Blue Monday
1983
A die-cut sleeve modelled on a floppy disk, an Oberheim drum machine, and the best-selling twelve-inch single ever pressed.
★ 8.4
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1983
Showing 117 works across all media from 1983
Every Breath You Take
1983 · From Synchronicity
Sting woke at Fleming's Goldeneye with the melody; Summers cut that arpeggio in one take and made surveillance sound tender.
★ 8.2
Synchronicity
1983
The three of them recorded in separate rooms because they could no longer stand each other, and then made the biggest album of the year.
★ 7.9
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
1983
Recorded on a secondhand eight-track in a Chalk Farm attic, and an American number one by September.
★ 7.9
This Charming Man
1983
Marr stacked roughly fifteen guitar tracks and dropped a knife on the strings; Morrissey lifted a line from Sleuth.
★ 7.8
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
1983
Robert Hazard wrote it in 1979 from a man's point of view, and Lauper flipped it into female solidarity.
★ 7.7
Let's Dance
1983 · From Let's Dance
Nile Rodgers on rhythm guitar, an unknown Stevie Ray Vaughan on lead, and Bowie's biggest-selling single by a distance.
★ 7.7
Sucker MC's
1983 · From Run-D.M.C.
An Oberheim drum machine, a few scratches, and two voices. Everything before it suddenly sounded old school.
★ 7.6
Sunday Bloody Sunday
1983 · From War
Mullen's marching snare was cut at the foot of a Windmill Lane stairwell, and Bono insisted it was no rebel song.
★ 7.6
Murmur
1983
Stipe's words are deliberately buried in the mix, and nobody could work them out. Rolling Stone still named it album of the year over Thriller.
★ 7.5
White LinesGrandmaster Flash
White Lines
1983
Doug Wimbish replayed Liquid Liquid's Cavern bassline, Melle Mel wrote the warning, and Flash's name went on the label anyway.
★ 7.3
Burning Down the House
1983 · From Speaking in Tongues
Frantz came home from a Parliament-Funkadelic show chanting it, and Byrne built the band's only American top ten.
★ 7.3
Sudden Impact · 1983
The Right Stuff
Directed by Philip Kaufman
1983
It answers the only question that matters about the space race, which is why anyone would climb in: test pilots, astronauts, and the real Chuck Yeager tending bar in a cameo.
★ 7.1
A Christmas Story · 1983
The King of Comedy
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1983
It flopped and now looks like prophecy: De Niro plays a man who believes fame is owed to him, and Scorsese refuses to let you laugh comfortably.
★ 6.9
Scarface
Directed by Brian De Palma
1983
No film has been quoted by more rappers: De Palma and Stone made a Miami cocaine epic so excessive that it turned into a genuine American myth.
★ 6.9
Blister in the Sun
1983
Busking outside a Milwaukee theatre got them discovered by the Pretenders, and Gano's riff has been filling dancefloors ever since.
★ 6.8
Ain't NobodyChaka Khan
Ain't Nobody
1983
Wolinski's synth loop, his threat to hand the song to Quincy Jones instead, and Khan sailing clean over it.
★ 6.8
The Loser
A Novel
1983 · 208 pages
Two pianists at the Salzburg Mozarteum hear Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations and understand they will never be that. Bernhard gives the ruin that follows in one unbroken paragraph of spite.
★ 6.8
Amarillo By Morning
1983
Stafford's idea, Fraser's overnight lyric, and a fiddle arrangement that rodeo crowds took for their own.
★ 6.8
New Year's Day
1983 · From War
A bass line Clayton stumbled on while decoding Visage's Fade to Grey, then Bono aimed the words at Poland's Solidarity.
★ 6.8
Between the Sheets
1983
Chris Jasper's keyboards and drum machine, Ronald Isley at his silkiest, and the loop under "Big Poppa".
★ 6.6
The Discoverers
1983 · 745 pages
The obstacle to discovery was never ignorance but the illusion of knowledge, Boorstin argues, then walks through the clock, the compass and the microscope as victories over what everyone was certain of.
★ 6.6
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
Directed by Richard Marquand
1983
The trilogy sticks its landing: the speeder chase through Endor still moves better than most digital work made since, and the whole climax runs on puppets, models and matte paintings.
★ 6.6
All Night Long (All Night)
1983
Those African-sounding chants are invented gibberish; Richie had no time for a translator and no reason to care.
★ 6.5
Pancho and Lefty
1983 · From Pancho & Lefty
Nelson cut his part after midnight, fetched Haggard from his bus, and kept the one take Haggard wanted redone.
★ 6.5
Imagined Communities
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
1983 · 256 pages
Nations are imagined communities, Anderson argues, assembled by print: strangers reading the same newspapers and novels came to feel like one people. He gave the study of nationalism its vocabulary.
★ 6.3
Holiday (Madonna)Madonna
Holiday (Madonna)
1983 · From Madonna
Mary Wilson and Phyllis Hyman turned it down; Benitez cut it at Sigma Sound in a week, cowbell included.
★ 6.2
Against All Odds
1983
A Face Value outtake with new lyrics for Taylor Hackford's film, and Collins's first American number one.
★ 6.0
Pink Houses
1983 · From Uh-Huh
Mellencamp waved at a man sitting outside a pink shotgun house near the highway, and wrote America's most misread chorus.
★ 5.9
Separate Ways
1983
Cain and Perry wrote it backstage during the Escape tour, melody one evening and lyrics the next afternoon.
★ 5.9
The Big Chill
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
1983
The soundtrack went platinum six times over and defined how a generation wanted to remember itself: old college friends reassemble for a funeral and spend the weekend auditing what they became.
★ 5.9
99 LuftballonsNena
99 Luftballons
1983
Karges saw balloons released at a 1982 Rolling Stones show in Berlin and imagined them crossing the Wall.
★ 5.8
Cruel SummerBananarama
Cruel Summer
1983
Jolley and Swain built it around oppressive heat, and The Karate Kid carried it into the American top ten.
★ 5.7
Love is a Battlefield
1983
Holly Knight and Mike Chapman wrote it as a ballad; Neil Giraldo's drum machines turned it into dance-rock.
★ 5.7
Flashdance...What a Feeling
1983
Cara and Forsey wrote most of the lyric in a cab to the studio; six weeks at number one followed.
★ 5.6
Lucky Star
1983 · From Madonna
Written on a Casiotone the DJ Mark Kamins gave her, finished by Jellybean Benitez, and Madonna's first top five.
★ 5.5
Footloose
1983
Pitchford wrote the screenplay first, then the lyrics; Loggins supplied the tune and his only number one.
★ 5.5
Trading Places
Directed by John Landis
1983
A regulation passed in 2010 is nicknamed after this film: two rich brothers bet a dollar on whether a broker and a hustler can swap lives, and Eddie Murphy runs away with it.
★ 5.4
A Man's Place
1983 · 90 pages
Ernaux's father ran a café and grocery in Normandy, terrified all his life of using the wrong word. Educated out of his class, she writes him in flat sentences that never condescend.
★ 5.4
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
1983 · 293 pages
Two centuries of crusade told from the receiving end, out of the Arab chroniclers: the Franj, as they called the invaders, eat the dead at Maarat and sack Jerusalem the following year.
★ 5.4
Terms of Endearment
Directed by James L. Brooks
1983
A mother and daughter argue on the telephone across three decades, and James L. Brooks makes it enormous: nobody else has moved this fluently between a joke and a gut punch.
★ 5.4
When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not.
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi · 1983
Karma Chameleon
1983
Judd Lander's harmonica, six weeks at number one in Britain, and Boy George singing about pleasing everybody.
★ 5.1
Uptown Girl
1983 · From An Innocent Man
Joel chasing Frankie Valli's falsetto and the Four Seasons' bounce; five weeks at number one, his only UK chart-topper.
★ 5.1
Madonna
1983
Madonna fought the label for control of her own debut and got a club DJ brought in to remix it. It sold ten million.
★ 5.0
Examples
The Making of 40 Photographs
1983 · 177 pages
Forty photographs, and Adams tells how each was made. His meter lost in New Mexico, he computed the exposure from the moon's known brightness and got one negative before the light went.
★ 5.0
A Christmas Story
Directed by Bob Clark
1983
American television runs it for twenty-four straight hours every Christmas: Jean Shepherd narrates his own childhood, and it is honest enough about children to stay genuinely funny.
★ 4.8
Jump (For My Love)
1983
Marti Sharron said the writers jumped around at the playback and named it for that; June Pointer does the rest.
★ 4.8