My first thought was "We Are The World." Normally I'd write a big old music post on this question, but I think you said enough. Paul Hardcastle might be a little bit fringe but otherwise your whole song collection is a museum of awesome 80's ridiculousness. How long did it take you to think of this list?
I read it, sat back and did a mental slow clap. "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.
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. 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. '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.Paul Hardcastle might be a little bit fringe but otherwise your whole song collection is a museum of awesome 80's ridiculousness.
How long did it take you to think of this list? I read it, sat back and did a mental slow clap.
"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.
I don't think I ever heard Paul Hardcastle on the radio in the 80's, but it might be a symptom of Detroit popular radio. Newcleus - Jam On It, The Egyptian Lover - Egypt, Egypt and Afrika Bambaataa - Planet Rock all got played next to Ah Ha - Take on Me on the local pop radio stations. You don't get ZZtop or Springsteen on an 80's night because it isn't dancy. I don't think people stopped listening to Depeche Mode or B52's, hell I know they didn't, I hear my neighbors and my wife play that stuff somewhat frequently. My wife randomly has my Paul Hardcastle LP in a small window that shoots slight right onto coffee table dimming her macbooks screen.