Favorite Songs of 1984

For 1984, my musical interests were confined to mainstream pop/rock. I enjoyed watching videos as well. There was a lot of jumping and running this year: Van Halen's Jump and the Pointer Sisters' Jump for my Love had finely crafted hits with great videos while long-time British act Slade finally had their (short-lived) breakthrough American hit with Run Runaway. My favorite Manfred Mann (Earth Band) song came out in 1984: Runner. German singer Nena's dual-language hit 99 Luftballoons (with English and German versions) told a story about a nuclear holocaust caused by a simple mistake. This, ironically, had almost actually happened twice in the USSR the previous year, without the West catching "wind" of it! The first REM song I ever heard, South Central Rain (I'm Sorry), featured a long-haired, wailing Michael Stipe and is still one of my favorites of theirs. Bronski Beat raised social awareness about the plight of gays facing violence from bigots with their haunting Small Town Boy. The Thompson Twins, after a string of obnoxious hits, finally came out with a compelling song that spoke to me: You Take Me Up. Naturally, it went nowhere on the charts and was hardly ever played. More than three years after John Lennon's murder, his Nobody Told Me, a sweet, catchy song with very interesting lyrics, was released as a single. Prince's movie Purple Rain came out in 1984 and, from it, two songs I liked: When Doves Cry and, especially, the raucous Let's Go Crazy. Speaking of raucous, there was nothing quite as raucous as Eddie Van Halen's guitar interlude in his group's Hot for Teacher. Queen had an artsy song and video in Radio Ga-Ga. Talktalk's It's My Life stood well on its on as well as in conjunction with its excellent animal-studded video. Rod Stewart, over the years only sporadically producing songs I liked, hit the bulls-eye in 1984 with Infatuation, showing that a simple rock n' roll tune, done with intensity, can go a long way. Drive, by the Cars, was, for a long time in 1984 my favorite song of that year, but overplaying on the radio tired me of it. John Mellencamp's protest song Pink Houses, carrying over from 1983 and mistaken by then-President Reagan as a positive song about America, grew on me in '84 and still is growing. Aside from Check it Out, it's my favorite of Mellencamp's. The group Depeche Mode released Everything Counts, a sobering indictment of the ascendency to power of big business and big politics. It introduced me to that band and was my #3 favorite song that year. My #2 favorite song of 1984 (as I lived through it) was Cyndi Lauper's extremely tearjerking Time After Time. I initially disliked it because of its maudlin video, but after hearing it on the radio for a few times, it too, grew on me. But 1984's greatest (in my mind) song comes from the resurgent and reinvented band Yes for their incredible exercise in harmony: Leave It.