Media, particularly pop culture, can help make summers feel endless. A song that tops the charts for more than four weeks. A blockbuster movie each month from May to July. One good thing after another. And most of them are remembered by millions. That was 1984, perhaps more than any other summer and calendar year in world history. It was an avalanche of hits.
I consider peak 1980s to be 1982 to 1990, since the decade was just so great for pop culture. Musically, the decade roughly spans from Yazoo and Missing Persons’ debut albums in 1982, to The Cure’s Disintegration, Doolittle by the Pixies and Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation in 1989. And with maturing subcultures, alternative music genres, and the global compatibility of smaller, more durable compact disc media, 80s music is incredibly vast.
But back to 1984. The summer seemed endless. While I can never finish big blog posts on-time, I want to be sure I post about 1984 and 1994 before we creep into late 2025, as they were formative years in my youth. I can’t deliver the full history. Other blogs, TV shows and books have covered 1984 in depth. This is my list of highlights, and without re-reading other blogs about the year, it will be interesting to see what I highlight. I will also cheat a little to include 4 bonus songs I absolutely loved, even though they came out in the fall (and 3 of which became hits associated with the year 1985). I’ll spoil one of the songs right now. During the spring and summer of 1984, Nile Rodgers and Madonna were recording Like A Virgin. We associate 1984 with Madonna’s breakthrough. But it came in the fall.
Music
First up, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and their debut album, Welcome To The Pleasuredome. It’s provocative, queer, futuristic, incredibly well produced, and part of the New Wave canon, all at once. A hit in the US and a blockbuster in the UK, it has to be mentioned in any rundown of what was significant in 1984. Furthermore it was novel how the first single from the album, Relax, had three music videos produced. The US never saw the very gay UK video which was banned But we did see the “laser” version as well as this wild concept video here:
1984 was a year of pop culture crashes. Yacht Rock and Album Oriented Rock (AOR) were fizzling out, and were about to say goodbye in 1986 with songs like Michael McDonald’s Sweet Freedom and Journey’s I’ll Be Alright Without You (which is technically a Yacht Rock song for me). New Wave, while being a product of the late 1970s, had experienced a boom from 1978 to 1984, but was about to contract. Not all New Wave bands were going to make it to the late 80s. This is because by 1989 we saw another incredible surge from the UK that gave rise to Madchester, Shoegaze, Drum & Bass, Trip Hop and general 90s indie and alternative. I really do think the 80s started and ended with massive waves of new music from the UK.
Meanwhile, in the US, there had been a big bang. And that explosion was Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which was released in late 1982, and dominated charts for more than a year after its release. In the wake of this shakeup, we saw the rise of hair metal, mainstream metal, big budget pop and even a little return of disco and dance music in the US and UK.
In Japan, City Pop, J-Pop, Fusion and Rock hummed along in the late Showa era, waiting to be discovered years later by westerners, which I can’t even touch in this post.
I think the popular music of 1984 was very diverse, stylistically. Country and folk were waning, but rock, jazz, hip hop, pop, heavy metal, light metal, reggae, ska and soul all co-existed on the charts.
Here are the songs that I loved, contemporaneously on the radio and MTV in the warm weather months of 1984. Note that Hello is not here. I don’t love Hello. I might not even like it. Sigh. Okay, I’ll include Hello.
A lot of songs went under my radar. I didn’t hear Human League’s “The Lebanon” or REM’s “So. Central Rain” when they were on college radio. I didn’t tune into college radio until 1987. Thankfully, I was spared hearing Hold Me by Teddy Pendergrass and Whitney Houston. I would be safe from Ms. Houston for another 18 months or so. Ditto with Bon Jovi. I missed that first radio hit and wouldn’t know of them until around the time Lethal Weapon was in theaters.
Here is my Summer 1984 playlist, mainly from memory:
Lionel Richie - Hello
Run D.M.C. - Rock Box
The Psychedelic Furs - Heaven
The Pointer Sisters - Jump (For My Love) and I’m So Excited
Thompson Twins - Hold Me Now and Doctor! Doctor!
Berlin - No More Words
Talk Talk - It’s My Life
Phil Collins - Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)
Footloose - The whole soundtrack album.
Queen - I Want To Break Free
Steve Perry - Oh, Sherrie
Madonna - Borderline and Lucky Star
The Cars - You Might Think, Magic, and Drive
Duran Duran - The Reflex
The Reflex was a massive hit, although it’s a mess of a song. But it kicked off summer both in the UK and US. It topped the UK chart on May 5 and the Billboard Hot 100 on June 23.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Two Tribes
Laura Branagan - Self Control
Culture Club - Miss Me Blind
Night Ranger - Sister Christian and When You Close Your Eyes.
Tracey Ullman - They Don’t Know
Van Halen - I’ll Wait and Panama
Prince - Purple Rain (both the album and the movie)
The world already knew about this dude. Price was already a star, albeit an alternative one. Prince already had four notable hits before Purple Rain. But his art, life, the city of Minneapolis, and for a while, music censorship, would dramatically change in its wake.
Dan Heartman - I Can Dream About You
Bruce Springsteen - Dancing In The Dark
Directed by Brian De Palma, that music video.
Billy Idol - Eyes Without A Face
Jefferson Starship - No Way Out
I don’t think I’d see Father Guido again until Handsome Boy Modeling School. Oh wait, he was in The Godfather Part III.
Chicago - Stay The Night and Hard Habit To Break
Eurythmics - Who’s That Girl?
Wang Chung - Dance Hall Days
Rod Stewart - Infatuation and Some Guys Have All The Luck
ZZ Top - Legs
Icicle Works - Birds Fly (Whisper To A Scream)
Nik Kershaw - Wouldn’t It Be Good
Hall And Oates - Adult Education
Our boys from Philadelphia were past their artistic peak. It would be a while before they returned to form with So Close in 1990.
Corey Hart - Sunglasses At Night
Sergio Mendes - Alibis
INXS - Original Sin
Tina Turner - What’s Love Got To Do With It and Better Be Good To Me
Elton John - Sad Songs Say So Much
Ray Parker Jr. - Ghostbusters
The Jacksons - State Of Shock
Ratt - Round And Round
Sheila E. - The Glamorous Life
Scandal Featuring Patty Smyth - The Warrior
Howard Jones - What Is Love
John Waite - Missing You
Huey Lewis And The News - If This Is It
This bar band was on its second consecutive summer in which it had a big hit. 1985 of course would bring The Power Of Love. 1986 would bring Stuck With You, but let’s not get carried away.
Peter Wolf - Lights Out
Bananarama - Cruel Summer
Twisted Sister - We’re Not Gonna Take It
Lindsay Buckingham - Go Insane
Billy Ocean - Caribbean Queen
Cherelle - I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On
A fantastic song. Covered by Robert Palmer mere weeks later for his 1985 smash album, Riptide.
A Flock Of Seagulls - The More You Live The More You Love
David Bowie - Blue Jean
Ending it with a flop. Flop Era Bowie would continue until 1993.
And given how huge the summer of 1984 was, I have decided to include some bonus songs from the fall. Think of these as shockwaves of a monster summer:
Madonna - Like A Virgin
Now that’s how you drop the first single of your biggest album yet - on the VMAs.
Sade - Smooth Operator
Jazz was back, baby! By the spring of 1985 this song and the genre of Quiet Storm was everywhere. Put Sade in the Rock hall of Fame. And Enya.
Don Henley - The Boys Of Summer
Not a summer of ‘84 song, I know! It closed out the year and was a still radio hit in ‘85.
Chaka Khan - I Feel For You
This would be a huge hit by early 1985 and into the spring and summer.
Pat Benetar - We Belong
Recorded in January 1984 and released that October. This and Shadows Of The Night are her best power anthems.
And a bonus artist, some guy named George Michael! Yes, throughout the fall of 1984, the UK was enjoying a new hot pop duo called Wham! that wouldn’t dominate the US charts until 1985. It was actually their second album, and it was a monster of a hit. When I think of Careless Whisper, Freedom and the fantastic Everything She Wants, I think of the spring of 1985 in the USA. But in the UK, those are 1984 songs. But the whole world got Last Christmas, recorded and released in just days in December 1984. What was it like to be George Michael in early December 1984? He pretty much recorded Last Christmas by himself and then recorded his vocals for Do They Know It’s Christmas the very next day! Both were hits that same month in time for the festive season.
Movies
That was nuts, right? The music of 1984 was just too many good things, and that wasn’t even touching the deep alternative cuts I would discover later in life.
As if the music wasn’t great enough, the movies of the summer of 1984 were completely nuts. Hollywood had seen in 1975 (Jaws), 1977 (Star Wars), 1980 (Star Wars, again), 1981 (Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Superman II), and 1982 (E.T.) that summer blockbusters were not just possible, but repeatable and sustainable. Studios could set up movies to be hits if they could get the casting, budget, completion and marketing just right. Throw in a soundtrack album and at least one music video in MTV rotation, and Hollywood had a lucrative multimedia mix. It was by no means foolproof. It worked for Footloose, which has one of the best soundtrack albums ever published, but it didn’t work for Streets Of Fire, which had a massive hit song and one of the best opening first acts of any film that decade.
In my view, Hollywood started to plan and produce ‘tentpole’ summer movies beginning in 1981. And the record supports that greatly. The big summer movies of 1981 were Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Superman II, Stripes, The Cannonball Run and Clash of the Titans. 1983 was a bit of a stumble (yet, Styling Alive, a movie I still can’t believe exists, was the second biggest hit that summer). But 1984 was the opposite of 1983. It was a summer full of hits. Monster hits (3 of them!). Big hits. Little hits. Cult hits. Indie hits. Even if you took out the 3 biggest movies of that summer, 1984 had too many hits to spare thanks in large part to some healthy genre diversification. It was also an era in which Hollywood made more movies compared to today. And the same could be said about 1964 compared to 1984. Hollywood was making fewer new movies throughout the widescreen, post WWII period, and then fewer still as we entered the on-demand home viewing era.
1984 Hollywood made movies for the young and the old. It kicked-off some franchises (IPs), and kept others healthy with profitable sequels. A surge of movies for summer meant more new stars, and Hollywood found some, like Molly Ringwald, Philip Michael Hall, and John Cusack, who all starred in the flawed Sixteen Candles.
Let’s break down this monster summer of movies. What are you going to see at the multiplex?
The blockbusters (3)
Ghostbusters, $229 Million domestic gross.
Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, $180 Million
Gremlins, $148 Million
The big hits (6)
The Karate Kid, $91 Million
Footloose, $80 Million
Star Trek III, $76 Million
Purple Rain, $68 Million
The Natural, $48 Million
Tightrope, $48 Million
The quasi-independents and surprise hits (8)
Breakin’ (Cannon) $39 Million
Red Dawn $38 Million
The Last Starfighter, $29 Million
Conan The Destroyer $26 Million
The Woman In Red $25 Million
The Muppets Take Manhattan $25 Million
Sixteen Candles $24 Million
Top Secret, $21 Million
The minor hits (and some losers)
Beat Street $16 Million
Streets Of Fire, $8 Million (loss)
The Bounty, $7 Million (loss)
The Pope Of Greenwich Village $7 Million (loss)
Firestarter $4 Million (loss)
Under The Volcano $3 Million
Just fabulous. True independent cinema was also coming back to life in 1984. Breakin’ was the shock hit that gave Canon ambitious to be the biggest independent studio in Hollywood. Other indie hits included Paris, Texas, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Repo Man, The Terminator, Nineteen Eighty-Four, This Is Spinal Tap, Before Stonewall, Stop Making Sense, Blood Simple, and Stranger Than Paradise. The 1980s were not going to suck after all!
I will wrap this post with my biggest memory of 1984 media. It was Star Trek III. A triumphant space opera that brought Spock back just two years after we lost him. Paramount had three great things the 80s. One was Star Trek. Another was Indiana Jones. And the third was Tom Cruise from 1986 onward.
In my memory, I was wrapping up 5th grade at Whitman School. But that’s not accurate. The weather was warmer. I was leaving jackets at home. But there was still 2 full weeks of school to go. Regardless, I saw Star Trek III on a Saturday morning, June 2 1984 in Worcester. The print burned as Kirk’s eulogy was being recapped. The projectionist had to splice and restart the movie! I wasn’t bothered as I almost remembered the eulogy word for word from Star Trek II. Then the movie takes us to Genesis, sets up the story, and we’re off into the clouds on the trail of a jet for the opening credits. The following week, I saw boys in my schoolyard showing off the official program for the movie. Maybe 2 days later, I had my dad get me a copy of my second viewing of the film. I studied the credits. I made myself learn what ever crew member did. I learned what a loop group was. I learned how much (and sometimes how little) effort went into the sets (notably the spare sets for the bridge of the Murchantman, the San Francisco bar, the Starfleet jail, Uhura’s San Francisco transporter room). I also learned how Leonard Nimoy and crew worked around a big fire that destroyed Paramount’s famous Chinatown outdoor set. Some of the smoke in that movie is from a real blaze.
1984 simply ruled. The 80s were in full swing.