The five songs that held the US number one spot for the longest in the 1980s
While music culture underwent its most drastic shifts across the heady 1960s, the industry encountered its biggest upheaval since the radio boom during the 1980s’ commercial tug of war.
The big labels were back. They’d never gone away, raking it in during the 1970s’ blockbuster album explosion and enjoying much of the preceding counterculture’s biggest names under their direct roster or watchfully tucked away on a sub-label. But, in tandem with the major film studios’ reasserted clout after New Hollywood’s auteur heyday, the music industry honchos similarly re-established control and wrested that tug of war further in their corporate direction, cementing the ‘Big Six’s ironclad grip.
Clashes and sparks were felt among the public, too. Amid the CD boom and MTV’s rapacious new promo machine, a clear schism was beginning to emerge among the music-loving masses, one side left cold by the second British invasion and their new wave rejection of the rockist vanguard eagerly clamouring at whatever airwaves would offer them good old-fashioned ‘real’ music unvarnished by the era’s music video gloss and Yamaha DX7 soaked pop charts. FM classic rock was born, and all the ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ you could ever want.
The singles that managed to dwell on the Billboard top spot for solid lengths of time smartly anchored themselves somewhere in the middle of the two camps. Alongside America’s longstanding love affair with soul and R&B, the 1980s’ Hot 100 winners shrewdly bottled a little of that classic rock nostalgia or harkening for easy listening, but eagerly hurtled into the era’s MTV flash to ensure the channel’s heavy rotation and copies flying off the shelves in record numbers.
So what are the top five songs?
Well, there are seven, really, as fifth place is shared with three artists. Enjoying seven full weeks at the Hot 100 top spot, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ ‘I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll’, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s ‘Ebony and Ivory’, and Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’ are all solid examples of the old marrying with the new dropping in a year or so of each other early in the decade.
One of the commercial heavyweights that truly conquered America, The Police’s immortal ‘Every Breath You Take’ takes bronze medal with eight weeks reigning supreme, just beaten by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie’s drippy ‘Endless Love’ duet at second place in equal standing with Kim Carnes’ ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ sharing a whopping nine weeks at number one in 1981.
The same year saw the 1980s’ ultimate Billboard monster, however. It’d been rejected by both Rod Stewart and Tina Turner, but Terry Shaddick and Steve Kipner’s sexually charged high-camp ‘Physical’ was just the number Olivia Newton-John needed for the new decade.
It set a precedent. Dialling up the eroticism to just the right degree while maintaining an innocent kitsch befitting her Grease legacy, ‘Physical’ dominated the US top spot for a gobsmacking ten weeks, helping forge a closer sonic relationship between new wave synths and the tastes of disco veterans, as well as illustrating MTV’s cultural primacy with its titillating video.
While erring on the wrong side of parody today, Newton-John’s workout number helped shape the decade’s pop terrain deeper than is remembered, and beyond even the ‘Physical’ team likely ever anticipated.
