My Top 50 Pop Singles of the 1980s
Tuesday, March 03, 2026
The first thing I should say is that I've already done several other genre lists for 1980s singles, so a lot of things you might expect to see in an "'80s pop" list might not be here. Michael Jackson and Prince were in my R&B list, Bruce Springsteen and Phil Collins were in my 1980s mainstream rock list, Van Halen and Bon Jovi were in my hard rock/metal list, Tears For Fears and U2 were in my alternative list, and Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers will no doubt be in the country list that I do next. And along the way here, I have a lot of thoughts about how "pop" really became a genre as we know it in the '80s, in that complicated and sometimes problematic process of rock becoming soft rock, and Black influences being minimized in music derived from R&B and disco, and so on. Here's the Spotify playlist:
1. Cyndi Lauper - "Time After Time" (1984)
I got close to finalizing this list about 10 months ago, before I put it to the side for a bit while I focused on the release of my book. And at the time I think I had "Time After Time" as low as #3 on the list, but the emotion brought forth last fall by listening to Cyndi Lauper's whole catalog, watching her get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and re-watching her documentary really made me decide it had to be #1. And I just always love the stories where the last song written for an album is an absolute classic that you can't imagine not being on the record.
2. Katrina And The Waves - "Walking On Sunshine" (1985)
I'm posting this on a Monday morning, so I feel like Barry popping in his special Monday morning tape in High Fidelity. A whole lot of this list is white people doing Motown homages, and "Walking On Sunshine" is one of those songs I loved before I could even distinguish much about who made a song when or where just from the sound of it, and I was a little surprised when I realized it was written by British white people in the mid-'80s. It's a little funny to think that this song was the first hit Scott Litt worked on before he produced six platinum R.E.M. albums.
3. Madonna - "Like A Prayer" (1989)
As I said, Michael and Prince and Whitney and Janet were on my R&B list, which leaves Madonna as by far the biggest pop star of the '80s who's actually on this list (and even she, believe it or not, was marketed as a racially ambiguous disco singer on her early 12"s, which had no photos on the sleeves). "Like A Prayer" still has the biggest streaming numbers of her imperial era hits (a recent, surprisingly decent Weeknd collaboration is her only song with a billion plays on Spotify). But "Material Girl" and, surprisingly, "La Isla Bonita," a song I seldom heard growing up and have never enjoyed, are nipping at its heels, and I'll be said if they ever catch up, because "Like A Prayer" is perfection.
4. Wham! - "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" (1984)
Another Motown homage by white people, although it's so charmingly synthetic and white that I would say it actually fits Bowie's 'plastic soul' concept better than what Bowie did.
5. Michael McDonald - "I Keep Forgettin'" (1982)
Another guy who was so obsessed with Motown that he made Motown covers the focal point of his career in the 21st century. But on his albums fronting the Doobie Brothers and his early solo career, he really had one of the best and most distinctive voices in pop and crossed over to the R&B charts with "I Keep Forgettin'" (twice, if you count Warren G and Nate Dogg's "Regulate"). His brand of soulful soft rock is now retroactively tagged with the playful name "yacht rock," but I don't really care what you call it, I grew up on Michael McDonald's harmonies.
6. Daryl Hall & John Oates - "You Make My Dreams" (1981)
Are we still saying "blue eyed soul"? I think that term's more frowned upon now. In any event, Hall and Oates became pop icons by staying pretty true to their Philly Soul roots. "You Make My Dreams" originally peaked at #5 in the middle of a golden run where it was preceded by a #1 and followed by two #1s, but at some point amidst the various film and TV syncs it became their defining song, and I got to interview Oates not long after it became their first track with a billion streams. I barely heard it growing up, and when I did I thought of it as the song that sounds like the "Ducktales" theme, but now I adore it.
7. Debbie Gibson - "Only In My Dreams" (1987)
Today we live in a pop music ecosystem that's been significantly shaped by women who wrote or co-wrote hit songs as teenagers (Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, etc. -- although there's still always a vocal contingent of the public that's quick to assume a man really did all the work). Carole King wrote hits as a teenager, but she didn't become a successful artist until she was almost 30. So Debbie Gibson, who became the youngest person to write, produce and perform a #1 single with "Foolish Beat," is a more important figure in that history than I think she gets credit for. My favorite of hers, by far, though, is the debut single she wrote when she was 14 and recorded when she was 16.
8. Tracy Chapman - "Fast Car" (1988)
A lot of the guitar-driven music on here is soft rock, but Tracy Chapman is an example of someone who came from the folk music tradition when she made a pop classic (that has since, via the Luke Combs, made her the first Black woman with a solo writing credit on a #1 country hit).
9. Paul Simon - "You Can Call Me Al" (1986)
Paul Simon also came to pop stardom through folk music a couple decades before Chapman, but Graceland came out of him embracing a whole bunch of musical traditions from different countries and cultures, and inspires debate and adoration in equal measure 40 years later. A lot of people say that I must hate this song because my name is in it, but I've always loved it. My late aunt Linda would always sing "You Can Call Me Al" when I was little and going by Alex, so the song always reminds me of her, and maybe I wouldn't go by Al today if not for this song? I really don't know.
10. Robbie Nevil - "C'est La Vie" (1986)
I initially forgot all about this song when I did my list of 1986 singles and went back and added it. I think it's only a couple of songs I've done that with. What a banger, this really epitomizes how hard that really slick, antiseptic '80s pop sound can hit.
11. Billy Joel - "The Longest Time" (1984)
Billy Joel is in some ways the typical rock musician whose career wound up defined by how much more people liked his ballads than his rockers. And even as someone who loves that Attila album and has no use for "Just The Way You Are," I have to admit that he really thrives as a pop songwriter. And he reached a new level of pop chart ubiquity, oddly, by making 1983's An Innocent Man, a nostalgic throwback full of pre-British Invasion styles, including the biggest doo wop song in the history of MTV.
12. Elton John - "I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues" (1983)
I grew up thinking of Elton John and Billy Joel as the being the concurrent piano man titans of pop music, but once I started to really look at their catalogs, I realized that Elton's imperial period ended around 1976's Blue Moves just as Billy's began around 1977's The Stranger. But Elton managed to bounce back pretty well in the '80s, and this one has always been my favorite, partly because of the really funny standup bit Tommy Davidson used to do about it.
13. Madonna - "Borderline" (1984)
Kind of an outlier in Madonna's catalog, it's just sweet and earnest in a way she didn't allow herself to be very often ("Cherish" is another great one in that lane), and it has some of my favorite '80s synth sounds.
14. Starship - "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (1987)
Haight-Ashbury psych rock legends Jefferson Airplane's transformation into Jefferson Starship and then simply Starship is the purest distillation of that familiar narrative about idealistic '60s hippies growing up and becoming unabashedly commercial capitalists. There's some truth to that, but I also like Grace Slick's voice on "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" just as much as on "White Rabbit." This song was the first of nine Hot 100 #1s written by Diane Warren as well as the first of Warren's 17 songs nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Song, and in both cases it's my favorite. "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" is better in The Skeleton Twins than in Mannequin, though.
15. George Michael - "Faith" (1987)
George Michael created a little 2-minute number with a Bo Diddley beat without intending it to be a single, and extended it with a guitar solo once people started to suggest it could be a single. And it seems strange to think this song was a happy accident, because now it's so central to his pop iconography.
16. Christopher Cross - "Ride Like The Wind" (1980)
It's weird to think that Christopher Cross, then already doughy and pushing 30, and a teenage Billie Eilish are the two only artist in Grammy history to come out of the gate so strong with debut albums that they won all four general category awards (Best New Artist and Song, Record, and Album of the Year). "Ride Like The Wind" also provided one of Michael McDonald's finest moments as a backing vocalist and Rick Moranis's greatest SCTV sketch.
17. The Pointer Sisters - "Neutron Dance" (1985)
The Pointer Sisters really epitomize how talented singers can move between genres fluidly -- they learned to sing gospel as kids, won their first Grammy in a country category, had a long string of R&B hits, and crossed over with some big pop hits in the '80s. "Neutron Dance" came out when I was 3 years old, and I remember getting so hyped up to this song when I was little, I just thought it was the hardest thing I'd ever heard. I also loved their "Pinball Number Count" song on "Sesame Street," of course.
18. Donna Summer - "She Works Hard For The Money" (1983)
I just made a Donna Summer deep album cuts playlist last week, and it sort of bookended her reign as the Queen of Disco with her early pop/rock material and her return to pop/rock with She Works Hard For the Money.
19. Cyndi Lauper - "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" (1983)
You really have to hear Robert Hazard's original recording of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" to appreciate how completely and brilliantly Cyndi Lauper overhauled the music and the lyrics to make it into the pop classic we know and love today.
20. Rick Astley - "Never Gonna Give You Up" (1988)
Before the "rickroll" memes, well, I wouldn't say this song was respected, but it was just another '80s pop hit, not one so infamously bad that people used it to taunt each other. I've never minded the memes, though, because if someone surprises me with this song, I just listen to it because I enjoy it. His soundalike follow-up hit "Together Forever" is a jam too.
21. Daryl Hall & John Oates - "Private Eyes" (1981)
Now that's a really good, really fake-sounding electric piano sound, maybe the best.
22. Bonnie Tyler - "Total Eclipse of the Heart" (1983)
Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman went their separate ways for a decade after the enormous success of Bat Out of Hell, and while Meat struggled, Steinman wrote a few smashes for other artists, most notably "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which I started to understand and like a lot more after I realized who wrote it and understood it as part of Steinman's maximalist oeuvre.
23. Tina Turner - "The Best" (1989)
Desmond Child produced the first recording of "The Best" by Bonnie Tyler, before Tina Turner recorded what became the biggest and...simply the best version of the song. Desmond Child also wrote "If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man)" for Tyler, and it also got recycled when Child used its melody for Bon Jovi's "You Give Love A Bad Name."
24. Madonna - "Express Yourself" (1989)
Like A Prayer is my top Madonna album, but I can't tell you what a buzzkill it is to hear the album version of "Express Yourself," it's gotta be the video mix all the way.
25. Buster Poindexter And His Banshees Of Blue - "Hot Hot Hot" (1987)
I knew David Johansen for "Hot Hot Hot" and Scrooged for so many years before I heard a New York Dolls song or realized it was the same guy. What a wild life he had.
26. Huey Lewis and the News - "If This Is It" (1984)
It's not exactly a Buster Poindexter-level reinvention, but Huey Lewis was a pretty credible rocker before becoming a pop superstar. While his early band Clover spent some time across the Atlantic, Lewis played harmonica on a few Thin Lizzy and Phil Lynott tracks, while the other members of Clover were Elvis Costello's band on My Aim Is True. And even when Huey and the News became adult contemporary crossover stars, he still had that big, raspy, commanding voice that most rock frontmen would kill for.
27. Kenny Loggins - "This Is It" (1980)
Another great Michael McDonald backing vocal, his second co-write with Kenny Loggins after their work on the Doobie Brothers' "What A Fool Believes" went supernova. I think this song is kind of underrated, I only really heard it more and a couple times and realized how much I liked it in the last decade.
28. Wham! - "Last Christmas" (1984)
In the streaming era, Christmas songs bum rush the Hot 100 every December, but so far "All I Want For Christmas Is You" and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" have been the only ones to go all the way to #1. And if any other song ever gets there, I really hope it's "Last Christmas." Really I was pretty disappointed that it didn't get there after George Michael died on Christmas day in 2016.
29. Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine - "1-2-3" (1988)
Gloria Estefan had so many hits, she was really my introduction to Latin pop before I knew what it was, great voice, hooks for days.
30. Murray Head - "One Night In Bangkok" (1985)
This song felt like one of those delightfully bizarre '80s chart oddities even before I realized it was from a musical about chess. Murray Head also kind of sounds like James Urbaniak to me now, so I picture Rusty Venture performing it.
31. Kim Carnes - "Bette Davis Eyes" (1981)
My wife and I sang karaoke for the first time just a few weeks ago, at this little bar in Napa, California. It was fun, but after people sang their picks, the DJ would random put them back in the queue with his own song picks, and my wife and her brother's fiancee were very surprised when the DJ informed them it was time to go up and sing "Bette Davis Eyes." They muddled their way through it, neither feeling very confident about their feel for the song, but it was still kind of a fun moment.
32. Indigo Girls - "Closer To Fine" (1989)
Another gorgeous, emotionally affecting folk pop crossover hit from that moment when Tracy Chapman and Suzanne Vega helped bring acoustic singer-songwriters back to the mainstream in the late '80s. The 2023 Indigo Girls documentary It's Only Life After All is highly recommended and gave me a greater appreciation for both this song and the rest of their catalog.
33. Frida - "I Know There's Something Going On" (1983)
If a lot of what we think of as pop is just anglicized R&B, then it makes sense that ABBA's big hits are the pre-'80s example of pop-as-a-genre that everybody can agree on -- they were Swedes doing really really white disco. ABBA broke up in the early '80s, and their biggest U.S. hit of the decade, "The Winner Takes All," isn't anything special, but Anni-Frid Lyngstad had a pretty great single as a solo artist.
34. Olivia Newton-John - "Physical" (1981)
Olivia Newton-John, the Australian pop country singer of the '70s who became a household name via Grease, kind of stumbled into becoming the template for the blonde pop superstar before Madonna's arrival. I was born during the 10 weeks that "Physical" was at #1 on the Hot 100, tied with the much less horny "You Light Up My Life" for the longest-running #1 at the time.
35. Madonna - "Material Girl" (1985)
I think Madonna probably disliked being nicknamed 'the material girl' more than she dislikes the song itself. But hearing as a kid that she didn't like this song was an early lesson for me that you don't have to agree with an artist about their own music.
36. Bananarama - "Cruel Summer" (1984)
I think another song with the same title, Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer," become so ubiquitous in the last few years has really increased my affection for the clearly superior Bananarama song.
37. Daryl Hall & John Oates - "Kiss On My List" (1981)
Three big Hall & Oates hits from 1981 are on this list, and it easily could've been four, they really hit an incredible hot streak that year.
38. The Weather Girls - "It's Raining Men" (1982)
I was very surprised to learn they were already releasing music as The Weather Girls before "It's Raining Men," it was actually on their third album, I'd always kind of assumed the group name was inspired by the song. Paul Shaffer co-wrote it, originally intending it for Donna Summer, and the Weather Girls made it a hit the same year that Shaffer began his run with "The Late Night with David Letterman." Hell of a year for ol' Paul.
39. Neneh Cherry - "Buffalo Stance" (1989)
This song was kind of futuristic, in the sense that a club kid with two famous parents rapping over a dance pop track was really a vision of how the music industry works today.
40. Karla Bonoff - "Personally" (1982)
Karla Bonoff wrote songs that were hits for Linda Ronstadt and Wynonna Judd, but she didn't write her only top 40 hit "Personally," which Glenn Frey suggested to her after it had been pitched to Bonnie Raitt. I never heard this song until a couple years ago, but it was just one of those tracks I found while looking at old Billboard charts that I ended up liking so much that I found room on it on this list alongside all this music I grew up on.
41. George Michael - "Father Figure" (1988)
I'm not saying the Babygirl needledrop tipped the scales, but I went back and forth a bit about whether this song would make the cut.
42. Dead Or Alive - "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)" (1985)
Stock Aitken Waterman sounds like a law firm, but it was a trio of British producers and songwriters that really helped turn pop towards the streamlined, professionalized assembly line system that it is today. "You Spin Me Round" was the first of 13 SAW productions to top the UK singles charts and was the first to reach as high in #11 as well (they also did the Rick Astley song I wrote about earlier). Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive was a much more unusual character and wilder vocalist than most of the people that fronted Stock Aitken Waterman productions, though.
43. Jermaine Stewart - "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off" (1986)
I didn't mean to put three songs by queer artists in a row here, but it certainly warrants mentioning that pop music was extremely gay in the 1980s even while mainstream culture was extremely homophobic, most gay entertainers were in the closet, and AIDS was killing so many people. Jermaine Steward died of AIDS complications in 1997, and in that context, his charmingly chaste and massively catchy crossover hit is heartbreakingly poignant.
44. Cyndi Lauper - "Money Changes Everything" (1985)
She's So Unusual is the only album with three singles on this list, which feels about right for me. The much bigger "She Bop" was going to be the third, but the way Lauper sings The Brains' "Money Changes Everything" just floors me every time I hear it, what a performance.
45. Was (Not Was) - "Walk The Dinosaur" (1989)
I know lots of people were into dinosaurs when they were kids, but I was really into dinosaurs, like I was reading college-level paleontology textbooks before Jurassic Park was out, I was basically a dinosaur hipster. So obviously this was my favorite song when I was 7, and learned much later that Was (Not Was) started out in Detroit making weird avant funk and collaborating with Wayne Kramer of the MC5, before Don Was became a super producer who worked with the Stones and Dylan.
46. Bobby McFerrin - "Don't Worry, Be Happy" (1988)
Guys who could do weird stuff with their voices were very big in my world as an '80s kid. Michael Winslow (the sound effects guy from Police Academy and Spaceballs), John Moschitta (the fast talking guy from the Micro Machines commercials), and a cappella musician Bobby McFerrin were some of the world's greatest entertainers in my mind. I understand why people find this song irritating I guess, but as a 6-year-old kid, I just thought it was so cool that he made this entire song with his voice, and I still think the melody is really catchy.
47. Madonna - "Open Your Heart" (1987)
I didn't have MTV until the '90s, but my dad would tape NBC's "Friday Night Videos," so that was my earliest exposure to music videos, I have vivid memories of Tears For Fears and Peter Gabriel videos. I'm pretty sure "Open Your Heart" was the first Madonna video I saw, which is kind of appropriate given the video's weird-ass concept of a kid watching her in a peep show. I was surprised at how low this song's streaming numbers are, of her #1 hits, only "Justify My Love" and "Who's That Girl" have fewer plays (and who the hell is listening to "Crazy For You" in this day and age?).
48. New Kids On The Block - "You Got It (The Right Stuff)" (1989)
Two of my older cousins were teenage girls in the NKOTB era so I have that very classic boy experience of growing up sneering at boy bands and being baffled by their popularity. And even as an adult who loves a lot of pop music today, it feels uncontroversial to say that New Kids were probably, musically, the weakest of any hugely popular boy band, and they probably have a lot to answer for by becoming the first "white version of New Edition" success story. I think their is their best hook, though, and "Weird Al" Yankovic did a pretty good parody that was about the white stuff in Oreos.
49. Harold Faltermeyer - "Axel F" (1985)
As far as pop hits that were an incidental byproduct of how funny Eddie Murphy was in the '80s, the instrumental theme from Beverly Hills Cop is a much better song than "Party All the Time." And writing about the Crazy Frog phenomenon for Stereogum last year gave me a renewed appreciation for how good "Axel F" is when there's not an animated frog jabbering over it.
50. Olivia Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra - "Xanadu" (1980)
I'm not much of a musician, and contrary to popular belief, it takes more musicianship to cover a song than to write one. So I haven't recorded many covers, but "Xanadu" is one of the three songs I've covered with Western Blot, last year for a friend's film project. So I had to listen to this song so many times to figure out the melody and structure, and it's now tattooed on my brain in a way few songs are.
