100 Best Songs of 1982
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.
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Toto
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!”
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Stevie Wonder
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.
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Toni Basil
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.”
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Void
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.
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Siouxsie and the Banshees
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.
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Hall & Oates
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.
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Sylvester and Patrick Cowley
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.
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Joe Jackson
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.
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John Waite
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.
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The Pointer Sisters
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.
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Axe
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!
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The Bangles
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.
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21-645
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.
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Scritti Politti
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.”
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John Anderson
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.
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Clint Eastwood & General Saint
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.
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Rush
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.
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The Birthday Party
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.
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The Dazz Band
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.
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Richard and Linda Thompson
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.
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Men at Work
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.
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Haircut One Hundred
“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.
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Bad Brains
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.
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Eddie Money
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.
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The Clean
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.
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Junior
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.
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Donald Fagen
“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.”
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ABBA
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.
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Shalamar
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.
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The English Beat
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!”
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Motörhead
“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.”
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Kim Wilde
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.
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Trio
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.
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Marshall Crenshaw
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.
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Missing Persons
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.
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Soft Cell
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.
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Bananarama
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.
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Peter Gabriel
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.
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X
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.
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Van Halen
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]!”
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The Fall
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.
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Aretha Franklin
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.
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The Minutemen
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.”
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Fleetwood Mac
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.
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Steel Pulse
“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.”
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The dB’s
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.
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Mecano
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.
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The Who
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.)
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The Jam
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.
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Bow Wow Wow
“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.”