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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Billy Idol
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.
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Trouble Funk
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.
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Hüsker Dü
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.
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Elvis Costello
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.
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Madonna
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!”
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ABC
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.
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Vanity 6
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.”
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Modern English
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.
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Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
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.
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Ray Parker Jr.
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.
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Adam Ant
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.
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Pretenders
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.
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David Bowie
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.
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Thomas Dolby
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.”
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Mission of Burma
“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.”
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King Sunny Adé
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.
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Lou Reed
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.
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Yaz
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.
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Kate Bush
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.
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Paul McCartney
“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.”
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The Gap Band
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.”
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Peter Godwin
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.
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The Dream Syndicate
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.
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The Waitresses
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.”
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Peech Boys
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.
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The Psychedelic Furs
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.
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Iron Maiden
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.
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The Replacements
“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.
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Romeo Void
“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.”
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The Clash
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.
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Roxy Music
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.
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The Cure
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.
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Afrika Bambaata & the Soul Sonic Force
“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.
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Bruce Springsteen
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.
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Depeche Mode
“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.
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A Flock of Seagulls
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.
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The Weather Girls
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.
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Marvin Gaye
“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.
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The Human League
“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.
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Indeep
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.
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Culture Club
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.
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Grace Jones
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.
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George Clinton
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.
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The Go-Go’s
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.
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New Order
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.
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Duran Duran
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.”
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R.E.M.
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.
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Michael Jackson
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.
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Prince
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.
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Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five
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.