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From A-ha's Take On Me to Whitney Houston wanting to dance with somebody, ten songs that made the '80s impossible to forget
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Few decades in popular music managed to contain as many notably contradictory scenes happening simultaneously as the 1980s, a stretch where gleaming British synth-pop, arena-filling American rock, early hip-hop’s first commercial breakthroughs, and polished adult-contemporary soul all competed for the same radio airwaves with little regard for each other’s existence. This collision produced a notably strange, sprawling, genre-agnostic musical landscape, one where a song built entirely from studio session players could chart alongside something recorded by four scrappy kids from Compton, with neither side acknowledging the other existed, let alone sharing an audience.
This range shows up quite clearly and consistently across any serious accounting of the decade’s most enduring tracks, spanning stark synth experiments through maximalist rock anthems without much concern for maintaining a single consistent sound throughout. Some songs earned their lasting reputation through immediate, overwhelming chart dominance, becoming so thoroughly inescapable at release that they still define entire specific years in listeners’ collective memories decades later, whether or not those listeners were even alive to hear the original release firsthand. Others grew into their reputation more slowly, gaining fresh cultural relevance through unexpected placements in film and television long after their initial, comparatively modest commercial performance, resurfacing for entirely new audiences who never experienced the original chart run firsthand.
