UPDATE: I have a new blog based on this concept, in which I'll be taking a look at all of the supposedly "bad" Number #1 hits throughout Hot 100 history. Check out https://badnumberones.blogspot.com
I’m going to take a leisurely break from doxxing phone spammers so that I can write about music again. My last couple of music posts were mostly positive in tone: I praised the Best “Bubbling Under” Songs of the 1980s and mentioned a few of the Best Obscure Novelty Songs. Now, however, it’s time for something a little more uncomfortable but probably funnier. I shall identify the absolute worst songs to reach #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the 1980s. (For completeness, I'll also determine the best #1 songs of the '80s. That will occupy just a paragraph or two later in this post.)
I could just list my least favorite songs of the decade and be done with it, but that wouldn’t be very objective. Instead, I’ve set criteria to filter out the worst of the worst. To be eligible for consideration, a song must have a Rate Your Music (RYM) community score in the bottom 10% of #1 hits in the decade. This gives us 24 songs rated 2.35 stars or lower.
Next, I look at scores given by two critics who have endeavored to review every #1 hit throughout history. The first is Tom Breihan of Stereogum, author of The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop. The second is Dagwood525, a well known user on RYM. Dagwood may not be a professional critic, but he is trained in music theory, voice, and composition, and he put a lot of time, thought, and brutality into his reviews. I will include a song on the “worst” list only if both Tom and Dagwood gave it a below average score and one or the other assigned it their absolute lowest possible rating. This reduces the 24 low-rated songs to a batch of six.
One of those six is the Captain & Tennille’s “Do That to Me One More Time,” which entered the charts in 1979 before hitting #1 in early 1980 and amassing an average RYM rating of 2.33 stars as of today. I don’t want to write about that song and you don’t want to read about it. So let’s make up another rule that we are only going to consider songs that were released within the decade. That leaves us with five. I shall count them down, in order of descending RYM scores:
#5 – “Separate Lives” by Phil Collins & Marilyn Martin (1985) – RYM score: 2.26 stars
Numerous boring soft rock ballads topped the charts in the 1980s, yet “Separate Lives” is the only one to earn enough of both critical and popular disdain to make it onto our list. Based on my memories of this song from my teenage years, I’m not particularly surprised. My parents were adult contemporary aficionados, and Barry Manilow, Air Supply, and Michael Bolton were all welcomed into our home without any judgment. “Separate Lives” was the rare tune that could send my entire family racing to turn off the radio.
How is “Separate Lives” so much worse than, say, something like Lionel Richie’s “Truly”? For me, it all comes down to the sluggish, painful opening that Collins half speaks and half sings before most of the instruments kick in. That’s 45 seconds of my life down the toilet, with absolutely no pay-off at the end. Dagwood525 tells us what to expect: “[I]t’s a song about wallowing in self-pity and martyrdom all while blaming others for one’s problems.” The video is even more of a mood wrecker – it prefaces Phil’s plaint with a depressing scene from the White Nights movie. It boggles the mind that someone thought this might be an effective advertisement for the film.
#4 – “We Built This City” by Starship (1985) – RYM score: 2.02 stars
This is perhaps the most vilified #1 hit in the history of rock music, and no list of “worst ‘80s songs” is complete without it. The team that created this record started with a protest against big business – specifically, how greedy companies were destroying the live music scene in L.A. – and pivoted to making a track that was so corporate it should have issued its own series of junk bonds. The label asked one of MTV’s top executives to do the disc jockey cameo, an obvious ploy to guarantee airplay for the ridiculous video. The lyrics have been mocked relentlessly, particularly Grace Slick’s self-referential line about corporations changing their names. (Everyone knows that Jefferson Airplane begat Jefferson Starship, which then spent a few weeks calling itself Starship Cougar Mellencamp before settling on Starship.) And yet, this song is not all that bad; it is just polarizing.
“We Built This City” deserves credit for doing exactly what it set out to do: it made a ton of money for all of the people involved. And it’s not even the most overtly commercial #1 hit of 1985, a year that was teeming with movie and TV soundtrack songs. John Parr turned a wheelchair athlete’s slogan (“Man in Motion”) into the theme for a film about whiny yuppies. How’s that for a pivot?
Unlike every other song on this list, “We Built This City” has never faded into oblivion. One ranking of the most-streamed ‘80s tracks placed it well within the top 100, just behind “Born in the U.S.A.” It is a timeless classic by this objective measure, albeit one that few people claim as a favorite.
#3 – “We Are the World” by USA for Africa (1985) – RYM score: 1.79 stars
Why do so many people hate a record that raised millions of dollars for famine victims? Maybe because most of the vocalists sound like Saturday Night Live parodies of themselves, and the song raged on for twice as long as was needed to make the point. It’s like a panhandler who gives you a 7-minute spiel about his dog’s expensive roundworm medicine before he asks for money. Still, it is kind of sad to see this one on the “worst” list.
#2 – “Baby, I Love Your Way / Free Bird” by Will to Power (1988) – RYM score: 1.72 stars
As a fellow cheapskate, I can relate to Will to Power’s Bob Rosenberg’s approach to the making of this hit. He handled pretty much every aspect of the production and asked his girlfriend to perform the lead female vocal. He should have hired a singer for the male part, but didn’t want to bother with that expense for a single that would probably sell only a hundred copies. He decided to sing the “Free Bird” lines himself. How hard could it be?
Now, Bob Rosenberg is as much of a singer as I am an author. I’ve written four self-published books, and I think they compare favorably to other self-published books. However, I wouldn’t expect How Not to Run for Pope to take the #1 spot on the bestseller list, nor would I be prepared for the scorn and condemnation that would inevitably follow. Rosenberg must have been stunned when his barely-professional recording topped the Hot 100 and indignant Skynyrd fans began calling for his hide. His mash-up with a Peter Frampton love song had completely missed the point of “Free Bird”. He’s supposed to be pushing the woman away, not feeding in to her romantic sentiments.
The so-called “Free Baby” medley paved the way for other low-budget one-man endeavors to top the charts in later years, like Timmy T, Owl City, and the dreaded Soulja Boy. Despite this tragic legacy, it’s not an agonizing listen – just a fairly unmemorable one.
#1 – “Hangin’ Tough” by New Kids on the Block (1989) – RYM score: 1.60 stars
“Hangin’ Tough” is not the most unlistenable of New Kids on the Block’s three #1 songs. That honor belongs to “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever)”, whose RYM score of 1.43 is the lowest of any #1 single of the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. It’s also not the NKOTB song with the stupidest lyrics. There are several contenders for that title, with my vote going to “Tonight”. (“We met a lot of people… and girls.”) But when you combine the popular and critical assessments using our magic criteria, “Hangin’ Tough” ranks as the worst #1 song of its decade. It does so by being phony to the point of absurdity. “We’re rough!”, the teens exclaim, and absolutely no one believes them.
Some music acts of 1989 could have made a convincing claim to roughneck status. Guns n’ Roses and N.W.A. were bands that you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. The New Kids, by contrast, were less menacing than Richard Marx and Amy Grant. The group did once trash a hotel, to their credit, but Donnie Wahlberg sheepishly apologized for the damage and agreed to make public service announcements about fire safety. After this, it was clear that NKOTB were not going to be remembered among the bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll. Keith Moon’s Wikipedia article has sections entitled “Exploding toilets”, “Flint Holiday Inn incident”, and “Passing out on stage”, while Wahlberg’s article mentions his endorsement of Marco Rubio for president.
As with most of NKOTB’s original compositions, “Hangin’ Tough” appears to have been thrown together by Maurice Starr with less creativity than most people put into writing a grocery list. The one clever idea is the interpolation of The Chakachas’ “Jungle Fever”, but this just makes me think of a really dirty 2 Live Crew track that sampled the same song. It may not be my personal least favorite 80s #1, but I can’t object to “Hangin’ Tough” appearing at the top of the “worst” list.
If we flip our criteria around to identify the supposed “best” #1 songs of the 1980s, we start with 24 songs with a RYM rating of 3.80 or higher. These are the top 10% beloved #1 hits of the decade. After we apply filtering to select only those songs that our two critics absolutely adore, here are the seven that survive scrutiny:
7. “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by Eurythmics (1983) - RYM 3.81
6. “Don’t You Want Me” by Human League (1982) - RYM 3.85
5. “Call Me” by Blondie (1980) - RYM 3.88
4. “Like a Prayer” by Madonna (1989) - RYM 4.06
3. “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince & the Revolution (1984) - RYM 4.18
2. “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson (1983) - RYM 4.24
1. “When Doves Cry” by Prince (1984) - RYM 4.28
Not a bad list, though the absence of Men At Work raises questions about the measures I have chosen and the tastes of our critics.
Since you’ve read this far, I’ll offer one more treat. I’ve created a graph that depicts how the songs of each pop music era, from the 1960s to the 2000s, have held up over time. The graph averages the RYM and critical scores of the #1 hits for each year, smooths them out, and shows some of the factors that contributed to the highs and lows (click to expand):
The 1980s occupy the middle 20% of this chart. As you can see, there was a nosedive in the average quality of #1 hits in 1981 as the airwaves turned into lite and sleepy mush. If not for “Jessie’s Girl”, it would be best to remove this year from the record books altogether and pretend that it didn’t happen. (Oddly, no songs from this year made it into our “worst” list, though Air Supply came really darn close.) Fortunately, 1981 was followed by a sharp rebound. The years 1983 and 1984 are generally regarded as the best period for Top 40 radio since the Beatles broke up. By the end of the decade, however, it was nearly impossible for a song to reach the pinnacle of the charts without resorting to trite writing and cookie-cutter production. The graph informs us that many of these formulaic #1 hits from the late 80s and early 90s are not fondly remembered.
If you liked this post, check my blog for other ruminations on 80s music. There are never any ads or affiliate links, because no one is stupid enough to pay for advertising here.