Ooh, my mistake. When he asked for the BEST songs, I thought he meant musically, not because of corporately pushed popularity.
There was a whole culture of us who shied away from the chart toppers in those days.
I like a lot of them today as a nostalgia thing but avoided them in the 80s. I grew up in a heavy metal farm community out in the sticks.
No, this woman is going by popularity. Which makes it representative. It also gives a solid baseline; anything else is just opinion, and we know what that’s like.
If people on this poll choose “Jump” or “Maneater”, so be it for me!
BTW, what is this stuff about “corporately pushed”?
You know the saying, “you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink”?
Same thing. We like what we like. Some people may be influenced much by their friends (most likely, as teens and young adults), but ultimately most people are just going to like it, or not. Doesn’t matter how often it’s played.
I’m going to ignore the silly, leftist snobbery notion that being discovered by the masses means the song had to be foisted on them and the Stalinist implication that corporate *necessarily* means evil in order to go straight to a logical issue: how do you expect a song to get voters if it HASN’T been widely heard? I mean, we’re talking ‘80s music on what’s largely a political forum; it’s not like you’re going to get agreement on some blues musician you saw playing a club in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.