My Top 50 R&B Singles of the 1980s
Last year I wrote a list of the 50 best hip-hop singles of the 1980s for Spin, and now I'm gonna start making counterpart lists for other genres on here. Here's the Spotify playlist:
1. Frankie Beverly & Maze - "Before I Let Go" (1981)
Whether you know this song as being by Maze, Frankie Beverly, Frankie Beverly & Maze, or Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, it's the crowning achievement of the Bay Area band and their frontman. Maze capped their classic period with Live In New Orleans, and "Before I Let Go" was one of the new studio tracks tacked on after the live recording (Beyonce's hit 2019 cover was also a studio track at the end of a live album, I kinda wonder if that was a coincidence or an intentional callback). Beverly recently announced a farewell tour, bringing an end to a great 54-year run -- apparently the band will continue to tour with a difference vocalist as Maze Honoring Frankie Beverly, one more name.
2. Prince - "Little Red Corvette" (1983)
It's tempting to split hairs when doing genre lists -- "Little Red Corvette" was Prince's pop breakthrough and charted higher on the Mainstream Rock chart than on the R&B chart -- but I didn't want to do that too much here. Prince, Michael and Whitney redefined Black stardom in the '80s and are rightfully respected for that now, but at the time there was a lot more handwringing about authenticity and whether their music or image appealed more to White audiences. Now, I'm more interested in appreciating their work in the context of the R&B canon where it's always belonged.
3. Luther Vandross - "Never Too Much" (1981)
Some of the greatest vocalists, especially in soul, are the backing vocalists on the side of the stage, keeping the big name solo star sounding better than they really are. Luther Vandross spent the '70s singing backup for a bunch of superstars, and released two unsuccessful albums with the group Luther -- one of Luther's songs, "Funky Music (Is A Part Of Me)," was adapted by David Bowie into "Fascination" on Young Americans. In the '80s, though, Vandross finally got his chance at solo stardom, after singing lead on the Italo disco group Change's "The Glow of Love" became a mainstream hit. And "Never Too Much" is just a tour de force, a perfect encapsulation of what would make Vandross perhaps the most revered male vocalist of his generation.
4. The Isley Brothers - "Between The Sheets" (1983)
The Isley Brothers' longevity is astonishing and unrivaled in popular music. They broke through with 1959's "Shout" and are still making hits today with founding frontman Ronald Isley, meaning they've been on the charts to some degree in 8 different decades. So "Between The Sheets" is both from the first half of the Isleys' run and one of the more cutting edge songs ever released by a group more than 20 years into its career, something that still sounds perfectly of-the-moment whenever it gets sampled every few years.
5. New Edition - "If It Isn't Love" (1988)
When Bobby Brown left New Edition, both parties initially floundered -- the group's Under the Blue Moon and Brown's solo debut King of the Stage each flopped in 1986. Two years later, though, they both rebounded big. In fact, Brown's Don't Be Cruel and New Edition's Heart Break were released the very same day in June 1988, each a multi-platinum blockbuster that helped define the New Jack Swing era thanks to new sets of producers and songwriters (Teddy Riley and Babyface with Bobby, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis for New Edition). "If It Isn't Love" rides an almost industrial-sounding clanking loop that lends a nice weird edge to a classic earnest boy band song of yearning.
6. Michael Jackson - "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" (1983)
You can't really say that the opening track on the biggest album of all time is slept on, especially since it was a top 5 hit. But "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" is I think sort of the connoisseur's choice, currently the 6th most streamed song on Thriller (only ahead of the two non-singles and the cursed "The Girl Is Mine"), and it's the longest, funkiest track on the album, the one where MJ uses probably his largest assortment of voices and tones, just an incredible feat of vocal layering.
7. Whitney Houston - "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" (1987)
Another song that feels a bit more like a genre-transcending pop megahit than straight up R&B. But Whitney Houston getting booed at the Soul Train Music Awards less than 2 years after "I Wanna Dance" is, I think, a sad chapter in the story of '80s R&B, a moment when a legend was treated with suspicion resentment for making great, successful music that didn't quite fit in the tidy genre boxes. I understand it to some extent, but Whitney didn't deserve it.
8. Marvin Gaye - "Sexual Healing" (1982)
The music industry was flush with cash in the early '80s, and in 1982 alone veteran artists like The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and Marvin Gaye signed huge, unprecedented new contracts -- CBS gave Gaye the biggest deal for any Black artist to date as he finally left his label of two decades, Motown. In a more ideal world, Midnight Love would've been the beginning of a whole new chapter for Gaye like Let's Dance was for Bowie, not his last big gift to the world before a sudden, shocking end.
9. Tom Browne - "Funkin' For Jamaica (N.Y.)" (1980)
The first sound you hear on "Funkin' For Jamaica" is Jamaica, Queens jazz musician Tom Browne's trumpet, but you wouldn't necessarily guess that it's his song -- vocalist Toni Smith sounds like an absolute star on it, even if none of her other many session gigs hit like her work with Browne. I love the quasi-rapped musician chatter in between the verses, especially the guy who fakes that he's going to quote "Theme from Shaft" but stops short of an f-bomb: "That Tom Browne, hey man, he is an...ordinary guy."
10. Sade - "The Sweetest Taboo" (1985)
Sade (the band) and Sade Adu (the singer) were one of the first British acts to get time on American R&B radio, and it feels like every year their enduring influence is felt a little more deeply. They were a precursor to neosoul (Sade guitarist/saxophonist Stewart Matthewman is all over most of Maxwell's albums) and the Nigerian-born and London-based Adu is a godmother to the last couple generations of more international R&B scenes that have cross-pollinated talent and influences between North America, the UK and Africa.
11. Soul II Soul - "Back To Life (However Do You Want Me)" (1989)
The London collective Soul II Soul were an example of how the UK was beginning to influence R&B more via dance music by the end of the '80s. They never quite sustained the success of their 1989 debut Club Classics Vol. One, but Soul II Soul's Nellee Hooper helped shape the sound of the '90s producing hits by Sinead O'Connor, Bjork, U2, Madonna, and Sneaker Pimps.
12. The Gap Band – “Outstanding” (1982)
Tulsa brothers Charlie, Robbie and Robert Wilson started the Greenwood, Archer and Pine Band in 1967, in reference to the Greennwood neighborhood's 'Black Wall Street' community that was destroyed in the Tulsa race massacre in 1921. But The Gap Band didn't release an album until 1974, and didn't really start making hits until the '80s, peaking with 1982's Gap Band IV (actually their 6th album). I got to interview Charlie Wilson once, I love that he's still out here sounding great and making everyone he works with sound better, as a go-to backing vocalist for multiple generations of hip-hop stars from Snoop Dogg to Pharrell Williams to Kanye West to Tyler, The Creator.
13. Prince - "When Doves Cry" (1984)
Often, the last song written for an album is a hit because the pressure is ramping up to make sure the album has a hit. Prince probably knew he already had a gang of hits on Purple Rain, though. He whipped up "When Doves Cry" overnight after director Albert Magnoli told him he needed a song to fit a montage scene, and he just happened to make an utterly unique chart-topping smash to launch the entire phenomenon. Part of the legend of "When Doves Cry" is that doesn't have a bassline -- and that Prince recorded one, but decided to mute it to make the song more strikingly unconventional. I don't think modern listeners would necessarily pick up on that without hearing the story, though -- "When Doves Cry" still has a massive low end just from the kick drum, much like a lot of popular music from the last few decades.
14. Lipps Inc. - "Funkytown" (1980)
Prince topped the R&B charts for the first time in late 1979 with "I Wanna Be Your Lover" just a few months before another surprising song out of Minneapolis called "Funkytown" scaled the Hot 100 (apparently Minneapolis isn't really Funkytown -- the lyrics are more of a fantasy of moving to a bigger, funkier town like New York City). Longtime Prince associate David Z played guitar in Lipps Inc., and "Funkytown" vocalist Cynthia Johnson was in an early lineup of The Time called Flyte Tyme, so they were all conected within the scene. But "Funkytown" still feels like something alien and singular, a synthy studio creation from the tail end of disco's commercial dominance that pointed the way towards the synth pop that disco would morph into.
15. Janet Jackson - "When I Think Of You" (1986)
For a few years, the hype around "the Minneapolis sound" was a little misleading because it was all, "Funkytown" aside, just Prince and acts he was producing and writing for. But Prince accidentally gave rise to another prolific Minneapolis hit factory when he fired Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis from The Time for moonlighting as producers. Soon, they hooked up with the little sister of Prince's biggest rival, and set off on a legendary run of their own. "When I Think Of You" was the first of 16 Jam & Lewis productions to top the Hot 100, dwarfing even Prince's number of chart-toppers (five as an artist plus "Nothing Compares 2 U."
16. Stevie Wonder - "Do I Do" (1982)
Stevie Wonder's music embodies joy better and more often than almost anyone else's, so it's hard to say if "Do I Do" is the most infectiously elated song in his catalog, but it's up there. And one of the things that puts it over the top is the genuine dorky enthusiasm in Wonder's voice when he announces, "Ladies and gentlemen! I have the pleasure to present, on my album, Mr. Dizzy Gillespie! Blow! Blow, blow, blow, blow!" Five years after topping the charts with a posthumous tribute to one jazz age giant, Duke Ellington, Wonder got to give another one last moment in the sun, and you can tell he was totally geeked about it.
17. Teena Marie - "Square Biz" (1982)
Plenty of White artists like Daryl Hall & John Oates would occasionally top the R&B charts in the '80s, but pop radio was really their home. And even now when White singers like Robin Thicke become a regular presence on Black radio, Teena Marie remains sort of the gold standard that everyone else invariably gets compared to, usually unfavorably. All that aside, though, "Square Biz" just kicks ass, I get so excited when it comes on the radio.
18. Chaka Khan – “What 'Cha Gonna Do For Me” (1981)
I saw Chaka Khan at Artscape when I was a kid, but I didn't really come to appreciate what a monster run she had, especially from '78 to '81 when she had hits both with Rufus and as a solo artist. It was hard to pick my favorite, but I eventually settled on this one, which I just learned was first written and recorded by Average White Band.
19. Michael Jackson - "Rock With You" (1980)
When I'm making album lists, I strictly go by release dates, but with singles lists, I tend to categorize songs by their year of impact, whenever they peaked on the charts. So while Off The Wall came out in 1979, "Rock With You" hit #1 in January 1980, setting the tone for the decade he'd become the king. Also, I like how "What 'Cha Gonna Do For Me" and "Rock With You" start with similar snare fills, so I wanted to put them together.
20. Anita Baker - "Same Ole Love (365 Days A Year)" (1987)
Anita Baker has much more obvious signature songs, but here and there I try to just embrace my personal favorites. And I just became infatuated with "Same Ole Love" maybe 20 years ago when I'd occasionally see the video on BET's "Midnight Love," when I was up late channel surfing in college. Legendary session bassist Freddie Washington sounds amazing on this song.
21. Cameo - "Word Up!" (1986)
The oldest memories I have of any song on this list are of "Word Up!" which was a hit when I was 4-5 years old. So I really loved when the great animated series "Infinity Train" actually had "Word Up!" in an episode as part of someone's happy childhood memory.
22. E.U. - "Da Butt" (1988)
Chuck Brown, the Godfather of Go-Go, helped mint the genre with "Bustin' Loose," which peaked at #34 in 1979. Throughout the '80s, Go-Go became the pride of Washington, D.C., a fiercely loud and loose strain of live band funk, but Go-Go only troubled the charts in the same way one more time, peaking right in the same region of the Hot 100 when Spike Lee's School Daze helped boost "Da Butt" to #35.
23. DeBarge - "I Like It" (1982)
The DeBarge family and their groups Switch and DeBarge never quite became a royal pop family like their Motown precursors the Jacksons, but they had a pretty good run for a few years. The only sister in the group, Bunny DeBarge, wrote the often quoted "I Like It" bridge, delivered by El DeBarge,
24. Prince and the Revolution - "I Would Die 4 U" (1985)
The fourth single from Purple Rain doesn't have the same kind of pop immortality as the first three singles, but it's an important one to me. The 10-minute extended tour rehearsal version of "I Would Die 4 U" from the 12" single is amazing, one of my favorite memories with any pieces of music is listening to it while standing on the beach in Australia during my honeymoon.
25. Bob Marley and the Wailers – “Could You Be Loved” (1980)
The final album Bob Marley made in his lifetime, Uprising, might be his most religious record, but its most enduring song is the sweet little secular love song that fuses reggae and disco into an irresistible groove. These days, dancehall gets a lot more play than any Jamaican music from Marley's era on American R&B radio, but "Could You Be Loved" is that easy groove that just fits right in any time it gets played.
26. Cheryl Lynn - "Encore" (1984)
"Encore" was Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis's first #1 on the R&B charts as producers, before they hooked up with Janet and started dominating the pop charts. For years, Cheryl Lynn was known on Twitter as one of those older artists who was active on social media and really understood how to use it, like Dionne Warwick, until everybody found out a few weeks ago that Lynn doesn't have any official account and the one posing as her has always been a fake. Weird!
27. Janet Jackson - "The Pleasure Principle" (1987)
My favorite piece of Janet Jackson trivia is that 5 members of The Time (everyone except Morris Day) produced Janet songs, not just Jimmy and Terry. Monte Moir went crazy with the drum programming and synth lines on "The Pleasure Principle."
28. Teddy Pendergrass - "Love T.K.O." (1980)
Teddy Pendergrass was probably R&B's #1 sex symbol at the dawn of the '80s. Sadly, a 1982 car crash left him paralyzed from the waist down. And while he released several more albums, he never got back to that level of "Turn Off The Lights" and "Love T.K.O."
29. Tom Tom Club - "Genius Of Love" (1982)
Talking Heads represented something of a new paradigm for rock bands: they loved R&B and Black music as much as '60s rockers, but they never really tried to mimic those influences and sound bluesy and soulful. By covering Al Green or taking inspiration from Fela Kuti and P-Funk while still being unapologetically bugged-out White art school weirdos, they sidestepped the authenticity question and came up with a unique fusion that still saluted the originals. And when the band's rhythm section went off and made a side project album, they ended up with a fluke hit that actually took off on R&B radio more than anything Talking Heads ever did and has been sampled by countless hip-hop and R&B acts.
30. Nu Shooz - "I Can't Wait" (1986)
One of the weirdest triumphs of a White group on R&B radio in the '80s was the Portland, Oregon group Nu Shooz. Even the original version of "I Can't Wait" is pretty funky, but the remix by Dutch producer Peter Slagjuis, with all the vocal "ah" samples played on a synth, is really what made the song stand out and conquer multiple radio formats. Art of Noise's "Moments Of Love" had a similar vocal synth patch on a song that also crossed a White group over to Black radio in the mid-'80s.
31. Michael Jackson - "Beat It" (1983)
Quincy Jones asked Michael Jackson to write a song like "My Sharona" in his (successful) quest to make Thriller the most widely appealing album ever, and thank god Michael didn't understand the assignment and wrote something much better than "My Sharona."
32. The Dazz Band - "Let It Whip" (1982)
I'm a little obsessed with how the biggest hit by this Cleveland group topped the R&B chart while Michael Jackson was making Thriller, and it has the same distinctive drum pattern as "Beat It." Can't be a coincidence, right?
33. George Clinton - "Atomic Dog" (1983)
George Clinton had an absolutely incredible run of leading both Parliament and Funkadelic in the '70s, it's just jaw-dropping how much great music they made in the space of a decade. Unfortunately, that run started to dry up right around the time Clinton released his first solo album, but we got one classic single out of that one.
34. Patrice Rushen - "Forget Me Nots" (1982)
"Forget Me Nots" features another unforgettable bass performance by Freddie Washington. It's interesting how the '80s was the last time musicians really moved freely between jazz and R&B, from Patrice Rushen and Quincy Jones to James Mtume and Thom Browne and countless session players. We definitely lost something when that crossover faded away.
35. Rick James - "Super Freak" (1981)
A huge number of the songs on this list were famously sampled in post-'80s rap and R&B hits, and I'm trying not to rattle them off too much here, because it almost goes without saying, but that was how I first experienced a lot of this music. And it took me a long time to hear "Super Freak" as anything but the MC Hammer sample, but I'm glad I eventually did, because it's so much better in its original form.
36. Prince - "Controversy" (1981)
Prince supported Controversy on the road as an opening act for Rick James, and it created a legendary rivalry as the young upstart got ready to surpass his elder. Controversy gets a little slept on sometimes as a transitional Prince album, but I love it, and the title track really feels like a preview of where he was headed on 1999.
37. Starpoint - "Object Of My Desire" (1985)
Before Toni Braxton and Dru Hill, Starpoint were probably the biggest R&B act to come out of Maryland. And I got to interview a couple of the surviving members of Starpoint last year after their biggest hit was featured in "Stranger Things," but really their whole catalog is full of gems, I recommend checking out Starpoint beyond "Object Of My Desire."
38. Janet Jackson - "Rhythm Nation" (1989)
Rhythm Nation 1814 had one of the most successful singles campaigns of all time, with seven top 5 hits and four #1s. The title track peaked at #2 behind a Phil Collins ballad, but it's impressive that it got that far, it's the closest any pop superstar got to making basically a Public Enemy song.
39. Lionel Richie - "All Night Long (All Night)" (1983)
Lionel Richie was the most unapologetically mild crossover star '80s R&B had, in a decade full of crossover success stories, and I kind of respect how well he understood his lane and never tried to overcompensate for it. Even his only song that could remotely be described as a 'banger' topped the Adult Contemporary chart with yacht rock smoothness.
40. Zapp – “Computer Love” (1985)
Lots of people manipulated the human voice with vocoders and talkboxes in R&B and dance music over the years. But before T-Pain became synonymous with AutoTune, Roger Troutman and his band Zapp were synonymous with talkbox vocals. In fact, the first time I saw a video credited to 'Zapp & Roger,' I was under the impression that Zapp was a robot and Roger was his human sidekick or something like that. "Computer Love" was the perfect song to sum up Troutman's whole aesthetic, although it got a little extra bit of human soul from Charlie Wilson's backing vocals.
41. Aretha Franklin f/ George Michael - "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)" (1987)
If there were still doubts about the guy from Wham! and the level of his talent and how influenced he was by R&B, George Michael cleared things up by winning an R&B Grammy for a duet with the Queen of Soul, Aretha's overdue return to #1 for the first time since "Respect."
42. Surface - "Happy" (1987)
I used to love the R. Kelly song "Only The Loot Can Make Me Happy," so I was relieved to learn that everything I like about it was from a sample. I was also very surprised to realize that the New Jersey trio Surface had four R&B #1's, none of which is "Happy," which peaked at #2. Unfortunately, those other hits are all gooey ballads, and only "Closer Than Friends" sounds even a little like "Happy."
43. The Jacksons - "This Place Hotel" (1981)
"This Place Hotel" was after Off The Wall, so I can't really say it's the arrival of adult Michael Jackson, but it definitely feels like an early indication of what a zone he was in before Thriller, I love this song. "This Place" got its awkward title out of an attempt to avoid confusion with Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel."
44. Bobby Brown - "Don't Be Cruel" (1988)
Bobby Brown may have been amping like Michael, but he didn't share MJ's compunction about releasing a song with the same title as an Elvis hit. Radio stations probably played the single edit of "Don't Be Cruel" at the time, but these days when I hear the song, it's the whole 6:48 album version, which I love. It doesn't really need to be that long but I enjoy it. Babyface had just written his first R&B #1, "Girlfriend" by Pebbles, a year earlier, and Don't Be Cruel really marked his arrival as one of R&B's most successful songwriters ever.
45. Jennifer Holliday - "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" (1982)
It's rare that songs from Broadway musicals cross over to the pop charts before being made into a movie. But Jennifer Holliday's legendary Dreamgirls showcase went to #1 on R&B radio and even #22 on the Hot 100, even better than Jennifer Hudson's impressive cover from the 2006 movie.
46. Diana Ross - "Upside Down" (1980)
I interviewed Nile Rodgers a few years ago, and he said, "In a weird way, even when I'm working with a superstar, I always think in terms of 'This is their first album.' So it's a strange thing -- even though they're stars and they have their footprint and their big, let's not go backwards, let's go forward." You can hear that philosophy at work on Diana Ross's 11th album Diana, which rebooted her career, and gave Rodgers and Bernard Edwards a second wind as producers and writers after the disco backlash cut Chic's hitmaking run short. I love how wordy this song is, "Respectfully I say to thee, I'm aware that you're cheating" probably shouldn't work in a dance track but Ross makes it work.
47. Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force - "I Wonder If I Take You Home" (1985)
Freestyle, or Latin Freestyle, was briefly a huge commercial phenomenon in the second half of the '80s, an explosion of Hispanic artists out of New York and Miami making uptempo bangers that appealed to R&B radio, and gloopy ballads that crossed over to Adult Contemporary. I didn't really know anything about Freestyle until decades later, I just accepted it as part of the sound of the time.
48. Milli Vanilli - "Girl You Know It's True" (1989)
The whole Milli Vanilli phenomenon was kind of an absurd music industry farce. But the first and best Milli Vanilli hit holds up pretty well as a song, and it was written here in Maryland, by a Baltimore group called Numarx (including future label executive Kevin Liles) with Starpoint's Ky Adeyemo and an Annapolis guy named Bill Pettaway, who continued working as a gas station attendant after the song became a huge hit.
49. The Time – “777-9311” (1982)
The drum machine pattern that Prince programmed for "777-9311" is so legendarily weird and intricate that there was a fascinating Reverb piece about its origins last year. For a minute before 1999 really made Prince into a major star, the songs he was writing for The Time were doing about as well on R&B radio as his own songs, he was his own competition.
50. Keni Burke - "Risin' To The Top" (1982)
Keni Burke was a member of Chicago's The Five Stairsteps and one of the lead vocalists on their 1970 hit "Ooh Child," and over a decade later he was still making hits as a solo artist. "Risin' To The Top" is another one of those records that's at this point probably more famous for all the times it's been sampled than the song itself, but the original track is just perfection.
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