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3. Tracey Ullman, They Don’t Know [1983, #3]
Dear Tracey Ullman,
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways:
1. The Simpsons might never have happened were it not for you.
2. This.
3. Household Saints.
4. The phrase “It’s my amnesia!“
5. A Dirty Shame.
6. You’re my favorite guest on talk shows. Apparently you hosted a talk show once, too, but I don’t know about that because I don’t have cable.
7-20000 or so. Your brief but wonderful career on Stiff Records, where you sang songs by Blondie and Madness and Kirsty MacColl in a sixties girl-group style, despite the fact that it was 1983 and nobody else was doing anything like that.
They Don’t Know, your only American hit, was a cover of a song by the wonderful Kirsty MacColl, who sang backup on the song and co-produced your first album, You Broke My Heart in 17 Places. It’s one of the best songs of the decade, not because it’s nostalgiac or because I’m a sucker for chimes, but because it’s pretty much a perfect pop song. Humble, sing-alongable, just about three minutes long, with a delightful piano bit and clever lyrics about a lady who’s mildly jaded but perfectly happy, anyway.
It’s the best part of that weird American 1983 fixation with English domesticity [see also the entries on It Must Be Love and Come Dancing], but more importantly it’s a really wonderful song, even if even you yourself don’t seem to agree with the line about how there’s no use living in the past.
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[Wordier and wordier...]
4. Madonna, Open Your Heart [1987, #1]
I’ve watched a lot of videos over the past two weeks. Ones that came out recently, in my dull fascination with this year’s lengthy MTV awards nomination process, and ones that came out in the eighties, for this list. And I have to say, there hasn’t been much of a change in quality over the years. Sure, videos have gotten more expensive; there’s no way a dance artist would get away with a boring live performance video now the way that they did in the eighties, for instance. But overall, they’re all still mostly really lame.
Madonna, of course, is a great exception to that. Though a number of her singles in the eighties–including a couple on this countdown–didn’t even have videos, the ones that were produced, with folks like Herb Ritts and Jean-Baptiste Mondino and Pet Semetary director Mary Lambert, are almost all totally awesome. Because Madonna’s all about context, and she knows it. In 1990, on the Blonde Ambition tour, she ran around the stage like a blonde cross between Betty Boop and Lucille Ball; by 2004 (the last time I saw one of her concerts) she was very serious and arty and political, despite the fact that she was singing a lot of the same songs. Is Into The Groove still interesting twenty years later? When it’s part of a weird caber-tossing spectacle it is!
Without a doubt, Open Your Heart is my favorite Madonna song, and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s partly because I can’t detach it from its video. The cone bra, the black wig, the gay sailors, the boy with the fedora, the light-up boobs, and the Italian subtitles are all as much a part of this song as the keyboards or the “watch out” exclamations, which I still think of as Madonna mysteriously saying “a witch-ah, a witch-ah.”
The lock and key sex metaphor is a little iffy. I mean, if it’s his heart that’s being opened, technically shouldn’t she be the one with the key? Either way, Madonna’s ode to (probably) innocent stalking is my favorite of her many, many, many great singles.
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[I decided to just post these one at a time, since I'm getting so wordy and because maybe I'll go faster that way.]
5. The Cure, Lovesong [1989, #2]
Before Lovesong, the Cure had only made the American Top 40 once, when Just Like Heaven peaked at #40 in 1987. But with the third single from Disintegration, they found American chart success, reaching #2 on both the pop and modern rock charts. (In a disgusting travesty that makes me want to die, the hateful 311 cover of the song actually topped the original, hitting #1 on the modern rock chart in 2004.)
There are a number of reasons why Lovesong is so great. First you notice the meandering bassline, which keeps the song in ballad territory but makes sure that it isn’t too slow or dreary. Second, there’s the lyrics. The verses are one line repeated a few times, with only one word change in each line. And the chorus is similarly spare, with eight “I will always love you” declarations in the course of three-and-a-half minutes. Also, there’s the keyboards, which I feel like could be a string section and could also be the kind of music one might dance to while crazily slow-dancing over one’s lover’s grave. Finally, there’s Robert Smith’s lovely vocal delivery. He sings, not like he’s gloomy or dying, and not like he’s on some sort of psychotic happy pills, but from a really pretty and sincere place in-between, which is something that he almost never does. It’s one of their simplest songs, and probably also the best. It’s definitely one of my personal favorite songs of all time, although I’m only listing it as #5 because I don’t particularly associate it with pop radio.
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I’m up to the top 10. I planned to write entries 10-2 today, but I got a little wordy so I figured I’d break the posts up. Here’s half of the rest of the list; I should say that any one of these songs might have been in the top five, or even number 1, on a different day. The top 10, as you can see from this half of it, skews pretty far toward the end of the decade. I’m not sure whether that’s because I’m old enough to remember songs from 1987 on from my childhood, or whether pop music actually got better as the decade progressed; I’m inclined to think it’s some of both.
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Here’s the start of the top 20. The countdown’s only country song*, some crazy bangs, and some really excellent singles by people that didn’t put out many very good hit singles over the course of the decade.
[*Sorry for ruining the surprise. #1 isn't going to be Islands In The Stream.]
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In this very belated segment of the countdown, silly earrings, worse hats, terrible gray off-the-shoulder getups, somebody with and without his Francois Sagat beard, and the only top 40 hit to ever mention both cocaine and Bohannon Bohannon Bohannon Bohannon.
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Hi guys–sorry for only posting one entry today. I know you’re excited about the top 40. In exciting news, yesterday was the biggest day ever for Mixtapes For Hookers, so apparently you guys like it when I spend time posting cumbersome lists.
Anyway, I’m DJing tonight and I’m totally not ready, so this is probably it for today. In this edition, an embarrassing ballad, lots of saxophones, and the second hit for a group most people classify as one-hit wonders.
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Entering the upper half of the countdown… Three of my favorite female singers of the decade, some groups that only had one memorable hit, a song I didn’t really like until about eighteen years after it came out, and the greatest hit by a group that recorded one of my least favorite songs ever.
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In this installment, lots and lots and lots of ladies. And a couple of gentlemen in fancy suits who don’t seem to know the difference between Texas and Brazil.
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Time for the fourth installment of my Favorite Pop Hits of the 80s list. I actually wish I could write these faster and not keep getting distracted listening to my noisy neighbors and watching Youtube videos of Alvin and the Chipmunks episodes.
