Member-only story

1984: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 52: My Own Top 40)

My favorites from the charts, plus the rest of what I was listening to that year

Stewart Mason
Three Imaginary Girls
9 min readDec 30, 2024

--

Photo by Maxim Berg on Unsplash

The best year for music is whatever year we’re in, because we can listen to everything that came out this year, plus everything that came out before. But although the year itself kinda sucked for me personally, I’ve always had a soft spot for 1984 musically.

1984 was the pinnacle of the unfortunately short-lived MTV Effect, when the cable channel thoroughly disrupted the priorities of both Top 40 radio and major record labels, alerting them that there were other kinds of pop music that the teenagers of America were — or could be — into. The result was the single most perfect year in Top 40 history, when new artists, legacy acts, and one-hit wonders working in seemingly every style were potentially able to score a hit.

(There was one unexpected holdout there: In retrospect, I’m genuinely surprised there turned out to be very little country music on the charts this year. Although I wasn’t much of a fan of the style in 1984, I had assumed there would be more. But apparently the Urban Cowboy fad of the very early ’80s was exhausted and the impending wave of the New Traditionalists, some of whom I did really like, hadn’t yet crossed over to the pop charts. I’m actually…

--

--

Three Imaginary Girls
Three Imaginary Girls

Published in Three Imaginary Girls

Medium’s sparkly indie-pop press! Music discovery, memoir, mixtapes and more.

Stewart Mason
Stewart Mason

Written by Stewart Mason

From West Texas. In Boston. It’s mostly gonna be music, food, and cats.

Responses (16)