Just like heaven - THE CURE, 1987
KISS ME KISS ME KISS ME was the soundtrack of my summer of 1987, the summer that I lost my innocence when I saw (for the first time) a young couple having sex in a tent during a summer camp at the beach...
Talking about show me, show me, show me how you do that trick!!!
Just like heaven was The Cure's eleventh top 40 hit in the UK, and stayed on the charts there for five weeks during October and November of 1987, peaking at number 29. In the US, the song became The Cure's first top 40 hit when in January of 1988 it reached number 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 for one week.
The group largely wrote the song during recording sessions in Southern France in 1987. The lyrics were written by the band's frontman Robert Smith, who drew inspiration from a past trip to the sea shore with his future wife, Mary Poole.
The video was filmed in England in October of 1987. Set on a cliff overlooking a sea, the video recreates many of the memory detailed in the song's lyrics. While Smith had claimed for years that the video was shot at the same place that inspired the song, he later admitted that the bulk of it was filmed in a studio, utilising footage of the water and cliffs of Beachy Head taken for the band's 1985 video for "Close to Me".
During the song's piano solo, the sky turns to nighttime and the band is shown clad in white shirts. Mary Poole appears in this sequence as a woman dressed in white dancing with Smith. As Smith explained, "Mary dances with me in the video because she was the girl [in the song], so it had to be her."
http://youtube.com/watch?v=z-nkSGg0lk4
Smith met Mary Poole in school when he was 14 years old. The couple married in 1988 and have been together ever since. Turns out guys who wear black eyeliner can be happy...
79
Push it - SALT N' PEPA, 1987
"Push It" was the first Salt-N-Pepa single to be a success at mainstream radio and also appear on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, perhaps promoting the overall emergence of rap music in the late 1980s.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=BCV5yGKWjv4
The song became Salt-N-Pepa's signature single and was the beginning of a successful career for the female rap trio that would carry on into the mid-1990s, as the group would become the most successful female rap act and one of the most successful rap acts ever.
Sorry Neneh Cherry, no more female rappers in this countdown...
78
Call me - BLONDIE, 1980
The song was the main theme of the film American Gigolo. European disco producer Giorgio Moroder originally asked Stevie Nicks to help compose and perform a song for the soundtrack, but she declined. It was at this time that Moroder turned to Debbie Harry. Harry was asked to write the lyrics and melody, a process that Harry states took only a few hours. The completed song was then recorded by the band, with Moroder producing. The bridge of the original English language version also includes Harry singing "Call Me" in Italian ("Amore, chiamami") and French ("Mon cheri, appelle-moi").
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MeSw6P1TC0
77 Video killed the radio star - THE BUGGLES, 1980
Originally released in 1979, the lyrics of this song refer to a period of technological change in the 1960s, the desire to remember the past and the disappointment that children of the current generation would not appreciate the past. In the 1950s and early 1960s, radio was an important medium for many, through which "stars" were created.
It's in the 80's that a new generation of pop stars were born when on the midnight of August 1st of 1981, MTV launched on the american cable television network with the words "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll"
Appropriately, the first music video shown on MTV was "Video Killed the Radio Star"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWtHEmVjVw8
On February 27, 2000 The Buggles' video became also the millionth video to be aired on MTV.
The song, produced by Hugh Jones, was a single from the 1982 album After the Snow. While never reaching the Top 40, it gained popularity due to its airplay on MTV in early 1983 and its inclusion during the closing credits in the movie Valley Girl. The band re-recorded the song in 1990 for their album Pillow Lips reaching #76 in Top 100.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd9Ajmvvn6A&feature=related
I melt with you has been also used in many commercials including Burger King, Ritz cracker, M&M's and Taco Bell.
75
Pour some sugar on me - DEF LEPPARD, 1987
Back in 1986 while Def Leppard was nearing the end of the recording sessions for Hysteria, producer Mutt Lange felt that the album was still lacking a song that would have an appeal beyond the hard rock fans who had bought Pyromania. That song came to him during a bathroom break... The name, POUR SOME SUGAR ON ME.
Attention all strippers...This is your anthem!!!
I'm hot, sticky sweet from my head to my feet, yeah!!!
The band's signature song reached #2 in the US Top 100 and its success would send sales of Hysteria into the stratosphere. It finally reached number 1 on the Top Pop Albums a year after its release, and sold four million copies during the single's run.
Pour some sugar on me caught on with pop radio with an arena rock anthem feel in the style of Queen's "We Will Rock You" and Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'N Roll" (in fact, the verses of Pour Some Sugar On Me strongly resemble the verses from We Will Rock You, while the chord progression of the chorus of Pour Some Sugar On Me is exactly the same as the one in I Love Rock 'N Roll). The band later confessed that the semi-rap verses were inspired by the Aerosmith/Run-D.M.C. version of "Walk This Way"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSaAXDBvfho
74
The message - GRANDMASTER FLASH & THE FURIOUS FIVE, 1982
An old school hip hop song which lyrics were some of the first in the genre of rap to talk about the struggles and the frustrations of living in the ghetto. The song was written by Sugar Hill session musician Ed "Duke Bootee" Fletcher and Furious Five MC Melle Mel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3kRuJhIVIo
THE MESSAGE's signature synthesizer riff became so popular during the summer of 1996 when the then Puff Daddy sampled it on his first top 10 hit "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down"
The song's chorus of "Don't push me 'cuz I'm close to the edge" has become one of the most well known choruses in rap music history.
73
I ran - A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS, 1982
I can't imagine a list of greatest songs of the 80's without this song included. And is the combination of essential elements that made this tune an emblematic piece of this decade:
Fashion style, new wave music, low budget video, HAIRDOS!!
I ran became a huge hit in the US during the summer of 1982 reaching to #9.
The single was promoted by a distinctive music video that received heavy rotation on MTV.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUjIA3Rt7gk
Despite success in the States the single did not enjoy similar success in the band's home country of the United Kingdom, failing to make the top 40.
IT'S RICK JAMES, BITCH!!
...And this 80s classic his most popular song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75qXUfp4wtw
Super Freak is that kind of song that is well known by EVERYBODY, especially by those who grew up in the late 80s/early-90s for being sampled by M.C. Hammer on his smash hit "U Can't Touch This". However, the "Rick James" segments featured on Chappelle's Show have brought the original song back into general familiarity.
21 years before becoming Eli Stone's visions, George Michael introduced to the world the definitive image of the 80's: 
HIS BUM!!
Ahem... I mean, the whole ensemble:
Michael in shades, leather jacket and a particularly memorable pair of tight Levi's blue jeans and cowboy boots, playing a guitar near a classic-design jukebox that it was blown 3 years later in the Freedom video
Faith became the top-selling single of 1988 and the album is widely considered one of the greatest in pop music history and produced an amazing string of hit singles, including six Top 5 hits, four of which ("Faith," "Father Figure," "One More Try," and "Monkey") reached #1, making him the only British male singer to have four #1 singles from one LP on the Billboard Hot 100.
*There's something that I just noticed today. Pay attention to the first 37 seconds of the song... When you hear that fade-up organ introduction, you will hear a familiar tone that is based on the Wham! song "Freedom".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmd83LIADnE
70 Total eclipse of the heart - BONNIE TYLER, 1983
Produced by the power ballad genius Jim Steinman, Total eclipse of the heart remains his most successful commercial composition to date.Story tells that Steinman had given the song, along with "Making Love (Out of Nothing At All)," to Meat Loaf for his Midnight at the Lost and Found album. However, Meat Loaf's record company refused to pay for Steinman and he wrote the songs himself. Steinman's songs were then given to Bonnie Tyler.
Tyler's career reached new heights with this release and put her in the history books as the only Welsh artist to hit the number-one slot in the U.S Billboard magazine charts.
At its peak, the single of this song sold 60,000 copies per day, and approximately 5-6 million copies in total, and was number one throughout (almost) the entire world charts.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55nTwg5NIPM
69
She blinded me with science - THOMAS DOLBY, 1982
The quirky, playful synth-pop number built around bouncy synthesizer hooks, peaked at #5 in the US and failed to make the Top 40 in Dolby's native United Kingdom.
The song features interjections from the British scientist and TV presenter Magnus Pyke, who repeatedly shouts "Science!" and delivers other lines in a deliberately over-the-top "mad scientist" voice, the most famous line of which was, "Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto! You're beautiful!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IlHgbOWj4o
67
In the air tonight - Phil Collins, 1981
It is the song most often associated with Collins' solo career and notable for its atmospheric production, macabre theme and the famous explosive burst of drums that releases the musical tension.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz7gajAb2ww
The lyrics of the song take the form of a dark monologue directed towards an unnamed, possibly prominent person; the singer describes having witnessed an unspecified act perpetrated:
I was there and I saw what you did
saw it with my own two eyes
and anticipating an equally unspecified consequence
I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
I've been waiting for this moment for all my life
Even when Collins wrote the song in the wake of a failing relationship with his then-wife, an urban legend has arisen around the song. According to the legend, the lyrics are based on a tragic event Collins witnessed, usually a drowning in which a man could have helped the victim, but did not do so.
Another version of the story is that Collins came home one afternoon to find his best friend in his house. Allegedly his best friend had just raped his wife, and ran out the back door of the Collins' house. The friend, in his haste, fell into the Collins' pool, became entangled in the cover, and drowned. Supposedly, Collins watched his friend drown and did nothing.
26 years after its original release, Cadbury Schweppes used the song in their 2007 advertising campaign for its Dairy Milk chocolate bar. The commercial features a gorilla playing the piece's famous drum sequence. After its premier week in September, the song reached number 14 in the UK singles chart.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy52yueBX_s&feature=related
Even when the song wrote by George Michael was inspired by a scribbled note left for him by his Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley at a hotel, I want to share with you my own interpretation about the origin of this song. Wake me up before you go-go was written for Michael's former lover who was a "go-go" dancer. Got it?
I truly believe that George Michael has been hiding his homosexuality ever since he started his music career. Here are some facts:
Debut album title: MAKE IT BIG --- Gay!
Titles of popular songs by the duo: BAD BOYS, I'M YOUR MAN, FREEDOM, CREDIT CARD BABY, CARELESS WHISPER --- Mega Gay!
Colourful clothing and tight shorts wore by Michael for this music video --- Super Gay!
Luminous gloves and Michael's eyes while holding himself for this music video --- Ubber Gay!!
Ummm, I don't know... All these elements brings me to this conclusion. You see what I mean?
The song became their first UK number one hit, the album, Make It Big, was an unqualified success. At their height of popularity the duo split in 1986.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wsCZ7Ft_Z8
65
Don't worry, be happy - BOBBY MCFERRIN, 1988
Inspired by the expression's charm and simplicity taken from a famous quote by spiritual master Meher Baba, Don't worry be happy is the only a capella song in the countdown and was also the first to reach number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, holding that position for two weeks in September of 1988.
This classic tune was originally included in the soundtrack of Tom's Cruise movie "Cocktail", and won the awards for Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, respectively at the 1989 Grammy Awards.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DzHJhmHSYXY
From the excellent album Remain in Light, the song is considered one of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century by National Public Radio.
The verses of the song consist of David Byrne speaking rather than singing. With the lyrics "Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down", the song has a rather existential vibe to it, although it is usually interpreted to be a song dealing with the middle age crisis and the inevitable sacrifice of youthful ideals and dreams for conventional success:
And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!
The main portion of the lyric is said to be based on a preacher heard on the radio by Byrne and producer Brian Eno while they were driving through New York.
The music video features a bespectacled David Byrne dancing much like a marionette. The choreography was done by Toni Basil, famous for her hit song "Mickey", song that will featured in this countdown later.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZONBKy7qNw
Don't stop believing - JOURNEY, 1981
An inmortal tune and the band's signature song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip1zsUIosoA
Don't stop believing is well-known for its lyrics and its distinctive detuned piano introduction, described as "one of the best opening keyboard riffs in rock."
The song reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and has appeared in a number of popular media productions.
In recent years, the song has received a major resurgence in popularity. Remember the final scene of The Sopranos show finale?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=rnT7nYbCSvM
Singer Steve Perry was initially hesitant in allowing the song to be used in the show but later agreed. Due to all this over-whelming popularity, the song was reborn in 2007, leading the track to #1 on the iTunes charts 26 years after its release.
62
Welcome to the jungle - GUNS N' ROSES, 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYRC4H64EFk&feature=related
Is the "good ol' kickass American rock 'n' roll" song that made military dictator of Panama, Manuel Noriega surrender in 1989 after years of cruelty and dirty maneuvers as the "chief executive officer" of that country.
When Manuel Noriega fled to the Vatican Embassy in Panama where he had taken refuge, U.S. troops surrounded the embassy and played loud music. Noriega enjoyed opera and detested rock music in general. The Washington Post News Service reported, "With U.S. troops at the Vatican embassy continuing to wage psychological warfare against Noriega by blaring rock music over loudspeakers and greeting him with a hearty 'Gooood Morning Panama'." And so, to irritate and intimidate him (and to enjoy themselves in the process), the troops set up their loudspeakers and blasted the Vatican embassy with loud american hard rock tunes.
Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" was the first song to come roaring through the speakers. These were eventually stopped upon request by the Vatican. A few days later, Noriega surrendered.
The song peaked at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the band's first significant hit single. It is also considered by Slash the first song the band ever wrote together.
According to Axl Rose, the inspiration for the lyrics came from an encounter he and a friend had with a homeless man while they were coming out of a bus into New York. Trying to put a scare into the young runaways, the man yelled at them:
"You know where you are? You're in the jungle baby; you're gonna die!"
61
Eye of the tiger - SURVIVOR, 1982
Written at the request of Sylvester Stallone for the film Rocky III, this classic tune has became the ultimate "ready to fight" song. Just think of how many times you have heard this song in your lifetime!! Is the kind of stereotypical song that you know you are going to hear in a box ring fight, football game or whatever there's a competition between two powers involved.
The intro of the song says it all... You know, that Prum! Prum-prum-prum, prum-prum-prum, prum-prum-prum!!!
The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks from July 24, 1982.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYVrTQwUJEI
(To be continued...)
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