All-time classics, buried treasures, cult favorites, and one-hit wonders — from Prince and Duran Duran to Kate Bush and the Go-Go's to the Replacements and R.E.M.
PHOTOGRAPHS IN COMPOSITE BY ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES; DAVID CORIO/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES; STEVE RAPPORT/GETTY IMAGES; RON WOLFSON/WIREIMAGE; DAVID CORIO/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
Welcome to 1982: the year that invented pop music as we know it today. One of the most experimental, innovative, insanely abundant music years ever. Hip-hop takes over with “The Message” and “Planet Rock.” New Wave synth-pop invades the Top 40. Disco and funk have a high-tech boom. Indie rock takes off with R.E.M. and the Replacements. Prince claims his throne as the Coolest Man Alive. Madonna dances out of Detroit. Thriller drops. New stars, new beats, new noises explode every week on MTV. So do some of history’s most tragic haircuts. Synthesizers. Drum machines. The Walkman. After 1982, music will never be the same.
Sure, you can go to the movies and see E.T. or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Or hit the video arcade to play Pac-Man. But the real fun is happening on the radio, where crazy new sounds are mutating and evolving at warp speed. Every style of music is booming. The kids are taking over. 1982 kicks off the cross-cultural mix-and-match future we’re all living in now.
That upstart network MTV has 24 hours a day to fill, so it’s forced to play these art-fop weirdos nobody’s heard of, since they’re the ones making videos. Except music video accidentally makes stars out of New Romantic provocateurs like Duran Duran, ABC, and Culture Club. Radical ideas about art, gender, race, sexuality are in the air. The old stylistic boundaries collapse. All over the world, rebels are checking each other out on the airwaves and plundering each other’s tricks.
The veteran stars realize it’s time to either evolve or die, so legends like Marvin Gaye, George Clinton, Lou Reed, Stevie Nicks, Aretha Franklin get inspired to make their boldest music in years. African music goes global via King Sunny Ade. Beatmasters get their hands on new toys to play with—the 808, the DMX, the Linn LM-2, the Jupiter-8. Rush go electro. Metal speeds up. Hardcore punk takes a huge creative leap. Toto bless the rains down in Africa. There’s go-go, ska, country, reggae, hi-NRG, goth. A Flock of Seagulls? They happened.
So let’s break it down: the 100 best songs of 1982, 40 years later. The hits, the flops, the flukes, the deep cuts. This list is full of all-time classics, still sung around the globe: “Don’t You Want Me,” “Billie Jean,” “Just Can’t Get Enough,” “Little Red Corvette.” There’s also buried treasures, cult favorites, one-hit wonders. Some of these tunes are influential works of art. Some are awesomely sleazy pop scams. And one is by Billy Idol. But every single one is excellent, and every single one helped invent the pop landscape we inhabit. So here’s to one of music’s greatest years. As Modern English would say, the future’s open wide.
Let us begin with an absolute classic: Toto’s “Africa,” one of the Eighties’ most enduring hits. Toto were a crew of L.A. rock dudes who’d never set foot in Africa, and part of the charm of the song is that you can really tell. As drummer Jeff Porcaro said, “A white boy is trying to write a song on Africa, but since he’s never been there, he can only tell what he’s seen on TV or remembers in the past.” (Fun fact: You can’t see Mount Kilimanjaro from the Serengeti, which is hundreds of miles away.) Yet it’s a 100 percent accurate song about feeling lost and bereft, which is why it’s so beloved by hipsters, wine moms, and tone-deaf karaoke singers belting, “I bless the rains down in Africaaaa!”
Stevie was so in the zone in the early Eighties, he could blow everyone else off the radio with his throwaways. “Do I Do” is just a vamp to close out his 1982 compilation, Original Musiquarium I, but it’s the most blissed-out brunch-funk groove, with Stevie rolling for over 10 playful minutes. He grabs the mic to announce, “Ladies and gentleman, I have the pleasure to present on my album, Mr. Dizzy Gillespie! Blooow!” After the bebop legend cuts loose on trumpet, Stevie tries some Sugar Hill-style rapping: “I know the record’s about to end, but we’re just gonna play and play until it goes away!” “Do I Do” is almost nothing except enthusiasm — but Stevie Wonder’s enthusiasm is one of the mightiest forces on earth.
Toni Basil became one of the Eighties’ great one-hit wonders with this crazed cheerleader chant: “Oh Mickey, you’re so fine! You’re so fine, you blow my mind! Hey Mickey!” Basil is a legendary choreographer—she acted in hippie movies like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, and worked on The T.A.M.I. Show in the Sixties. But she became America’s sweetheart with “Mickey,” widely heard as one of the decade’s most explicit odes to anal sex. (Well, what do you think she means by, “Any way you wanna do it, I’ll take it like a man”? Basil denies it, but hey, it’s just between her and Mickey.) Run-D.M.C. loved it so much, they turned it into “It’s Tricky.” As D.M.C. said, “I just changed the chorus around and we just talked about how this rap business can be tricky to a brother.”
The Faith and Void were two of D.C.’s toughest hardcore bands, but they teamed up for a split 12-inch on Dischord, at the suggestion of Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye. The result: Faith/Void, one of the all-time great punk broadsides. On Side One, the Faith define the new style called “emo,” but goddamn, Side Two — Void simply redefine fucked-up maniac noise. The African-American Filipino guitar wizard Bubba DuPree drove this crew of self-dubbed “outcast rednecks,” suburban metalheads who got their name from Black Sabbath’s “Into the Void.” “Explode” is Void at peak intensity, with John Weiffenbach’s demented cackle on top of DuPree’s guitar attack. One perfect 16-minute album side, then they crashed and burned — the hardcore ideal.
Siouxsie hits the dance floor in “Slowdive,” tapping into the krautrock power groove of bands like Can. “Pop now isn’t risque, it’s prissy,” Siouxsie told Record Mirror. “People are so insecure that they’re playing music that’s boring, music that has no sex or aggression or emotion.” She set out to challenge that. The shoegazers Slowdive named themselves after this U.K. hit; LCD Soundsystem encored with it in their early club days. When guitarist John McGeoch fell apart on the eve of a tour, the Banshees found a friend to step in: Robert Smith. For a couple of years, Smith served double duty in both the Banshees and the Cure — the ultimate goth dream team.
Watch out, boy — she’ll chew you up. Daryl Hall and John Oates get their hearts clawed and pawed by a feline femme fatale who only comes out at night. But it’s not what you think. “‘Maneater’ isn’t about a girl; it’s about New York City,” Oates said in 2014. “‘Maneater’ is about NYC in the Eighties. It’s about greed, avarice, and spoiled riches.” (Some fans have also theorized it’s about cocaine.) Their Number One hit retools the James Jamerson bass line from “You Can’t Hurry Love,” with bon mots like “a she-cat tamed by the purr of a Jaguar.” Peak moment: Oates’ epic “ooooh” after the sax solo has to be one of the all-time top five Oates “ooooh”’s.
So mighty. So real. The pioneering queer disco diva Sylvester was a grande dame by 1982, but still innovating in “Do Ya Wanna Funk.” It’s a blast of hi-NRG disco, heavy on the cowbell and post-Space Invaders video-game explosions, with Sylvester’s gospel falsetto (“Don’t go awaaaay!”) atop Patrick Cowley’s beats. Tragically, both artists were victims of the 1980s AIDS epidemic. While Cowley was in the hospital, Sylvester got him working on this single, to give him something to live for, saying, “Get your ass out of bed so we can go to work.” They cut “Do You Wanna Funk” on a $500 budget. Cowley lived just long enough to see it become an international hit.
Joe Jackson wrote “Steppin’ Out” long before the era of dating apps, social media, binge-watching, doom-scrolling, phone addiction. But “Steppin’ Out” resonates now more than ever, as Jackson sings about two people escaping the couch to go explore the night. Like, IRL. And even if their night turns out to be nothing special, at least they’re together. Three years after “Is She Really Going Out With Him?,” Jackson made Night and Day as a piano man into salsa, electro, swing. As he told Rolling Stone, “I kind of resent being typecast as a rock & roll performer because it’s too narrow.” “Steppin’ Out” is a song that dares you to turn off the phone and find the romance in wherever you are.
Quiz time: What’s your second favorite John Waite song? If all you know is his 1984 breakup classic “Missing You” (“I ain’t missing you at all!”), your life is about to get an upgrade, because “Change” is a warm-hearted blast of radio rock, with Waite singing his lungs out in heartbreak-overload mode. “Change” is a compassionate riff on that tres Eighties radio topic: small-town girls who run off to Hollywood to find stardom, rollin’ the dice of their lives, then get their dreams crushed, but Find Themselves and Start Again, because what’s in your heart will never change. This song made a great needle-drop in the 1985 high-school wrestling flick Vision Quest, in the scene where Matthew Modine climbs the pegboard.
The Pointer Sisters dropped a robot-disco bombshell with “I’m So Excited.” Sex-fueled hits by 30-something adult women were still scarce in those days, so this really hit home. The Sisters started out in the 1970s as a jazzy nostalgia act, but as Anita Pointer said, “It’s hard to be sincere with a pile of fruit on your head.” So they took a hard swerve into their rightful disco glory. “I’m So Excited” was one of those hits that absolutely everyone adored, from Jazzercise teachers to TV high-school speedfreaks. I’m so excited…I’m so excited…I’m so scared.
Let’s face it, rock bands would be back on top these days if they could just remember how to write songs like this: a dumb-ass air-guitar banger with the chant, “Let’s have a knock-down, drag-out, rock & roll party in the streets!” Nobody really knows who the hell Axe were, but these over-the-top one-hit leather boys spend their excellent video chugging brewskis, revving their choppers, smashing bottles, rocking with outlaws and nuns, while threatening to bust the heads of anyone who tries to stop their shenanigans. (“Once the party gets started, we’re all here to STAAAAY!”) It’s basically a biker-band version of “It’s Raining Men,” with more facial hair and a slightly less coy breed of rough-trade homoeroticism. Rock & roll!
Long before Prince ever heard of them, long before they tried walking like Egyptians, the Bangles were L.A. rock & roll hipsters, stuck on groovy thrift-stop miniskirts and vintage guitars. The California girls sing “The Real World” in slithery Rubber Soul harmonies that don’t disguise their penchant for tough talk. At first, they were the Bangs. “We liked the double entendre of the name,” Susanna Hoffs said in their Rolling Stone cover story. “You can read a lot into it. There was something gutsy about it.” But they were Bangles by the time “The Real World” got them on American Bandstand. Hoffs released her excellent covers album Bright Light last year, and just wrote her first novel, This Bird Has Flown.
A great lost underground band from Boston, with a dreamy guitar hook that seems to float in mid-air — as rousing as their friends Mission of Burma, yet softer. 21-645’s “Babble” is easily the most obscure song on this list, but once heard, it’s never forgotten. In the early Eighties, bands like this were popping up all over America, inspired by punk but not following any genre rules, reaching out for an audience nobody knew was there yet. (The catchphrase “indie rock” was still years away.) When R.E.M. blew up nationwide, they told anyone who’d listen to go find artists like this in their own town. But nobody was dreaming of stardom — just getting their ideas down on wax for other misfits to discover. Forty years on, “Babble” remains a mysterious yet beguiling sound.
Scritti Politti started out as London art-school postpunk anarchists. Then singer Green Gartside saw the light: He had a drastic conversion to pop. Overnight, he switched to glossy synth tunes with hyper-intellectual lyrics. “Fear of pop is an infantile disorder,” Green declared in Rolling Stone. “You should face up to it like a man.” He coos “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” like a crushed-out loverboy, even when he’s dropping sly jokes about French literary theory and overthrowing capitalism. It was the highlight of Scritti Politti’s 1982 debut, Songs to Remember, kicking off their run as one of the Eighties’ wittiest, craftiest groups, building up to their masterpiece Cupid & Psyche ‘85. “Pop music is of the Other, of the ironic,” Green told the NME. “It’s about criminality, sexuality, madness.”
John Anderson was a shot of down-home realness on Eighties country radio. His voice is full of raw Florida backwoods in “Wild and Blue” — no crossover slush, just fiddle, banjo, and his sister Donna singing along. It’s the doomiest of cheatin’ songs, a drunk waltz with Anderson singing in the voice of the stoic lover, resigned to his fate, waiting for his lady to finally come home. Best line: “Somebody’s room on the far side of town / With your minds all made up and the shades all pulled down.” With hits like this, Anderson helped kickstart the whole New Traditionalist movement in country.
Clint Eastwood hailed from Jamaica, General Saint from the U.K., but they formed a dynamic reggae duo, two superstar DJs combining to help define dancehall for the 1980s. They go for laughs in “Another One Bites the Dust,” toasting and chanting and rubbing their dubs with the mighty Roots Radics behind them. And they mash up the Queen hook into a whole new tune, which is poetic justice since Queen nicked that bass line from Chic. (Grandmaster Flash underscored the point by mixing “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Good Times” together in “Wheels of Steel.”) Different cultures and genres clashing together into something new: DJ power at its best.
A key part of the Rush legend: when Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neal Peart hit the big time with Moving Pictures, they took it as a license to experiment. With “Subdivisions” and the rest of Signals, Geddy Lee heavily into synthesizers, a divisive move for sure. (As you can see in the great doc Beyond The Lighted Stage, fans LOVE to argue over this phase.) “Subdivisions” was the first keyboard-based song the Canadian trio wrote. But even with all this machinery making their modern music, it still felt open-hearted. Rush condemn suburban monotony, with the warning, “Conform or be cast out”—the same dilemma as 2112, for a new kind of Megadon.
You want chaos? ? You want destruction? You want gutter poetry howled over ear-tormenting guitar clank, designed for black-clad Eighties vampire girls with pupils the size of golfballs, looking for a sexy leper messiah to crucify? Then you’re probably listening to the Birthday Party, like, right now. The Australian band’s 1982 album Junkyard was the Thriller of low-life goth-punk scuzz. Rowland S. Howard plays the six strings that draw blood, while Nick Cave unleases his graveyard-blues sex screams. The Birthday Party didn’t last long, yet Nick Cave not only survived, he evolved into one of the most consistently astounding singer-songwriters in rock history. And with the tragic deaths of two sons, he’s become one of the most painfully honest poets of grief, in albums like Ghosteen and his new book, Faith, Hope, and Carnage.
The Dazz Band gave Motown one of its finest Eighties hits, “Let It Whip.” They emerged from the Cleveland jazz-fusion scene, with a name that was short for “danceable jazz.” But “Let It Whip” is rock-steady Midwest electro-funk with a Minimoog bass line you could bounce a quarter on, plus the immortal chant: “Let’s whip it baby! Let’s whip it right! Let’s whip it baby! Whip it all night!” It led to a string of R&B hits like “Joystick,” “Swoop (I’m Yours),” and “On the One for Fun.” The Dazz Band are still whipping it, on their “Let It Whip” 40th Anniversary Tour.
Richard Thompson began as the great Celtic guitar hero of British folk-rock with Fairport Convention, writing morbid classics like “Sloth” and “Meet on the Ledge.” (His mother requested that he sing it at her funeral — the dark humor ran deep in the Thompson family.) The vocal powerhouse Linda Peters joined him for a string of Sufi mystic 1970s gems like Pour Down Like Silver. Yet ironically, they made some of their most moving music together at the end, when the marriage went south. In “Shoot Out the Lights,” his guitar seems to smoke and burn with pained beauty, fusing Coltrane and Link Wray — this is why he’s worshiped by his fellow guitarists, not to mention his fellow moody bastards. He’s still writing and playing at this level — imagine being this great at anything for over 50 years — and just wrote his excellent memoir Beeswing.
One of the biggest developments of 1982: The Police didn’t release any music, for the first time since they started, which meant the field was wide open for anyone who wanted to get their faux-Sting on, even Rush (“New World Man”) or Robert Plant (“Pledge Pin”). But nobody did it as well as Men at Work, an Australian pub band who loved Vegemite sandwiches and sax solos. They not only filled the Police void, they zenyattad their mondatta to the big time. Their debut, Business as Usual, became the year’s surprise blockbuster, topping the U.S. charts for an amazing 15 weeks. “Who Can It Be Now?” is a deceptively catchy hit about a mental breakdown, maybe a hint of the drama that would sadly plague the band in later years. But let the record show that the Men’s underrated follow-up, Cargo, had their best hits ever, the anti-nuke “It’s a Mistake” and the insomniac “Overkill.” Singer Colin Hay is now in Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band.
“A pop band at the moment is about really small things, like socks and vests and nice hair and the way the singer’s eyebrows are shaped,” Nick Heyward said. Haircut One Hundred definitely nailed that aspect of stardom—cheeky English lads barely out of their teens, with preppie ties and sweaters. They also had one of history’s most brilliantly confrontational band names. But thanks to Heyward, they had the most surefire gimmick of all: songs. “Love Plus One” is over-the-top romance, all boyish yearning over the splashiest bongos, marimbas, jazzy horns, cha-cha guitar. Their debut Pelican West has bangers like “Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)” and “Fantastic Day”—though “Lemon Firebrigade” is admittedly pushing the concept a bit far. Heyward released Woodland Echoes in 2017, proving he’s still got the songs.
The pioneering D.C. hardcore band Bad Brains dropped their debut album in 1982 — a self-titled cassette tape with the iconic cover design of a lightning bolt striking the Capitol building. These Rasta punks had their own unique reggae/thrash fusion, with H.R.’s vocals and Dr. Know’s Hendrix-gone-Ramones guitar at supersonic speed. On one level, “Sailin’ On” sounds like a jolly breakup ditty, but it’s also about being Black punks in a hostile city, moving through the concrete jungle of urban life with “P.M.A.” (positive mental attitude) for a shield.
One of pop music’s all-time great celebrations of the cosmic connection between Girl and Car. Eddie Money was the era’s most lovable rock meathead, a Brooklyn ex-cop who sang about bad girls much tougher than he was. In “Shakin’,” he rides shotgun with a seductress whose idea of a fun Saturday night is stealing her daddy’s car and blowing out the speakers. (“She was doin’ 80 and she slammed on the brakes” — that’s never good.) In the excellent video, she’s played by Apollonia, later Prince’s sex shooter in Purple Rain. Oh, the terror and awe in Eddie’s voice as he mutters, “I got real nervous…She took her coat off!” A few years later, he scored an even bigger hit with the de facto sequel, “Take Me Home Tonight,” bringing Ronnie Spector back to the radio where she belonged.
The rest of the world didn’t know it yet, but some of the freshest guitar rock around was happening down in New Zealand, the island with the planet’s highest sheep-to-human ratio. The Clean, from Dunedin, were the flagship for the Flying Nun label, home of the Chills, the Verlaines, Tall Dwarfs, Bailter Space, the Bats, and so many more. With nobody outside paying attention, these kiwi bands felt free to ignore fashion and wig out on their own terms. “Anything Could Happen” is a Velvets-gone-surf guitar drone with relatable lyrics about hating everything (“Can’t you see I’m on the run? Can’t you see I’m not having any fun?”) from their debut, Boodle Boodle Boodle. By the end of the decade, the Clean were legends around the world, inspiring bands from Pavement to Yo La Tengo.
Junior Giscombe brought fresh energy to U.K. R&B, a London kid catching the world’s ear with the effervescent soul electro-zip of “Mama Used to Say.” He wrote it while working at his day job, fixing shoes at a cobbler shop. As he explained, he was remembering “things that my mother would say to me about rushing to get old, getting to 16 and wanting to get to 25.” But “Mama” hit on both sides of the Atlantic, with Junior growling “Live your life!” in the voice of a young Stevie Wonder, doing his mama proud.
“I was a lonely kid,” Steely Dan’s arch-ironist told Rolling Stone in 1982. “And I guess jazz was probably a symptom.” Donald Fagen’s first project after Steely Dan turned out to be The Nightfly, a song cycle about his suburban adolescence in the Mad Men years, when he was the teen jazz fan who dreamed of growing up to be “Deacon Blue.” “New Frontier” is a surprisingly warm and affectionate campus trip from Mr. Never Going Back to My Old School, with JFK-era college kids partying in fallout shelters, flirting over Dave Brubeck records. It’s downright … sweet? “I was sort of striving for a lack of irony,” Fagen said. “Of course, there’s a limit to how little irony I can pull off at this point.”
The twilight of the Swedish gods: August 20, 1982. Bjorn, Benny, Anna-Frida and Agnetha meet up in the studio for one last time, to cut a stark farewell called “The Day Before You Came.” They all know this is where the story ends; this is goodbye. Both couples in the group have gotten divorced. It’s the last song Abba will ever record. Agnetha Fältskog recites a tale of emotional isolation, scripted by her ex-husband. She does her vocals in a darkened studio with all the lights out. A melodramatic exit for this most melodramatic of pop groups. And that was the end … until 2021, when Abba shocked everyone by reuniting to make Voyage, all four super troupers together for the first time in 40 years.
One night in June 1982, Shalamar’s Jeffrey Daniel went on Top of the Pops to give a legendary solo dance performance for “A Night to Remember.” The ex-Soul Train stepper lived in L.A., yet he blew up into a fashion idol in London, where he got a New Romantic makeover and a wedge haircut. (After years of English club kids emulating African American soul, he flipped the British Invasion script.) With Howard Hewett and Jody Watley, Shalamar had a string of creamy R&B hits like “There It Is” and “Dead Giveaway,” but “A Night to Remember” topped them all. On Top of the Pops that night, Daniel blew minds with his body-popping. But the showstopper was his “backslide” move, where he seemed to defy gravity and walk on air. You can hear the studio audience gasp out loud. This move later became known as the “moonwalk,” after he taught it to a slightly more famous pop star.
After two classic ska albums, steeped in radical politics, the English Beat got personal on their third album, Special Beat Service. “The situation is as shitty as we moaned it was on our first two albums,” Dave Wakeling told Rolling Stone. “But that screws up personal relationships too, dunnit?” He really torches it up in “I Confess,” a jazzy piano-and-trumpet lament about a love triangle that ruined three lives. When you hear “I Confess” these days, it’s uncanny how much it sounds like Taylor Swift wrote it, especially the extremely Tay climax where Wakeling yells, “My life’s not open, please get out! I know I’m shouting! I like to shout!”
“I don’t think we’re anything to do with heavy metal, mind you,” Lemmy told Creem in 1982. “I think we sound more like New Wave when you get into it…Punk, right?” But Motörhead never sounded like anyone but Motörhead, which is why “Iron Fist” remains a black-leather bad-guy anthem. Lemmy roars in his ozone-hostile voice over triple-speed guitar, “You know me, the graveyard kiss / Devil’s grip, the Iron Fist!” It was the final headbang for the classic early Motörhead lineup, with Fast Eddie Clarke on guitar and Philthy Animal Taylor on drums. While they were writing it, they let an awestruck 16-year-old superfan hang out in the rehearsal room; his name was Lars Ulrich. “I remember they were talking about this new song called ‘Iron Fist’ that they were working on,” Lars told Rolling Stone’s Kory Grow. “This is the biggest band in England, and I’m just sitting there with them in the fucking rehearsal room writing songs for their next record, just put that in fucking perspective.”
Kim Wilde had the authentic voice of a bored teenager, calling herself “the naughty schoolgirl stereotype.” She came from the English countryside, and by her own admission, she didn’t know toffee about American kids. (She also admits she has no idea why there’s a shout-out to “East California.”) But she envied all the fun they were having, which is why “Kids in America” is a synth-pop fantasy that still feels fresh. “Nothing bores me more than pinup girls,” she said at the time. “And yet sex is supposed to be the most exciting thing in the world. So they tell me.” Kim later became a star in the world of landscape gardening, hosting the BBC’s Garden Invaders. Weirdest pop meet-cute ever: She met her husband when they were both in a West End production of Tommy where she played Tommy’s mom and he played the sadistic Cousin Kevin.
Trio found the formula for world-beating pop success in 1982: an awesomely sub-minimal Ramones-level stab at DIY Eurodisco. A cheapshit Casio VL-Tone. A monotone vocal from a thug who just suffered a severe head wound and has to read the words “da da da” off cue cards. And it’s in German. Perfect. Trio took over European dance floors with “Da Da Da,” part of the German New Wave boom that also gave us Falco (“Der Kommissar”), D.A.F. (“Der Mussolini”), Nena (“99 Luftballons”) and Peter Schilling (“Major Tom”). The full title is “Da Da Da Ich Lieb Nicht Du Liebst Mich Nicht Aha Aha Aha”; the inferior all-English version is “Da Da Da I Don’t Love You You Don’t Love Me Aha Aha Aha.” Their surprisingly catchy second album was called Trio and Error.
Marshall Crenshaw sounded so fresh and spontaneous, like the spirit of Buddy Holly for a jaded Eighties world. No contrived image, just a boy, his glasses, and a guitar case full of three-minute nuggets about rocking around with cynical girls. He started out playing John Lennon in the jukebox musical Beatlemania; he went on to play Buddy Holly in La Bamba. His first three albums are flawless guitar pop — Marshall Crenshaw, Field Day, and Downtown, 32 songs without a single dud. But “Mary Anne” rules over them all: Crenshaw tries to cheer up a woman who’s having a rough day, in a room full of chiming 12-string Rickenbackers. His not-so-secret weapon: Crenshaw sings with a pro-girl positivity that was startling at the time and still is.
Teen angst, man. When Dale Bozzio sang “No one notices / I think I’ll dye my hair blue,” we all felt that. Missing Persons had one of the era’s coolest rock & roll couples: Frank Zappa’s drummer married Moon Unit Zappa’s babysitter. Dale was one of the great New Wave vocal stylists, queen of the sex hiccup, the godmother to bad Italian girls from Gwen to Gaga. Not to mention a fashion pioneer of “tinfoil + Saran Wrap” couture. But most fans had no idea Terry Bozzio was a revered technical virtuoso — Rolling Stone’s Number Seventeen drummer of all time. Between Bozzio and guitar god Warren Cuccurullo, Missing Persons had their own percussive punch to drive “Words” home.
P.S.: Dale revived Missing Persons (minus the others) for the 2020 covers album Dreaming, doing oldies by Joy Division, Blondie, and Peter Godwin’s “Images of Heaven,” which could have been written for her.
Soft Cell were the perviest of U.K. synth-pop duos — even their sad songs sound kinky. Case in point: “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye.” “People were using electronics in unfeeling, robotic ways,” singer Marc Almond told Rolling Stone. “But Dave [Ball] got these rich, warm, moody sounds. Exciting and slightly dirty sounds. We figured, ‘Why does electronic music have to be cold?’” Soft Cell blew up with the 1981 single “Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go,” which set a new record by staying in the U.S. Top 40 for nearly a year. Their classic debut, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, is full of bangers like “Sex Dwarf,” but the tearjerker is the U.K. smash “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” a fabulously bitchy breakup ballad. Almond stands in the rain, weeping outside the Pink Flamingo, waving goodbye to a hot mess in a cocktail dress.
Bananarama had the most glamorously bored pouts in the biz. The London girl-group trio of Siobhan Fahey, Sarah Dallin, and Keren Woodward gave serious sulk — even in the “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” video, they look ready to yawn in the middle of feeding the world. It was part of their anti-glam mystique — they boasted about having a strict “no high heels” policy. “Shy Boy” is their effervescent neo-Motown shoop-shoop about taking a sweet young thing under their wings to show him the ropes. A great moment from their 2017 reunion tour, introducing this song: “Are there any Shy Boys here tonight? Well, if you put your hand up, it means you aren’t one, are you? So this song is for everyone who didn’t put a hand up!” Bananarama, mercilessly reading the fuckboy Other since 1982.
Peter Gabriel let his imagination run wild after leaving Genesis, and he came up with a fearsome horror flick in “Shock the Monkey.” He’d always had a touch of gospel in his voice, as he displayed a decade earlier in the finale of Genesis’ prog epic “Supper’s Ready.” But he really sells it it here, chanting, “Don’t you know you’re gonna shock the monkey?” How bizarre that Gabriel was all over the radio with simian shock waves, while at the exact same time, on the same stations, his old drummer pal Phil Collins was chirping his remake of the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Equally disturbing, in their own ways.
The L.A. punk beatniks in X whipped up a barrage of sex-and-death city tales in the early Eighties. John Doe and Exene Cervenka trade poetic yowls, over Billy Zoom’s thrashabilly guitar and D.J. Bonebrake’s drums. “The Hungry Wolf” is X’s most fuck-crazed rant—two feral beasts prowl the streets of Hollywood, their jaws dripping with blood, feasting on tourists, then bang each other to shreds until it’s time to kill again. Has any rock couple ever sounded so hot for each other? John and Exene were married at the time, the ultimate taboo. When they scream “Together for liiiife,” they make monogamy sound like the sickest of kinks. Surprisingly, this isn’t the only song on this list about hungry wolves.
Eddie Van Halen + flamenco go together like David Lee Roth + sincerity, i.e., a rare but surprisingly powerful combination. Eddie came up with the acoustic intro to “Little Guitars” after seeing a TV show on Spanish virtuoso Carlos Montoya. Diamond Dave serenades a señorita with his purest love song, resisting any urge to crack a joke. “Edward is a true musician,” Roth said in 1982. “He’s the kind of artiste you spell with an ‘e’…And the only time he’s without a guitar, it seems to me, is when he’s sleeping. And I ain’t going to sleep with the fucker, so God bless Valerie [Bertinelli]!”
The Fall’s Mark E. Smith was the surliest bastard alive in 1982 — which made it just like every other year. “There are 12 people in the world — the rest are paste,” the late punk legend sneers in “The Classical,” but nobody’s sure if he ever met the other 11. The Fall cranked out dozens of albums, with Smith reigning as the “Hip Priest” of sarcastic bile, terrorizing his bandmates. (He famously fired a soundman for ordering a salad.) “The Classical” sums him up: a monster art-punk groove, kicking off the opus Hex Enduction Hour. “Hey there, fuckface!” Smith says at the start; it’s just his way of welcoming you in. At the end, the song explodes into the chant, “I never felt better in my liiiiife” — the scary part is he probably means it.
The Queen glittered with goddess dust in the Eighties. Like her fellow Sixties veteran Leonard Cohen — they have a LOT in common — Aretha just got cooler with age. One of her biggest fans: Luther Vandross, who produced her comeback album Jump to It as a love letter to his idol. “Jump to It” was her first Top 40 hit in years, an uptempo stomp where she dishes the dirt with the girls, or as she puts it, “giving each other the 411 on who drop-kicked who this week.” Lady Soul shows off her recharged mojo, her humor, her middle-aged sex drive, her royal confidence that she’s back making music worthy of her powers.
The Minutemen rode up from San Pedro, the blue-collar California port town — three corndogs who smashed every cliché about how much you could say in a punk rock song, musically and politically. They really got it together in “Sell or Be Sold,” from their SST breakthrough, What Makes a Man Start Fires? All three Minutemen fuse brotherly warmth and wise-ass humor — Mike Watt’s stop-and-start bass, George Hurley’s drums, D. Boon’s righteous spiel and guitar. As they famously sang, “Our band could be your life,” and “Sell or Be Sold” sums up that spirit. D. Boon was killed in a 1985 van crash; he is still missed. “Music can inspire people to wake up and say, ‘Maybe somebody’s lying,’” bassist Watt told Rolling Stone. “Make you think about what’s expected of you, of your friends. What’s expected of you by your boss. Challenge those expectations. And your own expectations. Man, you should challenge your own ideas about the world every day.”
Lightning strikes — maybe once, maybe twice. Fleetwood Mac made one of their best albums in Mirage, which is now underrated the way Tusk used to be underrated. But Stevie Nicks really outdoes herself in the twirl-core “Gypsy,” one of her greatest songs. Like so many of the Mac’s gems, it’s based on the long-running ballad of Lindsey and Stevie. She sings about her early days with Lindsey Buckingham, a broke girl window-shopping at the San Francisco boutique called the Velvet Underground, where Grace Slick and Janis Joplin shopped. Stevie told herself, “I can’t afford the clothes, but I’m sure as hell standing in the place where the great women have stood.” When she sings about how she “faces freedom with a little fear,” the way she hits the word “fear” — twice — is a seminar in everything that makes her Stevie Nicks.
“Good tidings I bring you,” David Hinds sings on “Chant a Psalm,” from Steel Pulse’s pivotal album 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, Solomon, and other scriptural figures, telling the faithful, “Attract these angels in dreams and in your prayers.” “It has most certainly held up after 40 years,” Hinds told the Jamaica Observer. “I believe it’s because of the initial impact it had when it first came on to the market. It was the freshest product that echoed the political energy of its time.”
If you were making a mix tape for a cool Southern rock girl in the Eighties, you had to get a dB’s tune on each side. These North Carolina boys were art-pop cult sensations, with their jangly guitars, sublime melodies, and twisted love songs. The dB’s had two brilliant writers on the job: Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey. “Neverland” capped Repercussion, the high point of their flawless 1980s run. Holsapple wrote cleverly poignant vignettes like “Neverland” and “Nothing Is Wrong,” while Stamey had quizzical hooks like “Happenstance” and “From a Window to a Screen.” Their Southern boho flavor was years ahead of its time, given the industry’s fixation on NYC and L.A. But the dB’s became massively influential on kindred spirits from R.E.M. to Elliott Smith, not to mention the soundtrack to countless indie-rock romances.
In the early 1980s, Madrid had one of the world’s most happening music scenes. After the death of the fascist dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Spanish culture opened up, shaking off decades of repression. The Movida Madrileña exploded, from directors like Pedro Almodóvar to punk and industrial music, with cutting-edge artists like Esplendor Geométrico, Alaska Y Dinarama, and Décima Victima. Mecano were a tecno-pop trio — singer Ana Torroja with two brothers, Nacho and Jose Maria Cano — whose blockbuster 1982 debut made them massive all over Europe and Latin America. “Me Colé En Una Fiesta” holds up as the sleekest of Nueva Romantica dreams, an Abba-worthy hit about sneaking into your crush’s party, until the night ends with two women sharing a forbidden kiss.
The Who’s end-of-the-road album, It’s Hard, was a bummer for everyone, especially them. “I hate it,” Roger Daltrey said years later. “I still hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it!” How Eighties was this album? They put a video game on the cover. But the Who cranked out one final blast of greatness with “Eminence Front,” one of their meatiest, beatiest arena-rousers, in the Who’s Next mode. Pete Townshend had an equally dynamic solo hit that year, “Slit Skirts,” though it’s fallen into obscurity because he put it on an album with the Eighties’ dumbest title. (If only Pete had called it The Sea Refuses No River, or even Exquisitely Bored, but no, he went for All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes. Great song, though.)
Paul Weller was still a boy wonder when he wrote “Town Called Malice,” a Motown-inspired, finger-snapping portrait of English working-class life. As he said, “It was the start of the hardline Margaret Thatcher years, and places — up north, especially — were being decimated.” But it’s also full of affectionate touches like the moment when “A hundred lonely housewives clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts.” “Town Called Malice” zoomed to Number One in the U.K., but also became wildly popular for American kids, who couldn’t figure out a word Weller was singing, yet felt his rage and the band’s mod sweat. It’s bloody great in Billy Elliot, too. The Jam were the biggest and best-loved band in Brittannia — yet Weller decided that meant it was time to call quits. He started the Style Council, then launched a solo career that’s still thriving today.
“I Want Candy” was a forgotten Sixties bubblegum hit, but Bow Wow Wow turned it into a timeless candy-crush rampage, with teen queen Annabella Lwin flaunting her sweet tooth and her cocky confidence, backed by her self-parodically buff boy band. Surf music from London — what could be more 1982 than that? Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren discovered Lwin at 14, working at a laundromat while singing along with the radio. Bow Wow Wow had spiffy hits like “Jungle Boy” and “Sexy Eiffel Towers,” but they got extra boom from Joan Jett producer Kenny Laguna, with Joan hanging out in the control room. “When I first heard my vocals on ‘I Want Candy,’ I was stunned,” Annabella recalls in Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein’s book Mad World. “I was thinking, Is that me? Who’s that girl singing? That was the first song on which I actually sounded like a singer.”
A philosophical statement about the existential crisis of religious belief? Or the demented scream of a hot young bleached-blonde ham with an insatiable need for attention? Both, obviously. Billy started in the London punk scene singing for the band Generation X, but “White Wedding” broke him big, with his curled-lip Iggy/-Nixon snarl and drums mixed in the red. Billy posed practically nude on the cover of the Rolling Stone with the headline, “Sneer of the Year,” starred in The Wedding Singer, and has never done anything sane in his life, which is key to his greatness. But he recently did his part for the environment by discouraging motor vehicle exhaust, as the ambassador for New York City’s “Billy Never Idles” campaign.
Trouble Funk summed up the D.C. go-go sound with “Drop the Bomb”: congas, cowbell, sci-fi keyboards, party chants for sweaty clubs. They released the 12-inch single on the hip-hop label Sugar Hill — a moment of unity between NYC and D.C. Go-go had some of the era’s most uncut live-band funk, with legends like Rare Essence, E.U., and Chuck Brown. But it was a proudly regional scene for Black artists, dancers, soul searchers, busting loose in the shadow of a White House bent on their destruction. 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.
Meet the Hüskers. This Minneapolis power trio made their name in the early 1980s as the fastest, loudest hardcore band around, breaking land speed records every time they played. “They fucking sheared everybody’s head off,” Halo of Flies’ Tom Hazelmeyer recalls in Jim Ruland’s book Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records. “The other guys in my hardcore band looked at each other with their jaws literally open.” Everything Falls Apart, their fall ’82 studio debut, is a tour de force. “From the Gut” packs it all into 100 seconds — Bob Mould’s psychedelic/industrial noise guitar, Grant Hart’s body-slam drums, their skewed sense of pop melody. Over the next few years, Hüsker Dü would make history as punk’s most emotionally powerful songwriters, on masterworks like Metal Circus, Zen Arcade, and New Day Rising. But at this point they just wanted to knock you down and make you like it.
Elvis Costello had already tried his hand at acerbic punk, pop, and country. But on his 1982 Imperial Bedroom, he went for piano tunes with a vintage lounge-crooner style, though as Elvis put it, the songs “exhibit a malaise of the spirit and a sinking feeling about happy endings.” (Big surprise.) “Beyond Belief” is a concise whirl through a bad night in a sinister cocktail bar, with a would-be rake on the prowl for romance, but coming face to face with his own vanity. As he sings, “So in this almost empty gin palace / Through a two-way looking glass, you see your Alice.” (Or is that “you see you’re Alice”?) It all builds to an incredible crescendo of drunk delirium and self-loathing. “Beyond Belief” is the soundtrack to a night you never want to have again — although the guy in this song will probably have the same night tomorrow.
The debut 12-inch from some unknown disco singer, an Italian girl from Detroit named Madonna. “Everybody” was her electro-throb anthem for the party people at clubs like Danceteria or the Fun House, produced by Mark Kamins. But the dancers who fell in love with “Everybody” had no idea how Madonna looked or dressed. Nobody did. MTV didn’t start playing her videos until “Borderline,” in 1984, after the audience had already flipped for “Everybody” and “Holiday.” Easy as it is to forget, Madonna’s music was always the most radical and innovative thing about her — long before her image or fashion. Best moment: When she whispers, “I know you’ve been waiting. Yeah, I’ve been watching you. Yeah, I know you wanna get up. Come on!”
ABC came on as dapper Brit-pop fashion plates, in their tuxedos and capes. Singer Martin Fry slinked like a Vegas crooner in his gold lamé suit, with a wardrobe full of lounge-lizard poses copped from Bowie and Sinatra. But “Date Stamp” is his funniest valentine, a sly satire of sexual consumerism. Martin goes shopping for love in a material world, where everything’s for sale and each romance is just product with an expiration date. Who else would sing, “Everything is temporary, written on that sand / Looking for the girl that meets supply with demand”? He sighs “zooby dooby doo” over splashy synth beats, Old Hollywood strings, and jingling cash registers. (Like most of his songs, “Date Stamp” doubled as a caustic critique of Thatcherism.) Every moment of ABC’s debut The Lexicon of Love is flawless, especially hits like “Poison Arrow” and “The Look of Love,” kicking off their impeccable four-album run of Beauty Stab, How to Be a Zillionaire, and Alphabet City. To promote Lexicon, ABC starred in their own hilarious gentleman-spy movie with Julien Temple, Mantrap, featuring future Real Housewife Lisa Vanderpump.
A hyper-sexual disco ode to the aphrodisiac powers of limousine floors and drum machines. Prince was hard at work on 1999, yet he took time to sponsor the girl-group trio of Vanity, Susan, and Brenda. The Purple One wrote and produced “Nasty Girl,” one of his filthiest, funniest hits. (Vanity 6 must’ve purified themselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.) The first time Prince struck a pose on the cover of Rolling Stone, Vanity was right there beside him. “I think it’s wonderful to be outrageous, to live out every fantasy onstage,” Susan told Billboard in 1982. Brenda added, “The stage is the one place in the world where you can be anything you want and get away with it.”
The greatest humming solo ever. Nobody summed up the desperate romantic vibe of Eighties teen pop like Modern English in “I Melt With You.” As singer Robbie Grey said, “It was about a couple making love as the bomb dropped.” “I Melt With You” takes place in the shadow of the nuclear arms race, with lovers trying for a moment of human connection before the planet goes up in flames. It became the love theme for Martha Coolidge’s teen rom-com Valley Girl, and has never faded away. And when Modern English stop the music cold for that hmm-hmm-hmm climax, they really do make it sound like the future’s open wide.
After playing guitar in the Runaways, Joan Jett was dismissed by the music biz as a washed-up leftover. But then she hit Number One with “I Love Rock ‘N Roll,” a forgotten oldie by the Arrows, claiming it as a feminist dirtbag anthem for the ages. As long as there are jukeboxes, dimes, rebel rockers strutting their stuff in black leather, and even blacker eyeliner, this song will be blasting. Saint Joan told Rolling Stone’s Angie Martoccio, “When I was younger, [I was] very emotional, in a sense that I would take offense to people talking about ‘Girls can’t play rock,’ whatever it was. I was quick to anger.” “I Love Rock ‘N Roll” is her definitive response.
Ray Parker Jr. is so underrated, but he’s one of the Eighties’ most brilliant pop auteurs, a one-man studio band cranking out eccentric, sex-crazed hits like “The Other Woman.” If all you know is “Ghostbusters,” you have no idea. He started at Motown, a teen prodigy playing the legendary guitar solo on Stevie Wonder’s “Maybe Your Baby.” He loved skewering the role of the super-smooth R&B lothario — he even did a slow jam where he proposes marriage with the words, “Your stuff is so good I want my name on it!” “Everybody thinks I’m running around sleeping with everybody,” Ray told Rolling Stone. “I’m kind of a shy guy.” But “The Other Woman” is a shameless blast of Rolling Stones guitar raunch. The best Mick Jagger hit that Mick Jagger never sang. BTW, if Parker was looking to clown the music biz for racism, he succeeded. Rock radio refused to play this phenomenal rock & roll song, and so did MTV. Take a guess why.
Adam Ant didn’t drink, didn’t smoke — his only vice was being the foxiest fame whore in the room, at all times. But he makes it sound like a spiritual mission in “Goody Two Shoes.” Adam was the ultimate New Wave dandy, a lover of ladies and a slayer of men, a London swashbuckler dressing in pirate foppery and yelping what he called “Antmusic for Sexpeople.” “I was a song-and-dance man,” he said. “I wanted them to think of me as a kind of Frank Sinatra, not David Bowie.” “Goody Two Shoes” is his poseur anthem, urging you to be your most shameless self. So what if people stare and laugh at you? Adam’s advice: “Put on a little makeup! Make sure they get your good side!” This vixen always knew ridicule is nothing to be scared of.
One of Chrissie Hynde’s most beautiful tunes, a chiming guitar elegy for a lost friend. “Back on the Chain Gang” is her posthumous valentine to the Pretenders’ virtuoso guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, who died way too young from drugs. (When drummer Martin Chambers had to identify the body, one of the cops asked him for an autograph — what a sad metaphor.) Original bassist Pete Farndon also died from drugs in his bathtub, a few months later. Hynde’s parting words are bittersweet yet eloquent: “Like a break in the battle was your part in the wretched life of a lonely heart.” Selena redid this song in Spanish, turning it into her gorgeous 1994 hit “Fotos Y Recuerdos.” It was Number One on the Latin charts the week she was killed.
The Thin White Duke wrote one of his hottest Eighties tunes for the soundtrack of a Nastassja Kinski horror film. Cat People was director Paul Schrader’s remake of the 1942 thriller, starring Kinski as a devout Catholic girl who responds to sexual temptations by turning into a deadly panther. Bowie hooked up with German disco legend Giorgio Moroder for the creepazoidal theme song. “Cat People” starts as a seething ballad, until it explodes when he roars, “I’ve been putting out fire with gasoline!” Great movie, too. (Kinski’s most soulful performance.) Unfortunately, Bowie did a flimsy remake on Let’s Dance. But accept no substitutes: The original 1982 seven-minute “Cat People” is the one that makes the fur fly.
Thomas Dolby had himself one hell of an Eighties. What can you say about a tweedy British synth-geek who plays with Bowie at Live Aid, produces Joni Mitchell’s most-hated album, scores films, goes down in history with the robot-funk smash “She Bllinded Me With Science,” AND goes on to be a Silicon Valley tech innovator? Well, you could mention that Dolby has always been underrated for his cerebral songwriting. Especially in his most lasting and resonant tune, “Europa and the Pirate Twins,” from his cult-classic debut, The Golden Age of Wireless. Two World War 2-era English children vow to stay friends forever and run away to be pirates. She grows up to be a Hollywood star; he spends his lonesome life pining away for the past. “Europa” is full of gorgeously pained details, like the blues harmonica lost amid the synth burbles. The New Wave “Waterloo Sunset.”
“Showbiz has nothing to do with us,” Mission of Burma’s Clint Conley told Rolling Stone in 1981. “When you see us, all you see is a lot of sweat and honest emotion.” The Boston band drew on the primal energy of punk, in nuggets like “Academy Fight Song” and “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver.” But they tapped into the headier art-rock realms, reaching to John Coltrane and Syd Barrett for inspiration, with Roger Miller’s guitar, Peter Prescott’s drums, and Martin Swope’s tape loops. “Trem Two” is the pinnacle of their debut album, Vs., and though the band soon split when Miller developed tinnitus, Burma became a word-of-mouth legend. As Miller said, “Rock is a physical thing. You can make it as complicated a chord structure as you want, as long as you can feel it in your body, and it really makes you want to move.”
The master of Nigerian juju already had over 40 African albums to his name. But King Sunny Adé scored his international breakthrough with Juju Music. “Ja Funmi” was a mind-blower for listeners around the world: talking drums doing call-and-response, trippy pedal-steel twang, Adé’s polyrhythmic guitar, and gentle Yoruba vocals. His 17-piece African Beats were famed for their eight-hour live shows. No artist from Africa had ever made such a splash in the U.S., pulling in a mix of New Wave kids, reggae fans filling the Bob Marley void, Deadheads, clubbers, P-Funk freaks. Bands like Talking Heads and Phish fell under his spell. 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: Afrobeats’ biggest star, WizKid, grew up in Lagos, raised on his parents’ Adé records.
Lou turned 40 — an achievement in itself, after all his debauchery in the Warhol Factory days — and celebrated with his toughest solo album ever, The Blue Mask. He faces up to adult life as an “Average Guy,” struggling to keep his marriage together, but still fighting the demons making noise in his head. As Rolling Stone’s Tom Carson wrote in a five-star review, “Lou Reed has done what even John Lennon couldn’t do: He’s put his Plastic Ono Band and his Double Fantasy on the same record.” He also got his hottest band since the Velvet Underground, with bass virtuoso Fernando Saunders and NYC punk/jazz guitar god Robert Quine. In “My House,” Lou strains to hit the gorgeous doo-wop high notes, in his gum-chewing, off-key croak — one of his warmest, funniest poetic confessions.
Yaz had the ultimate boy/girl synth-duo connection: the flamboyantly soulful belter Alison Moyet and the reclusive synth boffin Vince Clarke. After he quit Depeche Mode in a huff because he wanted more control, Clarke ended up with a collaborator as bloody-minded as he was. Yaz (“Yazoo” in their native U.K.) made one endlessly fascinating masterpiece, Upstairs at Eric’s, but soon broke up. “We were afraid of each other,” Clarke told me in 2008. “Paranoid, really. We were both excruciatingly shy, and I was a control freak.” But you can hear that exquisite tension in “Situation,” flaunting Moyet’s needy, pushy, hungry voice, as she demands more and more human passion from the chilly electro-beats. It’s definitely a situation — don’t mess around, you bring me down, don’t make a sound, just move out — but it makes them both feel alive.
Here’s to one of today’s brightest up-and-coming pop stars: Kate Bush. The Hounds of Love queen is more beloved than ever these days, since “Running Up That Hill” spent the summer in the Top Ten between Lizzo and Harry Styles. So the time is ripe to discover The Dreaming, her 1982 bizarro art-damaged opus, the one hardcore fans cherish. “The Dreaming was my ‘she’s gone mad’ album,” Bush told Q in 1991. “My ‘she’s not commercial anymore’ album.” “Houdini” is a ballad for the famous escape artist, sung in the voice of his wife. Madame Houdini was his secret accomplice; when he was in chains, she’d give him a goodbye smooch, with the key hidden in her mouth. (Hence the line “With a kiss I’d pass the key,” depicted on the album cover.) This song comes after his death, as the widow veers from high-pitched sweetness to angsty screams. Prediction: “Houdini” will never be a Top Ten hit — but it’s one of Kate Bush’s most wuthering creative heights.
“A love letter to John, written very shortly after he died,” Paul calls this ballad. Macca easily could have turned “Here Today” into a big Number One tearjerker if he’d wanted, but he deliberately made it feel personal, hushed, not even a chorus. He recalls the long, complex Lennon-McCartney friendship, including the night in a Key West motel room when they got drunk and cried about how much they loved each other. But he also grieves for the honest talks they never got to have. As he told Q, “It’s one of those ‘Come out from behind yer glasses, John, and look at me’ kind of things.” Paul still does “Here Today” live every night, solo on guitar, in tribute to his old friend, urging the crowd, “If you’ve got something nice to tell someone, get it said.”
If you went to a prom in the Eighties, this song was legally required, and it never failed to melt every AquaNet perm on the dance floor. The Gap Band rolled out of Tulsa with their fly cowboy hats, perfecting Yee-Haw Supremacy years before Lil Nas X was born. The brothers Charlie, Ronnie, and Robert Wilson racked up a slew of burn-rubber funk hits. “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” combined two of America’s favorite obsessions in the early Eighties: nuclear paranoia and insane bass lines. Dave Grohl has proudly said this is where he got the drum intro for “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “If you listen to Nevermind, the Nirvana record, I pulled so much stuff from the Gap Band and Cameo and [Chic’s] Tony Thompson, on every one of those songs,” Grohl says. “That’s all disco — it’s all it is. Nobody makes that connection.”
Strictly for the hardcore: a synth-pop underground epic that only the true devotees know, but once this song is in your soul, it’s there forever. German-born crooner Peter Godwin goes for the Bowie/Roxy swoon of the doomed romantic obsessive, over the most lush synth swirls. He weeps over the pain of falling in love with a vision of beauty, even though he can never touch it in real life. But he makes a “new religion” out of his devotion, with the proverb, “One cheap illusion could still be divine.” “Images of Heaven” could sound like real life for a closeted teen, at a time when there were virtually NO uncloseted teens. Bowie gave Godwin the ultimate payback compliment on Let’s Dance by covering “Criminal World,” by his group Metro.
The Dream Syndicate blew out of L.A. as a freewheeling garage band, with the guitar freakout “Halloween” as their testament. It’s the centerpiece of their acclaimed debut, The Days of Wine and Roses, with Steve Wynn’s poetic sneer and Karl Precoda’s surf-twang noir feedback. They were the kind of band who loved beating up on “Suzy Q” for 20 minutes at a time. Critics couldn’t resist the catchphrase “Paisley Underground” or the Sixties comparisons. “Robert Christgau said we were the most shameless Velvets rip yet,” Wynn told Rolling Stone. “Isn’t it great to be the best at something?” But they were groove monsters at heart, and “Halloween” is the “Trans Europe Express” of guitar fuzz, a motoric riff built for long-form late-night jams. The reconfigured Dream Syndicate is back on the road with an excellent new album, Ultraviolent Battle Hymns and True Confessions.
Patty Donahue eviscerates the male gaze in “I Know What Boys Like,” snickering “Suckerrrr!” in a voice full of gum-snapping sarcasm. Few fans would have guessed a boy wrote it, but Chris Butler crafted the Waitresses’ feminist vignettes with an empathetic ear. As he recalls in the book Mad World, “She could play that role pretty easily; she was a tough party girl.” “I Know What Boys Like” and “Christmas Wrapping” were the Akron band’s hits, but they’ve also got keepers like “No Guilt” and the teen sitcom theme “Square Pegs.” (Yes, this was a time when the dorkiest kid in high school could get played by…Sarah Jessica Parker.) Donahue died in 1996; Butler still makes sly gems like Got It Togehter! As he said, “I came up with a character who was half based on the wise-cracking school of comedy from the 1930s, and half on me kind of wanting a big sister to explain what’s going on.”
The Paradise Garage opened in 1977, and the house DJ Larry Levan became a legend, influencing dance music ever since. (Famously, NYC had record stores that opened early Sunday morning, right after closing time at the Garage, so rival DJs could snap up whatever Levan just played.) He made “Don’t Make Me Wait” with the Peech Boys, who took their name from the acid-spiked fruit punch at the Garage. It sums up Levan’s musical vision: gospel piano, rock guitar, Bernard Fowler’s soul vocals. “Don’t Make Me Wait” begins with those eerie dub hand claps. “The hand claps were an accident,” DJ David Depino told Rolling Stone. “The tape was running backwards. The moment that the hand claps came on backwards, Larry jumped up and said, ‘That’s it!’ and everybody looked at him like, ‘What are you talking about? That’s a mistake.’ Larry said, ‘That’s it, that’s the hook. People will scream from the first backwards hand clap.’” As always, Larry Levan knew what time it was.
The Furs’ Richard Butler was the great sarcastic romantic of the era, a world-weary roué with a London sneer swiped from David Bowie via Johnny Rotten. Yet there was warmth in that sneer, in songs about mixed-up kids that nobody notices, from “Pretty In Pink” (which inspired the John Hughes movie) to “The Ghost in You.” The Furs emerged from punk, with a name that flipped hippie and glam cliches — as Butler said, “Everything was razor blades. We wanted something different.” He wears his fickle heart on his sleeve in “Love My Way,” jeering at cynics and prudes and bigots, over Ed Buller’s marimba hook. As Butler told Creem in 1982, “It’s basically addressed to people who are fucked up about their sexuality, and says, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ It was originally written for gay people.” “Love My Way” also inspired some truly tragic dancing in Call Me By Your Name.
Iron Maiden uncaged an Eddie-sized monster on the world with The Number of the Beast, their first album with new singer Bruce Dickinson and the most impeccably crafted of wide-screen metal nightmares. It comes to a scarifying finale with “Hallowed Be Thy Name,” written by bassist Steve Harris, the monologue of a doomed prisoner facing the gallows pole, counting down the final seconds until his dead-man-walking fate. It’s inspired generations of teenage dirtbags to learn guitar. As Harris said, “If someone who’d never heard Maiden before — someone from another planet or something — asked you about Maiden, what would you play them? I think ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ is the one.” The band also released their own limited-edition craft beer in 2017, Hallowed.
“Kids Don’t Follow” captures all the gimme-noise mania of the Replacements at top strength. It begins with real-life cops, caught on tape breaking up a punk rent party: “Hello, this is the Minneapolis police! The party is over!” (The dude who yells “Fuck you, man” grew up to be Soul Asylum singer Dave Pirner.) “Kids Don’t Follow” kicks off Stink, the ‘Mats’ third-greatest album (after Let It Be and Tim), and one of the best-played, best-sung, best-recorded, most passionate rock & roll diaries of the Eighties or any other era. (Choosing between this song and “Go” is torture.) The whole song is ablaze with high-speed urgent emotion, especially Bob Stinson’s guitar and the perfect moment when Paul Westerberg tries to force “kids won’t stand still, kids won’t shuuuut up!” out of his ravaged throat.
“I might like you better if we slept together” — now there’s a pickup line. Deborah Iyall flexes her jaded take on modern romance in “Never Say Never,” the definitive art-school punk-disco hit. Romeo Void blasted out of San Francisco with this song, full of guitar churn and sax blurts. If you’ve ever spun around on the dance floor and locked eyes with a psycho stranger across the room, “Never Say Never” captures that vibe. Iyall, a Cowlitz Indian poet, sang in the languid post-coital sneer of a woman flaunting both her sarcasm and her libido, with no apologies for either. Bonus points for the hilarious verse where she stares down horny creeps on the street. (“He’d be warrrrm in yourrrr coat” — eeew.) As Iyall told Rolling Stone, “Love can be an illness.”
Joe Strummer had the punk rage, Paul Simonon had the reggae bass, and Mick Jones had the guitar flash. But the Clash’s biggest hit, “Rock the Casbah,” was just drummer Topper Headon, messing around in the studio waiting for the others to show up. The Clash were falling apart by 1982 — as Strummer claims in the doc Westway to the World, Jones was “like Elizabeth Taylor in a filthy mood.” Combat Rock is an underrated mess — even artier than Sandinista!, yet cleverly packaged as a pop move. But “Rock the Casbah” sure doesn’t sound like a band in collapse — it’s a rowdy blast of slash guitar, disco bass, digital bleeps from a Casio watch, and that crazy casbah jive. It was the Clash’s first — and last — U.S. Top Ten hit.
By the time Roxy Music made their most famous hit, “More Than This,” Bryan Ferry had already spent a decade playing the role of the pop Don Juan — suave and seductive on the surface, desperate on the inside, looking for love in a looking-glass world. MTV was full of Roxy clones, with pretty boys imitating Ferry’s mirror moves. But in “More Than This,” he finally surrenders to romance, sighing over the luxurious synths. Phil Manzanera’s guitar soliloquy at the end is just as soulful. Bill Murray did his memorable karaoke rendition in Lost in Translation. But every “More Than This” remake falls short, because (1) the song is only halfway there without the guitar coda, and (2) nobody can top Ferry’s moody precision. It took him a lifetime of posing to learn how to feel it this deep.
The most romantic songs ever written about a couple staying up all night to be miserable together. Robert Smith sobs through witty lyrics that accurately depict at least 10 percent of any real-life relationship (“The two of us together again/It’s just the same, a stupid game”), but he makes the situation sound more funny than hopeless. “Let’s Go to Bed” slides on that hum-along melody, elastic bass, and oddly empathetic asides like “You think you’re tired now, but wait until three.” This was the hit that really introduced the Robert Smith we know and love today. How fitting that he and Mary are still goth lovecats 40 years after “Let’s Go to Bed.” The two of them holding hands backstage at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame a few years ago was a sight to warm even the frostiest heart.
“Planet Rock” was the electro-hop 12-inch that totally transformed how this planet rocks. DJ Afrika Bambaatta from the South Bronx hooked up with producer Arthur Baker and synth wizard John Robie, biting the space beats of 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. “One of the most influential songs of everything,” Rick Rubin said. “It changed the world.” A telling detail: Note how the “rock rock to the Planet Rock” chant is identical to the guitar hook from the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah,” which dropped just a few weeks later. A coincidence, but a wonderfully symbolic example of how wild minds were tuned to the same wavelengths, in the cross-cultural mix-and-match games going on all over the 1982 music scene.
The scariest thing Bruce Springsteen ever recorded: a ghost rider on the New Jersey Turnpike, his hands wet on the wheel, weapon on his lap, dirty work done, ready to blast any spirit in the night that gets in his way. He cut “State Trooper” in the all-night solo session of January 3, 1982, most of which became Nebraska, just the man and his guitar. His inspiration was the NYC punk duo Suicide, in their murder tale “Frankie Teardrop.” As he told Rolling Stone in 1984, “They had that two-piece synthesizer-voice thing. They had one of the most amazing songs I ever heard.” Those howls at the end are terrifying — like Robert De Niro says in Taxi Driver, he sounds like God’s lonely man.
“I had a sister two years older who loved disco,” Vince Clarke told me in 2008. “And I couldn’t like it because she did, you know what I mean?” But he sure got over that. “Just Can’t Get Enough” became the definitive New Wave techno-twitch dance cut. Clarke quit the Mode soon after writing everything on their debut, Speak and Spell, but carried on with a noble career racking up more genius hits with Yaz (1982’s Upstairs at Eric’s) and Erasure (1987’s “Victim of Love”). Since Martin Gore took over the songwriting in Depeche Mode, and accidentally skidded into genius himself, this might be the most successful breakup ever, since we got twice as many great songs out of it. “Just Can’t Get Enough” will always evoke sideways haircuts, bouncy Casio beats, mesh-and-leather corsets, the entire ethos of the Martha Quinn era. R.I.P, Fletch.
Everybody pretended to hate A Flock of Seagulls in the Eighties. Yeah, well, everybody was a pitiful liar, because “Space Age Love Song” is a synth-crush epic as spectacular, gauche, embarrassing, and irresistible as their hair. Mike Score sings the haiku-like verses: “I saw your eyes/And it touched my mind.” No chorus, just gigantic waves of absurdly poignant synth/guitar heart-goosh, presented with zero irony, subtlety, or (lord knows) hipness. As a hardcore Flock-head who’s also a hardcore Swiftie (admittedly, not a huge demographic overlap), I have to add that this song is the “Enchanted” of the Eighties — a helpless tumble into the abyss of hyper-romantic obsession. The original lineup reunited in 2018 to do this song with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, and before you ask, yes, bald and beautiful now.
The whole disco story in one epic song: Black women, Eurodisco gay men, gospel, sex, rain, thunder, the apocalypse. The Weather Girls were two legends with majestic voices: Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes Armstead, longtime back-up singers for dance queen Sylvester, originally calling themselves the Two Tons o’ Fun. They rip into “It’s Raining Men,” written by producer Paul Jabara and David Letterman sidekick Paul Shaffer, in a flurry of hallelujahs and amens. The Weather Girls deliver a meteorological report on an impending sex storm, advising, “Get ready, all you lonely girls, and leave those umbrellas at home!” But the clouds really open when they belt the climax: “God bless Mother Nature! She’s a single woman too!” Amen.
“Sexual Healing” has all the heavenly sounds Marvin Gaye heard in his head, combined in one song. The Motown legend hit rock bottom in the late ’70s, when drugs and divorce reduced him to living out of a van in Maui. But he started over in his music, playing with new gadgets like the Jupiter-8 and TR-808 synthesizers. “Sexual Healing” was so sonically radical, all electronic whispers and sighs — as critic Robert Christgau called it, “a polymorphous vocal-percussive tapestry.” In 1982, the airwaves were full of young synth-poppers who worshipped this man (the era of Spandau Ballet “listening to Marvin all night long”), so it was shocking to think he was soaking up fresh ideas from the rookies he’d influenced. At a time when fans feared Gaye was burned out, “Sexual Healing” is the sound of him reaching for redemption and resolving to wake-up, wake-up, wake-up. Nobody would have guessed he’d get cut down so soon.
“Don’t You Want Me” is a whole synth-pop telenovela in one song: the tragic duet of a Hollywood star and a waitress in a cocktail bar. “The idea behind it was A Star Is Born, the Judy Garland film,” the Human League’s Phil Oakey told Rolling Stone. “Everyone who was in a group in Britain was a really big cinema fan in those days. Those were the two things that everyone was interested in: music and going to the pictures.” One night in a tacky disco in the Northern English steel town Sheffield, he met two high-school girls and recruited them for the group: Susanne Sulley (the blonde one) and Joanne Catherall (the brunette). 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 pathos of “Don’t You Want Me” is those ordinary voices, emoting over the high-gloss electronics.
The love story between a girl and her radio: the place where all pop dreams begin. Indeep’s glorious dance one-shot captures a moment when club sounds, disco, rap, New Wave, R&B, all combusted to create the future we’re living in now. In “Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life,” two party girls speak for any lonely fan who ever went searching for salvation in the bass line, then found it. For the payoff, the DJ comes to her emotional rescue, promising her, “There’s not a problem that I can’t fix/‘Cause I can do it in the mix.” So many great remakes, from Mariah Carey (in her Glitter version, she’s the DJ saving Busta Rhymes and Fabolous) to King Britt, who declares, “I wanted to be that DJ. The DJ that saved my life. Maybe I can save someone else’s.” But there’s no topping the Indeep original — Reggi Magloire and Rose Marie Ramsey’s voices, producer Michael Cleveland’s beat. In every way that matters, this song is the story of pop music.
Boy George always knew how to make a scene. He grew up a Bowie freak in London, the “pink sheep” of his working-class Irish family, and blew up into the world’s favorite gay pop rebel, at a time when even Freddie Mercury and Elton John were in the closet. “Time (Clock of the Heart)” is a bittersweet soft-soul lament, but you can hear the Boy’s mischievous grin in it. “I think the rest of Culture Club would have rather been in a rock band,” George told Rolling Stone in 2014. “Certainly, some of the things I made them wear — they’d much rather have been in Bon Jovi or something.” This Club always had way too much drama — for one thing, George was in a torrid, destructive affair with the drummer. But that’s why there’s something so beautifully garish about “Time” — so much excess, so much lipstick, so much clumsy warmth. A song that gets it all wrong, yet ends up spectacularly right.
Grace Jones spent the 1970s as a Studio 54 disco scenester. But then she transformed into a fire-breathing New Wave cyborg diva, leading a tough Carribean band anchored by reggae masters Sly and Robbie. As she said, the new Grace was “a creature that was based on me, that was all me, but made more, made bigger.” Her funk-punk gender-fuck club was massively influential — when Madonna released her first single in 1982, she told Melody Maker her target audience was “the kind of people who might like Grace Jones.” “Nipple to the Bottle” is her rage-queen anthem, where she chants, “I won’t give in and I won’t feel guilty!/You rant and rave to manipulate me!” It was inspired by her volatile marriage to French artist Jean-Paul Goude; as she recalled in her memoir, “We’d have a fight; I’d write a song,” she recalled in her memoir. “I wrote ‘Nipple to the Bottle’ after a row — ‘You’re never satisfied.’” The album version is cool, but it’s the bass-heavy 12-inch mix that really brings the thunder, especially when she sneers, “You scream and you shout/You’re still a BABY!” Rage on forever, Grace Jones.
Woooof! George Clinton already had a lifetime of funk cosmic-slop 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, a song that bridges six or seven generations of Black brilliance. George was partying hard the night he freestyled “Atomic Dog” on the mic (“I walked into the studio blind as a bat and out of my head,” he recalled), barking and growling “bow wow wow, yippy-oh yippy-yay” over that monster bass. But hip-hop producers have spent decades chasing his tracks, especially on the West Coast, where “Atomic Dog” defined the low-end G-funk thump — Dr. Dre built an empire on this bass line. Even in his 80s, Uncle Jam remains the baddest of brains. May the dog in him always chase the cat.
The California rock goddesses share the pangs of a summer fling they still can’t get over — after two whole weeks! Bassist Kathy Valentine wrote this classic cry from the heart. “When I was 21, I went home to Austin, Texas, for a vacation, and I met a boy,” she told Rolling Stone. “I wrote the song on the plane coming home — I was smitten.” Belinda Carlisle sings the Valley-girl blues, while Gina Schock stakes her claim as the era’s rockingest drummer. According to guitarists Charlotte Caffey and Jane Wiedlin, the song’s spirit matched up with real life. “We were hedonists — there were many summer romances in the Go-Gos,” Caffey said. Wiedlin added, “Spring, fall, and winter ones, too. My boyfriend and I used to have sex in the studio when people weren’t there.” But “Vacation” is why everyone dreamed of being a Go-Go in the Fast Times at Ridgemont High summer of 1982: radiant guitars, exuberant beats, sun-kissed voices without a single phony moment. Peak Totally Awesome.
The whole New Order saga is right there in “Temptation.” Four gawky English kids from the industrial wastelands of Manchester. They’re lost, scared, confused after the demise of their band Joy Division, with the tragic death of singer Ian Curtis. They start messing with cheap synthesizers, and channel all their yearning into “Temptation,” an epiphany of art-punk disco bliss. When these twits hit the dance-floor chorus — “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. New Order couldn’t seem to stop rerecording “Temptation,” but they never topped the original nine-minute single, on the Factus 8 1981-1982 EP. At the 7:30 point, Peter Hook’s bass jumps up a note as Bernard Sumner swoops into his delirious “ooo-hoo-woo”’s, a tiny detail that feels like getting touched by the hand of God. The dancers sound terrified, positive this night will end in heartbreak. But they’re curious enough to stick around till dawn to see what happens.
Duran Duran began their global breakthrough hit with the sound of a laughing girl — a bold New Romantic manifesto in itself, kinda like putting her smiling face on the album cover. The Fab Five set out to combine their two favorite bands, Chic and the Sex Pistols, and they got there in the first few seconds of “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Simon, John, Nick, Roger, and OK, fine, you too, Andy — five androgynous starboys with a radically innovative sound, a lycanthropic sex twirl that danced across musical and gender boundaries. Overnight, DD were the planet’s most hated band (especially by Rolling Stone, who advised, “Get it while you can, guys”) and the most loved (especially by girls). “We got the encouragement from the American audience,” Simon Le Bon told RS last year. “It didn’t matter to us if it was 80 percent female, 90 percent female, 99 percent female. It was just American people, waving their arms around and dancing and screaming.”
Enter the Georgia boys in R.E.M., the most influential American rock band of the past 40 years, not to mention the best. “Wolves, Lower” was their calling card to the world, kicking off their debut EP, Chronic Town. Drop the needle on the vinyl, and wonder: What the hell is going on here? Guitar jangle, but no power chords, no keyboards, no cliches. An urgent bass pulse. Michael Stipe warns, “Suspicion yourself, don’t get caught,” while Mike Mills chants, “House in order.” Every instrument tingles with excitement. Fast, too — real, real fast. “I guess every town had one band that was kinda like us,” Peter Buck said. But this was the ultimate “go make your own art, start your own band, find the other weirdos in town” statement. The mysterious swirl of “Wolves, Lower” invited listeners to take it or leave it. But people took, with an enthusiasm that must’ve shocked R.E.M. more than anyone. By the Nineties, everything halfway interesting in guitar rock came from somewhere in this song. That house was never in order again.
The greatest trick disco ever pulled was convincing the world that it died. Because despite the “disco is over” hype, it had its biggest year yet in 1982. “Billie Jean” was an unmistakably disco song — but one so broad, it redefined all of pop in disco terms. MJ’s voice in “Billie Jean” sounded so fragile and tormented, even before you noticed how disturbing the lyrics were, over nearly five minutes of creepy strings and heavy drums and paranoid bass. One of the odd things about “Billie Jean” is that even though it’s close as you can get to a timeless hit, it really only could have happened in 1982, a year when electro-funk and pop and R&B were feeding into each other on the radio. The gigantic musical imagination of “Billie Jean” became a permanent part of the world.
Everything cool about the 20th century, in one convenient package. Prince grabbed the keys in “Little Red Corvette,” taking all the fervid avant-garde music ideas in the air and making them rock. He made the album of the decade with 1999, its main competition his own Sign O’ the Times. “Little Red Corvette” became his first Top Ten hit, despite lyrics about falling for a girl with a pocket full of used Trojans, while proving himself pop’s most inventive singer. (Listen to the way he purrs “I started to worrr-raaay”—nobody has ever sounded less worried.) The Rolling Stone critics voted Prince the Best Rock Artist of 1982. As guitarist Dez Dickerson told Billboard’s Michaelangelo Matos, Prince got inspired by “the New Romantic thing,” getting hooked on Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. It was the year the world went electro, from the Bronx to Detroit to Manchester to Kingston. But Prince outfreaked everyone, with a song that’s been making it all right for the past 2,000 Saturday nights.
Grandmaster Flash worried that “The Message” would flop. “It was a shock,” the South Bronx DJ visionary told Record Mirror in 1982. “At first we were a little too afraid to release ‘The Message.’ It was a little too truthful.” But it became the most famous of hip-hop classics, a war report direct from the streets of inner-city America. “The Message” was a total knock out of the park,” said Chuck D of Public Enemy. “It was the first dominant rap group with the most dominant MC saying something that meant something.” “The Message” takes off from Duke Bootee’s poem about ghetto life, with Reggie Griffin’s future-shock keyboards and Furious Five MC Melle Mel chanting, “It’s like a jungle sometime/ It makes me wonder how I keep from going under.” As Flash said, “It had no call and response, nothing happy in it.” But it changed the hip-hop game forever.
From Rolling Stone US.
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