Best Songs of 80s

The hard rock music of the 80s was wild, filled with guitar solos and played by musicians with long hair. You weren't a teen in the 80s if you didn't play air guitar and sing into your hairbrush, flipping your head around to imitate one of these bands. We thought we'd invented music. In fact, I think there are so many incredible songs form that period that it's impossible to list them all.

We were also heavily influenced by the launch of MTV in 1981. Our generation had a video to tie to nearly every song which made the song itself more memorable - the goal of music videos. These videos were really marketing tools geared towards selling more records and cassettes. Yes, kids, cassettes. I had boxes and boxes of them!

One look at any of the band members themselves would explain why they're referred to as Hair Bands. If you could see their faces, they were wannabes. These bands were mostly male and almost all the members (especially the guitar players) had wild, unruly hair down their backs. These guys looked fierce but often had a ballad or two in their hip pocket that demonstrated the power and passion that drove their music.

Frankly, this is my favorite genre and there are 50 more songs I could have listed in this section but then the page might never download. I was a bit of an oddball amongst my friends because I liked Styx and Scorpions best but those weren't as popular at the time as Judas Priest and Def Leppard.

Many of these songs are still popular today and have millions of views on YouTube. My son, a 15 year old finishing his first year of high school, begged me for an AC/DC t-shirt when school started this year and is constantly bringing me a song he thinks is "new" only to find out I already know all the lyrics. Love the look of shock on his face when that happens.

Bands in the 80s had a lot to say. Not only did we have the hair bands, we had some of the deepest, emotional, stick-with-you songs of love, hope and life. Who doesn't remember Bruce Springsteen and Born in the USA or Billy Joel railing about the unfairness of our generation having to deal with crap we didn't start in We Didn't Start the Fire? He wrote this song after John Lennon's (Beatles) son Sean had expressed how distraught he was over world politics and the issues being dealt with at the time. I know what he meant. I grew up in New York with air raid drills vs. lock down drills because we never knew if Cuba or Russia might attack the coast. When that alarm went off it was into the hall, on your knees head down against the wall. Aids was new and mysterious...and very deadly. Until then, we'd only ever had to worry about getting mono but no one knew for sure how you might get Aids. We learned about nuclear missiles and watched movies of the mushroom clouds and how they would wipe out all life. There were times we didn't know if the world would outlast us or if it would expire and take us with it. We weren't giving up without a fight, though. Our feelings came out through the bands that spoke on our behalf.

A side note - not that it means much except to me, but my 5 year old son can sing Joan Jett & the Blackheart's I Love Rock N Roll perfectly - even her "Yowww" in the chorus. It's a riot.

Okay, we had some goofy stuff, too. J Geil's Band's Centerfold, a song about a guy seeing an old highschool flame as a centerfold in a magazine. Funny AND the beat stuck in your head. If you've never heard that one before, listen and see if you don't find yourself humming it later in the day.

I had to laugh when I saw that Captain & Tennille's song Do That To Me One More Time was on the top of the charts in 1980. I remember their Muskrat Love song. A song about a couple of muskrats who get married. I still can't think about that song without the Chipmunks simultaneously popping into my head. I think the Chipmunks should sing Muskrat Love. In either case, I remember watching Captain & Tennille on variety shows during the 70s and 80s.

These songs had feeling, though, and most of them are timeless. Having a romantic night at home? There are certainly a couple of songs in here that will fit the mood.

Except maybe I Will Walk (500 Miles) by the Proclaimers. It's not your typical love song but this is one of my favorites. Several times a year this song will just pop into my head. It may have had something to do with having watched the movie Benny and Joon with Johnny Depp, Mary Stuart Masterson, Aidan Quinn and Julianne Moore in the 90s. This movie doesn't get a lot of attention, but I thought it was adorable (definition: chickflick) and this song is in the soundtrack. Another one that will stick with you once you've listened.

Quick - name the movie! I bet, if you were old enough to be listening to your own music and watching movies in the 80s, you could name the movie for each of these songs. My husband watches Top Gun at least twice a year - must be a guy thing - and partly because of the music. He has almost every song from that soundtrack on his iPod. He loves Footloose, too, although he's never seen the movie (okay - he's younger than me so I try not to look at him funny anymore when he says things like that).

Would these songs have lasted as well as they have had they not been tied to such successful movies? I tend to think so. They're catchy and dramatic and absolutely addictive.

A song with a phone number in the lyrics became so popular that today people still call that phone number and ask for Jennie. Most of the time, though, they can't remember the real name of the song. Another band, Devo, had costumes that sometimes looked like toilet seats. My sons think their song, Whip It, is the strangest song they've ever heard. And we danced to it back then - don't ask me how, I don't remember. Check out Rock Me Amadeus by the German artist, Falco. It wasn't as popular as it should have been - probably because everything but the chorus was impossible to understand (most of the song being in German) but there was a club in Portland, Oregon, that played this song every Saturday and my friends and I would go every weekend just so we could hear this song.