“It would never have occurred to me to do such a deep dive on the bottom 100.” That was author Bill Carroll’s response when I dug into his Ranking the ’70s, Version 2.0 to find a few the gems at “The Very Bottom of the Billboard Charts.” Out of the hundred lowest-ranking songs of the decade, according to Billboard’s Hot 100, I felt about half would make a pretty good playlist.
I found a lot of collectors’ favorites and worthy obscurities on Carroll’s ’70s list. When I repeated the exercise for the following decade, with the help of his Ranking the ’80s, there was something different: a surprising number of songs that have a more significant footprint now than their ’70s counterparts.
The best known among them is there on a technicality, sort of. Alphaville’s “Forever Young” spent one week at No. 93 as the 1985 follow-up to “Big in Japan.” It barely registered, but became one of the most-requested anthems of the pre-Nirvana Alternative format, then charted briefly again in 1988 around the time that “Red Red Wine” and other early-’80s new-wave titles were reissued.
“Forever Young” still plays on a relative handful of Adult and Classic Hits stations, but on some of those, it’s one of the top-spun titles, even in markets where it had no radio history. It had some help from Napoleon Dynamite and Jay-Z’s “Young Forever.” Now, it’s experiencing a resurgence on TikTok. Because Carroll counts that original run separately, “Forever Young” is doing pretty well now for the No. 4088 song of the ’80s.
There are other acknowledged ’80s new-wave classics among the bottom 100, even if most of them didn’t find quite the afterlife that “Forever Young” did. Those include R.E.M.’s “Fall on Me,” the Cure’s “In Between Days (Without You),” and the Smithereens’ “Only a Memory.” (If you dig down to the obscurities, you also get great songs from Graham Parker (“Life Gets Better”), Dave Edmunds (“High School Nights” from the Porky’s Revenge soundtrack), and Julian Lennon (“Now You’re in Heaven”).
“One Simple Thing” by the Stabilizers didn’t stay forever young in the same way as Alphaville, but for a while, the Rush-meets-Police-but-several-years-later (1986) low-charter remained a secret weapon record for decades in markets like Minneapolis and Denver, where you wouldn’t have known it wasn’t a hit. It finally disappeared from the radio altogether about the time that “Forever Young” finally surfaced.
You’ll also find Diana Ross’s “Chain Reaction,” the Bee Gees-penned Motown homage that is in no way an “oh wow” when encountered on the radio elsewhere in the world. The bigger-abroad dance hits also include Yazz & the Plastic Population’s “The Only Way Is Up” and 3 Man Island’s “Jack the Lad” from the early days of house music. There are also less-remembered late-’80s freestyle dance titles from Denise Lopez, Tia, Alisha, and the Cover Girls.
Freestyle’s late-’80s rock counterpart, hair metal, is represented by “Youth Gone Wild” by Skid Row, a song that I distinctly remember as being much bigger at the time. The bottom 100 also includes Tesla’s “Little Suzi,” an even more unlikely cover (of an early-’80s British hit by synth-pop act Ph.D.) than “Signs.” There’s also “Let’s Put the ‘X’ in Sex” by Kiss, included here for the entertainment value of the title, but also among the solid mid-’80s singles where the band wasn’t yet unable to overcome its then-image as a ’70s relic.
New Edition’s “You’re Not My Kind of Girl” didn’t cross over, but it still plays on Adult R&B stations today. War’s “Outlaw” is more lost now, but it was a Bay Area classic, thanks to KFRC San Francisco, the station that most refused to participate in the disco backlash and yacht-rock regatta of the early ’80s.
That pre-MTV moment was also dominated by Country crossovers, some as left-field as “I Love My Truck” by Glen Campbell and “Dancing With the Mountains” by John Denver. When Country crossover ended, early-’80s hitmaker Juice Newton tried to rock out with “Dirty Looks.” Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers returned with the AC-ish “Real Love,” but never recaptured the “Islands in the Stream” magic. B.J. Thomas makes both the ’70s and ’80s lists, but at least “What Ever Happened to Old Fashioned Love” was a Country and AC hit.
“No Souvenirs” by Melissa Etheridge spent one week at No. 95, five years ahead of her eventual breakthrough. In 1989, Etheridge had a hard time fitting in at Top 40. In the mid-’90s, as the format rebounded from near-extinction, she was briefly a core artist.
“Still Cruisin’ (After All These Years)” by the Beach Boys is the song that didn’t sustain their “Kokomo” comeback. There’s also Natalie Cole’s “When I Fall in Love,” on which she covers, but does not yet conjure, her late father, a few years before actually duetting with Nat “King” Cole on “Unforgettable.”
There are lesser-remembered singles from major acts: Chic, James Brown, Bananarama, Robert Palmer, Eddie Money, the Pointer Sisters, Steve Miller Band, Amy Grant, Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White, Erasure, and Paul McCartney. There are mostly unheard follow-ups (or leadoffs from unsuccessful follow-up albums) from Suzanne Vega, ’Til Tuesday, Sly Fox, and When in Rome.
There are little-heard remakes from [Sammy] Hagar/[Neil] Schon/Aronson/Shrieve (“A Whiter Shade of Pale”), Southside Johnny & Asbury Jukes (“Walk Away Renee”), Rick Astley (“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”), the Hooters (“500 Miles”), and Patty Smyth’s “Downtown Train,” a few years ahead of Rod Stewart. There’s a deliberately oddball remake from “Weird Al” Yankovic,” trying to score with a Michael Jackson parody for the second time with “Fat.”
The final title, 1927’s “That’s When I Think of You,” is Australian soft pop that managed only a week at No. 100 in America. Here’s a playlist of the best of the bottom 100.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com