1984: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 9: March 3, 1984)
More Duran Duran, plus Rockwell, Sheena Easton, Dwight Twilley, and why Madness weren’t really a ska band
(Note: If you’re new here, you might want to read an introduction to this series to get caught up on what we’re doing. Glad you could make it.)
Moving into the year’s third month, it’s time to start examining a few of 1984’s less-remembered hits. There were 10 new entries this week, the highest being the third single from Culture Club’s Colour By Numbers, “Miss Me Blind,” at 40.
At #7, “Somebody’s Watching Me” by Rockwell
The success of this inexplicably weird single proves only how thirsty the American public was for Michael Jackson in early 1984. Built on a deliberately cheesy keyboard line mimicking a cheap horror movie’s portentous organ riffs and sung/rapped in some sort of vague approximation of a British accent, “Somebody’s Watching Me” sounds like it was recorded in anticipation of decades’ worth of Halloween party mixtapes and playlists. Between the tune and the cartoonishly paranoid lyrics, it’s basically a straight-up novelty song.
And because Michael Jackson sang the chorus, it went to #2 on the Billboard charts.
