MTV’s Top 100 of 1985, a look back (Part 10)

Here we are, the top 10 videos of 1985.

A lot of them aren’t very good.

It’s weird. This countdown is full of classic tunes that are still played to death on the radio, but while many of the songs that make up the top 10 have stayed in the public consciousness in the years that followed, it hasn’t always been for the right reasons. The low points here are some of the most maligned, poorly-aged songs of the decade. Not only bad, but textbook examples of all the worst aspects of 80s music, both in terms of music and lyrics. When people were throwing out their 80s records and embracing grunge and indie music in the 90s, these were the records they shoveled off to CD Warehouse first.

But while many of these tracks aren’t the best 80s songs, they’re all the most 80s songs. These are the tracks that exemplified where music was in 1985, and where pop would go in the next few years. You might not like all of these songs, but if you were there in 1985, you’d have to agree that this top 10 is pretty indicative of what that year was like, for better or worse.

 

10. REO Speedwagon – “I Can’t Fight This Feeling”

This is an amazing video that should be meme’d to death. Every frame is a painting. A ridiculous, stupendous, painting.

My favorite part is when that kid is staring out the window, looking upon a sea of literally faceless people. He then closes the window, turns to the camera to reveal his REO Speedwagon sweater, and smiles smugly, suggesting that the key to overcoming life’s struggles (as represented by the faceless mob) is REO Speedwagon – like they’re Dianetics or something.

I got nothing but respect for REO Speedwagon. They paid their dues in the 70s by cultivating a dedicated fan base and then branched out to mainstream radio success in the late 70s. While many of their contemporaries had to be dragged into MTV kicking and screaming, REO Speedwagon embraced the new medium immediately, and I mean immediately – “Keep On Loving You” was the 7th video played on MTV.

“I Can’t Fight This Feeling” is a pale imitation of “Keep On Loving You,” but as pillow soft rock goes, you can do a hell of a lot worse. The world needs inoffensive light rock for teenagers to dance to at their junior prom, and REO Speedwagon is there to fill that need.

 

9. Sting – “Fortress Around Your Heart”

Oh god, I don’t want to talk about Sting more than once. Go on to number eight.

 

8. Sting – “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free”

My mom loved Sting. I think every suburban mom in the mid-80s loved Sting. If you were in a home owner’s association that was part of the contract.

I’ve never understood it. The Police were fantastic, and released some of my all-time favorite albums and songs, but Sting solo is just…ugh….I don’t know. It’s not fair to say he’s boring. His music is complex, well-crafted, and he obviously puts a lot of time and thought into it. He’s not half-assing it ala Michael Bolton, Richard Marx, or any other light rock artist. He’s a notch above the other adult contemporary sludge that was beginning to pollute the airways in the mid-80s. He’s unique for sure. He’s combining jazz, rock, and new wave in ways that very few others were doing at the time. He’s immensely talented and creative and…

Ah fuck it, he’s boring.

 

7. Tears For Fears – “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”

I love how Tears For Fears have all these dark, moody, introspective songs like “Mother’s Talk,” “Mad World” and “Pale Shelter,” but they broke through in the US with “Shout,” a song that barely means more than nothing. They certainly made up with that with their second bit hit though, a fantastic song that doubles as a catchy, fun single and as a commentary on 1980s politics and money lust. It’s my favorite single from Songs From The Big Chair.

Tears For Fears’ stuff holds up a lot better than that of their contemporaries, because they avoided a lot of the trappings of 80s synthpop that would become trite and grating. No bright synthesizer presets. Not a single synth sax. They don’t sound raw, but they sound deliberately downbeat, just a bit, just enough to make them stand out. They have goth origins with “Mad World” and they never totally shed them, even if they dressed like they were the auditors for your school’s Young Republicans club.

 

6. John Parr – “St. Elmo’s Fire”

John Parr is not a one hit wonder. He scored a rock hit the year prior with a track called…sigh… “Naughty Naughty.” That song, unsurprisingly, has aged poorly. This song hasn’t exactly aged well either. The very first thing you hear is that overbearing synth, followed by the most gated reverb drums of 1985. Before the first chorus can even begin, needless saxophones are pumped into the mix, as seemingly even more synths somehow find their way into the song. This isn’t a wall of sound, it’s a whole damn room.

But the song has remained. It refuses to go away. Because the world needs motivational uptempo rock songs goddammit, and since we don’t get nearly enough of them now, we’ve just collectively held on to all of the great ones that came out in the 80s. This is on someone’s workout mix right now, I guarantee. And I’m not just saying that because it’s on my workout mix.

Do yourself a favor and never listen to any other John Parr songs though, they’re all awful. And do yourself another favor and never see St. Elmo’s Fire. It’s awful too.

 

5. Simple Minds – “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”

It’s always a bummer when you hear that a band hates their biggest hit. Flock Of Seagulls can’t stand “I Ran,” Berlin is more than a little sick of “Take My Breath Away,” and Simple Minds are simply not big on this song. At least they weren’t at first. Reading interview with them now they seemed to have come around on it.

Unless you were born in a cave on Mars, or after 1985, you know that “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” is from the soundtrack to The Breakfast Club, every middle-class white suburban teen’s favorite film for at least five minutes. The song was written by Keith Forsey, the film’s composer. He wrote it specifically for Simple Minds, as he was a fan of the group. They turned him down multiple times because they weren’t too keen on recording other people’s music. It took singer Jim Kerr’s then wife, Chrissie Hynde, to convince him that hey, the song is pretty great, so get off your high horse and record it already.

She was right. Not only is it a great song, but it’s a great song for the soundtrack to The Breakfast Club. This countdown has a lot of soundtrack hits on it. But this one feels the most like it was written for the movie from which it came. The lyrics echo the themes of the film, but not too directly. It touches on the film’s ideas with broad strokes, evoking the same feelings. And it’s a somber song about friendship that can also make you dance. That’s a hell of a balancing act.

La la la la.

 

4. John Cougar Mellencamp – “Lonely Ol’ Night”

There are two Mellencamp songs on this countdown, “Small Town” and this. “Small Town” almost feels like a parody of heartland rock with its “I small town in a small town with my small town small town because small town,” lyrics. This track kicks that track’s ass. Not only are the lyrics infinitely better, it’s more interesting from a production standpoint as well. It mixes the big 80s sound with Mellencamp’s down home feel perfectly. It’s very much cut from the same cloth as Bruce’s Born In The USA album.

With it’s big, slick, polished sound, this track could’ve easily gotten a big, boisterous stadium performance video, but its muted, high-contrast black-and-white look is a much better match, because it matches the song’s lyrics. This is not a happy, fun song. This is a sad song with a happy wrapper. It’s about two sad, lonely (duh) people settling for each other because they got nowhere else to go and no one else to be with. It’s like Pearl Jam’s “Better Man” but not as depressing because at least the feeling is mutual. And hey, at least they got somebody, and maybe that’s why the song sounds so damn peppy.

As a whole, I’m pretty uneven on Mellencamp’s stuff, but this one has always been a favorite.

 

3. Mr. Mister – “Broken Wings”

Every genre goes through a progression. Let’s look at grunge rock as an example. First it’s raw and underground (Green River, Mudhoney). Then it gets polished just a bit, just enough for it to find the mainstream and it starts to break through (Nirvana, Pearl Jam). After that, the imitators rush in and try to copy the hits, coming up with poppier material that’s even more watered down (Bush, Candelbox, Sponge). Finally, the copies of the copies come out, anything that made the genre interesting in the first place is bleached away, and you’re left with crassly commercial, overblown bullshit (Creed, Nickleback). That’s just how it goes.

And it’s never clean cut. It’s not like one phase of the progression ends and another begins. You can easily have bands from the first phase cranking out fantastic music while rip-off copycats are doing their thing at the same time. 1985 was still a prime year for new wave music and synthpop. This chart is evidence of that. The new wave scene was still working hard to inject life into rock music. For example, you had Devo, Oingo Boingo, and Talking Heads.

And you also had Mr. Mister.

Mr. Mister are the sound of nothing. They put the “dull” in dulcet. They are drab. They are boring. They are wallpaper. They make vaporwave sound like drum and bass. They are the opposite of energetic. They are musical vampires, but not in the cool Bauhaus way, I mean they suck the life out of all those around them and replace with with radio-friendly bullshit.

Remember when Train referenced Mr. Mister in their terrible “Hey Soul Sister” song? I thought that was an odd choice at the time, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Mr. Mister is the most nothing excuse for a band of the early-80s, and Train were the same for the late-90s and early-2000s.

Banality embraces banality.

This song is a coma.

 

2: Starship – “We Built This City”

In 2002 I was fresh out of college, with a journalism degree I was itching to use. I scored a short-lived job with my hometown’s free weekly newspaper. Once a year, the paper had a “rant” issue where the writers and some readers could vent about whatever they wanted to get off their chest. Any problem they had with the city. Anything.

I used my 500 words to complain about the local radio stations still playing this song.

“We Built This City” is uniquely terrible because it’s awful in two very distinct ways. Firstly, and most noticeably, it sounds like complete garbage. This thing makes “St. Elmo’s Fire” sound modern. It has all the hallmarks of bad 80s production. Every poor choice I’ve already mentioned here, excessive (bad) synths, generic drums, overpowering chorus effects, they’re all here with bells on (or preset synth bell sounds on).

But, strip away all that dated production and instrumentation and you still have an absolutely horrific song. Let’s go back to “Sussudio” for a second. Yeah, “Sussudio” is stupid, and not the greatest song by any stretch of the imagination, but if you stripped away the overbearing saxophones and mountains of bad synthesizer sounds, you’d have a perfectly fine, perfectly fun, perfectly forgettable piece of pop.

The same cannot be said for “We Built This City,” it is a broken song to its very foundation. To the aggravating bassline, to its lack of any discernibly melodic hook, to the vapid brainsucking hooray-for-Yuppies bullshit lyrics sung by someone who was at Woodstock and should just have fucking known better, it’s beyond repair. An acoustic, stripped-down arrangement of this song would suck. Replacing the synths with a full orchestra wouldn’t save it. Turning it into an ironic heavy metal or ska cover wouldn’t make it palatable. 100% pure trash.

VH-1 and Blender magazine (RIP) named this the worst song of all-time a while back, and in the years since then, that decision has been criticized. The song has even had a tiny bit of a critical re-evaluation, with some people saying that it’s really not that bad, and it’s fun if you’re in the right mood for it.

Fuck those people. They are objectively wrong. Sure, it’s not the worst hit song of all time, hell it’s not even the worst hit song on this countdown, remember that “Every Time You Go Away” is here, but that sure as hell don’t make it good.

This.

Song.

Is.

Shit.

Now, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship, that’s a decent track. Gimme that.

 

1. Dire Straits – “Money For Nothing”

Yo. This is Sting’s best song on this countdown.

If you had said in 1984, that the number one video of 1985 would be by Dire Straits, people would’ve probably thought you were crazy. Dire Straits were a well-known band by the mid-80s for sure, but they weren’t the type of band to score hit singles, and certainly not hit MTV singles. They only had one major hit before 1985, and it was their very first single, “Sultans of Swing,” back in 1978. It would be like saying in 2020 that the biggest artist of 2021 will be Walk The Moon. It’s possible sure, but it’s a longshot.

The sound of Dire Straits did not line up with what was popular at the time. Dire Straits were not a new wave act. They were not a synthpop group. They were not hair metal. They were a bluesy pub rock band that occasionally dabbled in prog. Not a single adjective in that sentence should have allowed them to have a hit in the mid-80s. And they were not pretty boys, nor were they known for elaborate, successful music videos. The video for the single preceding this, “So Far Away” was just a live performance. They weren’t fans of the format.

But I suppose when you make a song with the line “I want my MTV” someone at the record company is going to insist you shoot a real music video for it. And that person was by and large responsible for this song being a monster hit. Let’s be real about this; “Money For Nothing” is a fantastic song, but the video made the song the decade-defining hit it became.

And it wasn’t just because it was full of then-revolutionary computer graphics. A few other videos from this time also had a lot of CG. Rush’s “The Big Nothing,” which we saw earlier in this countdown, was also a gratuitous CG fest. What made “Money For Nothing” stand out was how the CG fit the song’s story, and how the CG was used to create memorable characters that the audience could recognize as actual people. This music video is to CG animation as Pac-Man or Donkey Kong are to video games. It was the first to take the technology and give it personality.

But let’s not discount the song entirely. It’s a damn good song! That riff is a banger. Singer/guitarist Mark Knopfler was famously trying to copy ZZ Top’s guitar sound with it, but effect he created was somehow even better. That strange, fuzzy, sound that has zero sustain or feedback is one-of-a-kind. You could play “Name That Tune” with this one and most people would be able to name it with just one note thanks to that crazy sound Knopfler had coming out of his amp.

Stereogum has a feature where they look back at every Billboard number one single ever. A few months ago they made their way to this one. It was a good piece, I recommend reading it, but the hand-wringing over the alleged offensive lyrical content of the song nearly made my eyes roll out of my head.  Yes, Knopfler sings the word “faggot” several times. Yes, it’s hateful and mean-spirited. Yes, it would not play well today on modern pop radio. Yes, it’s jarring to hear. But within the time it was written, and within the context of the song, it makes sense. Knopfler is playing a character here, he’s a working-class idiot asshole who hates everything new. That character would of course say “faggot” when confronted with the image of a glam rocker or new wave pretty boy. And he would be pathetic for saying that. And that’s kind of the point of the song.

Again, in 2021, even with the best of intentions, I wouldn’t want to hear that word in a pop single, but 1985 was a long-ass time ago, and my gay ass has a hell of a lot more things to be worried and upset about than homophobic slurs in songs that are over 30 years old. I, and every other gay man I’ve ever met, have all given this song a lifelong pass. It’s one of two songs that can get away with it. (The other, of course, being “Fairytale Of New York”.)

Buoyed by insane popularity of the “Money For Nothing” video, the album Brothers In Arms would go on to be not only Dire Straits’ most successful album, but one of the most successful rock albums of all-time. It’s sold nine million copies in the states alone, and over 30 million copies the world over. The band quickly put out a greatest hits collection called Money For Nothing that featured day-glo artwork inspired by the performance footage in the video, but they never really capitalized off of their newfound superstar status. They didn’t release a proper follow-up until 1991, with the underwhelming On Every Street. It sold well, but produced no real hit singles, certainly nothing that came close to “Money For Nothing.” The band broke up a few years later, Knoplfer went into solo work and film scores, and they never reunited. Their clout in music as a whole also seems minor. You don’t hear anyone citing Dire Straits as a stylistic influence. They came and went, left some good tunes, a great video, and that’s it.

But in terms of music videos, I think it’s hard to overstate the influence that Dire Straits had not only on the medium, but in the business behind it. By 1985, MTV had already proven that a hit video can translate into record sales. Michael Jackson took care of that. But Dire Straits and “Money For Nothing” proved that even a band who only experienced a modicum of success in the past could, with the right gimmick, ride a music video to international superstardom. The second half of the decade saw the rise of the million dollar video and the dawn of the music video being used to test out new special effects and computer technology. I don’t see those things happening without the wild popularity of “Money For Nothing.” Dire Straits left a mark on the music industry that, for good or bad, helped define it for over a decade after. This is the only video on the countdown that can claim that, so its status as the number one video of 1985 holds up some 36 years later.

Okay…anyone got a tape of the 1986 countdown?

Seriously.