21 Songs That Epitomized the ‘80s
These days, nerds (that is, scientists) like to complain that music all sounds the same, but no matter what the data says, you’d be hard pressed to pin down the “2020s sound” or even the “2010s sound.” It’s probably just the lack of hindsight, but if you had to set a TV show in, say, 2017, it’s not as immediately clear what song you’d play in the background as if it was set in 1995 (“Kiss From a Rose”) or 2007 (“What What (In the Butt)”).
Perhaps no era, however, was more sonically well-defined than the ‘80s. If you want to make sure your audience knows you’re in the Reagan days, there’s really only a handful of hits to choose from to accompany the parade of shoulder pads and clouds of hairspray. Reddit proved that when user jeffmartin47 asked r/AskReddit, “What’s a song that just says to you ‘Ah, yes, the ‘80s!’?”
