a thank-you note. Carnes later sang a two-word solo on “We Are The World.” (“When we!”) Taylor Swift did a memorable acoustic version on Speak Now World Tour Live, telling the crowd, “I’d love to play you some music I’m a fan of that’s come from L.A.,” adding, “This song came out in 1981, 8 years before I was born.”

Elvis called the Eighties “the decade music forgot,” but he made a string of classics, including the underrated gem Trust. “That’s a record that falls between the cracks a little bit,” Costello told me in 2002. “I think it has one of the greatest Attractions performances, ‘New Lace Sleeves.’” It’s a dissection of male vanity, with two lovers facing each other the morning after. Sad but true: “Good manners and bad breath will get you nowhere.”

The hardest old-school rap, with LL rocking over a go-go percussion sample from Trouble Funk. As he told Rolling Stone, “We were going to bring it down, break it down, reduce it to its most minimal flow—like real low.” Rick Rubin earns his legend with this head-banging production. LL predicts, “Some girls will like this song and some girls won’t”—a rare moment of humility from the self-proclaimed king of crowd rockers. 

The Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler was the great sarcastic romantic of the Eighties, a world-weary post-punk roué with a London sneer swiped from David Bowie via Johnny Rotten. He sang about the secret lives of weird girls nobody understands, from “Pretty In Pink” (which inspired the John Hughes/Molly Ringwald film) to “Susan’s Strange” to “The Ghost In You.” The Furs’ first three albums are flawless, with “Love My Way” as the hit from their third, Forever Now. “It’s basically addressed to people who are fucked up about their sexuality, and says, ‘Don’t worry about it,’” he told Creem in 1982. “It was originally written for gay people.” “Love My Way” also inspired some truly tragic dancing in Call Me By Your Name.

Strange as it might seem now, people were obsessed with the Fine Young Cannibals. Especially their mysterious singer Roland Gift—his androgyny, his opacity, the way he sang like Grover with emphysema. Who else would cover a Buzzcocks song like it was a Motown ballad? “She Drives Me Crazy” was FYC’s big hit, but “I’m Not The Man I Used To Be” is their most enigmatic: Brit-soul for a post-hip-hop world, taking the chopped-up Eric B. & Rakim “I Know You Got Soul” guitar lick and turning it into a trembling confession.

Owen Wilson voice: Well, everyone knows Bon Jovi peaked with “Livin’ on a Prayer.” What this song presupposes is, maybe they didn’t?

The tears of a mod, when there’s no one around. The Jam were the biggest band in Britain when they made “That’s Entertainment.” Paul Weller was just a lad of 22, but already a master of Kinks-level songcraft, as in “Start!,” “Going Underground,” and “Boy About Town.” “That’s Entertainment” is his heartfelt acoustic tale of urban melancholy. Weller recalled, “Coming home pissed from the pub and writing ‘That’s Entertainment’ in 10 minutes, ‘Weller’s finest song to date,’ hah!” Don’t sleep on the excellent live version from Dig the New Breed.

The Clean were the flagship band for New Zealand’s legendary indie label Flying Nun, where some of the decade’s freshest rock bands were happening, in the island with the world’s highest sheep-to-human radio. The Clean’s jagged guitar sound was a thing of beauty, especially in wry tunes like “Anything Could Happen,” “Getting Older,” and the Velvets-gone-surf crescendo “Point That Thing Somewhere Else.” They were kindred spirits to New Zealand bands like the Chills, the Verlaines, Tall Dwarfs, Bailter Space, the Bats, and so many more. By the Nineties, the Clean were internationally acclaimed kiwi rockers, inspiring indie bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo. 

When Nick Cave announces “I wanna tell you about a girl,” you know it’s going to be a stormy night. The goth-punk demon preacher steps out of the shadow of The Birthday Party with a truly demented tale of sexual obsession, slipping “out of her nightmare and back into mine.” Blixa Barfeld mangles his guitar, while Barry Adamson plays one of the sickest basslines of a bass-intensive decade.

You’re the beginner, Shanté’s the winner, having all you competition for dinner. Shanté was queen of the rap battle rhyme—she mixed it up both of the iconic early hip-hop beefs, the “Roxanne” Wars and the Bronx/Queensbridge rivalry, and she’s the only MC who slayed in both of them. “Go On Girl” was written to order by her Juice Crew comrade Big Daddy Kane, over the same James Brown “whooo! yeah! whooo!” loop from Rob Base’s “It Takes Two.” As Shanté boasts, “While you were over here, perpetrating a fraud/I was overseas on the charts with Boy George!”

Even by Eighties standards, Haysi Fantayzee were the most absurd of one-hit wonders. The London boy/girl duo came out of the New Romantic scene with “Shiny Shiny,” two art-damaged kids chanting a death-disco sex chant over a bouncy little jump-rope riff., from their debut album Battle Hymns for Children Singing, chanting, “Shiny shiny / Bad times behind me!” They called it “a party song about dressing up after the bomb has dropped.” God, I loved this group. Haysi Fantayzee weren’t for everybody—in fact, they were for basically nobody. But “Shiny Shiny” up the beautiful excess of Eighties pop at its most delightfully deranged.

Strut, pout, put it out. Before “Strut,” Sheena Easton reigned as the industry’s most offensively boring pop starlet, a doe-eyed Scottish moppet with stomach-turning dreck like “Morning Train” and “For Your Eyes Only.” So it was a shock to hear her trash it up with “Strut.” She turned into a Prince muse, inspiring him to write her hit “Sugar Walls” (“Come spend the night inside my sugar walls”—subtle) and dueting on “U Got The Look.” Sheena does not play coy in the hilariously kinked-up fetish trip of “Strut,” singing, “All this fascination with leather and lace/Is just the smoke from another fire.” Yet she struts and pouts, until the sugar walls come tumbling down.

Like Lemmy says, the pleasure is to play. “Ace of Spades” is the outlaw existential anthem for Lemmy’s “double-stake or split” philosophy of life, with the classic Motorhead trio of Fast Eddie Clarke on guitar and Philthy Animal Tayor on drums.

Boston street-corner busker Tracy Chapman cut through the glitz with the gravitas of her deep contralto voice, her folkie guitar, and an acoustic tale of hard times. “Fast Car” didn’t fit in with any trend—just a few chords and the truth. That’s why it was a massive hit in 1988—and that’s why it was an equally massive hit in 2023. Not a bad trick to win an CMA award for the year’s top country song, nearly 40 years after you wrote it.

The most Eighties career of the Eighties? Daryl Hall and John Oates, the boy-boy duo who cruised across the radio dial and crashed every party. They could do it all, from slick pop (“Maneater”) to slicker pop (“Kiss On My List”) to their goth phase (“Adult Education”) to their big bam boom (“Out of Touch”) to kinda-boring slow jams (“One on One”) to this perky New Wave nugget. (The original title was ‘You Make My Dreams’ until streaming services added ‘Come True,’ a micro-controversy in the H2O fandom.) That “yooou-ooo, who-who” chant is some top-quality Oatesmanship, but his six-string rhythm blurt at the 1:55 mark (chik-i-ta-chinnnnng!) is the finest two-second guitar solo of the decade.

Iron Maiden’s definitive metal anthem, from their Eddie-sized monster The Number of the Beast. “Hallowed Be Thy Name” is the last words of a doomed prisoner condemned to death, with Bruce Dicksinson counting down the final seconds until his execution. It’s inspired generations of teenage dirtbags to learn guitar. “If someone who’d never heard Maiden before – someone from another planet or something – asked you about Maiden, what would you play them?” Steve Harris asked. “I think ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ is the one.”They also released their own craft beer, Hallowed.

Deep house evolves into post-Philly mighty-love soul, and for a brief shining moment, it actually slips into Top 40 radio. The Chicago house trio made “That’s The Way Love Is” with producer Marshall Jefferson, of “Move Your Body” fame. Byron Stingily testifies in a Sylvester-worthy falsetto, with lush strings and gospel piano. “When Ten City started, I think we were both at a point where we wanted to expand the genre by writing proper songs while at the same time doing more abstract things,” Jefferson said. Ten City’s entire Foundation album is one to rediscover.