Billie Jean
1982 · From Thriller
That bassline, mixed and remixed until it gleamed, and the four minutes that integrated MTV.
★ 9.8
Browse by time · decade
1980s
1980 – 1989
Showing 1,213 works across all media from the 1980s
Raging Bull
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1980
Scorsese shot boxing as penance rather than sport, and audiences come out feeling bruised: De Niro's jealousy destroys everyone near him, in the blackest black and white imaginable.
★ 9.6
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1981
Every adventure film since is measured against it: Spielberg and Lucas built a machine of chases and near misses so efficient that forty years of imitation have not worn it out.
★ 9.5
Thriller
1982
Quincy Jones and Jackson remixed the whole record because the first version sounded thin, and Eddie Van Halen played his solo for free.
★ 9.5
The MessageGrandmaster Flash
The Message
1982
The record that proved hip hop could report and not just party, and the edge everyone's been close to since.
★ 9.5
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Directed by Irvin Kershner
1980
Everyone learned how to make a sequel from this: the pressure builds for two hours, the tone stays darker than anyone expected, and one line near the close rearranged a generation's childhood.
★ 9.4
Beloved
1987 · 360 pages
Sethe escaped slavery years ago and cannot escape the daughter she lost, who comes back to the house as a young woman. Morrison writes American history's worst chapter with unbearable tenderness.
★ 9.4
Beat It
1982 · From Thriller
Van Halen dropped in, played the solo for free, and Jackson made rock and pop the same building.
★ 9.2
Thriller
1982 · From Thriller
Vincent Price cackling over a disco-funk groove, and a fourteen-minute video that turned pop into event television.
★ 9.2
The Shining
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1980
Whole documentaries exist about what this film means: Kubrick threw out most of King's novel, sent a Steadicam gliding down those corridors, and left a dread nobody can explain away.
★ 9.2
Blade Runner
Directed by Ridley Scott
1982
It flopped, then quietly redesigned the future: every rainy neon city of the last forty years is borrowing from Ridley Scott, and the mood still outlasts the plot.
★ 9.2
Blood Meridian
1985 · 337 pages
Scalp hunters ride the Mexican border in 1849, among them a runaway Tennessee boy and the hairless giant Judge Holden. McCarthy writes the violence in Old Testament prose and never once looks away.
★ 9.1
Hounds of Love
1985
Bush built her own studio at home so nobody could interfere, then gave over an entire side to a woman drowning through one night.
★ 9.0
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
1988
The producers used sirens, squeals and feedback as rhythm instruments, which is why it sounds less like music than like an emergency.
★ 9.0
Once in a LifetimeTalking Heads
Once in a Lifetime
1980 · From Remain in Light
Byrne borrowed a preacher's cadence, Eno hummed the chorus melody, and the band looped its own jams like samplers.
★ 9.0
Fight the Power
1989 · From Fear of a Black Planet
Spike Lee asked for a defiant anthem, and the Bomb Squad answered with layered samples and Branford Marsalis's saxophone.
★ 9.0
Love Will Tear Us Apart
1980
The title flips Captain and Tennille into its opposite, and the single arrived a month after Curtis's death.
★ 8.9
Back to the Future
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
1985
Screenwriting teachers use it as the worked example: every joke and every prop planted early comes back later, and the whole machine runs without a single wasted second.
★ 8.8
Remain in Light
1980
Most of it is built on a single chord that never changes, with the interest coming entirely from layers of interlocking rhythm.
★ 8.8