my top songs of the 80’s list-in-progress
Pitchfork’s top 00’s song countdown inspired me to finally start and follow through on my long backburnered 80’s track-down over at postpunk, and I’m already 10 songs in!
In order to make the project doable (I am writing blurbs as well), I chose 35 songs with room for a few last-minute impulse/oh-shit-i-missed-that inclusions as “honorable mentions”. All told, there should be 40 songs on the final list.
- HM1: The Passions - Africa Mine
- #35: Stevie Nicks - Edge of Seventeen
- #34: My Bloody Valentine - She Loves You No Less
- #33: Adam & The Ants - Stand and Deliver
- #32: Hüsker Dü - The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill
- #31: Orange Juice - Falling And Laughing
- #30: Hall & Oates - I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)
- #29: Martha and the Muffins - Three Hundred Years/Chemistry
- #28: Soft Cell - Tainted Love
- #27: Fugazi - Waiting Room
It’s funny reading some of P2K postmortems while I produce/publish this list, because I am dealing with reader expectations and responses on a song by song basis. It’s nice to see something like “Edge of Seventeen”—generally loved, but overlooked by a lot of 80’s canons—do quite strongly in terms of Tumblr notes/playcount. My two most idiosyncratic and obscure choices so far—“Africa Mine” and “Three Hundred Years/Chemistry”—have signifcantly fewer plays than my hours-old Fugazi post (the ratio is like 5:2).
Of course, these are imperfect metrics for measuring response, since you have to account for how packageable the post is (a tl;dr post discourages reblogs and hence plays by non-followers) and consider how the reader experiences the posts (if they check once a day, they should see two of my posts in reverse order but will likely only budget their attention on one of the songs).
