The 30 best songs released in 1984

1984 is roundly considered to be one of the greatest years in pop music history, a year that produced an embarrassment of riches in both the mainstream and underground. It was a year where the echoes of Michael Jackson’s Thriller could still be felt, a year that Prince turned into a superstar and Madonna had her first hits. And it was a year where the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen, and R.E.M. defined college rock as MTV took hold throughout America, just as Britain wound down its new pop renaissance.

There was too much great music made during 1984 to fit on one list (for further exploration, turn to Michaelangelo Matos’ definitive document Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year). But the 30 songs that follow convey the breadth and depth of the music that dominated the airwaves—both in the mainstream and on those stations existing to the left of the dial—and those still sounds phenomenal forty years later.

30. “On the Dark Side,” John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band

Early in the 1980s, the USA was rife with blue-collar rock & roll groups in the vein of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street, but John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band catapulted over the likes of Iron City Houserockers for one simple reason: they were cast as the band in , a music melodrama that was a staple on HBO. “On the Dark Side” was the big hit from the film and it remains a modest wonder, an expert distillation of the cinematic sweep of Darkness On The Edge Of Town given a people-pleasing pop punch.