Also, in reference to Canadian content, it would mean a song may get played more than it deserved, but it maybe didn't get purchased. Looking at the Canadian songs to make the top 10 throughout the year of 1983, there were only 5 Canadian songs to hit the Canadian top 10 in the entire year, and never higher than #8 (Sheriff & Payola$ with Carole Pope). Less than 30 Canadian artists placed songs in the Canadian top 40 in the entire year. Not good.
My favorite #1 hits of 1983 1. Total Eclipse Of The Heart 2. All Night Long 3. Billie Jean 4. Sweet Dreams 5. Man-eater Honorable mentions to Say Say Say and Beat It... Songs that deserved the #1 spot 1. Sexual Healing 2. Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? 3. She Works Hard For The Money 4. Electric Avenue 5. Uptown Girl
Possibly, but unless they re-EQ'd Seven And The Ragged Tiger I don't know what difference that would have made. Lossy compression doesn't generally mess with the EQ. And I've streamed albums I'm quite familiar with and they generally sound just fine. Not good enough for critical listening maybe but certainly not out of character. It's possible this came from a compressed master, but the songs sounded like I remembered them sounding (and the hits not dissimilar to how they sound on their Decade collection, which I have).
I haven't done one of these, but I always enjoy when the rest of you all do: 1983 Fav #1s when it was 1983: Every Breath You Take Let's Dance Maneater Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) Down Under #1s I like just fine now, but didn't so much then: Africa Billie Jean Beat It Still make me throw up a little in my mouth: Total Eclipse of the Heart Come on Eileen My favorite singles from 1983: 1. Burning Down The House | Talking Heads 2. Our House | Madness 3. Breaking Us In Two | Joe Jackson
Looking through 1983, I still find it astonishing that Culture Club only had one no. 1 US single (in '84) -- though that one certainly deserved it.
Yeah, given how huge they were - at least for around 16 months or so - it's amazing they only had 1 #1 hit here. Boy George was - briefly - the most improbable superstar on the planet.
Nine of my ten highlighted tracks from the US top 100 are here, the exception being Heartbreaker by Dionne Warwick. In its place, we have In a Big Country by Big Country at #41, Rise Up by Parachute Club at #62 and Wishing by Flock of Seagulls at #82. A fair exchange, as Be-bop Deluxe might have called it ...
Time once again to use my magic wand to elevate one song from the year to number one! 1983 was a particular fruitful and interesting year, and there were literally dozens of songs I could have chosen from. Just a small smattering of my favorites would include: Twilight Zone, Safety Dance, Stray Cat Strut, Mexican Radio, Promises Promises/Always Something There to Remind Me, She Blinded Me With Science, Goody Two Shoes, Rock the Casbah, Our House, Overkill/It's a Mistake, She's a Beauty, China Girl/Modern Love, Come Dancing, Steppin' Out/Breaking Us In Two, Don't Change (INXS) and The Walls Came Down. Two songs I very nearly chose were: 1999 by Prince and Back on the Chain Gang by the Pretenders. 1999 is one of my favorite Prince songs, and it is certainly one of his most iconic, but given that the Purple One is about to explode in 1984, I decided to give it a pass. I really really like the Pretenders (no, REALLY!), and they never made it to the top, so this would have been a great chance to right that wrong. Chain Gang and My City Was Gone are two great songs of theirs from this time. I probably like Chain Gang even more than my eventual choice, but I think that song is probably more deserving. My choice is Burning Down the House by the Talking Heads. A Talking Head is a term for a person on television who present news or information; usually you only see them from the chest up. This is an apt name for a group who were so interested in the multimedia aspect of their art. They were already great and influential before MTV took off, but once it did, they were there to create arty and unusual videos that augmented their offbeat musical viewpoint. Talking Heads were David Byrne (lead vocals, guitar, big suit), Chris Frantz (drums), Tina Weymouth (bass) and Jerry Harrison (keyboards, guitars). They were art school students who got together in the mid-1970s in the punk environment that thrived around CBGBs in New York at that time. They started releasing albums in 1977, working with Brian Eno on several of them. They had an early splash with their song Psycho Killer, and continued to produce great albums like Fear of Music and More Songs About Buildings and Food. But they were definitely more a cult band than a popular act at this time, at least in the States. I loved Psycho Killer, but I got turned on to them for real in 1982. I had a friend who really liked them and used one of their songs in a student film he made. I went on to buy several of their albums. I liked them right away, but there was also something intimidating about them. Nobody else I was listening to was doing stuff like that, and they seemed vaguely dangerous to my teenage mind. There was also a lot going on there that I could somewhat detect but had trouble parsing. Fortunately, I decided that these things were positives and kept paying attention. One of their early videos that really captured their angsty approach to music was Once In a Lifetime. It didn't make much of a splash initially in 1980, but I recall it getting a huge amount of play in 1983, when I first got MTV. Byrne is the only Head in this one; dressed in geeky attire like a new wave Buddy Holly, he sings about his beautiful wife and beautiful house, and asks forlornly, 'Well... How did I get here?' His character jerks and spasms as if hit by invisible fists, and tries to knock water out of his head as if he had just taken a swim in the electronically generated water effect behind him. The memorable hook of the song is the repeated 'same as it ever was' as he chops his arm relentlessly. The musical background is a weird mishmosh of electronic noise. I absolutely loved everything about it. Same as it ever was... The song and video has since become a classic, and if it were possible, THAT is the song I'd elevate to #1. But it was several years old at the time, so I'll focus instead on their single of the time, Burning Down the House, which I also love but not as much. The song was released in July of 1983 and was their only top ten hit, reaching 9. Burning is a funky exercise that originated as a jam by several members of the group. Chris the drummer had recently been to a P-Funk concert, where the audience chants 'Burn down the house' as a regular tradition. Byrne changed it to Burning Down the House, but it took a while to arrive at the final lyrics. Byrne basically shouted out whatever came into his head as they developed the backing track, eventually arriving at a set of lyrics he liked. Among the rejects were: 'You travel with a double', 'I'm still under construction' and 'I have another body'. Even his rejects are cool. The video is typically weird 1983 stuff as filtered through the group's usually surreal Talking Headspace. The whole band gets a chance to be in this one, although Byrne is front and center. For some reason there's a second much different band in the video, and they wind up colliding toward the end of the clip. Or maybe they're joining together? See what I mean by 'hard to parse'? Below: I have no idea who did this, but it's pretty cool Although they never had a hit as big again, this song, combined with the ubiquity of Once in a Lifetime, established the band as a more mainstream force, and for the next few years, they continued to shine, notably with their incredible concert film of the next year, Stop Making Sense. The group broke up in 1991, but their impact earned them a deserved spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And since they never did reach the top, what better song to elevate to the top than their biggest smash?
My hot take is that he's the worst thing about the group. The songs are actually pretty good for the most part, imagine how amazing they could be if they had found someone who could sing them! I don't like the whiny tone of his voice at all. I also don't think it helped the group in the long run to have his weird front man presence hogging all the attention. It instantly dates the band. Yeah, I know most people don't agree with me, and I have no idea if he wrote any of their hits or whatever. Just muh opinion!
Naah, there would have been no Culture Club without Boy George. It's not that he "was" the band, but he was definitely what made them special. And I've loved his voice from the get-go - I never found his vocals remotely "whiny". I always thought his voice was warm, rich, husky and honeyed, like a husky reincarnation of Dusty Springfield. Who I'm sure was probably an inspiration. They wrote the songs together. I've always thought that Roy Hay was probably more responsible for more of the music than the others, but that's just a guess. The whole was certainly greater than the sum of the parts. George was definitely writing the bulk of the lyrics - most of their best hits are about his tumultuous relationship with bandmate Jon Moss.
Yeah, that was my reaction to them as well. They first came onto our radar with the "Once In A Lifetime" video - "Burning Down The House" actually prompted record purchases - but it wasn't until a friend got obsessed with Stop Making Sense (I must have heard that cassette in his mom's Honda Civic a dozen times) that I became an active fan. Toni Basil choreographed that, maybe my favorite "dance move" from any '80s video. She'd found it in a film of native dances.
Boy George was/is Culture Club. Without him, they never would've reached the heights they did in 1983-1984. I think the image did date them (but in 1983-1984 image was everything for every artist on the charts), but what really did them in was a lackluster third album that they were essentially rushed into writing and recording after a long tour because Virgin demanded something new for the Christmas 1984 season (Colour By Numbers spent six weeks at #2 behind "Thriller" in early 1984, Waking Up With The House On Fire never got higher than #26 at the end of the same year), and the final nail was when George's heroin addiction got out of hand and sunk the fourth album (which actually did produce a bigger hit single with "Move Away" than anything off the third album) before it really got off the ground.
My favorite Talking Heads song is “Life During Wartime.” The lyric, “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin around” was a rallying cry for us punk & new wave fans -a middle finger to the popular culture. (Of course, we completely completely misinterpreted the lyric - the next line was “this ain’t no Mud Club, or CBGBs” refers to punk/new wave clubs.)
I think the fact that Talking Heads were able to score a top 10 in 1983 does attribute to how much MTV changed things for the better for a certain amount of time.
