Although, it’s worth noting that one of the great things about the 80s musically is that so many legendary and/or successful acts of the 70s and 60s were still around (or made comebacks of a sort) and putting out new music.
Theres a little slice of music that ranges about 79-81 that kind of doesn’t fit in either decade.
Without looking up the dates, I’d say Genesis’s Abacab, Peter Gabriels Security, The Police’s Ghost in the Machine.…I think Breakfast in America fits nicely in there.
As for MTV
Diamond Life - Sade
May I present a post which I created back in…Christ, August '20-- almost 3 years ago??!?
Anyway, it’s about the Eighties-est songs, but the Eighties-est songs will be found on the Eighties-est albums:
I wore out two Footloose cassettes from playing them so much as a child. So I guess that’s my definitive 80s album
Agreed. I was going to post just what EinsteinsHund said. If anything, Supertramp is a quintessential 70’s band - in style, sounds, looks, impact, success etc. After Breakfast In America, from 1979, they were close to a spent force.
Your list hits the gist, so to speak, and you clearly speak from authority (I was an 80’s kid, myself, with a keen interest in popular music).
It seems there are two different approaches here with the replies. Plenty of acts mentioned, like AC/DC, ZZ Top, Guns n’ Roses, Dire Straits etc. did their biggest albums in the 80’s, sure, and were played everywhere. But do they define the 80’s, except to people who go back to those times when hearing these? They don’t really have the sounds or the styles of the 80’s, which is a big part of why they have endured. As great as they are, I can’t personally agree they define the 80’s.
Then there are the acts / albums that SCREAM the 80’s, in having been wildly popular and current then, and having the production sheen, the echo’y drums, the very period-specific synth sounds, and the puffy, permy mullets that define the 80’s music, and only that. Madonna, Duran Duran, Def Leppard etc., to me, define the 1980’s.
The Footloose soundtrack was the first soundtrack that sprang to mind for me as well.
I do concur with @The_Other_Waldo_Pepper that GnR’s Appetite for Destruction is pretty much one of the very top of the iconic rock albums of the 80s, along with Van Halen’s 1984.
1984 and Van Halen in general do scream 1980s, so that would be my #1 pick on the rock side of things for the rock album that defines the 1980s. U2’s The Joshua Tree is one of the most celebrated and popular 1980s albums, but it doesn’t really define the decade- U2 didn’t look or sound particularly iconically 80s in the way that say… Madonna or David Lee Roth did.
On the pop side of things, the top two would have to be Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and Madonna’s Like a Virgin. Those two albums were absolutely definitional as far as the decade goes in terms of albums.
The thing is though, that typically it’s the singles that are most iconic, not the albums. I mean, people tend to think of Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me” as an iconic 80s song, but nobody actually considers the album (Breakfast Club Soundtrack) as anything special.
Can’t Slow Down (Lionel Richie). At the 1984 Olympics closing ceremonies the only pop performance was Richie performing All Night Long.
Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” got a lot of airplay.
SAW (Stock Aitken Waterman) were highly influential, too, although I can’t name any albums.
The 70s were wildly different musically from the first half, coming down from the acid-drenched 60s, like a light switch, it was “easy listening” and lots of singer songwriters, and taking it easy with sunshine on our shoulders. Disco was a further departure.
Punk was even yet a further departure from departure, but the 80s still featured “Corporate Rock” in a big way. Foreigner and REO Speedwagon, for two odious examples.
Even now, there is an oldies station playing “More Than a Feeling” and “Hot Blooded” 20 times a day, interspersed with endless Public Service Announcements. Yum.
INXS - Kick (1987) had tons of hits, music videos, and radio play
Remain In Light - Talking Heads
Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads, both the album and the concert video was the height of culture and professionalism in the 80’s. Maybe not everyones cup of tea, but it was flat out one of the greatest performances of all time, not just the 80’s.
And I see that @Ike_Witt ninjaed me with a Talking Heads album while I was typing. Remain in the Light was great as well.
Did you check the copyright on the back? 1979! But of course one of the albums of the 80s!
And Einstürzende Neubauten „Kollaps“ or „Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T.“
Prince, as mentioned, and also Parade.
Fully agree! And Soft Cell’s Tainted Love too! (What? A single is not an album?)
Not my style, but Simply Red was played at every party I went for a while (time to go to the kitchen and grab a beer…). And Tracy Chapman, at the end of the decade (another beer?).
And Bowie’s Let’s Dance, of course. Saw him in the Serious Moonlight Tour in the Waldbühne (cooooool!), in the Glass Spider Tour in front of the Reichstag (well, OK) and in some festival in Denmark (cooool again).
There’s a curiosity: It was released in December 1979 in the UK and January 1980 in the US. That’s why that album regularly turns up on both best albums of the 70s and 80s lists.
Well, even if you liked it not as much as the other Bowie concerts, it was a historical event when two years before the fall of the Wall, thousands of East Berlin youths went near the Wall to listen and got of course pestered by Vopos and the Stasi. One of the first open and public signs of massive social unrest in the GDR.
(of course you, @Pardel-Lux , know that, but I wanted to add an interesting historical point to the story)
Here’s the story:
Yes of course, but if you look at the picture in your article you see the problem with that concert: the stage was too low, the audience stood on a flat ground, the acoustics were atrocious. Politically and symbolically and all that I am with you all the way, only musically it was disappointing. Specially compared with the other performances in good settings. /hijack 
Yeah, I can believe that, I was at the Reichstag in the same year (as a mere tourist, not for a concert), and such a huge open field is always a crappy place for a concert acoustically. And if they really pointed the speakers somewhat Eastern as alleged, which was to the back of the stage, it was probably even worse.
The Eighties-est song ever is I Believe in a Thing Called Love by The Darkness.
Yeah, I know…