My Top 50 Hard Rock and Metal Singles of the 1980s
So far I've done lists of my favorite hip-hop, R&B, and alternative rock singles of the 1980s. When I did the alternative list last year, I figured that would be one of two rock lists I did for the decade. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to do one list focused on metal and hard rock and a third that's just, for lack of a better term, "mainstream rock" that has neither a metal nor punk/alternative lineage (you know...Bruce Springsteen, Journey, stuff like that). I try to avoid too much subgenre hairsplitting, but it just felt like it made sense for the '80s, when hard rock really became a permanent thriving sector of the music industry. I tried to really represent the range of the genre in the '80s, even if there is a lot of so-called "hair metal" here.
Here's the Spotify playlist.
1. AC/DC - "Back In Black" (1980)
AC/DC were one of the best bands in the world for a few years there, both before original frontman Bon Scott's untimely 1980 death, and after his replacement Brian Jones as well. And while the Scott era is the original article and the later version is great partly because they changed nothing musically and got a singer with a similar vibe who Scott himself was a fan of, I do love Jones's unique shriek, and I think the title track to Back In Black adds a nice little swing to the band's terse grid of four-on-the-floor riffage.
2. Iron Maiden - "Run To The Hills" (1982)
Iron Maiden also changed singers just before their greatest commercial triumphs. And while Paul Di'Anno, who just died four months ago, sang some Iron Maiden classics admirably on the band's first two albums, his replacement Bruce Dickinson brought the operatic wail that turned them into champions of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
3. Van Halen - "Panama" (1984)
I am unintentionally running into an early theme here of bands that famously changed singers, although really that just underlines how hard rock and metal are a bit different from other styles of rock in how the guitarist is often king and the lead singer is far more likely to be replaced. Van Halen, much more than AC/DC or Iron Maiden, actually became a fairly different band after the lineup change, while still remaining pretty hugely successful with Sammy Hagar. Alex Van Halen recently vindicated a lot of Van Hagar haters by writing a book about the band that abruptly stops at the end of the David Lee Roth era, which is really his prerogative. And in a way the band's ascent up through 1984 and 1984 was a complete journey unto itself, with the album's last two singles "Panama" and "Hot For Teacher" representing, at least to me, the summit of their excellence.
4. Guns N' Roses - "Welcome To The Jungle" (1988)
Of course, Guns N' Roses never changed lead singers because Axl Rose flipped the script and seized power to become the band's only permanent member and hard rock's most infamous diva. But for a couple beautiful years, those 5 guys from the Appetite For Destruction lineup ruled the fucking world. I started really paying attention to music in the early '90s when GNR were already established, and they were briefly my first favorite band (until Pearl Jam came along -- I really loved guitar solos so it was mostly just Mike McCready luring me away from Slash). And I'd always kind of assumed "Welcome To The Jungle" was a huge song right away, I didn't realize until much later that it took over a year to become a top 10 hit, after its follow-up "Sweet Child o' Mine" had gone to #1. But it still just feels like the song that kicks in the door and demands that you love this band.
5. Motorhead - "Ace Of Spades" (1980)
Just a perfect song, not something I've never heard on the radio very often, but it still felt like it needed to be hear as a shining example of speed, volume, and attitude. Lemmy was so fucking cool.
6. Rush - "Tom Sawyer" (1981)
Arguably the two greatest rock drummers of all time, Keith Moon and John Bonham, died in 1978 and 1980, respectively. And while Rush drummer Neil Peart was an entirely different kind of drummer than those two British legends, he's easily the most likely candidate for who became the greatest living rock drummer in the early '80s after they passed. Is "Tom Sawyer" the ideal air drumming song? Probably. I'm a drummer and I'd be scared to play "Tom Sawyer" on actual drums, but I love to pretend to rattle off those insane tom-tom fills when it comes on the radio in the car.
7. Motley Crue - "Kickstart My Heart" (1989)
Chart peaks can be deceiving or surprising when it comes to a band's biggest hits, and sometimes it takes years or even decades for the truth to shake out. "Kickstart My Heart" was the Motley Crue's 6th-highest charting song on the Hot 100, and 16th-highest charting song on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. But today it's got twice as many streams as any other Crue song, and it's the one I hear on the radio most often, and that's totally deserved. I think Vince Neil is the weakest frontman of any of the '80s monsters of rock, but I love that he sounds so wistful about how much ass they kicked on the bridge of "Kickstart My Heart."
8. Living Colour - "Cult Of Personality" (1988)
When I was a kid I found it slightly confusing that the most significant Black sketch comedy show was called "In Living Color" and the most significant Black hard rock band was called Living Colour. Funk metal got pretty embarrassing in the '90s, but Vernon Reid and Corey Glover really made an explosive and incredible sound together on Vivid and they remained an awesome band for a while, I wish their initial success had been sustained a bit longer.
9. Metallica - "One" (1989)
Metallica was initially a true word-of-mouth phenomenon, and in 1988 they got their first platinum plaques, for Master of Puppets and ...And Justice For All, without really any radio or television exposure. So by the time they finally released their first music video in early 1989, they had the clout to get MTV to play an incredibly bleak 7-minute black-and-white of a prog metal epic about the anguish of an injured soldier on the edge of death. Whatever you think of Metallica's more accessible '90s work (I'm personally a fan), the way they became huge on their own terms in the '80s was pretty awesome.
10. Ozzy Osbourne - "Crazy Train" (1980)
Ozzy Osbourne was kicked out of metal's greatest band Black Sabbath in 1979, and soon linked up with Quiet Riot guitarist Randy Rhoads to make a couple of classic solo albums before
I wish I never heard the jazz crooner version of "Crazy Train" that was the theme song for the reality show about Ozzy's family, in fact I wish I never saw the show period.
11. Dio - "Rainbow In The Dark" (1983)
Ronnie James Dio and Vinny Appice joined Black Sabbath for a couple years in the early '80s before breaking off to start their own band, and I love both Sabbath-fronted Dio and Dio's records, which kick ass despite the synths and rainbow talk. Appice really goes nuts with drum films at the end of "Rainbow," I wish it faded out later so I could hear more of that. If Ozzy wasn't the most obvious candidate for the living embodiment of heavy metal, it would probably be Ronnie, who popularized the "devil's horns" gesture. Nice use of "Rainbow In The Dark" in the recent film Kinds Of Kindness, by the way.
12. Bon Jovi - "Wanted Dead Or Alive" (1987)
The first two Slippery When Wet singles that Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora co-wrote with Desmond Child, "You Give Love A Bad Name" and "Livin' On A Prayer," both hit #1 and made the band the greatest pop star of 1987, effectively began hair metal's era of Hot 100 dominance. But it's the third single, a slower, campier outlaw anthem that Bon Jovi and Sambora wrote before meeting Child that I think is their finest hour.
13. Def Leppard - "Photograph" (1983)
When I tabulated my favorite singles artists of the 1980s, Van Halen was the highest ranking hard rock band, but Mutt Lange was just ahead of VH for his work with AC/DC and Def Leppard (Metallica was the only hard rock act in the list of albums artists in the same post). And that feels right, Mutt Lange was basically the Michael Bay of rock music, a vulgar auteur who made everything he produced bigger and louder and sillier and pushed all his contemporaries in the same direction just to keep up.
14. Judas Priest - "Breaking The Law" (1980)
A whole lot of the entries on this list conjure memories of things "Beavis & Butt-Head" said while watching a song's video, including this one, where they were baffled by Rob Halford's shimmying little dance move ("what's he doing with his shoulders?") about 5 years before the Judas Priest frontman came out of the closet. They didn't care for the song ("I still like Judas Priest and everything, but...there's all this stuff that just sucks"), but I think Priest did concise, bumper sticker-level simple radio singles better than most of their contemporaries.
15. Billy Squier - "Lonely Is The Night" (1981)
When the biggest band of the '70s, Led Zeppelin, broke up in 1980, it left the field wide open for imitators, particularly since Robert Plant moved away from hard rock in his solo career while Jimmy Page spent many years bouncing around from one forgettable collaboration or supergroup to another. And "Lonely Is The Night" is the most convincing fake Zep song on the greatest bubblegum Zep knockoff album ever made, Billy Squier's sophomore album Don't Say No.
16. Whitesnake - "Here I Go Again" (1987)
Whitesnake were described as a Zep knockoff more than anybody, at least pre-Greta Van Fleet, but I think David Coverdale had Robert Plant's look more than his sound (although Coverdale pretty muc encouraged the comparisons when he did Coverdale/Page, one of those forgettable Jimmy Page supergroups). Whitesnake first recorded "Here I Go Again" in 1982 before topping the charts in 1987 with a much slicker re-recording that makes a small but crucial lyric change ("like a drifter" was originally "like a hobo," which in passing sounds an awful lot like "homo"). Coverdale wrote the song about the end of his firs marriage, and then the song became irrevocably associated with his second wife, the late Tawny Kitaen, who does a split on the hood of his car in the video. The swirly synth fanfare of the '87 version's first minute sounds like it could've come straight out of a Peter Cetera record, but that just makes the chorus rock harder after the drums kick in.
17. Heart - "Alone" (1987)
Heart was the greatest Zep disciple band in the '70s, but they dropped off the charts in the first half of the '80s, and had to revive their fortunes by recording a series of one-size-fits-all power ballads written by industry pros like Diane Warren, Jim Vallance, Bernie Taupin, and the duo of Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, who penned "Alone" as well as megahits like "Like A Virgin" and "True Colors." Ann Wilson's powerhouse voice is the reason the Heart hits from that era still go hard, though.
18. Van Halen - "Hot For Teacher" (1984)
I remember MTV had a "new music revolution" promotion around, I don't know, 1992 or '93, where they finally changed their programming to mostly new/recent music videos, which sounds weird, but up until that point they were still just constantly playing the big '80s videos by Michael Jackson, Van Halen, etc. So even though I didn't have cable or care about MTV until the early '90s, a lot '80s videos are tattooed on my brain, perhaps none more than "Hot For Teacher."
19. Guns N' Roses - "Sweet Child O' Mine" (1988)
So much of "Sweet Child O' Mine" was sheer accident, from the "circus music" scales Slash started playing as a joke that became the iconic opening riff, to the band asking each other "where do we go now?" when pondering how to end the song and deciding to use that very phrase as the climactic outro refrain. I love hearing stories like that, and realizing how much great music we've gotten out of serendipity and dumb luck.
20. Poison - "Talk Dirty To Me" (1987)
Poison had one of the best "Behind The Music" episodes, they're right up there with Styx where their "Behind The Music" is almost more entertaining on the whole than their discography. C.C. DeVille's many quotables in the episode include "I had all the right influences to be a great guitar player, but something between the record player and my fingers just didn't translate," which I think sums up Poison and a lot of their contemporaries -- they knew all the cool '70s bands, but they wound up making something broader and more tacky, but still kind of awesome.
21. Scorpions - "Rock You Like A Hurricane" (1984)
There are a lot of really horny songs on this list, but this one's really got a few lines that make me uncomfortable. "Give her inches and feed her well"? Jesus Christ, Klaus, tone it down! I recently learned that Scorpions are doing 60th anniversary shows this year, and I had no idea that they'd been around that long before their run of hits in the '80s. Without looking into it any further, I'm just going to picture Scorpions in the '60s being a lot like the Thamesmen scene in This Is Spinal Tap.
22. Lita Ford - "Kiss Me Deadly" (1988)
Mick Smiley wrote two songs that I've been absolutely obsessed with over the years: his song "Magic" that appeared in Ghostbusters, and Lita Ford's "Kiss Me Deadly." Ford never quite became a star on the level of her Runaways bandmate Joan Jett, but she had a nice little run there as pretty much the only successful woman in an extremely dude-heavy scene, with a platinum album that included the Ozzy Osbourne duet "Close My Eyes Forever," the only Hot 100 top 10 of Ozzy's career.
23. Autograph - "Turn Up The Radio" (1984)
A good number of acts on this list were kind of a flash in the pan, but Autograph is one of the few true one hit wonders, I had to look up the name of their one other single that even charted.
24. Motley Crue - "Home Sweet Home" (1985)
I forget sometimes that this song has some cool Mick Mars guitar leads despite being piano-driven and perhaps the archetypal '80s hair ballad. I like the way Vince Neil suddenly says "NIGHT" with ten times more attitude than any other word in the song.
25. AC/DC - "You Shook Me All Night Long" (1980)
More "Beavis & Butt-Head" memories: "Don't forget to scrub your wiener."
26. Metallica - "For Whom The Bell Tolls" (1985)
The first few seconds of "For Whom The Bell Tolls" feature an ominous bell ringing, very similarly to AC/DC's "Hell's Bells." As someone who was introduced to Metallica with the Black Album singles, this was the first '80s Metallica song to really click for me, because MTV would show the performance from the Live Shit: Binge and Purge VHS as a video, and because it's the one that's kind of closer to their simpler midtempo '90s sound, not a lot of speedy thrash complexity to this one. I love that the outro is in 5/4, though, I used it to close one of my 5/4 DJ mixes.
27. Slayer - "Reign In Blood" (1986)
I think there's some healthy skepticism around Rick Rubin these days, particularly in the hard rock community, with a number of bands firing him and/or shit talking his hands-off production style of being a guru who gives creative advice but mostly lets the engineer and the band do the actual recording without him presence. But when Rubin co-founded hip hop's most important label, Def Jam, and produced a few classic rap records, it was genuinely unusual and exciting that he could also produce one of the era's best metal albums, Slayer's Reign In Blood.
28. Megadeth - "Peace Sells" (1986)
I heard the bass intro as the MTV News theme music ("you hear it..." dun-dun-dun-d-dun "...FIRST") for many years before I even heard the full song, but it kicks ass. After getting kicked out of Metallica, Dave Mustaine formed Megadeth, who'd form the canonical 'big four' of thrash metal with Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax. Anthrax isn't on this list because I don't think I've heard a single song by them besides their version of "Bring the Noise" with Public Enemy. Scott Ian was constantly a talking head on VH1 back in the day, though.
29. Van Halen - "Everybody Wants Some!!" (1980)
Each verse of "Everybody Wants Some!!" is a single couplet, which is the bare minimum simplicity I often aspire to in my songwriting -- just put down as little as you can get away with as a launching pad for the chorus. The scene in Better Off Dead where a claymation cheesburger sings "Everybody Wants Some!!"? Real cinema.
30. Kix - "Blow My Fuse" (1988)
Kix were the biggest band to come out of Maryland in the '80s, and I saw several of their 2000s reunion shows in Baltimore and have interviewed both Brian Forsythe and Steve Whiteman, I'm definitely in the Chuck Eddy camp that Kix are one of the greatest hard rock bands of their era. The ballad "Don't Close Your Eyes" from 1988's Blow My Fuse is their best known song, but I really wanted to include one of their more representative uptempo songs, and went with that album's title track.
31. Billy Squier - "The Stroke" (1981)
Don't Say No has two songs on this list but it could've had four, "In The Dark" and "My Kinda Lover" kick ass too. Apparently "The Stroke" is a cautionary tale about the music industry, but I'm going to continue thinking of this as the hilariously horny "stroke me, stroke me" song.
32. Red Rider - "Lunatic Fringe" (1981)
If it's possible to be a one hit wonder twice, Tom Cochrane. "Lunatic Fringe" wasn't one of Red Rider's two Hot 100 entries, but it's the only song by the Toronto band that anyone in America remembers. And a decade later, Cochrane had one huge song, "Life Is A Highway," as a solo artist. It took me a while to realize it was the same guy, but then I saw the "Lunatic Fringe" video and Cochrane stands with his hand resting on his guitar in the exact same way he does in the "Life Is A Highway" video. Red Rider bassist Jeff Jones, one of the few prominent Black musicians in the Canadian rock scene at the time, was Rush's original frontman before Geddy Lee.
33. Aerosmith - "Love In An Elevator" (1989)
Aerosmith are "the best-selling American hard rock band of all time," and the precise phrasing is necessary because the Eagles have them beat in the American category, and Led Zeppelin and AC/DC have them beat in the hard rock category. In any event, though, Aerosmith had incredible commercial longevity, mostly made possible by the band's '80s comeback after a few rough years. I grew up in the era of '80s/'90s comeback Aerosmith ubiquity, and I still think Pump is a pretty enjoyable album, but I was kind of surprised that I didn't feel like including them in this list more, I think a lot of those '80s songs have been spoiled for me by overexposure, and obviously the '70s stuff is way better.
34. Poison - "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" (1988)
VH1 followed up Flavor Flav's dating show "Flavor of Love" with "Rock of Love" with Bret Michaels, a truly hilarious shitshow that regularly leaned on the only Poison hit with gravitas, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," to soundtrack poignant moments. And it worked on me, now I'm like "damn, that's a really good song."
35. Bon Jovi - "Livin' On A Prayer" (1987)
Peter Frampton's "Do You Feel Like We Do (Live)," Bon Jovi's "Livin' On A Prayer," and Alice In Chains' "Man In A Box" are the three most iconic uses of talkbox in rock music, and they're all connected. Frampton built Richie Sambora's talkbox, and AIC's producer suggested the use of the talkbox after hearing "Livin' On A Prayer" on the radio.
36. Def Leppard - "Animal" (1987)
Hysteria famously had seven hit singles. And while "Pour Some Sugar On Me" is the most enduring song from the album, and "Love Bites" was its #1 power ballad, "Animal" is the one I find I'm most likely to crank up and enjoy when it comes on the radio today.
37. Rush - "Freewill" (1980)
I recently ranked every Rush album so I've really been marinating in their catalog. And what I've always loved about '80s Rush is that they got really good at shiny, concise radio songs with synths, much like other prog bands like Genesis and Yes, but unlike those bands, Rush never abandoned live band bombast or weird time signatures. "Freewill" has so many different time changes, from 4/4 to 13/8 and 7/8 and 15/8 and 3/4, but it still works as a pop song with a melodic hook to keep you right on track with the band through every rhythmic pivot.
38. Blue Oyster Cult - "Burnin' For You" (1981)
All five members of Blue Oyster Cult's classic lineup have sung lead with the band, with Eric Bloom and Albert Bouchard singing the most often on the band's early albums. But guitarist Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser eventually emerged as the band's hitmaker, writing and singing all of the band's three radio staples: "Don't Fear the Reaper," "Godzilla," and "Burnin' For You." Richard Meltzer co-wrote "Burnin' For You," which means it's probably the most popular piece of music ever made by someone who's primarily known as a music critic. My band may someday release a B-sides compilation called Time Everlasting, but only because Blue Oyster Cult hasn't done it themselves.
39. Guns N' Roses - "Paradise City" (1989)
A few albums have two songs on this list (Back In Black, 1984, Pyromania, Slippery When Wet, Don't Say No), but Appetite For Destruction is the only album with three songs. How could it not be? It's the holy fucking trinity. I remember hearing kids on the school bus sing "Paradise City" before I ever heard the song, except they'd add dirty words like "shitty" and "titties" to the lyrics. I was actually kind of surprised to realize later that those weren't the real GNR lyrics. They shot the "Paradise City" video while opening for Aerosmith but it really makes them look like the stadium headliners they were on the verge of becoming, so it doesn't even feel deceptive.
40. Van Halen - "Unchained" (1981)
The bit where David Lee Roth roasts Ted Templeman's suit and Templeman responds on the talkback monitor is some of the best studio chatter of all time, as hokey and scripted as it is.
41. Twisted Sister - "We're Not Gonna Take It" (1984)
I think it's a tossup between this and Twisted Sister's other big hit, "I Wanna Rock." But this one makes me laugh more because of the way Dave Chappelle references it in his first standup special back in the day.
42. Ozzy Osbourne - "Over The Mountain" (1981)
I would recommend "Nothin' But A Good Time: The Uncensored Story of '80s Hair Metal," a 3-part docuseries that came out on Paramount+ last year. There are some really funny and illuminating stories in there, but one moment that really stuck with me was the story Quiet Riot's Rudy Sarzo told about being on tour with Ozzy Osbourne when Randy Rhoads died, and at one point walking into a church and seeing Ozzy in there, wrestling with his grief. Ozzy is both larger-than-life and kind of a cartoon character at this point, so that was just a very humanizing moment. And "Over The Mountain" has some of my favorite Rhoads shredding, he just goes crazy on this song.
43. Great White - "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" (1989)
Great White frontman Jack Russell passed away last year, and one of his final interviews is in the aforementioned "Nothin' But A Good Time" doc. Great White named their 1987 album Once Bitten... and then followed it with ...Twice Shy in 1989, covering Mott The Hoople frontman Ian Hunter's 1975 solo single "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" on the latter album. I have to wonder if they were playing the long game and planning to cover that song two years ahead of time, but then I don't know if they'd have any clue it would become by far their biggest hit.
44. Quiet Riot - "Cum On Feel The Noize" (1983)
Like Great White, Quiet Riot was an '80s American band who had their biggest hit covering a '70s British glam nugget, in their case by Slade. Quiet Riot were early rivals of Van Halen who fell way behind after Randy Rhoads left, but they eventually caught up and notched one accomplishment before Van Halen when Mental Health became the first #1 by an American metal band on the Billboard 200 (VH didn't get a #1 album until the Sammy Hagar era, amazingly).
45. Ratt - "Round and Round" (1984)
Ratt was there with Quiet Riot in the earliest wave of metal bands to getting heavy rotation on MTV, partly because they were one of the first acts to discover an enduring cheat code for music video success: celebrity cameos. Ratt's manager was Milton Berle's nephew, and getting the comedy icon to star in the "Round and Round" video was the tipping point moment that got the band into the Top 40.
46. Bon Jovi - "Runaway" (1984)
John Bongiovi famously got his foot in the door by doing grunt work at his cousin Tony's studio Power Station, and put together his demo, possibly the best-sounding demo of all time, with pro musicians who were recording at the studio as well as some guys from the Asbury Park scene that John came up in (Roy Bittan from the E Street Band and Mickey Seele from Southside Johnny's band). Bon Jovi as we know it, Richie Sambora and all, didn't come together until "Runaway" already started to become a hit, but the kid had the goods from day one, I love this song.
47. Kiss - "Lick It Up" (1983)
Some songs are just on this list because I think they're funny, and to me, this one is the funniest. After a decade in facepaint, Kiss finally took off the makeup in 1983, and the reveal in the "Lick It Up" video is hysterical. For the first 40 seconds, you only see the members of Kiss from the waist down as they talk down the street in some kind of apocalyptic wasteland. Then, the reveal: those four ugly bastards in sleeveless shirts, singing "LICK IT UP! LICK! IT! UP! AHHHH AHHHH AHHHHHHH!"
48. Def Leppard - "Foolin'" (1983)
For many years, I'd hear this song on the radio and go "Oh yeah, I forgot about this one, what is it called? 'Is Anybody Out There'?" and then the chorus would hit, and I'd realize there are just so many distinct hooks in this song, it could've been 2 or 3 different songs.
49. Survivor - "Eye of the Tiger" (1982)
This song makes me smile for a silly reason. About a decade ago, I was going through a rough patch, and I was in a pawn shop selling off some of my possession so I could pay some bills. "Eye of the Tiger" came on the stereo in the store, and then a few seconds later, I realized it wasn't actually the Survivor song, it was the "Weird Al" Yankovic parody, "Theme from Rocky VIII (The Rye or the Kaiser)."
50. Europe - "The Final Countdown" (1986)
I kind of pair this song with "Eye of the Tiger" in my mind, they feel almost more like memes than songs at this point. Both are so overplayed that it's been a while since I heard them on the radio and didn't change the station, but they're both so era-defining that it felt wrong not to include them. I allowed myself to leave out "Sister Christian," though, I just don't like that song.
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