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Music from the ’80s is beloved not only by people who remember the jams from their initial appearances on the radio, but also by those who missed it the first time around by virtue of having not yet been born (or at least too young to exert any control over the car stereo). Any ’80s playlist worth the trouble will remind you of how it felt to hear the songs first, whether you bought the cassette yourself — at the mall, no less — or found them on a classic rock station. Indeed, ’80s artists could tap into feelings of youthful energy and the fun of having your life ahead of you like few musical eras before or since.
No love songs here, though crushes and noticing someone cute are acceptable, and everything we’ve listed has passed the “will your friends sing along to it in the car” test. Four of these songs were made famous by people who were themselves young, more or less, when they came out; the closest thing to an exception is a post-divorce recording by an artist who felt very free (and wasn’t all that old, as she would have been the first to tell you). Nothing here is an obscure guy-at-the-record-store deep cut: Everyone knows these songs, and everyone who has ever had fun loves them.
Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go — Wham!
“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” gives a bright, bouncy spin to FOMO. The singer (George Michael, mostly) has a crush, and it looks like things are going well! But he didn’t get to go out dancing with the crush last night, and he wanted to come along. (The crush is named in the song as “my lady,” and sexuality is of course fluid, but … c’mon. You go on to talk about Doris Day in the same song.) The initial repetition of “jitterbug,” a fun-to-say word even if it wasn’t a popular dance in Wham!’s heyday, sets up the go-go, yo-yo, solo rhythm of the song. If someone did wake you up to go out dancing, this song is the perfect jam to shake off the sleep and get yourself ready to hop around the club.
Wham!, the exclamatory British band that saw cute boys performing cute songs, also has a cute origin story. Georgios “Not Yet George Michael” Panayiotou and Andrew “Other Guy from Wham!” Ridgeley met as tweens, both the children of immigrants in a bedroom community outside London. After a failed ska project, the pair burst onto the scene as Wham! in 1982, racking up four years of hits before the two broke up the band, parting as friends to let the more ambitious (and harder-working) Michael’s celebrity continue its parabolic rise. Ridgeley continued making music and has spoken and written warmly of his old bandmate before and after Michael’s 2016 death.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun — Cyndi Lauper
“Girls Just Want to Have Fun” wasn’t Cyndi Lauper’s first recording, but the song was undeniably her big break. The poppy, easy-to-whistle tune and chantable chorus cover a subtle feminist backbone in the lyrics: Lauper isn’t mindlessly obeying her parents, nor is she letting a man run her life. Like many ’80s women, she’s got a job — and since she’s got her own money and her own schedule, she’s free to do what she wants after work. Which is have fun all night! But Lauper’s devotion to fun doesn’t mean you don’t have to take her seriously.
The song’s credibility gains additional heft from the fact that Lauper is certifiably cool: who wouldn’t want to have fun with her? She dropped out of high school, clawed her way to musical stardom, and in 2013 became the first solo female to win the Tony for Best Original Musical Score for “Kinky Boots.” And her hair was always incredible. Even now that she’s reached the “celebrity medication endorsement” career phase with her spots for a psoriasis drug, Lauper is still one of history’s greatest and coolest ladies.
I Wanna Dance With Somebody — Whitney Houston
In the video for “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” Whitney Houston looks pretty and young — which she was, of course — but she also looks like an ’80s girl, with her hair in crimp-like curls, her makeup colorful and playful, and sporting the required huge plastic earrings. “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” matches Houston’s vivacious look, even if the lyrics are a little wistful. Houston wants romance and excitement, both the “dance of courtship” and to actually show off on a dance floor with a good-looking guy. If she’s a little lonely right now, she’s smart enough (and young enough) to know that won’t last: there are plenty of men as interested in the young Houston as she is in them, and the dance floor is where they’ll find each other.
It’s easy to remember Houston through the glamorous persona of her later career. But before she was a movie star, before she was quite the Whitney Houston most people remember, she was a fresh and exciting performer with a crystalline voice and the youthful energy to sell it all the way to the cheap seats. “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” captures the star’s youth and its era like nothing else.
I’m So Excited — The Pointer Sisters
America loves three or four women singing in harmony, a popular music including wartime warblers like the Andrews Sisters, as well as the explosion of ’60s girl groups. The Pointer Sisters, a group of two to four (depending on the year) actual sisters from California, brought that tradition into the ’80s. “I’m So Excited” is clearly a disco track, but it’s not just a disco track. Disco energy overlays the classic girl-group simplicity of “these women sing well together,” all while the catchy lyrics and jump-out-of-your-seat danceability of the music mean that by the end of the song, everyone is as excited as the sisters themselves.
A sexy-but-classy video of the singers getting ready, applying makeup, and taking bubble baths before heading out to the club to perform only added to the tune’s vim and appeal. The song has lasted long enough to get new generations excited, both for listeners and performers. The daughter and granddaughter of original Pointer Sister Ruth now perform with the group.
I’m Coming Out — Diana Ross
It sounds like a fever dream, but it inspired “I’m Coming Out,” one of the most enduring gay anthems in all of popular music: a crowd of transwomen and/or drag queens all dressed as Diana Ross. Songwriter Nile Rodgers witnessed this Rossening, this Rossmageddon, and the sight, combined with the not-yet-common phrase “coming out,” inspired him. Ross herself was coming out of a bad chapter in her life, with a divorce and a couple of bum projects behind her, and the energy of the song matched what she wanted: to revive her career and her own energy.
If Ross didn’t initially know that “coming out” meant something else, she certainly came to embrace that meaning as well, embracing and encouraging her gay fans with, among other messages of love, endless performances of the anthem. Ross rode the song, which updated her sound for the coming decade while still letting her sound like Diana Ross, back into the spotlight that was always her natural habitat. Few things are more freeing than coming out — of the closet, of a bad relationship, of a career slump — and plenty of straight people have joined their gay friends in letting Ross’s hymn to personal liberation set them free.