What were the first and last songs to sound like 80s songs?

Prince's Gold is incredibly 80s for 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IQE62Vn4_U

I guess "Don't You Want Me" was a slow burner because it hit the Cashbox chart in early March '82 (don't know about Billboard)

Like "Tainted Love," it was an unusual slow burner: it took 12 weeks to climb into the top ten, another five to dislodge "Ebony and Ivory" (how's that for A New Day is Dawning?).

Wait, why would a Journey poster have seemed ridiculous in the year of Pyromania?

I associate Talking Heads so strongly with the ‘80s, that when complaining (on this board) about Pitchfork’s recent “Best Albums of the 1980s” list, I was all — “...and they left off the first two Talking Heads LPs??”

(keep in mind, I know all about the CBGB scene; as well as the title of the first album!)

Obviously Roxy Music were a big influence on the early '80s new pop/new romantic scene but this song in particular seems to have the groundwork for that sound pretty much down:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFeqtXMKZ4U

(From 1975)

Look I love that you guys know stuff & all but I was ten frickin years old; all I knew was what I heard from Casey Kasem. Tainted Love, Don't You Want Me. 1982.

I'm with ups here - "Life Is A Highway" sounds like "Let The Day Begin" or a Richard Marx tune more than 1991 rock.

1992 was peak Poppy Bush Interzone era. Check out the modern rock chart.

1972

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK3ZP6frAMc

I'm with ups here - "Life Is A Highway" sounds like "Let The Day Begin" or a Richard Marx tune more than 1991 rock.

I don't think it's that different from the Petty/Mellencamp/Dire Straits songs on the 1991 list but neither is "Let the Day Begin" (which is from 1989) tbh.

I guess there's a late 80s/early 90s 'interzone' sound that's distinct from the mid-80s sound of Born in the USA or Slippery When Wet (which is what I was thinking of as '80s', probably too narrowly) but also distinct from what came after (which the REM and Black Crowes songs were looking towards). "Dreamline" sounds like "Show Don't Tell" but not like "Marathon".

Of course there's also Can in 1972 sounding like Madchester groups of '89, but I guess that's a whole nother thing

I guess there's a late 80s/early 90s 'interzone' sound that's distinct from the mid-80s sound of Born in the USA or Slippery When Wet

Precisely. It's like early seventeenth century English poetry or Italian painting compared to the Renaissance: gaudier, Mannered, as if biding its time for the next revolution.

Gonna be hard to beat Obscured By Clouds really.

Not to turn this into a general prescient outliers thing but the lush breakdown around five minutes into Gino Soccio - Dancer (1979) sounds a lot like some bouncy FM bass you'd hear in early 90s prog house or proto trance, skipping over the 80s entirely. But of course there's also a clear line of influence back to disco, it's just very neat use of electronics for the time.

Roxy Music is a good call - theirs is some of the first music I'd feel comfortable calling "New Wave"

YMO's "Pure Jam" always felt like an early 90s track, when in fact it was released in '81

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STPpnnfJ-GM

For me the 80s began when M's 'Pop Musik' hit #1 in 1979.

a John the Baptizer moment

i always used to think of roxy music as an eighties band

if that prince song works, i think i would also go with other alt-ballad sounding hits like Adam Ant "Wonderful" (95), Duran Duran "Ordinary World" (93), maybe The Pretenders "I'll Stand By You (94).

i would maybe extend that to expensive-sounding AOR ballads hits that don't really exist anymore - from the likes of Bryan Adams ("Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman") or Celine Dion ("If You Ask Me To," "The Power Of Love") which don't feel specific to the late '80s but definitely felt ubiquitous then and throughout the '90s. maybe that was more of a '90s thing?

i'm not sure if this is what you're asking for but something like Depeche Mode "I Feel Love" (2001) feels to me like something that could have existed 15 years prior, although "'80s nostalgia as a commodity" was definitely a thing by that year.

there must have been mid-'90s hair metal but i'm having trouble thinking of what bands stuck it out. Def Leppard "Let's Get Rocked" was 1992.

the power of love was an 80s ballad though

Word, I never knew that. lol not a huge fan of that song so I never bothered reading into its history.

Jennifer Rush had a huge #1 with it in the UK in the 80s

Ha, I didn't know until now that the Jennifer Rush version never made the US Top 40. It was #1 in Canada.

There's definitely a bit of 80s in "Obscured by Clouds", that intro sounds a bit like "In The Air Tonight" in fact, but the analog synths make it still pretty obviously 70s for me. The sound of the 80s was all about digital synths like the DX7.

Jennifer Rush had no career to speak of in the US. Shame, too, because I genuinely do like some of her stuff.

This Diana Ross song from 1978 was obviously an attempt to ride the Moroder/Summer wave as far as it would go, but I think it's actually a bit more forward looking than even "I Feel Love."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOgei80XNK4

I feel like the last 80's hit was Jane Child's 'Don't Wanna Fall In Love' in 1990. After that the charts were full of eurohouse, r&b ballads, and AOR pop rock.

what about Amy Grant?

^yeah

I tend to think of Young Americans as the line in the Sand between "late Sixties" & "early Eighties" but as far as og New Wave records go, you really can't fuck with Taking Tiger Mountain

I’m not sure what the first “80s song” was, but I’m pretty sure the first song to sound like the 90s was “It’s The End of the World As We Know It”

What screams '80s' about "Life Is a Highway" for you, ums? It mostly seems of a piece with the mainstream rock format of 1991 to me. (At the time, that stuff had a definite 'the 80s are over' feel for me. Obv, they became more over the further we got into the 90s.)

― silent as a seashell Julia (Sund4r), Saturday, February 9, 2019 5:04 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I actually side with ums here too since whenever that song gets even within the vicinity of a recognizable *~Nineties~* aesthetic it spontaneous transform into Cracker's 'Low'

Ha, cool comparison. Seriously, though, not much sounded like "Low" on the radio in 1991. I still don't think "Life Is a Highway" sounds more stuck in the 80s than most other songs on the same format from the same year but I might have lost this one. I do think Alfred is right about the interzone.

Again with Roxy/Ferry, Bryan looking fully 1985 in 1975, and commissioning 1985 Tina Turner guitar, sax and harmonica sounds from his 1975 greasers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9EbR0ckb40

"Life Is A Highway" doesn't sound 80s to me, it sounds like it was released in 1997

Even with that harmonica?

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released big singles (“Into the Great Wide Open,” “Learning to Fly”) after “Life Is a Highway”

(My point being that even if you do consider “Life...” to be ‘80s-sounding, it wasn’t the last ‘80s-sounding rock hit to have heavy MTV rotation)

In any case I don’t think any song from the 90s could qualify because people are still making songs that sound like 80s songs today. Many of them placed in the ILM poll.

Yeah, I thought the idea was “last hit song to still use ‘80s-style songwriting & production with the original intentions behind it, and not as a ‘retro’ aesthetic move,” or something.

(And I think it has to have at least charted for the answer to be interesting, because obviously some artists never stopped making ‘80s-sounding music with the original intentionality... same with every decade.)