Having recently read Michaelangelo Matos’ Can’t Slow Down, a thorough assessment of how 1984 was an especially important year for pop music, it’s an ideal time for me to post my own list of favorites from that year (also, it happens to be the most recent year I have yet to cover on this blog.)
Given that 1984 produced Purple Rain, Born In The USA, Private Dancer, Make It Big, Let It Be (Replacements, not The Beatles, naturally), Zen Arcade and This Is Spinal Tap (which I couldn’t resist including a track from here), I don’t need to further the argument for this year being special. Even beyond LPs, 1984 was flush with classic hit singles, from Chaka Khan’s transformative Prince cover to the beginning of Madonna’s world-conquering run to era-defining anthems by Thompson Twins and General Public to, well, “Weird Al” Yankovic capturing the zeitgeist with his so-obvious-it’s-almost-brilliant Michael Jackson parody.
As with any year, the stuff that missed Billboard entirely but lingered on in the collective unconscious is just as noteworthy. Nine years old at the time, I didn’t even hear these selections from The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, Bronski Beat, The Nails and Hoodoo Gurus until at least a decade later when I was a college student and the local Alternative Rock station aired their daily “Retro Flashback Lunch” hour dedicated to post-punk new wave gems.
However, it’s in the margins where ’84 truly fascinates. Billy Bragg’s electric but spare folk music sits next to Kirsty MacColl’s big pop cover of one of his songs. Rubber Rodeo reinterprets the Pretenders’ jumpy rock with a western twang. Cocteau Twins seem to beam out from their own planet with a sugary wall of sound and pleasantly indecipherable vocals. Everything But The Girl subsists on their own jazz-and-bossa-nova-suffused plane. XTC continues to make perfect pop music while defying nearly everything the rest of the world describes as such.
If I had to pick one song that obviously sums up the year, it’d be “Sexcrime (1984)” by the Eurythmics, but it’s not on Spotify so I’ll go with a sweet techno-pop movie theme (about a love triangle between a man, woman and computer!) from the lead singer of The Human League and the electronic music pioneer whom seven years before gave us Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”.
My 1984 playlist:
Haunted Jukebox 