Welcome to the 80s-est!

Can one song encapsulate an entire decade? For the sake of what we’re doing here, let’s go ahead and say “Yes!” 

You don’t need to have lived through the 1930s to understand it, as long as you can listen to “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” because that’s everything you need to know right there. The reason Happy Days used “Rock Around the Clock” as its original theme song is because it gave you the exact feeling you needed to put you in the 50s mindset. 

So what about…the 80s? What song sums up the Reagan years? What tune immediately transports the listener to the JCPenney checkout line with a pair of Wranglers and a Trapper Keeper in their cart? What song would Dolph Lundgren and Grace Jones have on in the background as they made a quiche and solved their Rubik’s Cube?

That’s what we here at The 80s-est have set out to discover. 

We, the creators, lived through the 80s and so we have some definite ideas about which songs scream 80s! But let’s be clear: we fully understand that the decade was not experienced in any sort of monolithic fashion. If you lived in The Bronx in 1984, the sounds you listened to were likely very different than what someone living in remotest Alaska in 1981 might have heard. Our perspective is very much that of two guys who were teenagers in the 80s in rural Ohio. Our perspective is that of cable-less denizens of a small town whose pop music experience was shaped by Casey Kasem and Friday Night Videos, because we didn’t even live in a big enough community to have access to MTV. Our 80s are not everyone’s 80s. 

Additionally, we’ve made some choices in our selections. We very deliberately decided to eschew artists who we felt really transcended the decade. Madonna reinvented herself 1,000 times after 1989 was gone. Prince is eternal. Bruce Springsteen continues to produce good music, when he’s not podcasting with President Obama. So, although we agree that Like a Virgin, Purple Rain and Born in the U.S.A. are very 80s songs, you will not find them here. 

As is indicated above, the creators here were very much not cool in the 80s. So, while you and your super-hip friends might have been listening to The Cure and/or Eric B. and Rakim, we were not exposed to them. Our brackets are very Top 40-forward. 

We ask, then, that you take our bracket in the spirit it was intended and join us in determining which of these 64 songs best capture the spirit of the years 1980-1985. This is…The 80s-est!

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