The 100 Best Songs of 1983, the Year Pop Went Crazy

Let’s kick it off with a true classic: Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl.” The Piano Man had just made The Nylon Curtain, an excellent yet somber art record, but this time, he decided to ditch all the next-phase new-wave malarkey and go for cheap rock & roll kicks. “Uptown Girl” souped up the doo-wop sound of 1963 for the summer of 1983. But the song took on a new life when a teenager named Olivia Rodrigo claimed it for the 2020s. Olivia turned it into “Deja Vu,” where she’s fighting with her ex over a hit from 20 years before she was born. She just sang “Uptown Girl” onstage with Billy last summer. Now that’s the mark of a classic — it keeps right on telling new stories, into the future. From 1963 to 1983 to 2023, the beat goes on.

The German synth-pop icon Nena tapped into a timeless sense of doomy teen melodrama with “99 Luftballoons.” Hell, Nena even predicted the China balloon invasion of 2023 — now that’s a New Wave prophet. Like Sade, Nena was the name of both the singer and the group, with “99 Luftballons” as a protest against the nuclear-arms race. They remade it as “99 Red Balloons” — her voice shreds harder in the German original (oh, the way she snarls “Kriegminister”), but the English version is the one that still rules the karaoke bars. Bonus points for the Captain Kirk reference — needless to say, William Shatner loved it.

The Isley Brothers reached a pinnacle of Eighties baby-making R&B with “Between the Sheets.” These guys were soul legends before many Eighties pop stars were even born. But they weren’t ready to settle for being a nostalgia act. “Between the Sheets” was a fresh style of Quiet Storm balladry, with Ernie Isley’s guitar, Chris Jasper’s lush synths, and the iconic vocals of Rudolph, Marvin, O’Kelly, and Ronnie Isley. It took on a whole new life in hip-hop, sampled on classics from A Tribe Called Quest and Keith Murray. Most famously, Biggie turned it into “Big Poppa.” Yet it will always belong to the Isleys.

Thomas Dolby came on as a crackpot English gearhead, in his white suit and glasses. The son of an Oxford archaeologist, he was building his own synthesizers as a teenager. He toyed with the boffin image on his great debut, The Golden Age of Wireless, but he took it to the bank with “She Blinded Me With Science.” “The sort of slightly forlorn mad-scientist character was somewhat endearing to people and was definitely a part of my personality,” Dolby said in the book Mad World. “And so I decided I was going to create a vehicle for that character.” The old man yelling “science!” was the real deal: 74-year-old Dr. Magnus Pyke, a U.K. TV personality. Pyke didn’t approve of the title, sniffing, “As a known scientist, it would be a bit surprising if a girl blinded me with science.” The tape was rolling, and that became the famous intro.

You know it’s an insane year when Rodney Dangerfield scores a rap hit. The comedy legend busts rhymes about how he don’t get no respect. Rodney’s got bars, too: “Steak and sex, my favorite pair/I have ‘em both the same way — very rare.” He was enjoying his late-game career boom, as every Eighties kid’s favorite ol’ dirty bastard. So the time was right to bumrush MTV with “Rappin’ Rodney,” kvetching from his childhood (“I was an ugly kid, I never had fun/They took me to a dog show and I won”) to old age (“They left the car and towed me away”). In the video, Rodney goes on trial for being a loser and faces the death penalty. The executioner turns out to be Pat Benatar.

Hooow-dyyyy! “Space Cowboy” is a lost electro-funk classic from Jonzun Crew, the essence of Eighties hip-hop yeehaw realness. Michael “Spaceman” Johnson rocks the party people with “yippie-aye-ay” chants and yodels, over galactic synth beats. He rides high in his 10-gallon hat and cowboy boots, singing, “He was last seen between Venus and Mars/Riding a comet and lassoing stars.” The Johnson brothers were electro pioneers from Boston, inspired by Sun Ra and P-Funk, with roller-skating hits like “Pack Jam (Look Out for the OVC),” “Electro Boogie Encounter,” and “Space Is the Place.” One of the brothers: Maurice Starr, the boy-band impresario who gave us New Edition and New Kids on the Block. “Space Cowboy” was a mega-weird art experiment that also happened to be a dance-floor smash, the ultimate 1983 combination.

A turning point in the history of American punk: Sonic Youth slither out of the Lower East Side, rising from the gutter with a whole new style of NYC art-freak guitar noise. “Shaking Hell” is the Youth’s first classic, from their full-length debut, Confusion Is Sex. The guitars clang and toll like evil bells, as Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore ride Jim Sclavunos’ bad seed of a groove. Kim Gordon declaims like an evil priestess, as she chants, “I’ll take off your dress! I’ll shake off your flesh!” Her voice escalates into demonic heavy breathing. “We did an incredible version of ‘Shaking Hell’ which we erased,” Moore told the zine Forced Exposure in 1985. “We only had a copy of it on a bad cassette which we had to transfer back to reel-to-reel, which got mangled, to use on the album.” Yet that just adds to the grimy ambience. Moore said, “They were dirty, dirty recordings.”

The last thing anyone expected from 1983: ZZ Top, the bearded blues buzzards from Texas, became chic. They didn’t need new haircuts, either — and still the same cheap sunglasses. But against all odds, these mangy old dogs adapted brilliantly to the pop-culture youth explosion, by leaning all the way into their beardness. They conquered MTV with their Eliminator Trilogy of “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Legs,” starring a trio of video vixens as superhero feminist avengers. “Sharp Dressed Man” is their turbo-charged hyper-boogie ode to lookin’ sharp and lookin’ for love. “Our audience grew up with us until the videos,” the late great Dusty Hill told Creem. “And they were beginning to get a little long in the tooth. Then the videos came along, and now we’ve recaptured the 16-year-old girls. The 16-year-old girls!”

“That song has created more babies after the song,” Lionel Richie once said. “We have populated the world.” “All Night Long” was a radical artistic left turn as bold as Neil Young’s Trans — the king of smooth ballads switched into fiesta-forever mode, with a calypso-inspired smash that made even Lionel-phobes break down and admit this man is three times a boss. Every detail clicks: the Trinidad-via-Tuskegee rhythms, the Pastel City video, even that accent when he purrs, “Life is good, wiiild, and sweet!” As for the African chant, it’s total gibberish — Lionel just made it up. But damn if it doesn’t work. “What I try to write about are real events,” he said. “There will always be an easy like Sunday morning. There will always be an endless love. There will always be an all night long.”

Stacey Q voices the erotic yearning of every California girl who ever dreamed of having sex with a synthesizer. The SSQ singer is one of the most underrated synth-pop sirens, best known for her 1986 solo smash “Two of Hearts.” (“I-I-I-I-I need you!”) But “Synthicide” is one of the great lost New Wave electro-kink bangers, as she pleads, “I gotta have my digital fix today!” The video is an anthology of all the Eighties tropes: You gotta love the keytar dude who tries to go Hendrix, playing it with his teeth, then smashing it on the ground. “Synthicide” was the highlight of SSQ’s cult fave Playback, along with “Screaming in My Pillow,” “Synth Samurai,” and the song about the girl who can only have sex with her “Walkman On.” It also appeared on the soundtrack of one of the Eighties’ dumbest teen comedies, Cavegirl. (You’re not missing a thing.) SSQ just reunited in 2020 for a new album, Jet Town Je T’Aime.

Neil Young went off the deep end with Trans, the notorious synth experiment where he distorted his voice through vocoders. It’s infamous as the flop that led to his label boss David Geffen suing him for making music that was “not commercial in nature.” As Young said, “To get sued for being noncommercial after 20 years of making records, I thought was better than a Grammy.” But as the world found out years later, Trans came out of Young’s struggles with his two-year-old son, who had cerebral palsy and couldn’t understand spoken words. In “Transformer Man,” he sings directly to his child — as he says in the bio Shakey, it’s about his search “to find some sort of interface for communication.” Young revived the song in a beautiful acoustic version for his 1993 MTV Unplugged special.

These Montreal synth geeks might have seemed like Men With One Hit, but they had the last laugh. “The Safety Dance” turned everyone in earshot into a blithering imbecile for a few weeks that summer. Preach, Men Without Hats: “We can dance if we want to! We can leave your friends behind! Because your friends don’t dance, and if they don’t dance, well, they’re no friends of mine!” The video featured singer Ivan Doroschuk in medieval garb, with a jester and a frolicsome peasant maiden. He wrote the song as his protest against mean bouncers. As he told Time Out, “I was getting kicked out of clubs for pogoing — for hitting the dance floor whenever they played Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ or the B-52s’ ‘Rock Lobster.’” Vindication: Men Without Hats bounced back four years later with a second hit, the equally excellent “Pop Goes the World.”

The Lyres were Boston garage-rock scruffers, led by Jeff “Monoman” Connolly on his Vox Continental organ. Their indie 45 “I Want to Help You Ann” updated the Nuggets songbook with a punk frenzy, going for a gritty high-speed tremolo guitar attack. The flip side, “I Really Want You Right Now,” sounds just as fierce. The band was ruling Boston clubs around the time the Pixies were learning how to write songs, and you can hear the Lyres’ loud-quiet-loud dynamics on Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, not to mention PJ Harvey, Nirvana, and all that followed. They retitled it “Help You Ann” on their debut, On Fyre, maybe the only 1980s album to cover a Pete Best song.

Two great country outlaws team up for a classic outlaw ballad: “Pancho and Lefty,” by Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt. One night on tour, Willie’s daughter Lana played him Emmylou Harris’ version. Willie was so blown away that he recorded it immediately with his band, then woke up his tourmate Merle to sing his part. A few months later, their one-take duet was a Number One country hit. In the video, Willie plays Pancho and Hag plays Lefty. But both their grizzled voices fit Van Zandt’s hard-ass poetry, as when Willie growls, “Livin’ on the road, my friend, is supposed to keep you clean/Now you wear your skin like iron and your breath’s as hard as kerosene.” At Willie’s 60th-birthday concert, he sang “Pancho and Lefty” with another outlaw who’d lived out this story: Bob Dylan.

Shalamar hit the sweet spot between L.A. R&B and London New Wave, with the shiny black-leather funk of “Dead Giveaway.” It’s a last dance for the classic Shalamar trio: smooth frontman Howard Hewett, future solo diva Jody Watley, and New Romantic style icon Jeffrey Daniel, more famous in Europe, Asia, and Africa than at home. They had their roots in Seventies disco — Watley and Daniels started out as Soul Train dancers, chosen for the group by Don Cornelius himself. But “Dead Giveaway” sums up the era when Daniel was hitting the London clubs with Bananarama and Culture Club. Equally great: “No Limits (The Now Club),” about a hotspot open to disco dancers, punks, and rockabillys, where “Beethoven freaks are into funk.” Shalamar went on to do one of the Eighties’ few protest songs about police racism: “Don’t Get Stopped in Beverly Hills.”

Joan Jett deserves credit for so many innovations, but “The French Song” is one of her boldest moves: an explicit garage-metal ode to a threesome. After fighting her way to the top with “I Love Rock & Roll,” Joan refused to tone it down for the mainstream. Her next album, brilliantly titled Album, has “The French Song,” where she rips through the chorus in her hilariously abrasive all-American sneer: “J’aime faire I’amour sur tout a trois!” In case you don’t parlez-vous her francais, she spells it out for you: “I have to laugh out loud, when you say three’s a crowd.” It was the “voulez vous couchez avec moi” of its time, yet it ruled MTV all summer. Proof that St. Joan really doesn’t give a damn about her mauvaise réputation. Eat your heart out, Serge Gainsbourg.

Mark E. Smith was notorious as the “Hip Priest” of U.K. post-punk, leading the Fall with the most evil sneer in rock & roll. But his music took a surprise turn in the early Eighties, when he arrived home with a young American bride on his arm. Brix Smith was a blond California art girl who was glam, tuneful, flashy, and a few dozen other things that he wasn’t. But they mesh in “Hotel Bloedel,” the song that kicked off the Fall’s classic Mark-and-Brix heyday, from the album Perverted by Language. “The first song I ever recorded with the Fall,” she recalls in her memoir, The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise. Her doomy croon meets his slang-king snarl over droning violin for a profoundly creepy epic. Brix Smith Start is now an acclaimed London fashion designer. Mark E. Smith died in 2018 — but he’s still scaring people.

The bitch was back. Many people figured Elton John was washed up at this point, and he was serving them plenty of evidence. (Have you listened to Jump Up! lately? Don’t.) But Captain Fantastic came back strong as an elder statesman in “I’m Still Standing,” his kickiest hit in years. He proved his New Romantic cred in the video, a pansexual MTV smash where he frolics on the French Riviera with an army of naked gay clowns. You can spot future Dancing With the Stars judge Bruno Tonioli, as the leather-thonged hotel doorman who Elton tips with a fistful of glitter. (The queer equivalent of catching the keys in a ZZ Top video.) Elton took a break during the video shoot to guzzle a half-dozen martinis with Duran Duran. After “I’m Still Standing,” he never faced another popularity crisis.

“We’d made two LPs as a male-only group,” Phil Oakey told Rolling Stone in 2000. “But two of the guys left and we had to do a tour, so we went out and recruited a couple of women. And then we had to give them something to do, really.” But those female voices made all the difference. Joanne Catherall and Suzanne Sulley were the first to say they couldn’t sing, yet their playful voices are the heart of “(Keep Feeling) Fascination,” along with a creepy synth hook that sounds like an asthmatic goat doing Cher karaoke. Those guys who left the Human League? They went on to form the equally brilliant Heaven 17, who crafted synth-pop classics like “Temptation,” “Let Me Go,” and “We Live So Fast.”

The world has decided to remember exactly one Loverboy song, the Friday-afternoon radio staple “Workin’ for the Weekend.” World, you’re blowing it. That isn’t even one of the top five Loverboy hits, but there’s no question about Number One: “Hot Girls in Love,” a blast of perfect disco-as-metal headband-wearing spandex glam-pop. These Canadian rockers elevate the cars-and-girls concept, with an ode to a muse who’s hot because she’s cool, with her lust for fast wheels, soft boys, and loud music. (“She likes her tapes on 10!”) Also savor the semiotics of Loverboy doing a hit called “Hot Girls in Love,” as if these loverboys are lovergirls in drag. The original boys of Hot Girl Summer.

One day in 1983, Paul Simon gave Art Garfunkel a phone call. The bad news: He was wiping Artie’s vocals off the reunion album they’d just recorded. The good news: Garfunkel was invited to his wedding to Carrie Fisher, just a few days away. Simon decided he didn’t want another voice singing these personal songs. “He makes the sound of them more agreeable to many, many people,” Simon told the L.A. Times. “But I don’t care.” Hearts and Bones holds up as his most underrated album, full of stormy adult romance; as you can hear, Simon and Fisher went through even more drama than Simon and Garfunkel. But it’s got a moment of romantic bliss in “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War.” It’s a fantasy of the Belgian surrealist painter and his wife dancing naked in the moonlight, to their favorite Fifties doo-wop records. (“The Penguins, the Moonglows, the Orioles, the Five Satins.”) It’s one of the most hopeful love songs in his catalog.

Wire Train get slept on these days, but that just means these San Francisco guitar boys are ripe for rediscovery. “Chamber of Hellos” was the underrated single that defined how Modern Rock for Sad Girls would sound for the rest of the decade; there was seriously a time when it wasn’t clear whether R.E.M. or Wire Train would become sad-girl America’s favorite band. The intricate guitar frills, the dub-wise bass, the echoey art-boy voices — an enigmatic power-gloom sound that Wire Train took to American Bandstand. They came from the Bay Area’s 415 Records scene, with simpatico labelmates like Translator (“Everywhere That I’m Not”), Romeo Void (“Never Say Never”), and Red Rockers, whose awesomely inane “China” became the pop breakthrough that Wire Train never had.

Pablo Moses was a crucial rustic figure in the Jamaican roots-reggae scene, rising up in 1975 with his album Revolutionary Dream and the crossover hit “I Man a Grasshopper,” a religious parable based on the TV martial-arts drama Kung Fu. He never had any interest in being a star, but he devoted himself to mystic meditations like “In the Future.” Moses looks ahead to the 21st century, warning about environmental disaster in his calm, kindly voice, over the skank of bassman Aston “Family Man” Barrett and drummer Mikey “Boo” Richards.

Accept blew the roof off the radio with “Balls to the Wall,” a revolutionary anthem with the German leather boys urging you to rise up and overthrow capitalism. The band chants the title over savage guitars, while Udo Dirkschneider yowls, “Let’s plug a bomb in everyone’s ass.” Udo’s voice is pure sandpaper — he sounds like Lemmy’s wart just had a baby with Bon Scott’s back hair. The whole Balls to the Wall album is a classic, reveling in the homoerotic subtext of metal testosterone. In “Love Child,” Udo rasps about “feeling the power of lust when this guy’s passing by,” adding, “Don’t know what I am/A woman or a man?” Balls to the wall! 

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark were one of the U.K.’s kickiest synth-pop duos. On their 1983 gem Dazzle Ships, they managed to get more awesomely pretentious than ever, and that’s an achievement considering their previous album was called Architecture and Morality. Dazzle Ships was their Kid A — as Andy McCluskey said, “We wanted to be Abba and Stockhausen.” It was a commercial flop that got roasted (“Guzzle Shit,” the Boston Phoenix called it), but it’s rightly taken its place as their masterwork, right down to the elegiac finale “Of All the Things We’ve Made.” “Telegraph” is the crown jewel, a satire of how people keep falling for the utopian promises of new social media. (Talk about a song that’s decades ahead of its time.) O.M.D. are still running at the same creative level, on recent albums like The Punishment of Luxury and English Electric.

Never bet against Cheap Trick. Just when the music business figured the Trick were washed up, these high rollers roared back in ’82-’83 with power-pop gems like “She’s Tight,” “If You Want My Love,” and best of all, “I Can’t Take It.” It wasn’t just the first song on their new album — it’s their greatest post-Budokan tune, the moment when Robin Zander stepped out as a songwriter, and arguably the best thing Todd Rundgren produced in the Eighties.* MTV couldn’t resist the psychotic video. “I Can’t Take It” missed the charts, but it can hang with any hook on In Color or Heaven Tonight — hell, it wouldn’t sound out of place on Rubber Soul. Cheap Trick still play it today. As Rick Nielsen proudly told Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene, “We’re too dumb to quit.”

* Except the Psychedelic Furs

The late Scott Miller was one of the Eighties’ most brilliant indie songwriters, besotted by Big Star, James Joyce, and Star Trek. His band Game Theory operated under the radar, with a string of head-spinning classics like Lolita Nation and Real Nighttime. (His book Music: What Happened? is a treat, too.) “Nine Lives To Rigel Five” is a love song to the brightest star in the Orion galaxy, a blue supergiant 870 light years away. It soars with Miller’s jagged guitar, sci-fi B-movie keyboards, and the invitation, “Let’s get out the Twister game and get down on all fours.”

The L.A. punk poets stretched out in “The New World,” a road trip through the down-and-out side of Reaganist America. After X spent their first three albums chronicling the dirty dreams of L.A., More Fun in the New World was the album where they did that for the rest of the country, from Flint to Buffalo to Mobile to the Motor City. “The New World” chronicles the have-nots, at a time when the new president’s supply-side economics were raising the unemployment rates to all-time highs. John Doe and Exene Cervenka harmonize over Billy Zoom’s rockabilly guitar twang and D.J. Bonebrake’s drum shuffle, wisecracking, “It was better before, before they voted for what’s-his-name.” The revitalized X are back on the road this year, with new music on the way.

“I can’t get to sleep/I think about the implications” — now there is one extremely 1983 opening couplet. Men at Work did happy-go-lucky pub-rock singalongs like “Down Under,” one of the year’s first Number One hits. But under the jolly surface, the Australian band explored surprisingly dark emotional territory. “Overkill” was their loveliest song ever, a poignant tale of insomniac loneliness, with the hook “Ghosts appear and fade awaaay.” (The follow-up hit was equally choice: the anti-nuke protest “It’s a Mistake.”) “Success went to my head,” Colin Hay told Rolling Stone when the Men made the cover. “But it didn’t like it there, so it moved down into my left lung, where it lives quite comfortably, except for an occasional bit of congestion.”

The US Festival was one of the key music events of that summer, especially Heavy Metal Day, headlined by Van Halen. It introduced a horrified adult world to the new breed of headbangers, especially a Sunset Strip mob calling themselves Mötley Crüe. Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, and Mick Mars went on in the kiss-of-death afternoon slot, playing songs nobody knew from their upcoming debut album, Shout at the Devil. Were these guys nervous? Ah, no. “Looks That Kill” slew the crowd and became the Crüe’s career-making single, winning over skeptics with its over-the-top glam burlesque.

One of the year’s craziest left-field hits: a celebration of NYC jump-rope culture, from former Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren. The London huckster shouts out champion double-dutch teams like the Ebonettes and the Fort Greene Angels, calling out, “All over the world, high school girls take to the ropes and turn them slow!” “Double Dutch” also salutes hip-hop scenesters like the Zulu Nation, and swipes a South African mbaqanga groove straight from Soweto, the Boyoyo Boys’ 1977 “Puleng.” (Yes, they sued.) It was a U.K. Number Three hit, but it really took off on MTV. The video showcased the double-dutch teams’ eye-popping artistry, plus the most unfiltered African grooves heard on U.S. airwaves at that point. Liz Phair turned it into her 1990s indie-rock classic “Whip-Smart,” with the hook, “When they do the double dutch, that’s them dancing!”

Womack & Womack were a family affair, rooted in the bloodlines of classic American soul. Cecil Womack’s brother Bobby was Sam Cooke’s guitarist; Linda Womack was Cooke’s daughter. (Bobby was married to Cooke’s widow Barbara — until she shot him after catching him in bed with Linda.) They debuted as a married couple with their album Love Wars, harmonizing with family members singing and playing along, in gritty tunes about real-world romantic struggles. “Love Wars” is the soul testimony of lovers who don’t want to be fighters. It’s a goosebumps moment when they sing, “Bring it on home, and drop them guns on the floor.”

Adam Ant was the kind of rogue who would try absolutely anything for a hit, whether it was pirate gear, tribal drums, heavy guitar, even “Ant Rap.” But in “Strip,” he offers a philosophical inquiry into the topic of nudity, and why he’s in favor of it. As he pleads, “We’re just following ancient history/If I strip for you, will you strip for me?” Adam goes for a glam-folk makeover in “Strip,” with rollicking Celtic fiddles. But even when he’s stripped naked, this Prince Charming remains a show-biz pirate at heart, overdubbing himself a chorus line of hormonally crazed showgirls kicking madly at the ceiling.

A before-and-after moment for rock — the first time Metallica hit the world hard enough to be heard. “Hit the Lights” kicked off their full-length debut, Kill ‘Em All, announcing the arrival of a new metal generation intent on doing it their own way. It was the first song James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich ever wrote — they sound like the hungry, pimply kids you see on the back cover. Kirk Hammett had only been in the band three weeks. It’s a statement of purpose, with Hetfield roaring, “No life till leather, we’re gonna kick some ass tonight!”

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto. Styx invented recap-rock with “Mr. Roboto,” a Number Three hit that breaks down the plot of their sci-fi concept album Kilroy Was Here. It gives you the backstory of Robert Orin Charles Kilroy, a guitar hero in a futuristic theocracy where music is outlawed. (Yeah, basically a rip of Rush’s 2112.) As Dennis DeYoung admitted, “‘Roboto’ was never intended to be a single.” But it was catchy enough to stand on its own. He sings, “The problem’s plain to see/Too much technology/Machines to save our lives/Machines dehumanize!” And this was in an era when “technology” meant landlines and TRS-80s. DeYoung shows off his ability to sing in Japanese and his inability to pronounce the word “modern.” (No, there’s no such thing as a “modren man.”) It remains a travesty that he failed to win an Oscar for his portrayal of Kilroy.

I don’t want to oversell this one — just a melodramatic little synth-pop shiver, not much of a hit in the U.S., the U.K., or elsewhere. But for synth-pop devotees, it’s a ballad that pierces to the heart with all the exquisite beauty of doo-wop like “Earth Angel” or “In the Still of the Night.” The Comsat Angels came from the Northern English post-punk stronghold of Sheffield, taking their sci-fi name from a short story by J.G. Ballard. Unfortunately, in the U.S., they had to use the name “C.S. Angels” for copyright reasons. “Will You Stay Tonight?” is the song of a bashful heart at the moment of truth, when you realize that shyness is nice but now is the time to finally blow your cool and say how you feel. There’s so much emotion in every digital tremble. And those octagonal drums — wow.

“Our first American tour, people were not ready for us,” INXS’s Andrew Farriss told me in 2008. “One night in Texas, somebody threw a pistol onstage. There was a note tied to the barrel. It said, ‘You’re gonna need this.’” But the Australian rockers changed minds with “Don’t Change,” an undeniable punk-disco anthem from their breakthrough Shabooh Shoobah. A generation of girls and gays heard Michael Hutchence’s voice and felt the earth move under their feet. As Ferriss said, “Radio had very tight formats then — you were in the rock area or the dance area. So if you wanted to go exploring like Star Trek outside your area, then ciao.” But INXS made “Don’t Change” hit home like a new sensation.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, was accusing Billy Idol of not posing ridiculously enough. But Billy obviously took a look in the mirror and demanded “Mo, mo, mo.” “Rebel Yell” is the most egomaniac moment in the career of a man who turned egomania into a musical genre. But he roars through this tale of an insatiable midnight-hour sex fiend — Billy seems to meet lots of those — with every guitar screech and drum thump amped into the red. 

So hard for it, honey. The Seventies disco queen fought her way into the Eighties with a hard-hitting populist ode to the blue-collar female work force, not a demographic getting much love from the Top 40 in those days. Summer wrote it inspired by a women’s-room attendant she met at a fancy Hollywood restaurant — Summer put her photo on the back of the album cover. The video, with a grown-up flash mob of waitresses and teachers and construction workers dancing in the street, was a cathartic rush then and now.

The Violent Femmes got discovered one summer afternoon in 1981, three nerds busking on the sidewalk outside of a Milwaukee drugstore. One of the pedestrians who stopped to listen: Chrissie Hynde, who was so knocked out, she immediately invited them to open for the Pretenders. That night. The Femmes banged out their debut album with little more than Gordon Gano’s acoustic guitar, Brian Ritchie’s stand-up bass, and Victor DeLorenzo’s drums, with intense tension-and-release dynamics matched to weapons-grade bad vibes. Still in his teens, Gano seethes with sexual frustration in “Add It Up,” pondering key philosophical questions like “Why can’t I get just one fuck?/I guess it’s got something to do with luck.”

The greatness of Def Leppard can be summed up in four words, and not gunter glieben glauten globen. The four words are: Girls totally liked them. This was a breakthrough in metal terms. Lep served glam thrills for the dancing ladies: They sang harmonies, they pumped up the beat to near-disco levels, they wrote songs as tight as their Union Jack shorts. As guitarist Phil Collen used to say, “We’re more Duran Duran than Black Sabbath.” Fighting words, but the Sheffield crew lived up to it with “Photograph,” the Pyromania banger that turned them into a megaplatinum hit machine. “We never wanted to look like tramps,” Joe Elliott told Rolling Stone. “Some of these bands, like Motörhead, just sort of turn up in their car-mechanic overalls, with unwashed hair. To me, that is really abusing the audience.”

A buried treasure of Paul McCartney’s career, not to mention his finest tune of the Eighties. Macca was on a post-Wings roll with his twin hits, Tug Of War and Pipes of Peace. “So Bad” is an impossibly delicate and bittersweet ballad, the kind of melody any other songwriter would have sold a kidney to compose, with Paul lobbing high notes across the room to Linda like it’s no big deal. (Not much cop in the lyrics department, but it beats “Say Say Say.”) The drummer? Some guy named Ringo. “So Bad” wasn’t a major hit, and he’s never done it live, but it’s a ballad soulful enough for Macca’s idol Smokey Robinson to sing — he covers it beautifully on the 2014 tribute album The Art of McCartney.

The New Zealand rock scene was a hotbed of creativity, with nobody in the outside world butting in or paying attention. Just an island of 70 million sheep and a bottomless supply of eccentric guitar bands. The Verlaines dropped their debut single, “Death and the Maiden,” on the Dunedin label Flying Nun, gossiping about French poets over chiming guitars, with the “Verlaine Verlaine Verlaine” chorus. Graeme Downes was already one of the craftiest songwriters anywhere, as heard on the band’s EP 10 O’Clock in the Afternoon, with gems like “You Say You” and “Joed Out.” By the 1990s, the Verlaines’ influence was all over indie rock, from the Spinanes (their fan tribute “Hawaiian Baby”) to Pavement. Stephen Malkmus later covered “Death and the Maiden,” the least he could do after ripping it for “Box Elder.” Matthew Goody’s recent book Needles and Plastic gives a superb Flying Nun history.

Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson — now and forever, are the ultimate New Wave double threat. Hearing them sing together is one of the eternal joys of being a music fan, and they belt “Legal Tender” like 52 girls packed into the four lungs of two groovy Southern women. Pierson and Wilson sing about counterfeiting cash in the basement, using it as a feminist metaphor for outsmarting the patriarchy. (New Wave girls love to sing about stealing.) There’s so much evil glee in their voices when they chant, “10! 20! 30 million dollars! Ready to be spent!” A highlight of the B-52s’ stellar Whammy!, which has hidden gems like “Trism” and “Song for a Future Generation.”

Ebn-Ozn were the quintessential 1983 one-hit wonder, cramming so many ideas into “AEIOU Sometimes Y” they didn’t really need another one. Ebn is the synth whiz, whipping up deranged hooks on his Fairlight CMI. Ozn is the suave blond stud, talking shit about his escapades with a Swedish muse named Lola, having a cappuccino on the streets of NYC. He’s like a cross between Klaus Nomi and David Lee Roth, with cooler hair than either. True romance, Eighties-style: “She was nice to me, you know? She let me keep on my cowboy boots!” For us diehard Ebn-Ozn fans, the whole Feeling Cavalier album is a must. The sleeper: “Video DJ,” which has a shout out to Kajagoogoo.

The Minutemen were raging through the punk underground, coming off their ferocious full-length debut, What Makes a Man Start Fires? Guitarist D. Boon and bassist Mike Watt were best friends from childhood, and with drummer George Hurley, their music was full of corndog humor and working-class resistance. As Watt put it, “All you got is you, so you have to make something out of it.” They stretched out on Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat, with grooves like “Cut” and “Little Man With a Gun in His Hand.” But the left-field highlight is “The Product,” with Byrds-gone-feedback guitar and an out-of-nowhere trumpet solo. D. Boon babbles like a man possessed, about feeling like “the product, the product, the product, the product … the product of capitalism!”

There comes a moment in every jazz legend’s life when they realize it’s time to to strap on that keytar and dance. At least, it happened to Herbie Hancock. The result: “Rockit,” his avant-ridiculous hip-hop robo-funk smash. Hancock’s résumé included everything from Miles Davis’ Nefertiti to solo fusion like Head Hunters to the Death Wish soundtrack. But here he hooked up with Material producers Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn, plus scratching from turntablist Grand Mixer DXT, who’d shown his moves in the movie Wild Style. Throw in some “Planet Rock”-inspired vocoders and a Led Zeppelin sample, and you’ve got “Rockit.” Hancock also appeared at the 1985 Grammys for a strange synthesizer tutorial, in a four-way keyboard jam with Howard Jones, Thomas Dolby, and Stevie Wonder.

These days Sparks are recognized as art-rock pioneers, thanks to Edgar Wright’s documentary The Sparks Brothers. Ron and Russell Mael had quirky hits around the globe, yet they remained unknown in their native U.S. But “Cool Places” gave them a shot at American kids, as an irresistible synth-disco duet with the ultimate New Wave California girl, the Go-Gos’ Jane Wiedlin. Who’s cooler than Jane? Nobody. It’s an irresistible ode to two dorky kids hitting the hipster clubs they can’t get into, with Sweet Jane cooing, “I never wanna cool down.” Her yin is the perfect match for their yang — this is the closest Sparks came to a Top 40 hit.

The most audacious fan-fic hit of all time. German one-shot Peter Schilling didn’t just do an unauthorized sequel to David Bowie’s Major Tom saga, he wrote himself into the story. Just like Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and “Ashes to Ashes,” Schilling’s “Major Tom” tells the story of the lonesome space cadet, lost in the cosmos, but he does it so powerfully that it became a permanent part of the story. “Major Tom” made a memorable appearance in Breaking Bad as the karaoke video left behind by a dead meth cook. But maybe the ultimate epitaph is William Shatner’s amazing 2011 concept album Seeking Major Tom, where he narrates the whole story of Tom’s space voyage, covering the Schilling and Bowie songs, but also throwing in “Rocket Man,” “Walking on the Moon,” “Spirit in the Sky,” “Space Cowboy,” “Twilight Zone,” and “Iron Man.” This album actually happened.

The bottle-blond threesome were on top of the world in 1983. Years before BTS made concept albums about psychologist Carl Jung, the Police were on the case with Synchronicity. (It was the Map of the Soul of its time.) “Every Breath You Take” was the year’s biggest hit, yet it’s never left the radio, with its brilliantly sparse sound. Sting does for the one-note piano solo what Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” did for one-note guitar solos. “It’s ostensibly a love song, a very seductive romantic love song,” Sting told Rolling Stone. “But it’s about controlling somebody to the nth degree and monitoring their movements.” Most fans missed the dark subtext. “It’s not like ‘Stand by Me,’ which is this wonderful noble song that means just one thing. ‘Every Breath You Take’ is very ambiguous and quite wicked.” Sting later wrote an answer song, his 1985 solo hit “If You Love Someone, Set Them Free.” “I had to write the antidote,” he said, “after I’d poisoned people with this horrible thing.” Go off, King of Pain.