The eighties were a great decade.  That’s probably a fairly parochial thing to say as I graduated high school in ’81 and college in ’85.  That’s the time in everyone’s life that makes the biggest impression on a person’s life and sets its course.

We had the Reagan Revolution, an economic boom, and the Berlin Wall came down.  We enjoyed movies like Wall Street, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Ghostbusters and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  We were the pioneers of video games with the Atari video game system and games like Space Invaders and Asteroids.

Times were good and the music, at the time, was excellent.  In fact, it’s still good today.

So, how do we remember the decade through music?  Perhaps an impossible task, but one worth attempting for us 40-somethings.  Here’s how I would remember it: through songs that marked some turn in tastes, culture, how we saw music or how a song reflected the times.  It would be those songs or bands that immediately come to mind when one says, “The ’80’s.”

So, here goes my list.  I’d love to hear about yours.

Video Killed the Radio Star - The Buggles

Video Killed the Radio Star was the first video ever to be played on MTV.  (For those who were not around in the ’80’s, the M in MTV once stood for Music.  That’s right, MTV, believe it or not, used to play music videos.)

The song and its accompanying video marked a departure point for the music industry.  No longer would fans be deprived of seeing their favorite artists and no longer would music stand on its own.  From that point on, sound and video would be forever linked together.

Karma Chameleon - Culture Club

OK, so Boy George is a carnival sideshow and a human grease fire on many levels.  That doesn’t change the fact that in the early ’80’s, Culture Club was the hottest group out there and dominated conversations with their music and George’s antics.

But give the devil his due:  George could sing and he could write.  Mostly, though, he could influence the youth of the day, at least for a few years.

Of all their hits, it was Karma Chameleon that transcended the most social boundaries and had everyone from angst-ridden teenagers to housewives to construction workers tapping their feet.

I Ran - A Flock of Seagulls

The first song to achieve the status of obnoxiously overplayed.  Only Easy Lover by Phil Collins and Phillip Bailey could possibly have been played more times on the radio in the ’80’s than I Ran.

I Ran was more than just a pop song that you couldn’t avoid.  While it may not have been the first to feature the synthesizer, it certainly set the tone for that instrument’s exposure 

Beyond that, though, the song and the group helped legitimize nerds.  I Ran and the Flock of Seagulls’ success set in motion the parade of anti-’70’s, testosterone-driven bands that would rule the Billboard charts for the first half of the decade.  The new bands were led and populated by the bookish kids that were shoved into lockers in high school.  The bands of the early ’80’s were a real-life truth-is-stranger-than-fiction incarnation of the movie “Revenge of the Nerds” with bands like the Thompson Twins, Pet Shop Boys, Haircut 100, Depeche Mode and many, many more enjoying the success that their jock tormentors from school could only hope for.

But not only did the song set the stage for the over-use of synthesizers in the decade, the band’s name created a template for sentences and sentence fragments to be acceptable as names for musical groups like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Tears for Fears, and more.

Material Girl - Madonna

Only one person had more influence on pop culture in the early ’80’s than Boy George, and that was Madonna.

Although shy on singing talent, she was never shy to push whatever envelope needed pushing.  From wearing a belt buckle that read “Boy Toy” on an album titled “Like A Virgin” to writing and recording “Papa Don’t Preach”, which stuck a thumb in the eye of Christian conservatives, Madonna’s penchant for getting attention compensated for her lack of vocal ability and helped her achieve superstar status.

Madonna tapped the new-found economic prosperity of the times with the campy “Material Girl” and created yet another persona for herself.

Along the way, Madonna became the most powerful woman in music, while simultaneously setting the women’s movement back 50 years.

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For - U2

Most of the songs on this list are from the early ’80’s because that’s what dominated the music of that decade.  U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found...” is the only one from the late ’80’s (1987).  Why?  Because U2 absolutely dominated the music scene for the rest of the decade.

Although the band had been slowly building a fan base for several years prior, breaking through to the mainstream in a big way with “Pride (In the Name of Love)” from 1984’s Unforgettable Fire, it wasn’t until the release of the Joshua Tree album that U2 achieved Beatlesque status.

Had The Joshua Tree been released earlier in the decade, the texture and complex of the entire decade could very well have been very different.

Do They Know It’s Christmas? - Band Aid

Was it a reaction to conservative power in the US and UK or were the images from drought-stricken African countries simply too much for Sir Bob Geldof to bear?  Either way, Band Aid, along with its child Live Aid, made an indelible mark on the decade.

The collaborative effort of the day’s most popular musical acts on Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was the birth of a tremendous fundraising effort that not only captured the world, but shamed its American counterparts to join in with their own rushed copycat effort, “We Are the World”.

But it was “Do They Know It’s Christmas” that set the standard for ego-less self-sacrifice and collaboration for a cause.

Hungry Like the Wolf - Duran Duran

If Video Killed the Radio Star set the stage for video’s influence on the music scene, Duran Duran and their song/video Hungry Like the Wolf, set the standard for how to best exploit it.

The original pretty boys, Duran Duran rode a wave of teen idol worship and created a formula for success in the music industry by combining modest talent with teenage-heart-melting good looks to hook the young and impressionable.  The formula worked and Duran Duran enjoyed the kind of success and popularity that most bands only dream of.  They also gave birth to the boy bands of the ’90’s.

When Doves Cry - Prince

There are five artists that can lay claim to being the biggest of the decade --- Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, U2, Michael Jackson and this guy, Prince.

But When Doves Cry was more than just Prince’s best song from his ridiculously successful Purple Rain album. The song was fresh and introduced a truly new sound into the pop culture.  It was unmistakably Prince’s and helped establish him as a true artist of the decade.

But, wherever there is Prince, there is also sex.  It seeped into just about every song he wrote and perhaps that was his biggest contribution to the culture - a new sexual liberation to counteract the conservative backlash to the no-holds-barred sexuality of the ’70’s.

Born in the USA - Bruce Springsteen

OK, so the meaning of the song was lost on most people.  All the listening public cared about was belting out the refrain Born in the USA! Born in the USA!

But it was this song and album that re-established Bruce Springsteen as the working class hero and dealt a blow to the thin-sounding, synth-driven pop of the early ’80’s.  Rock and roll was back.  The jocks were back to claim their turf.

Springsteen’s Born in the USA LP was rivaled only by Prince’s Purple Rain as the top-selling album of the year and is still the top-selling album in the Springsteen catalog.

Billie Jean - Michael Jackson

At a time when Michael Jackson had some connection to reality and the human race, before the chimps and children and the surgical mask and the traveling oxygen chamber, he was the first and probably biggest mega-star of the decade.  His album, Thriller, still holds records for sales and hit singles.

From that album, his first hit song and, more importantly at the time, video, was his paternity-suit rebuttal entitled Billie Jean.  The catchy bass riff and driving beat, combined with Jackson’s dance moves and mysterious presence in the video, propelled the song to the top of the charts and into minds of just about everybody.  It also crept into the minds of the songwriters that composed Madonna’s “Like A Virgin”, as many believed there was too much similarity between the two songs, including Jackson’s attorneys. 

So that’s how I remember the ’80’s through music.  How do you?