My Top 50 Mainstream Rock Singles of the 1980s
Friday, April 04, 2025
I've already done lists of my favorite hip-hop, R&B, alternative, and hard rock/metal singles of the 1980s. And this is the first time I've really split hairs this much and divided the rock music of a given decade into three different buckets. I'm almost tempted to break the genre into four pieces and make a soft rock list, but I figure a lot of the adult contemporary yacht rock stuff that did better on pop radio than rock radio in the '80s will just slide into my eventual pop list here and there.
Here's the Spotify playlist.
1. Queen and David Bowie - "Under Pressure" (1981)
Hearing a song via sample, particularly a sample in a far inferior song, can often ruin it for you, or at least fill your head with associations that are hard to shake. But I definitely knew "Ice Ice Baby" before "Under Pressure," and it hasn't done anything to stop "Under Pressure" from becoming one of my favorite pieces of music. It's probably the single most played song on my Amazon Music account, not so much because of my love for the song specifically but because Queen and Bowie are two of the artists I most frequently ask my Echo to shuffle songs by while my family has dinner.
2. Tom Petty - "I Won't Back Down" (1989)
I love that Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne made Full Moon Fever in Mike Campbell's garage and really were just having fun getting out the usual Heartbreakers way of making records and wound up with the biggest album of his career. I mean, they had to have known that "I Won't Back Down" and "Free Fallin'" and "Runnin' Down A Dream" were probably hits, but the album's genesis was a lot more casual than what it sounds like when you hear those massive hits on the radio just about every day.
3. Stevie Nicks - "Edge Of Seventeen" (1982)
Stevie Nicks actively campaigned to become a member of the Heartbreakers, which never happened, but she did make a few hits with Tom Petty. And even one of her biggest songs without Petty was directly inspired by his wife, who Nicks heard say "age of seventeen" in a thick Florida drawl (Benmont Tench also plays on the song). Waddy Wachtel, who Nicks has made music with her whole career, dating back to the Buckingham Nicks days, contributed that staccato guitar riff that makes "Edge Of Seventeen" sound so badass.
4. Phil Collins - "In The Air Tonight" (1981)
There are a couple of classic rock stations I listen to that both, naturally, play "In The Air Tonight." But one of them, WBIG-FM, always plays a version that has loud live drums layered over the quiet drum machine pattern in the first half of the song, which sounds really stupid and totally fucks up the whole point of the big dramatic ending (you can hear a little of this version here). It turns out this is the single mix that was originally released in 1981 at the suggestion of Ahmet Ertegun, before people defaulted to the mix on the Face Value album. Ertegun has a pretty glowing reputation in the music industry, but man he made the wrong call there.
5. Journey - "Any Way You Want It" (1980)
1997 was hip hop's jiggy era, the period in which the term 'jiggy' was popularized, and I submit to you that if other genres had jiggy eras, this song epitomizes mainstream rock's early '80s jiggy era. This is that Rodney Dangerfield dancing on a golf course music. Apparently this song's writing style was influenced by Phil Lynott when Journey toured with Thin Lizzy in the late '70s, which makes it even cooler.
6. Pat Benatar - "Heartbreaker" (1980)
Pat Benatar is such an incredible rock vocalist, she probably belongs up there with Freddie Mercury as someone who could've been a straight up pop singer or any number of other styles but chose to be a rocker. That little phaser effect on her voice on the a cappella breakdown on "Heartbreaker" is so fucking cool, what a dynamite record. A rep for Benatar was helping me set up an interview with her a few years ago and then they ghosted me, and I'm still bitter about that. Let's talk, Pat!
7. Neil Young - "Rockin' In The Free World" (1989)
A whole lot of the artists on this list are legacy rock acts from the '60s and '70s that very shrewdly adapted to the '80s with slicker records and music videos and were rewarded with enormous album sales. There are relatively few guys who really spent most of the '80s in the wilderness. I think Jimmy Buffett had the worst commercial dip in the '80s, while Bob Dylan had the most divisive '80s run. Neil Young was so far off in his own world for most of the decade that Geffen unsuccessfully attempted to sue him for not sounding like himself, but he was also the guy who ended the '80s with a career-defining smash that completely reset his trajectory for the '90s.
8. Bruce Springsteen - "I'm On Fire" (1985)
Of the aforementioned '60s and '70s rockers who adapted well to the MTV era, nobody did it bigger than Bruce Springsteen, turning Born in the U.S.A. into a juggernaut with a run of seven Top 10 singles to rival Thriller. "I'm On Fire" didn't feel like one of the most ubiquitous hits from that album at the time, but in the streaming era it's pulled ahead of every track but "Dancing in the Dark" on Spotify, and I think it's totally justified, I love how it's gentle but fast, sad but sexy, rootsy but synth-heavy.
9. ZZ Top - "Gimme All Your Lovin'" (1983)
The members of ZZ Top were all born in 1949, the same year Bruce Springsteen was born. meaning they were pretty much the same age when they were ubiquitous on MTV in the mid-'80s. The once-scraggly Springsteen took on a youthful clean-shaven look to become a music video star, while Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill had grown out their beards and seemed like mystical Texas boogie elders in their videos.
10. John Mellencamp - "Cherry Bomb" (1987)
This song just makes me so happy, every time I hear it. When I interviewed John Mellencamp a few years ago, I just had to tell him it was one of my favorites and ask how he decided to have multiple singers alternate lead vocals on the second verse, and he expounded on his love of Sly and the Family Stone and how it was a direct homage to them.
11. The Who - "Eminence Front" (1982)
Sometimes I wonder if The Who's legacy would be any different if they never did another tour or album after Keith Moon died the way Zep did after Bonham died. We got some good stuff out of the Who's continued existence, though, and "Eminence Front" is way at the top of that list. Pete Townshend was still messing with some of the burbling atmospheric keyboards that were a big part of Who's Next and Who Are You, but Faces drummer Kenney Jones keeps a much more straightforward groove than anything Moon would've played, and the result is something special and hypnotic that just works every time I hear it, whether on the radio or on a recent episode of "Severance."
12. Rick Springfield - "Jessie's Girl" (1981)
Rick Springfield was a singer dabbling in acting when the stars aligned and he briefly became the king of all media in the early '80s when he had one of the biggest hit songs in the world and a popular 2-year stint on the soap opera "General Hospital." Springfield's existence has been boiled down to that moment, but his career is a lot longer and more interesting than he gets credit for, with a decade of hits with the band Zoot and as a solo artist in his native Australia before "Jessie's Girl," and four Platinum albums that each had at least one Top Ten hit in America. Still, if you're gonna be remembered for one song, you could do a lot worse.
13. Steve Winwood - "Roll With It" (1988)
There are a lot of White guys who sing "soulfully" in this list, especially British guys, and sometimes that stuff ages surprisingly well and sometimes it ages like milk. I don't think Steve Winwood gets enough credit these days as one of the very best vocalists in that particular niche, though, just a fantastic voice and a great catalog across his solo career, Traffic, the Spencer Davis Group, and Blind Faith. Holland-Dozier-Holland's lawyers were busy in those days, they got their names added to the songwriting credits of both "Roll With It" and Aerosmith's "The Other Side" for similarities to their old Motown hits.
14. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - "Refugee" (1980)
When I crunched the numbers for all my lists of albums of each year of the decade to make lists of my favorite artists of the 1980s, Tom Petty was in the top 10 for albums as well as singles, with his frequent collaborators Jimmy Iovine and Mike Campbell also in the top 10 for singles. "Refugee" is, like Pat Benatar's "Heartbreaker," a 1979 single from a 1979 album that peaked in 1980, and I hate when songs straddle decades in a way that makes it hard to say which one it belongs to, but I'll just bite the bullet and make my choice here.
15. Genesis - "No Reply At All" (1981)
Genesis in the early '80s was really fucking cool if you ask me, those really taut grooves on "Paperlate" and "Turn It On Again" and "Abacab," to say nothing of the Phil Collins solo stuff, it's really right in a sweet spot of a style that I love. Collins putting the Phenix Horns from Earth, Wind & Fire on some of those Genesis songs and some of his solo stuff always sounded so good.
16. Bruce Hornsby and the Range - "The Way It Is" (1986)
I kind of wish Bruce Hornsby had come out in the era of Elton John, because I love the sound of his piano playing, but the production on his stuff is so slick, a lot of it reminds me of the "Wings" theme song. This song is perfect, though, one of those pop hits that feels so deceptively simple and pretty while he's slipping in all this history about civil rights legislation and just a general outlook about empathy and equality.
17. Toto - "Rosanna" (1982)
As a drummer there are times when I like the drummer more than the band, but that usually means it makes the band grow on me, and Jeff Porcaro was just incredible, man, I love the spin he put on the Purdie Shuffle on this song.
18. Queen - "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" (1980)
Queen's only two #1 songs in America were both from The Game and were both instances of the band wearing a musical costume rather than sticking to their core sound. And I think "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" is an example of how what Queen did went beyond pastiche, like Freddie clearly took the Elvis Presley template, but created a song that Elvis would've been lucky to have been offered, it would've been one of his best songs ever.
19. The Romantics - "What I Like About You" (1980)
I always loved this song since I was a kid, and the "What I Like About You" video was probably the first time I ever saw someone play drums and sing at the same time, some thing I do in my bands now. It's actually not as hard as I thought it would be before I tried it!
20. Eddie Money - "Shakin'" (1982)
Eddie Money was a real goofball (check out the way he mouths along with the stuttering guitar lead in the "Shakin'" video) but he made some songs that really kicked ass. It's so funny that he slips in the line "her tits were shakin'" in the second verse and it never got censored on the radio or MTV. The 1997 compilation Shakin' With The Money Man is one of the best titles ever given to a greatest hits record.
21. Bruce Springsteen - "Hungry Heart" (1980)
Many people don't know, this song is written from the perspective of a man whose entire family was eaten by Baltimore Jack, the legendary Maryland cryptid.
22. Journey – “Stone In Love” (1982)
I love how the last two minutes of "Stone in Love" just go off on this tangent with a completely different melody than the first half of the song, I guess it's a bridge but they just keep going and never properly return to the chorus other than some harmonies repeating the title line.
23. The Greg Kihn Band - "The Breakup Song (They Don't Write 'Em)" (1981)
I didn't realize it until after both of them had passed away, but Greg Kihn went to the same high school at the same time as my father. This may be a quintessential power pop song not just for the hooky chorus but for the way it openly yearns for the songwriting of another time.
24. Pete Townshend - "Let My Love Open The Door" (1980)
The Who never cranked out albums as steadily as their contemporaries -- by the end of the '70s, they'd released 8 studio albums, while the Stones had 14 and the Kinks had 18. So I'm not sure what got into Pete Townshend in the early '80s that he decided to sign a solo deal and pushed out 4 albums (2 solo and 2 by The Who) in the space of two and a half years. He probably spread himself too thin and could've had a classic or two if he'd consolidated those songs into fewer releases, but I'm glad we got both "Let My Love Open The Door" and "Eminence Front" out of that burst of activity.
25. Don Henley - "The Boys Of Summer" (1984)
Since Tom Petty heard and passed on Mike Campbell's demo that became "The Boys of Summer," people like to imagine that it could've been a Petty song or that it's his "the one that got away," but I don't know, I really like it as a Henley song. I worked with Henley on a Leonard Cohen tribute concert last year, he was surprisingly friendly, although I think he was trying to riff on some weird joke that I had just come from Vegas and I totally failed to pick up what he was putting down.
26. Fleetwood Mac - "Gypsy" (1982)
I know the title of this song is a word people frown upon using and I respect the reasons why, but god I love this song, I know people are big on the Tango in the Night singles but this is by far my favorite post-Tusk song by Fleetwood Mac.
27. Traveling Wilburys - "Handle With Care" (1988)
I'm gonna go ahead and stamp this as the last classic hit song involving any of the Beatles, better this than "Free As A Bird" or "FourFiveSeconds." Joseph Quinn doesn't know how Timothee Chalamet got his number, or why his texts always begin with "Nelson, it's Lucky."
28. Fabulous Thunderbirds - "Tuff Enuff" (1986)
Stevie Ray Vaughan may be the most revered guitarist of the 1980s, but I kind of prefer the music of his older brother Jimmie's band the Fabulous Thunderbirds, who had sort of a more bubblegum take on blues rock on their four great Hot 100 hits "Tuff Enuff," "Wrap It Up," "Stand Back," and "Powerful Stuff."
29. .38 Special - "Hold On Loosely" (1981)
.38 Special is another band that features the brother of a more famous rock icon. Donnie Van Zant had a nice run of hits with .38 Special, which I think is a better career to have than Johnny Van Zant, who tried in vain to fill the shoes of their older brother Ronnie as the frontman of later lineups of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
30. John Mellencamp - "Jack & Diane" (1982)
Given that John Mellencamp is the archetypal "heartland rocker," I found it fascinating to realize that he started out as kind of a glam rock disciple of Bowie who was discovered by Tony Defries, manager of Bowie, Mott the Hoople, and Iggy Pop. And Spiders From Mars guitarist Mick Ronson was a big part of Mellencamp's biggest hit, playing guitar and suggesting some of the percussion choices and the vocal harmonies on the bridge.
31. Genesis - "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight" (1987)
"Land of Confusion" has historically been my favorite Invisible Touch track (I loved the weird video as a kid) but this one has slowly crept up, it just feels so huge and cinematic. I forgot sometimes how weird the bridge is in the full 8-minute album mix -- not really proggy because they just ride the same 4/4 groove for the whole song, but they have fun with a variety of synth noises in there.
32. Rod Stewart - "Young Turks" (1981)
Rod Stewart felt so much more ubiquitous in the '80s and early '90s than he does now, I used to find him pretty annoying, but now I realize he made some pretty great music in the early '70s. And even after he started to get a bit obnoxious in the disco era, he made a pretty great song with some modern new wave-y influences on "Young Turks," the first video shown on MTV to feature breakdancing.
33. Styx - "Too Much Time On My Hands" (1981)
"Too Much Time On My Hands" is another example of how classic rockers adapting to new wave seems like a pretty terrible idea on paper but wound up giving us some great music. I also really enjoyed when Paul Rudd and Jimmy Fallon remade the song's video. It's Styx's only top 10 hit written and sung by Tommy Shaw, who leads the band now, while founder Dennis DeYoung, who wrote and sang their other 7 top 10 hits, sits on the sidelines. Apparently he played the singer in a Styx tribute band in a Hilary Duff movie once.
34. The Outfield - "Your Love" (1986)
I was kind of surprised to learn The Outfield was British. Maybe because I associate the word "outfield" with baseball? I don't know. I also think I assumed this song was more of an early '80s thing, maybe because there were so many bands with that raspy The Police/Men At Work vocal sound at the time.
35. Donnie Iris - "Ah! Leah!" (1980)
The first girl I was completely infatuated with in middle school was named Leah. Weirdly I don't think I ever heard this song, or at least didn't realize what it was called until many years later as an adult. And I'm kinda glad I didn't know it at the time, it doesn't feel like it lines up with the emotions I have attached to that name. Still a pretty good song, though.
36. Bryan Adams - "Somebody" (1985)
There are some Bryan Adams songs that have been so overplayed that I kinda never wanna hear them again, including "Summer of '69" and some of his '90s soundtrack ballads. But "Somebody," "Cuts Like A Knife," "It's Only Love," I never get sick of those jams. I feel like Counting Crows kind of ripped off the lead guitar from "Somebody" on "Hanginaround," but in a good way, I like both of those songs.
37. Queen - "Another One Bites The Dust" (1980)
Considering that John Deacon was inspired by Chic's "Good Times" for the "Another One Bites the Dust" riff and Michael Jackson was the person who told Freddie Mercury it should be a single, it feels a little funny to put this on a 'rock' list. But disco's influence on rock music was a greater force for good than it usually gets credit for, and this is probably right beneath "Miss You" by the Stones as the top classic of the form.
38. Stevie Nicks with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" (1981)
Given how many simultaneous hits guys like Drake or Kendrick can have these days, it feels silly to think that the success of "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," the highest charting song of Tom Petty's career, would stifle the Heartbreakers single that was out at the time, "A Woman In Love," but it was a different time.
39. Bonnie Raitt - "Thing Called Love" (1989)
Bonnie Raitt had been making records with occasional minor success for two decades when her tenth album, Nick of Time, won the Grammy for Album of the Year and hit #1 on the Billboard 200. And that album's yearlong climb to the top started with a pretty great lead single, which I didn't realize was written by John Hiatt until I bought a Hiatt best-of CD for a dollar last year and his version was on it.
40. Little Feat - "Let It Roll" (1988)
Little Feat were arguably the greatest cult band of the '70s, and one of my personal favorite bands of all time. Almost a decade after original frontman Lowell George died, the remaining members of Little Feat decided to make a go at reuniting. They considered some old collaborators, including Bonnie Raitt and Robert Palmer, before bringing on Craig Fuller of Pure Prairie League. Little Feat didn't quite become household names, but for a couple of albums they had a bit of the mainstream visibility that had eluded them for so many years, including a "Saturday Night Live" appearance and four top 10 rock radio hits. Paul Barrere's "Let It Roll" is my favorite of those hits and it sounded great when I saw the band last year and they threw it into a set of their '70s songs and blues covers.
41. Journey - "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" (1983)
Considering the way "Don't Stop Believin'" has become by far Journey's most ubiquitous song over the last couple decades, it might seem ridiculous that I have three Journey songs on this list but not that one. But listen, I like that one too, I just enjoy some other Journey songs more, and "Separate Ways" kicks ass, probably one of the hardest rocking synth-driven songs in the AOR canon.
42. Foreigner - "Juke Box Hero" (1981)
I still sort of think of Journey and Foreigner as two peas in a pod in that wave of really slick radio rock. Far more of Foreigner's best hits were in the '70s, but they had some good ones in the '80s too, and "Juke Box Hero" is just so deliriously hammy and over-the-top.
43. George Thorogood & The Destroyers - "I Drink Alone" (1985)
I lived in Delaware for about a decade growing up, and as a young rock fan in Delaware, there weren't many local success stories to get excited about -- Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell met in a private school in New Castle County and got out of there and headed to New York as fast as they could, I guess that's kinda cool. I remember Delaware rock stations playing a ton of Thorogood, though, and always referring to his band by their original name, The Delaware Destroyers. That's a pretty funny name, though, it sounds like they wanted to destroy Delaware, which I suppose could've been a popular position to take in Delaware.
44. Robert Plant - "In The Mood" (1983)
While dozens of bands tried to fill the void left by Led Zeppelin in the '80s, the band's frontman has always seemed wonderfully unconcerned with trying to recapture the band's sound or stature in his solo career. And I just adore the dreamy groove of "In The Mood," driven in part by Phil Collins on drums, I heard this song so much on the radio growing up that I was surprised to learn that another song from the same album, "Big Log," is technically far more popular.
45. Loverboy - "Working For the Weekend" (1982)
Loverboy is, like Rick Springfield, one of those acts where I'm surprised how successful they were -- four multi-platinum albums, and ten Top 40 hits, including two that were bigger than "Working For The Weekend," the only song I hear by them all the time today.
46. Pink Floyd - "Learning To Fly" (1987)
A lot of people kind of side with Roger Waters over David Gilmour in the Pink Floyd split, but you could do worse than having the band be led by the great guitarist with the best voice in the band. Certainly the post-Waters albums aren't as weighty and conceptual, but there are some pretty good songs, and "Learning To Fly" is a great one.
47. Jackson Browne - "In The Shape Of A Heart" (1986)
I heard a lot of Jackson Browne growing up (my parents met at a festival he was playing at), and my dad always loved this song. It's an incredibly sad song, about Browne's first wife who committed suicide, but I don't know, it's beautiful and I have a lot of memories attached to it. Also some really nice guitar leads from Rick Vito, about a year before he joined Fleetwood Mac
48. Bruce Springsteen - "Dancing In The Dark" (1984)
I love that Bruce Springsteen basically turned a writer's block fit in search of a lead single into one of his biggest hit, he always came up with great stuff when his back was against the wall and he needed to deliver.
49. The Rolling Stones - "Start Me Up" (1981)
The Stones' peak period was incredibly long, writing a song that rivals "Satisfaction" as their definitive hit a whole 16 years after "Satisfaction" is almost unheard of. And it's pretty hilarious that Mick Jagger sings "you make a dead man come" over the fade out in such a ubiquitous song.
50. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - "Don't Come Around Here No More" (1985)
Tom Petty famously couldn't quite crack Southern Accents as a concept album and wound up doing some songs with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics that didn't really fit the idea of the record but were still good, including its biggest hit. I love the way the Heartbreakers take over from the drum machine groove and rev up the song at the end.
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