Earlier this summer, Paste began its big, multi-month project: picking the greatest songs of all time. The plan is to go decade by decade and choose our favorite singles and deep cuts before producing one large definitive ranking later this fall. In June, we tackled the 1960s. Last month, we surveyed the 1970s. Now, our focus is on the 1980s—maybe the most innovative decade of music ever.
As I noted last time, this isn’t us saying our ranking is better than anyone else’s. Instead, we are looking to curate an interesting perspective on an important 10-year span in music history. Some of our picks will have overlap with other publications’ choices from over the years. That’s inevitable, because some songs really are that good. But we didn’t want to just settle for songs you can find on albums in every record store in the country. Instead, this is a combination of undeniable hits and personal picks released between 1980 and 1989. We aren’t working from any template other than last month’s.
The criteria from June and July remains the same: We are only featuring one song per artist. If you’re not interested in entries 100-11, you can view the top ten of this list here. Enjoy our rankings, disagree with us in the comments, and come back next month to see what we have to say about the 1990s.
100. The Stone Roses: “I Wanna Be Adored” (1989)
The Madchester craze birthed a lot of great love songs, but make no mistake—“I Wanna Be Adored” isn’t one of them. With lyrics so simple they could fit on a Post-It, The Stone Roses’ neo-psych hit “I Wanna Be Adored” imparts a lust so iron-willed it’d leave Satan himself impressed. In fact, he’s the only person Ian Brown mentions in the song, which unfolds from a supernatural sound collage into a reverb-soaked dose of proto-shoegaze: “I don’t need to sell my soul / He’s already in me.” Judging by its smattering of TV syncs and notable covers, desperation is rather resonant. —Abby Jones
99. Iron Maiden: “Run to the Hills” (1982)
I am by no means a metalhead, but the genre always pulls me in when it teeters on the brink of pop music. No sane person would hear “Run to the Hills” and think that Iron Maiden was readying a Billboard breakout, but it did sneak into the Top 10 in the UK. The Number the Beast lead single, a dual-perspective lament of colonialism, finds the London heavyweights at their most commercial and their most impressive. That the chorus, yowled by a ten-stories-tall Bruce Dickinson, is as sticky as this one… Glam and hair metal were obviously surging, and Iron Maiden took their piece. —Matt Mitchell
98. Laurie Anderson: “O Superman” (1981)
Forty-five years later, nothing sounds like it. Pop music was rarely like this. Laurie Anderson, a well-known performance artist in NYC’s avant-garde circles—who used to replace her violin’s bow hair with audiotape—unexpectedly scored a No. 2 hit in the UK when “O Superman” was released in late 1981, thanks to the efforts of DJ John Peel. Inspired by the operas of Jules Massenet, Anderson layers her processed, Greek-chorus vocal over a looping “ha” syllable, culled from an Eventide harmonizer. Saxophone, bird calls, and flute rush in at the final minute, yet Anderson rarely sounds like our time. “O Superman” is, on its face, a simple pop experiment. But Anderson later called it “one long war, we just keep doing it.” —Matt Mitchell
