Paul Hardcastle might be a little bit fringe but otherwise your whole song collection is a museum of awesome 80's ridiculousness.

the Hardcastle song is, best I can determine, "Patient Zero" for '90s techno.

Consider: Industrial was off on its own thread and had been since the '70s; it evolved from Kraftwerk and Throbbing Gristle and hit the '80s in stride - Skinny Puppy's Cleanse, Fold, Manipulate actually tracked as an album and Front 242's Headhunter tracked as a single. But the industrial thread blitzed through Ministry and Front Line Assembly without hitting a popular nerve until Nine Inch Nails (which, for most people, is "Closer", which might as well be David Bowie, not "Head like a Hole".

Nineteen, by way of comparison, has none of the latent anger of the Industrial scene. It has the requisite sampler abuse and paucity of content. It has no lyrics, effectively, yet isn't a grandiose byzantine construction like Axel F. And it tracked. It made it into the top 20 on Billboard, something that didn't happen again with this "genre" of music until M.A.R.R.S, which led directly to 2 Unlimited.

How long did it take you to think of this list? I read it, sat back and did a mental slow clap.

Read the question before heading out of work at 1am. Rode 30 minutes home. Realized I'd misread it and was thinking of music VIDEOs, decided to post anyway, went to bed at 2. Probably 20 minutes.

When you grow up in New Mexico in the '80s, you either listen to a lot of Country music or you wait slavishly for Casey Kasem every Sunday night. That's your culture.

"Rock Lobster" is a song that while recorded in 1979 gets played at every 80's night. Watching people party down to it makes me yearn for sharia law.

'80s nights are, however, a product of the coasts and necessarily revisionist. Songs that never made it anywhere become seminal simply because they're dance-able and the rights are available cheaply. Madonna tracked. I think there's an element of nostalgia from a "dance night" perspective that requires the band to be archaic; "it's '80s because we no longer listen to it." So you don't get your ZZ top. You don't get your Springsteen. You get your Depeche Mode, you get your Culture Club, you get your Dead or Alive, and you get, yes, Rock Lobster.