’80s movie soundtracks that are actually better than the films themselves: Do you agree?
Ask someone to name their favorite scene from Footloose and watch what happens. There’s a pause. Maybe they get as far as the warehouse. Maybe they mention the tractor. But ask them to name their favorite song from the soundtrack, and something entirely different happens: no pause, no searching, the answer already sitting there like it was not there. That is what happened to a specific handful of 1980s films. The music escaped. It moved into the culture on its own terms and has been living independently ever since.
Footloose (1984)
The premise requires a specific kind of charity (a small town has banned dancing, a city kid arrives, complications ensue) and collapses on inspection. None of that turns out to matter. What Rolling Stone called an indelible triumph of AOR cheese put seven of its nine tracks onto the Hot 100 simultaneously, which had essentially never happened before. Kenny Loggins got his only number one. Bonnie Tyler turned a tractor chase into something that required air quotes around the word ridiculous. The film came out in 1984. The soundtrack is still playing.
Top Gun (1986)
Mute it and watch for five minutes: men in flight suits making prolonged eye contact with each other in an extremely expensive volleyball sequence. Billboard documents over 3 million copies sold after SoundScan began tracking, years after the film finished its run. “Danger Zone” understood what the movie was doing better than most of the actors did.
Purple Rain (1984)
The Razzie for Worst Actor went to Prince. So did Worst Director. Meanwhile, the album had “When Doves Cry” at number one for five weeks and spent 24 weeks at the top of the Billboard 200, which is not a record that belongs anywhere near a film Rolling Stone describes as having the widest disconnect between a movie’s watchability and its soundtrack’s listenability in history. Prince later said the film wasn’t quite what he’d imagined. He left out the part about the music.
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Simple Minds had no American chart history. None. Then John Hughes ended his film with “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” and Billboard documents what happened next: the band’s only American number one, a song that appeared in every conceivable context for the next forty years until hearing it anywhere is essentially being inside the film, involuntarily, whether you have any interest in being there or not. Hughes understood something about the last thing an audience hears. He used it better than anyone before or since.
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
The synthesizer figure that opens “Axel F” registers before conscious listening begins. The hook arrives in the brain before the brain has organized itself to receive it. Billboard documents Glenn Frey reaching number two, the Pointer Sisters landing with “Neutron Dance,” and none of it feeling like it needs the film to justify it. Then, in 2005, Crazy Frog reached number one in 14 countries with a remix. Which is a sentence that contains multitudes.
Dirty Dancing (1987)
Without the song, Patrick Swayze is just a man walking through a door. The horn figure starts and suddenly he’s making an entrance; the room shifts, something is about to happen that the film alone could not have produced. Billboard documents 2.3 million copies sold since SoundScan began tracking. Nobody puts Baby in a corner. Nobody turns off “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” either.
The bottom line
The films are remembered. Some of them fondly. But the soundtracks are inside people in a way the films are not, showing up uninvited at weddings and in grocery stores and through car windows, carrying everything they were attached to without asking permission. That is a different kind of survival than a movie gets. That’s the only kind that counts.
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