The Absolute Best of the 80s - A Short Editorial on Nearly Everything that was the 1980s.

I've been working on this list for many years now - a collection of energetic and pop-culture iconic songs that encapsulate much of the spirit of the 1980s.

Before giving the list, I need to preface this topic by talking about this time period.

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Every period of music reflects its zeitgeist. In my opinion, no where is this more evident than in the 1980s, where Americans re-discovered politics, economics, pop culture and the whole world felt the power of the American dream. This is not an understatement by any means. The reverberations of the American 80s is being felt today in all parts of the world, through every part of layers of social and economic strata.

America was recovering from the triple blow of spiraling inflation, recession fueled by a lack of productivity and an oil crisis, and the dark period of industrial deterioration that left large swaths of America rusting and in despair. A new threat of Islamic fundamentalism found its first succesful revolution in Ruhollah Khomeini, who rose to power in Iran in 1979 (although nobody knew at the time how much of a global impact that event, and the attendant Iran Hostage Crisis, would spark for decades to come).

If that wasn't enough, the spectre of communism loomed larger than ever as the evil empire known as the Soviet Union with its iron curtain of darkness spreading like a malignant tumor over much of the other side of the world. America has lost its absolute supremacy in the world, losing its first war in its entire history in Vietnam. In 1984 for example, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced the Doomsday Clock - that everpresent sword of Damocles that gave notice to how close the world was to nuclear annihilation - had moved to 3 minutes from midnight. The following is the first two paragraphs of that Bulletin:

"AS WE ENTER the new year hope is eclipsed by foreboding. The accelerating nuclear arms race and the almost complete breakdown of communication between the superpowers have combined- to create a situation of extreme and immediate danger.

In response to these trends and as a warning of where they lead, we have moved the Bulletin’s “doomsday clock” forward by one minute-to three minutes before midnight. It is a measure of the gravity of the current situation that only once in our 39-year history-in 1953 in response to the advent of the hydrogen bomb- have we seen fit to place the warning hand any closer to midnight than it stands today." - January 1984, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Under this backdrop of fear, depression and economic downturn, something happened to turn around. President Ronald Reagan began a series of moves that changed America. Supply-side economics, complete with a 25% income tax cut, unprecedented governmental borrowing and deregulation in all sectors of the economy lit a fire that literally "bought" America out of its misery and injected hope back to America. Money literally poured back into America as weborrowed and borrowed. Over President Reagan's 8-year term, America went from having a debt to GDP percentage of 32% to over 53%.

But Americans had money again, and consumerism became the name of the game. The American Dream, hidden in the folds of economic despair, emerged strongly as ever. On the political front, we found that Islamic fundamentalist revolutionaries weren't always a bad thing as they created a "Vietnam" for the dreaded Soviet Union in Afghanistan - their first real military defeat since the beginning of the Cold War in 1947. America had also beaten the Soviet Union at ice hockey (1980 Olympic "Miracle on Ice"), and trounced all-comers at the Soviet Bloc-less 1984 Olympic Games held in Los Angeles. By the late 1980s, the Soviet Union could not sustain the rate of military spending that they had, and collapsed upon itself.

America had won the war for world domination and hegemony, and all it took was to mortgage our respective futures by betting that our rates of productivity would continue to grow faster than our ability to pay it back. And with optimism in the bank, people needed a release in a way they could not express adequately. The collective feeling was akin to taking drugs - the euphoric high was very real, and it was sustainable so long as supply was there. (Note: the 80s also saw the growth of the counter-culture movement in the African-American cultural scene. Rap music became more than a faddish experiment in scratching turntables and urban poetry; it was a language unique to those who lived in the America that the economic boom did not touch. For the sake of brevity, however, I will not address this now).

Along with the highs, came excess. Big Hair, Big Cars, Boomboxes grew from shoebox-size radios to something that needed to be carried by two people. It was in this environment that the following songs came to fruition. In my opinion, these songs cannot be appreciated without having lived through or at least understood the time period. For the young people of the 1980s, this was a time to be enjoyed without consequences. For those who knew better, who knew that the time of carefree fun could not last, this was to be their last excess, their last hurrah.

With that long preview, here we go. Over a period of many years, I have tried to pare down what I thought would be a list of songs that could capture a good portion of the energy and optimism of the 1980s. I took my personal collection of hundreds 80's songs, and I tried to pare down the list enough to put onto a single music CD.

The result is the following, in alphabetical order:

(I Just) Died In Your Arms - Cutting Crew
Always Something There To Remind me - Naked Eyes
Dancing With Myself - Billy Idol
Do You Believe In Love - Huey Lewis & The News
Don't Forget Me (When I'm Gone) - Glass Tiger
Footloose - Kenny Loggins
Freedom - George Michael
Get Out Of My Dreams, Get Into My Car - Billy Ocean
How Will I Know - Whitney Houston
If You Leave - OMD
Man In Motion - Jack Parr
Only In My Dreams - Debbie Gibson
Someday - Glass Tiger
Summer Of '69 - Bryan Adams
Take Me Home Tonight (Be My Baby) - Eddie Money
Take On Me - Aha
Walk On Water - Eddie Money
Who's Johnny - El Debarge

Listening to these songs almost forces you to engage in a momentary delusion that anything other than the feelings that you have for a mythical special someone is simply unimportant. And revisiting the 1980s on a pop music safari is like taking a dip in the River Lethe (pronounced LEE-thee) in Hades and forgetting just about everything except what is in front of you.

Yet I enjoy it and these songs immensely. What that says about me is a post for another time.

Totally,
-David