SPOTIFY: 1980 Glory (playlist)
On Facebook, I had made a post about what I feel is my second favorite S.O.S. Band song, “Just The Way You Like It”. When asked what was my #1 pick, I said it was “Take Your Time (Do It Right)”. That lead to a brief exchange between Seattle resident Samson Spears about the great music that was released in 1980, when “Take Your Time (Do It Right)” was released. For me, while I had listened to a growing amount of music in my youth, slowly stepping up to the double digits in age lead to anticipation. For most of 1980 I was 9 years old, and in my 9th year in life I first heard rap music, I got nerdy for the first time in my listening habits thanks to The Beatles, video games were becoming a regular habit at the arcade or corner store, and I was about to become ten. That was a big deal for me, and my music listening habits consisted of the records my parents bought me and things I was able to pick out on my own, the radio, and what I could catch on TV. MTV: Music Television did not exist but “promotional film clips” could be seen on cable public access, Casey Kasem’s America’s Top 10, Solid Gold and any variety of shows that were on at the time. The music video had yet to be a major promotional tour for music, albums, artist, and labels, at least not in the U.S., it was still the live or lip-synched television appearances, although people like Ashford & Simpson and Al Jarreau did make videos back then.
Nonetheless, when this exchange between Samson S. and myself happened, I thought “I should create a Spotify playlist of my favorite songs from 1980″ and here it is. This is a mixture of songs I had at home, or songs I could always hear on the radio. A few of these were songs I would love later during the first few years of MTV, but I wasn’t aware they were released in 1980 until much later. They are a healthy mixer of rock, pop, hard rock, soul, funk, disco, new wave, and even a small burst of the quirky, courtesy of The Residents. I was already reading Rolling Stone magazine as a kid, so when I read that a guy who represented themselves as eyeballs made an album of 40 songs, each song being a minute each, I had to know who these freaks were. They’re in this playlist.
What this playlist isn’t is a representation of the world of music in 1980, the playlist would be 10 to 20 times as long if I ended up doing deep research. This playlist is a representation of my favorite songs from that year. The majority of these songs were released in 1980. A small handful of these were released in 1979, but added them because to me they are “1980 songs”. While I could have played a good amount of Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall, released in 1979, I wanted to shy away from adding his work here simply because everyone else does it. Other wise, I would have added about five or six songs from that album.
Listening to some of these songs for the first time in years, I’m happy that these songs still hold up. I also realize: I’m an old man who still fondly remembers these songs from the old days, 32 years ago. When I hear these, I’m 9 all over, back in Honolulu, wanting to explore the world on a rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. To those who remember 1980, or for those who wonder why old people always complain that today’s music is crap and “it was better back then”, judge for yourself.