The 1980's Pop Music Tsunami

For me, Ronald Reagan, Reaganomics, peacetime prosperity (yep, even during a recession, you can still have a taste of the good life in America) weren't the only things worth remembering about the 1980's decade. That's right, I'm one of those people who thought Ronald Reagan was one of our best presidents. Get over it.

If it wasn't for the creative, memorable tsunami of original music that hit the American shores in the 1980s, I'd say Reagan was the best thing about the Eighties. But he had great company. Call them "New Wave" bands or "Romantics" or whatever you want to call them (let the experts label them), the rock bands, composers and singers of the 1980s took America's Pop Music Culture somewhere it had never been before and would likely never go again. From 1980 to 1990, pop musicians from all over the place showed people like me that the "wave of the future" didn't necessarily mean "bad news".

Just when I thought there were no new frontiers for "rock" musicians to explore with the electric guitar, keyboards or vocals, along came the (mostly) young musical talent of the 1980s and artists from the 1970s who showed us that they still had a lot to offer. Even hard rock went in new directions and hip-hop eclipsed soul and rhythm & blues with a new sound of its own. And jazz, that American original invention that almost defies vocal accompaniment, saw a whole new wave of new talent come ashore. For me, the 1980's pop music scene introduced a new music genre that almost defied labeling. The Eighties provided me with new "head music", new "driving music" and some new "dance music" that had all the earmarks of a generation that was celebrating not only life but the simple joy of making music.

Below is a list of memorable and very cool songs that really made me feel good about being (relatively) young and alive back then (I was 29 in 1980). Some of these songs are "New Wave" and some aren't. But they're all 1980's "Pop Music" and that's good enough for a guy like me who couldn't carry a tune of my own to save my life. I'll never stop loving the sounds these artists produced or the way they made me feel. I was more into their music than the way they looked or behaved in their personal lives. That meant very little to me. People who make courageous, awesome, insane, beautiful, cool and original music like they did certainly deserve a little retro credit. My hat is still off to them and this "Mix" is my tribute to the 1980s. Headphones are highly recommended.

1. Cars — Gary Numan (released in 1979 but hit U.S. Top 40 in 1980)

2. Call Me — Blondie (1980)

3. Rapture — Blondie (1981)

4. Once In A Lifetime — Talking Heads (1981)

5. Down Under — Men At Work (1981, ignore the 1982 on the video)

6. Super Freak — Rick James (1981)

7. Rock the Casbah — The Clash (1982)

8. Let It Whip — Dazz Band (1982)

9. I Melt With You — Modern English (1982)

10. New Religion — Duran Duran (1982)

11. She Blinded Me With Science — Thomas Dolby (1982)

12. I Ran (So Far Away) — A Flock of Seagulls (1982)

13. Electric Avenue — Eddy Grant (1983)

14. One Thing Leads To Another — The Fixx (1983)

15. Let's Dance — David Bowie (1983)

16. Hang On To Your Love — Sade (1984)

17. West End Girls — Pet Shop Boys (1984)

18. Take On Me — A-Ha (1985)

19. Everybody Wants To Rule The World — Tears For Fears (1985)

20. Material Girl — Madonna (1985)

21. Venus — Bananarama (1986)

22. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For — U2 (1987)

23. Just Like Heaven — The Cure (1987)

24. Kissing A Fool — George Michael (1988)

25. Love Shack — The B52s (1989)

P.S. I suggest you ignore the comments posted by You Tube viewers, who tend to misuse the video comment section at YouTube as an adult-oriented chat room and a space for hateful rhetoric that has no place in an enlightened culture. In far too many cases, they also disparage the music by attacking the personal lives of the artists. A lot of YouTube comments aren't fit for public viewing anyway. But YouTube allows anything and everything. Free speech and all that rot.

As far as I'm concerned, music is music and none of these artists single-handedly ran our world culture into the ground. By the same token, when I like a song that doesn't necessarily mean that I like anything else about the artist. Sometimes I even dislike them. But that isn't the point of this post.

My music posts at Blogger are about the music and the musical talent of the artists and nothing more. Except for Petula Clark, who was my older woman schoolboy celebrity crush in the 1960s — she and Julie Andrews, but that's another story — and whose voice and compositions I really liked. So, if you have a problem with any of the artists I showcased here, that's your problem, not mine.