Okay so…what had happened was…

I totally had intentions of finishing this feature in a timely matter. I actually wrote 95% of it before I even published the first part, just to give myself enough of a head start. But the “I’ll write something funny to distract myself from the hell of 2020” mood I was in when I started this slowly morphed into a far less productive “everything is shit and I just wanna die” mood, and it’s really hard to write quips about “Sussudio’ when you’re in that headspace.

But I vowed to get this done by the year end and dammit that’s going to happen! So buckle up for the first half of the Top 20! We were already into the serious shit on the countdown, but things get real here. Save for one forgotten track by an artist whose already had one other forgotten track on this countdown, everything here is a straight-up classic. Even the bad songs. We’re in the timeless section now. Right now, at the very second you’re reading this, every song on this countdown is being played on the radio somewhere.

No matter how hard we want to get away from “Sussudio,” we just can’t I’m sorry. Continue reading →

The next section of the MTV’s Top 100 of 1985 might be the best. There are a couple stinkers here (including one that’s absolutely horrendous) but they’re more than outshined by the bangers, the classics, the timeless tunes that have held up better than most of the songs that have preceded them on this list. We were in the big leagues already, but now we’re reaching the all-star game. Nearly every song from this point on is on a “Best of the 80s” playlist or CD somewhere.

There’s also a song by The Firm but hey they can’t all be winners.

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Now at the halfway point of the Top 100, we come to what might be its most drastically fragmented section yet. Synthpop, 80s rock, 70s leftovers, bubblegum pop, bar rock, all that and more. It’s really a testament to just how many sounds were fighting for dominance at the time, with synthpop beginning to fall from cultural relevance, hair metal not yet finding its audience, and Michael Jackson taking the year off, it seemed that anyone and everyone could score a hit, genre be damned. While not all of the tracks here have aged well (or were even all that great at the time) they certainly get points for diversity, another reason why 1985 was so great for music.

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As bad as the last set of videos was for new-and-upcoming acts, this section is even worse. Over half of the 10 videos here are from artists who first established themselves in the 1970s or 1960s. There are only two new artists in this section, and neither ever scored another hit.

But even some of the more “classic” acts don’t fair all that well here, with some terrible tracks that signaled the beginning of the end of their careers. There’s more than one (bad) swan song here. With so many prominent artists of decades past churning out some of the crap you see in this section, it’s no wonder that hair metal would begin to take over the charts in just a few months. It was time for a change.

Our number 69 (nice) artist certainly knew that.

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As we head into the 70s of the countdown, we hit a crossroads of artists new and old. Half of these tracks are by artists who were well into their second, or in some cases even third, decade of making music, while the other half are hit singles by young up-and-comers. Time has been a friend to most of the songs on here, even the terrible ones are remembered (unfortunately). But time was not nearly as kind to most of the new acts here. Of the debut artists appearing in this set of videos, only one managed to maintain any kind of substantial mainstream success as the years went on.

It’s a shame too, because all of the songs here by then-new artists are fantastic. Certainly better than the two showing by one of the kings of shit-ass AOR bullshit that make their appearances here as well.

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Continuing my look at MTV’s Top 100 Countdown of 1985 with numbers 89-80 (part 1 can be found here). This set of ten brings up some huge swings in quality and staying power, with some all-time classics by legendary artists and songs that have been absolutely (and rightfully….and thankfully) lost to the sands of time. This section of the list is also one of many that shows how much power artists from the 1970s still had on MTV. It wasn’t all day-glo and hairspray. You could be a boring white dude in his 40s who was good at playing an instrument and still score a massive hit.

Or Rod Stewart.

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Like most of the world, I’ve been spending a lot of time indoors lately, absorbing as many distractions as possible from this hellscape that we call 2020.

Early on in the pandemic, an incredibly kind soul uploaded a metric crapton of vintage MTV clips to the Internet Archive. This repository has been an absolute godsend for me right now. With the present world in shambles and the future not looking that much better, I’ve not ashamed to say that I’ve used this collection of vintage VHS rips to dive headfirst into the past, soaking up as much audio/video content from my childhood years as possible. All for that fleeting dopamine fix that is rose-tinted nostalgia.

For me, the crown jewel of the entire collection is the 1985 Top 100 countdown, which is included in its entirety, complete with commercials, VJ breaks and news bits. It’s a wonderful time capsule that serves as an amazing document to that incredibly important year in music. While not all scenes and styles are present on the countdown this year (MTV was getting more diverse, but they still weren’t showing a lot of hip-hop, nor anything particularly intense like punk rock either), the list does feel like a perfect microcosm of what was really popular that year, the big guns, the stuff that left an impact.

And Billy Ocean, but we’ll get to him.

While there are more than a few totally forgotten songs on this list, the overwhelming majority of them are legit classics now. So many timeless numbers are here. Since MTV’s countdowns from other years in the decade are not as easy to find, it’s hard to compare them to this list, but I have to imagine that this one stands out for just the sheer number of songs that you still hear on the radio today. 1985 really was a banger of a year for pop music.

And since I have nothing better to do for the foreseeable future, I decided to write about every single one of them. The good, the great, the well-remembered, the terrible, and the utterly forgotten. Doing so, I noticed some patterns and trends of the era that are forgotten now (70s rockers really did well in the 80s, seriously), and was also reminded that some stereotypes of the decade are stereotypes for a reason (so much hairspray, my god, and hair metal hadn’t even really taken hold yet).

I hope that in reading this, memories of what you were doing when you first heard these songs are jogged loose, and bring a smile to you in these times where it seems like smiles are hard to come by.

But let’s kick things off with a nice, long, cry.

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