The B List: 10 Guilty Pleasures From The ’80s

9) Invisible Touch – Genesis

This one goes way back to the days of the ghetto blaster. While nowadays, it feels like a sin to fluff the post-Gabriel era, but at age 10, this was the cat’s pajamas. First one to correctly identify the total number of mullets in this video wins a free Flowbee.

8) Forever Young – Alphaville

What Alphaville lacked in creative song titles, they more than made up for in excellent flame retardant space suits. Also, is that a saxophone or a keyboard? I can’t even tell. That synthesizer technology was so amazing in the 1980s.

7) Lean on Me – Club Nouveau

While this cover of his classic probably has Bill Withers rolling over in his Lazy Boy, I am a fan. If you didn’t find that new move you were looking for from the jury in “Who’s Johnny,” you can certainly find it here. Another illustration of that marvelous ’80s technology shines through in the wide range of doh, doh, doh dohs present throughout the entire song. Apparently, the ability to record one’s voice and then play it back at 88 different pitches on a keyboard really blew Club Nouveau’s mind. Shit is amazing.

6) When You Were Mine – Prince

This is another tune that stems from ’80s movie magic. This song makes a cameo in an old family favorite, Hot Dog: The Movie. Eighties wunderkind actor, David Naughton, who plays the aging ski bum Dan O’Callahan, drops an epic line to Rudi “Garnshit” Garnisch (the European hot shot who has the judges in his pocket). “You can kiss my ass. Not on dees side, not on dat side, but vight in zee middle.” Just after O’Callahan makes his legendary crack at Garnshit, the beloved gang of Squaw Valley riff raff proclaims, “Let’s go tear up this mountain” and they proceed to rip it up to the tune of Prince’s When You Were Mine. What a phenomenal movie.

This is where we’d link a YouTube if Prince wasn’t a bastard

5) Man in the Mirror – Michael Jackson

I’d rank this amidst the most inspirational songs ever written. Tell me you don’t want to go make a change after you listen to this song. And don’t say, “Yeah, make a change of the station.” Michael Jackson and Man in the Mirror are like the real life version of the Wyld Stallyns. Just look at all those political leaders shaking hands while they listen.

4) Take On Me – A Ha

There’s nothing to be ashamed of here. To this day, I think this is the greatest music video of all time. If there’s one thing MTV needs to regain everything it lost in the past ten years, it’s partially animated videos involving bad guys with wrenches, race car helmets with numbers on them, and secret getaway portals that appear in the walls at the most opportune times.

3) Into The Groove – Madonna

As of late, it’s become evident that early 80s Madonna songs are loaded down with distinctive details in the backing musical arrangements. There is far more to attend to than simply Madonna’s vocals, such as bouncy synth basslines, funky guitar fills, and creative solos. Unfortunately, industry execs are retarded assholes and they edited out the magnum opus of a piano solo that typically appears about 2:30 minutes into the song for the sake of this video. Nevertheless, this old Madonna stuff brings back some great memories. In my case, most of these memories are based on stealing my sisters love letters to Michael J. Fox, but I’m sure you all have some fine ones of your own.

2) Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper

I’m sorry to say that the embedding on the original video is restricted, so Captain Lou Albano will not be joining us today. Instead, we have a pretty rad live rendition that not only exhibits how bat shit crazy Cyndi Lauper was/is, but also the electric crowd at a Cyndi Lauper concert. That place is on fire. There’s a nice little calypso beat box jam in there for an added bonus as well.

1) Let’s Hear It For The Boy – Deniece Williams

Perhaps the crowning moment in Kevin Bacon’s career, the scene in Footloose set to this song, taught country boys across the nation how to dance and inspired young country kids to express themselves in spite of weird Mormon authorities instilling them the fear of God-inflicted-wrath upon them. My imaginary band covers this song all the time with Grace Potter on guest vocals.

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5 Responses

  1. Any guilty pleasures list from the 80s that doesn’t include Whitney Houston usually gets the “bunk” tag from me. HOW-EVAH…the Hot Dog: The Movie reference was well-played, well-timed, well-researched, and well…awesome. Although, I think I’d go with “Top Of The Hill” or the song Harkin Banks sings to Sunny over the Prince tune, but whatever.

  2. The town in footloose is Lehi Utah where it was filmed. The religion portrayed was not Mormon but Rather an unspecified Baptist sect in Elmore City Oklahoma

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