What albums do you think ‘define’ the 1980s? As in, you listen to it today and you just think, ‘That’s the 80s?
I’ll start with No Jacket Required by Phil Collins. A bunch of hits in heavy radio and MTV rotation and more drum machine than you can handle. Yup, the 80s sexy sax which is in every ballad of the era, is present. Guest vocals from Sting? Yup! You could insert just about any song from the album into a Miami Vice episode.
I see your No Jacket Required and raise you Slippery When Wet, the iconic Bon Jovi album. You could not go anywhere in the mid to late 80s without hearing at least one of those songs getting airplay, in a movie, or at a club.
Moreso, it was full of the 80s hair metal that was it’s own thing - as was the movement to take ‘harder’ (for values of hard) rock and tone it down to acceptable levels for middle-America.
Let’s Dance by David Bowie
Oh, and Rio by Duran Duran
Those two go hand-in-hand for me for that decade (or, well, really for the first half of that decade).
Two John Hughes soundtracks; The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink.
Sign o’ the Times or Purple Rain by Prince. Pick one or the other, or both. I’d say- Sign o’ the Times
Top Gun Soundtrack
Jingoistic movie staring Tom Cruise, shot with the MTV-aesthetic. Fits in nicely with Rambo and Red Dawn as a piece of Reagan-era “America, Fuck Yeah!” cinema.
Musically you got…
Kenny Loggins - populated a shitload of 80s movie soundtracks
Harold Faltermeyer - trying to follow up his Beverly Hills Cop work
Berlin - first rose to fame as a new wave act
Miami Sound Machine
Loverboy
A forgettable Cheap Trick soundtrack song, like a lot of their 80s output.
Doesn’t get much more 80s than that.
Maybe it’s because the first half of the 80s was young-mid teenagerhood for me and the second half was college life, but those two albums feel decades apart to me yet they’re really not!
Best LP of the 80s.
The Rolling Stones…Tattoo You
Appetite For Destruction: the first side kicks off with Welcome To The Jungle and wraps up with Paradise City, and the second gives us Sweet Child o’ Mine.
(Where do we go? Where do we go now?)
Thriller, of course.
And if we’re talking soundtracks, the Footloose soundtrack is the first one that springs to my mind.
Neither of these are anywhere near my own personal favorites, and I didn’t own them. I could give a long list of my personal 80s albums.
Thomas Dolby - “The Golden Age of Wireless”
Science!
George Michael – Faith
Def Lepard – Hysteria
Prince’s Batman soundtrack was great as well.
For reference, Billboard’s best performing albums in the U.S. for each year of the 1980s, from Wikipedia and not independently checked. No opinion is to be implied or may be inferred beyond the matters expressly so stated herein:
1980: Pink Floyd’s The Wall
1981: REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity
1982: Asia’s Asia
1983: Michael Jackson’s Thriller
1984: Michael Jackson’s Thriller (!)
1985: Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A.
1986: Whitney Houston’s Whitney Houston
1987: Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet
1988: George Michael’s Faith
1989: Bobby Brown’s Don’t Be Cruel
1984 Tears For Fears / Songs from the Big Chair
1984 - Van Halen
Brothers In Arms - Dire Straits
I’ll also endorse Born In The USA. Thriller was a monster, mainly because of Quincy Jones’ production.
Madonna’s Like a Virgin.
First album I bought with my own money. I am not ashamed!
Joshua Tree - U2