The Best and Worst Songs of 1985

Fuck you, Spin. We need better memories, especially now.

Index of best songs 1955-2015 is here.

In recent years, mainstream corporate music mags like Rolling Stone have belatedly started to grapple with their racist and sexist past. As a result Black performers, women performers, and even some non-Anglophone performers have started to show up on their semi regular best-ofs alongside the usual boomer rock Micks and Bobs and Bruces.

Spin, though, doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Their recent list of the best and worst songs of 1985 is a remarkably tedious and predictable affair, studded with retro rock sloggers like John Cougar Mellencamp and Huey Louis, interspersed with second wave Brit pop invasion radio staples like “Take on Me.” There’s no hip hop, no Latin music, no metal, and hardly any Black performers on the best of list—though Black musicians are well represented among the worst. (The venomous assault on Aretha’s New Wave experiment is particularly ugly.)

There are certainly some great songs on the list, including “Runnin Up That Hill” and Nick Cave’s “Tupelo” (probably the most left field choice on mention.) But overall, the article is a drab exercise in the most uninventive kind of nostalgia, remembering, or recreating, a narrow 1985, with little breadth or diversity, and little perspective on the ways that people at the time might have been limited in their ability to see what sort of music might be important down the line. It’s a list that could have been written in 1985—complete with all that eras bigotries and blinkers.

At this point you might well ask, “Who cares what Spin thinks?” And the answer is—well, I guess I kind of care. In part that’s because bad music journalism annoys me, especially now when most outlets are cutting staff and the number of music writer jobs is barely above zero.

More than that though, this is a bad moment to forget the full range of the past, and a worse moment impose a bland conformity on our memories and our music.

So, I made an anti-Spin list. It’s also limited, as any list by one person is going to be, and I’m sure longtime readers will notice a number of familiar names and enthusiasms. But I hope it’s at least wide-ranging and idiosyncratic enough to remind people of just how much different music was being made in 1985, in how many different places, across how many genres. And I’ve also thrown in a couple of worst ofs, too, as a reminder of what happens when our view of music, and of life, turns into a cramped apology for the status quo.

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Best Songs of 1985

12.
“One Day At A Time”
Willie Nelson

Willie Nelson released his last full-on masterpiece album in 1985. Me and Paul was an easy rolling reiteration of his easy rolling style, with his usual band strolling through some of his classics as Willie’s voice wanders over and around the tune, leaving space for love, hope, and rambling. Every song is wonderful, but “One Day At A Time” is a transcendent performance, cutting itself loose from any year as Willie floats away from the zeitgeist, tipping his hat to eternity. “Yesterday’s dead, and tomorrow is blind/but I live one. day. at a time.” Keep singing, Willie.

11.
“The Sweetest Taboo”
Sade

Sade’s quiet storm just-funky-enough lead single from her second album was a huge hit, and righteously so. A torch song with enough shake to get you shimmying, Sade’s haunting, jazzy yodel demonstrates once again why her voice was one of the defining sounds of the decade. I presume “The Sweetest Taboo” didn’t make Spin’s list because the smooth jazz vibe is considered gauche. But anyone who prefers Huey Louis to this is suffering from a catastrophic dearth of soul.

10.
“O Maria O Maria”
Asha Bhosle and S.P.Balasubrahmanyam

R.D. Burman’s 80s career is much less well known overseas than his 70s output, but this gloriously preposterous track from the hit film Saagar shows he could still bring the bizarre infectious horn/strings/Indian percussion/how does that even work? The track manages to be catastrophically corny and sexy hip at the same time, with a lascivious flute solo (?!) and onetime wife, longtime collaborator Asha Bhosle wailing “ho-ho-ho-ho-ho” high and fierce enough to leave your eardrums bleeding—not that you’ll notice with all that Bollywood fabulousness on screen.

9.
“King of Rock”
RUN-D.M.C.

Hip Hop had yet to take over the world in the mid-80s, but RUN-D.M.C. saw the future coming. The video is set in a knock off of the (then newly established) Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and our heroes cheerfully deface/pay tribute to rock’s memory while crafting one of the most unrelentingly harsh rock songs of the decade. The group’s trademark ultra-sparse, brutal beats are juxtaposed with Eddie Martinez’s Funkadelic-worthy psychedelic guitar solo. Few songs have ever connected yesterday and tomorrow with such perfectly graceful grit.

8.
“Raspberry Beret”
Prince and the Revolution

Prince’s interracial, multi-gender band with an all-time all-time summer ode to horniness and telling your boss to fuck off. This is the one I really can’t believe wasn’t on the Spin list. It’s fucking Prince. What is wrong with you?

7.
“Love Vigilantes”
New Order

It’s hard to imagine another brit pop band crafting a super-catchy synth ode to the plight of undead veterans. Bernard Sumner said he wanted to create a “redneck song,” but the result is neither exactly sincere nor aexactly parody. Instead, the lush earworm strums along with melancholy longing, pulling the listener, and the narrator, inevitably from Vietnam to America, which the end of the song reveals is a trip from death to death. The four minute pop song becomes a kind of ominous destiny; you can’t stop humming it, even though every hum strips you of your self and of hope. New Order was a transatlantic phenomenon by 1985, and “Love Vigilantes” is in part about a US empire so alienated from its own actions and identity that it doesn’t know what it’s listening to, or who it is that’s listening.

6.
“Leper Messiah”
Metallica

Not the most famous track from Metallica’s “Master of Puppets,” but that is not my fault. “Leper Messiah” is a doomy prog slog anthem which feels like it’s being dragged face first behind a dripping zombie on a motorbike. Motorhead’s crazed propulsion is grafted to Sabbath’s festering detuned grandeur, and the result is a monstrous deep nerd howl at Reagan-era propaganda and moral majority death cults. Bassist Chris Burton was killed in a road accident soon after this album, and the band turned into a lumbering corporate parody of themselves soon after. “Leper Messiah,” though, is a bracing jolt of loathing directed at exactly the right christofascist enemies.

5.
“Gbe Mi Ro”
King Sunny Ade

Nigerian jùjú legend King Sunny Ade’s music isn’t really singles-focused; his shimmering, boiling boogie groove is his shimmering, boiling boogie groove, across songs, albums and decades. This is adamently not a criticism; when you have achieved such mesmerizing perfection, why change it? “Gbe Mi Ro,” from his 1985 album The Truth, picks up the usual trappings and shakes, glides, and rolls with them over 8 glorious minutes. The one distinctive feature is the addition of what sure sounds like a synthesizer, adding electronic beep and moog-like wails to the trance chant. It’s a reminder that the whole world was still there in the 80s, picking up new ideas even as they went their own way.

4.
“Conga”
Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine

In the great tradition of Cuban immigrants past, Gloria Estefan, Emilio Estefan, and friends grab the mic and every percussion instrument that isn’t nailed down on their way to delivering an absolute fucking monster of dancefloor funk. Incessant wedding play has given “Conga” a reputation for corniness, and the white guy retro establishment consistently overlooks Estefan as the wrong kind of retro, but try to listen to it with fresh ears and it will just about tear those ears off. The lyrics are a tribute to the old island; the video is a cheeky tribute to the diaspora’s new sounds, moves, and eroticism. It’s a vision of Americana which includes everyone who comes here to get up on that dance floor.

3.
“Cock E.S.P.”
Hanatarash

Before there was the Boredoms, there was Hanatarashi. Screaming uber weirdo Yamantaka Eye and guitar despoiler Mitsuru Tabata took the blueprint of Einstürzende Neubauten, added power tools and 50% more feralness, and created a blast of Japanoise designed to flay the face off would-be noise avantists like Sonic Youth or Jesus and Mary Chain. There’s not necessarily much to choose between the tracks on Hanatarash’s 1985 self-titled debut, but the howling vocals on “Cock E.S.P.” give it the edge, in various senses. Sometimes the best resistance is just opening up the pits of hell.

2.
“Runnin’ Up That Hill”
Kate Bush

Rediscovered when it was used for nostalgic filigree in Stranger Things, Bush’s signature song is too odd, and too brilliant, to be contained in a mediocre horror show. Bush’s sweeping, bizarrely honking synth pop calls on God to release a couple from the confines of gender—a spiritual plea for sexual understanding and for a liberation from the dead weight of cis bodies. “Runnin’ Up That Hill” is not usually considered an antifascist song, but right now it sure feels like one.

1.
“How Will I Know”
Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston’s most joyful song is also her most heartbreaking. Her inimitable, stunning gospel powerhouse vocals take the default synth funk and turn it into an oceanic jolt of joy, hope, and possibility. At the same time, looking back from 40 years later, it’s impossible not to think about what all that hope and joy came too—not least because Houston’s family, fans, and country forced her to forswear her love and identity. Hearing Houston question her own romantic intuitions with that matchless control and passion is almost too painful to bear, even as the song is too uplifting to deny. Our queer geniuses give us so much, and deserve so much better—forty years ago, and still.

The Worst Songs of 1985

2.
“You’re Only Human (Second Wind)”
Billy Joel

The obvious choice for worst song of 1985 is “We Are The World”. And that is in fact not a good song. But even coming together to create an Event by committee, the collected stars of 1985 could not cobble together a tune of glib uplift as smug and clunky as this execrable foray into desperate synth relevance by the reliably execrable Billy Joel. Released as one of the new singles from Joel’s Greatest Hits collection, the melody of “Second Wind” performs a grimacing rictus of ill-fated rhythm as Joel mouths hoary dad platitudes that were hoary when his dad was a kid (“you’ll learn more from your accidents/ than anything you could ever learn in school.”) A clumsy exercise in hectoring cluelessness, the video somehow is even worse than the song alone, as Joel offers up an It’s a Wonderful Life riff where some teen gets to imagine how much his family would miss him if he committed suicide. Meanwhile the singer wanders around in a would-be cool hipster hat and facial hair. Joel was to have many other career nadirs, but this remains a striking tour de force of wretchedly oblivious smarm.

1.
“Johnny B. Goode”
Michael J. Fox

Michael J. Fox’s performance of “Johnny B. Goode” in Back to the Future was not released as a single; nonetheless, it was one of the most famous songs of the year. As it happens, this poorly considered nostalgic effort is also a good summary of everything wrong with Spin, with 1985, and with 2025. In the film, Fox’s character Marty McFly travels to the past, where he gets to perform an “updated” hard rocking version of Chuck Berry’s song, supposedly inspiring the “new sound” of the man himself via the magical power of time travel. Black people’s genius and originality is gigglingly erased in favor of the blandified posturing of talentless hacks. Turning rock and rolls’ origins retroactively white mirrors Spin’s obligatory whitening of 1985, and our current fascist efforts to erase Black people and Black contributions.

Back to the Future, and this dreadful song, are both reminders that the past we imagine is in large part determined by the present we want to create. The year 1985 had music that speaks to us, and resources we can use. But we have to be willing to hear them.