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

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.)