1985: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 21: May 25, 1985)

Animotion get obsessed, Howard Jones goes Britfunk, Jean Knight invents electro-zydeco, and Phil Collins just vibes

Astrid Plane and Bill Wadhams in the video for “Obsession” (Mercury Records)

I’ve always been fascinated by supermarkets, ever since I was a little kid. To this day, one of my favorite things about travel is exploring the local supermarkets, and one of my favorite parts of moving back before I settled in one place was deciding where I was going to shop from the nearby options. When we moved to Lubbock in 1985, the local supermarkets seemed like a major upgrade from the small towns we’d spent the preceding 18 months in. United Supermarkets felt more old-fashioned, with stores that mostly dated from the ’50s and ’60s, but they were decently stocked. Furr’s Supermarkets were more contemporary, with better graphic design, wider aisles, and a few feints toward changing tastes. Like, you could buy tofu at Furr’s, if tofu was something you wanted to buy.

At the end of the ’70s, the new trend in supermarket design had been the warehouse store, an aesthetic response to the recessionary economy. Designed to look as no-frills and bare-bones as possible, they were deliberately austere to make it seem as if they had cut costs so they could pass the savings to the customer. Groceries were shelved in their corrugated-cardboard…