My Favorite Songs of 1982

     I love the 80’s. Well, not living through it—that kind of sucked, actually—but the movies, television, and especially the music of the 80’s was all pretty wonderful. There was a study years ago that postulated that the music you are exposed to between the ages of 11 and 21 will forever be deeply tied to your identity, so it makes sense that the 80’s still matter to me, all these years— hell, decades—later. 

     You know what I love even more than 80’s music? Lists! I’m probably the reason those clickbait articles—the music related ones, anyway—are littering your search engine feeds, because I find headlines like TEN ROCK BANDS THAT DIDN’T HAVE A DRUMMER almost impossible to ignore1.

     All of this is preamble for a list of some of my favorite 80’s songs from the half-remembered days of 1982. Why 1982? It serves as a nice halfway point between when I first became seriously aware of music and started religiously listening to the radio (around 1976 or so) and the end of the 80’s. Besides, 1982 was essentially when MTV was born (it debuted four months earlier), and MTV is to the 80’s as tariffs are to our current president.  

     I tried to keep my list relatively concise—ten songs—but that was really damn hard, so I included a handful (okay, maybe two handfuls) of honorable mentions. You’ll quickly notice not all of these songs were singles, as I tend to prefer album tracks or deep cuts to songs that were played endlessly when I was growing up. Still, there were a few hit songs from the year that were undeniable and I had to include. 

     Now let’s return to the days of suitcase-sized boomboxes, video games with lousy graphics, and some of the best music ever pressed to vinyl: 

Honorable Mention—Three creepy songs: Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask is widely considered to be one of his best albums, and it includes The Gun, one of my favorite Reed songs. Reed’s deadpan delivery over minimal instrumentation (with one vital lyrical omission) makes this song about a gun-toting sociopath truly chilling. Pornography is the title track off The Cure’s fourth album, and it’s a doozy. Garbled vocal samples, icy keyboards and tribal drums anchor the track, gradually increasing in intensity while Robert Smith shrieks about “the sounds of slaughter.” Smith never wrote a darker song than this. Time Bomb doesn’t sound like anything else on Beatitude, an underrated solo album by The Cars’ front man Ric Ocasek. It’s cold, stark, and odd, as Ocasek lists off pairs of seemingly unrelated items (ex: “I live in a world/of blather and godfear”) that grow in menace as the song progresses, culminating in a searing guitar solo. It should have been a new wave classic.

Honorable Mention—Three great songs by 70’s rock dinosaurs: Signals might not have been one of Rush’s best albums, but Subdivisions is a great Rush song. Rush updates their classic sound on this keyboard-heavy track, with guitarist Lifeson relegated to fills and a relatively restrained solo on the bridge. Geddy Lee sings about alienation and isolation here, which is very 80’s. King Crimson in 1982 sounded nothing like their incarnations in the previous two decades. They managed to integrate a postpunk sensibility into their prog framework starting with 1981’s Discipline, and continue with this years Beat, which starts off with Neal and Jack and Me, a nod to the beat writers of the 50’s. Newcomer Adrian Belew is a welcome addition to the Crimson sound, and his unique guitar stylings here and on all the King Crimson 80’s albums are another weapon in the band’s arsenal. He’s not a bad vocalist, either. Eminence Front may well be my favorite Who song. Sacrilege, maybe, but the song is just so damn catchy. The keyboards have a Tangerine Dream quality that I love, and Roger Daltrey’s vocal is one of his very best.

Honorable Mention—Four shots of new wave goodness: Love Plus One was the only song by Haircut 100 to hit in the U.S., probably due to the fact the band fired their lead man and sole songwriter after their first album. Still, this is one groovy song, with lots of bright saxophone, an understated guitar riff, and some vibraphone (which is always welcome). A Flock of Seagulls did some fine work in the beginning of the 80’s, especially on their debut album. Space Age Love Song is my favorite— the vocal is earnest, the guitar/keyboard bits are simple but propulsive, and the whole thing is so damn pretty. I could have picked a half dozen songs off of Duran Duran’s Rio—it’s that good—but I went with The Chauffer, which is the band at their coolest and most atmospheric. A bank of keyboards, some sound effects, a well-programmed drum machine, and Simon LeBon’s soaring vocal make for a winner. The Psychedelic Furs are one of my favorite bands. If pressed, I prefer the harder edge of the songs off their 1981 album Talk Talk Talk, but Love My Way is a wonderful song. Richard Butler is an excellent vocalist and lyricist2, and here you also get Todd Rundgren playing a marimba and backing vocals by Flo and Eddie.

Honorable Mention—Every song on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska: Nebraska was my entry point into Springsteen fandom3, and is on my list of the ten best albums ever. Springsteen’s mournful acoustic masterpiece doesn’t have one bum track on it, and “Atlantic City,” “State Trooper,” and “Highway Patrolman” would easily vie for spots on this list. However, I would rather listen to all those songs in conjunction with each other, as part of a perfect album.  

Honorable Mention—One song my wife loves: There is no way a list of music from 1982 would be complete without at least mentioning Eddy Grant’s Electric Avenue, one of my wife’s favorites. Grant’s expert blend of rock and reggae is definitely one of the funkiest protest songs ever written (there’s one that tops it later on this list), and is perfect summer driving music, preferably with the windows down and a breeze blowing. Grant didn’t let any of his music hit streaming services until January of last year, but “Electric Avenue” is available now. Go listen to it before Eddy changes his mind.

#10. Billie Jean—Michael Jackson: It’s hard to assess Michael these days. The shadow of scandal and bad behavior blots out his legacy for many; I tend to focus on the part of his career before his sudden ascent to fame (like 1979’s Off the Wall) where I can enjoy the music without being forced to address the person Jackson would become. That being said, I don’t have to make excuses to enjoy this song—”Billie Jean” is undeniable. It is actually a simple song held together by two things: that amazing, hypnotic bassline, and Jackson’s vocal. Michael sings this song like it’s the only song he’s ever going to sing— he yelps, he squeals, he takes exaggerated breaths between lines-but nothing feels forced or out of place, as if each vocal tic and trick is predestined. The lyric is a take on the same sort of theme Eminem would explore in “Stan”: fans are crazy, fans will bring you down. Jackson’s inspired performance suggest that he believes it; you can practically feel his paranoia and anxiety seeping between the beats. It was just the start (of course) of a slew of hits for Michael, but his career could have ended with this, his greatest song. Maybe it should have4.

#9. 867-5309 (Jenny)–Tommy Tutone: A nostalgia pick, certainly—few people would readily assert this one-hit wonder is one of the objectively best songs of any year, let alone a year as clotted with great songs as 1982. Musically the song is almost inconsequential: a nervous slice of rock and roll, competently played, borrowing equally from Elvis Costello and Eddie Money. But Tutone manages to imbue his tune with a sweaty desperation that appealed to a teenaged me, probably due to my longing for connection with a member of the opposite sex as much as Tutone did, if you believed his lyrics. Speaking of lyrics: these are ridiculous and more than a little sleazy, but they speak to the selling point at the heart of pop music—fantasy, mystery, the potential for danger or escape. And love, of course, which Tutone hopes to get from the anonymous girl with the phone number scribbled across the bathroom wall. We were content to settle for singing along, miming the phone digits with our hands when we got to the chorus.

#8. Seconds—The Human League: 1981 is the year The Human League actually transformed from a icy robot5 to a dancy robot, but 1982 is when the move brought them chart success. “Don’t You Want Me” hit number 1 on the Billboard charts in July of 1982, and will always be a) a great little earworm of a tune, b) a very strange choice for an album closer6, and c) a song that instantly reminds me of my first summer job as a busboy/dishwasher at a country club restaurant, a job I failed spectacularly at. “Don’t You Want Me” is not, however, my favorite Human League song of 1982. That would be the hit single’s b-side, “Seconds”. A stark piece of synth pop, “Seconds” manages to be both eerie and catchy. Phil Oakey intones about the Kennedy assassination while piercing keyboard notes soar above him, the insistent drumbeat burrowing beneath the song and proving this incarnation of The Human League was a dance band, even at its darkest. Few songs better capture the mixture of kitsch and angst that was the early 80’s like this song did, and it may well be the highest point in the band’s catalog.

#7. The Message— Gradmaster Flash and the Furious Five: I didn’t hear this song in 1982. Most of my early exposures to hip-hop were through MTV, and they notoriously avoided most black artists in the early days of the channel. A few years later the video for this song was in heavy rotation, and I can’t hear the song without seeing the blurry herky-jerky footage of New York City and Melle Mel rapping-in-place about being young and black in the early Eighties. The music here is skeletal funk, yet also so memorable and catchy it has been sampled in other songs 331 times. And the lyrics? Basically a litany of the horrors of ghetto life: drugs, pimps, gangs, violence, poverty, prison. I didn’t have to live through any of that, but I could completely relate to Mel’s internal emotional state, neatly communicated in the following couplet:

Don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge

I’m trying not to lose my head

And that laugh— a half-chuckle that manages to express equal measures of incredulity and exasperation, ridiculousness and rage. It too was influential, inspiring Phil Collins’ bark in “Mama,” another song about desperation. “The Message” is considered the first prominent socially-concious hip-hop song, but I always loved it as much for how it made me feel. Like Mel, I’ve often wondered how I kept from going under.

#6. Capital (It Fails Us Now) —Gang of Four: Gang of Four is my favorite “issues” band. They always had a lot to say, sure, but they did it with ferocious intensity and a barbed melodicism that made their songs so damn memorable. I especially loved their rhythm section—Hugo Burnham is an underrated drummer, and Dave Allen’s bass playing on the early Gang of Four albums is among my favorite guitar work of any punk (or early postpunk) band7. Here, they provide a menacing bottom while Andy Gill’s lead guitar skitters over the top. Jon King (not the CNN anchor) wails about his struggles to avoid drowning in credit card debt and his need to buy, buy, buy, which hasn’t changed one iota in forty plus years: from the first day I was born/I reached out for my credit card. King rants about wanting a freezer and a “hi-fi” while the guitars screech, but it’s Gill who gets the best line as a nervous aside: “I’m still in credit…just.” I think of this song often and how prescient it is—usually when I get my credit card statement in the mail.

#5. Shock the Monkey—Peter Gabriel: 1980 to 1982 is my sweet spot for Peter Gabriel. Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, but it took him a couple of solo albums to get his musical bearings and figure out his sound; after 82’s Security, Gabriel got poppier and more accessible, and for me, a little less interesting. “Shock the Monkey” is poppy, in a way—it reached #29 on the Billboard Top 40—but it also (as AllMusic noted) sounded like nothing else on the radio that year. This was the first Peter Gabriel song I ever heard, and it struck my teenaged ear as cold and alien…but also incredibly funky, riding on the thrum from bassist Tony Levin’s Chapman Stick. I loved the timbre of Gabriel’s voice—he always sounds tense or unsettled, even when he is singing a love song—and that anxiety bleeds into the snatches of guitar, the programmed drum beats, the periodic stabs of keyboard. I figured the lyrics were about animal testing or somesuch, but what stuck out to me were lines like cover me when I breathe and I can’t take any more, wrapping the song in a sense of claustrophobic dread I found appealing. By the time Gabriel hiccups over the word “shock” 4 minutes and 40 seconds in, I was hooked. Security was one of the first cassette tapes I ever bought, and even on my tinny little cassette player, this song always sounded imposing…and amazing.  

#4. Gypsy—Fleetwood Mac: If someone pressed me against a wall and demanded I tell them who my favorite Mac is, well…it would be Stevie. It was always Stevie. Oh, I loved Lindsey, all of his guitar wizardry and his studio tricks, trying to get Brian Wilson to meet Brian Eno by way of David Bryne. And I loved Christine McVie formerly Perfect, who had been in the band forever and knew how to survive it better than any of them8, always good for one amazing song for every three she penned. But Stevie…wow. She is easily my favorite creator of rock ballads in music history9, and this is her last great one with the band10. That being said, this might be the ballad where Stevie gets the most help to make the song great. John McVie deploys what may be my favorite bass line of his outside of “Dreams,” I love McVie’s repeating keyboard riff, and Lindsey’s backing vocals are superb. And when Stevie is done pouring her heart out about her early days when she was happier, Lindsey provides a beautiful guitar outro that gets me in the feels every, every time.

#3. Gardening At Night—R.E.M. I didn’t hear this song in 1982. Athens, Georgia was a million miles from the midwestern hinterlands where I was growing up, and R.E.M. were years from playing on radio stations I listened to. I discovered R.E.M. in college through a friend, but even then this song remained a mystery— the Chronic Town EP was out of print at the time (despite every critic within a stone’s throw gushing over it), and it was years before I was able to snag a cassette copy when it was reissued. Many white whales don’t turn out to be worth the effort to chase them, but Chronic Town did, and especially this song, sandwiched between two other winners on Side One. “Gardening at Night” starts with a little acoustic guitar riff repeated four times quickly before the jangly guitars kick in— much cleaner sounding than anything on Murmur (the band’s album-length debut), which wouldn’t be released until April of 1983. I love Peter Buck’s sitar, I love Stipe’s vocal (which isn’t as mumbly as he’d be accused of later on), and I love the obtuse lyrics, which were inspired by the habit some had of urinating by the side of the road at night (hence, night gardening). I have gone through periods of my life where I loved R.E.M. and others where I was indifferent to their charms11, but I have never grown tired of this song. This is where the magic first happened.

#2. I Dreamed I Dream—Sonic Youth: Consider this a paragraph-long plug for Sonic Youth’s criminally out-of-print collection Screaming Fields of Sonic Love. A likely attempt by record label DGC to cash in on Sonic Youth’s new-found critical success, Screaming goes backward, Memento-like, through the band’s career to that point, starting with the more accessible songs on Daydream Nation, getting increasingly more drony and dissonant, and ending with “I Dreamed I Dream.” This song starts with a thudding bass line that never changes through its over five minute running time, then adds the strum of oddly-tuned guitars. The guitars continue to churn while Kim Gordon talks about impotence and drops f-bombs in a disaffected monotone, while Thurston Moore harmonizes…sort of.  I know many prefer Sonic Youth’s later, poppier music, but this is where I like them best—edgy, dark, experimental. I have loved many songs and albums throughout the breadth of Sonic Youth’s career, but this is the one I prize the most.

#1. Something in the Water (Does Not Compute) —Prince: There was a time where I didn’t really like Prince. Oh, I liked “Little Red Corvette” and “When Doves Cry” —I can’t imagine having the gift of hearing and not appreciating those songs—but “Purple Rain and “Let’s Go Crazy” were everywhere in 1984 and 1985, and I was tired of it. Yawn, I thought. Then I saw the video for “Dirty Mind” on Night Flight12 one evening, and decided my opinion needed revising. I quickly bought Dirty Mind and Controversy…and 1999, where “Something in the Water” is on Side Three. I loved all of it, but “Something in the Water” trumped everything. I loved the skittering drum track, the keyboards that sound like they were beamed down from space, and Prince’s vocal, which comes across as incredibly haughty and totally vulnerable at the same time13. There’s a minimalism and sense of space in this song that Prince would utilize again and again (to great effect, I would add) during his career, but never as good as he did here. And it climaxes14 with my favorite scream in the history of recorded music. This is my favorite song by one of my favorite artists. There is no way any other song could be my #1 song of 1982.

  1. I’m tempted to write a book comprised of interesting music lists with attention-grabbing titles like you’d find on the internet called Rock and Roll Clickbait. ↩︎
  2. Butler is responsible for one of my favorite lines of all time: “Words are all just useless sound.” ↩︎
  3.  Nebraska is the only album I own in all three physical formats: vinyl, cassette, and CD. ↩︎
  4.  I cannot think of  “Billie Jean” without seeing images from the music video in my head—it’s the way I first experienced the song, back when Friday Night Videos was still a thing. I’m sure the video is horribly dated today, but it was a revelation in 1983, a surreal tone poem that had the added advantage of Michael dancing, something he did better than, well, everybody. Michael was a wonderful singer, but it’s doubtful he would have become the superstar he was without the videos. ↩︎
  5. Prior to changing their style and becoming a new wave dance machine, The Human League made stiffly mannered synth rock with no bite and few hooks. It didn’t sell, so Martyn Ware and Ian Marsh left in 1980 to form Heaven 17. I’ve always liked their song “Let Me Go.” but haven’t really explored their catalog. ↩︎
  6. Dare (1981) is a very backloaded album, as the best three songs—”Love Action (I Believe in Love,” “Seconds,” and “Don’t You Want Me” are the last three songs on Side Two. Side One has 1.5 good songs and achingly clumsy lyrics. ↩︎
  7. It’s no surprise the band got less interesting when Gill left in 1981. He’s still present on this song, though, as it was recorded a year earlier. ↩︎
  8. It’s ironic, therefore, that she was the first of the band members to pass away. I will always treasure McVie’s work on Tusk (especially “Over and Over” and “Brown Eyes”), one of the two main reasons I’ve always ranked that album higher than Rumours (the other being Stevie’s amazing “Beautiful Child”). ↩︎
  9. Although Brandi Carlisle in gaining on her, year by year, and I am slowly learning to appreciate Joni Mitchell. Check back in a couple years. ↩︎
  10.  I’m sorry if anyone’s a big fan of the ballads on Tango in the Night, but…no. “Seven Wonders” is too slick and shiny, “Welcome to the Room…Sara” sounds rote and exhausted, and “When I See You Again” is too maudlin even for me, Mr. Yacht Rock. ↩︎
  11.  I didn’t like Out of Time when it was initially released, and quit paying attention to R.E.M. for awhile. I when back and listened to a big chunk of the band’s catalog about five years ago and realized I was hearing them differently. I now appreciate them more than ever, and would rank them in my ten favorite bands of all time. ↩︎
  12. Anybody out there remember USA Network’s Night Flight? I learned more about music and oddball movies from that late night program than just about anywhere else. ↩︎
  13.  Favorite line: “Why in God’s name do you want to make me cry? Why?” ↩︎
  14. Pun intended. This is Prince, after all. ↩︎

Leave a comment