And a look at the nine other top pop songs of the decade.
What is the best song of the ‘80s, and why is it “The Boys of Summer” by Don Henley?
Sting, Bono, Michael Stipe, John Mellencamp, and Henley became the self-appointed, humorless consciousnesses of our MTV age. As Gen Xers developed empathetic awareness – thanks to the 24-hour news cycle that slowly revealed the cracks in our white, middle-class experience – guys like Henley took up causes that resulted in any number of irritating displays and hectoring anthems. These guys might have gotten too preachy, but what were we supposed to do? Be satisfied with listening to Poison for the rest of the decade?
Henley morphed from a not-so-exciting drummer, excellent vocalist, and pretty decent songwriter for one of the seventies’ biggest bands to being that guy with the poser ponytail who made an entire career out of the accusatory tone he adopted on “The Last Resort,” which closed out the Eagles’ best album, Hotel California (1977): Basically, men are evil, greedy bastards, and their business interests rape the land for profit. Then the same selfish money-hungry dinosaurs smugly stand up in churches and thank their white God for all this luck. “The Last Resort” is a dirge in eight verses, like an environmentalist “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” But suddenly Henley found his niche. After limping through the wretched The Long Run (1979), the Eagles disbanded. Glenn Frey went on to write a batch of crappy songs suited to television visuals, and Henley doubled down and became a superstar. We used to call him humorless, but he was right about everything, wasn’t he?
Tone. Henley understood it, and it sums up his defining solo artistic statement album, The End of the Innocence (1989), colored by a somber title track that soars with help from Bruce Hornsby’s plaintive piano. But Henley’s lyrics are the real star on the song – surprisingly subtle ruminations (the opposite of “The Last Resort”) about childhood, Reagan’s American nightmare, and the joy of maybe forgetting all this nonsense and going to live in a bubble.
The End of the Innocence was a culmination of Henley’s art — arriving at the end of the ’80s right before angst took a different, much more youthful turn. Turns out, he got the whole “true undercurrent of the ’80s” thing exactly right a full five years before Innocence. Instead of going external and accusatory, he turned inward and suggestive, watering down his lectures to connect on a spiritual level instead of a political one.
Working with Mike Campbell, tasteful guitarist extraordinaire for Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, he wrote and performed the single greatest song of the eighties: “The Boys of Summer.” (From his album Building the Perfect Beast – 1984.)
The Voice
Say what you will about Henley, but he has one of our most distinguishable voices. He sang all the Eagles’ best songs, and, if nothing else, he would count as a legend for his delivery alone on “Hotel California” by navigating that symbolic narrative of excess and loss into something we all instinctively understood. Henley weaves complex metaphor with the perfect amount of cynicism in his distinct rasp, and his lack of vocal range only accentuates his emotive power by more closely mimicking everyday speech.
He summed up the seventies with “Hotel California.” He sums up the eighties in “The Boys of Summer.” Who knew?
The Song
What a dense, mournful sound this track has: keyboards set on “melancholy,” echoing electronic drums, and Campbell’s wispy, lyrical asides – this especially stood out in 1984, where we were used to either no guitar at all, guitar mixed way too thinly (listen to any song by Rick Springfield to hear what I mean), or guitar that was over the top in a brazen rip-off of Eddie Van Halen’s sound.
“Nobody on the road.
Nobody on the beach.
A feeling’s in the air.
The summer’s out of reach.”
Straight out of the gate, Henley identifies the essential sadness that peaks around the corners of our revered childhood. This is what the end of summer felt like for kids. This is also what it feels like to be an adult during every waking moment of modern life. The fun has come tumbling down, like a carnival packing up and moving out of town. We all knew that the song targeted lost love before the lyrics made it explicitly clear (“I can see you! Your brown skin shining in the sun!”). But the sound of the thing, that ratchety drum machine locked in tandem with forlorn synths, suggests a lost life, one where the cold autumn and winter will bring nothing but overwhelming responsibilities instead of daydreams and puppy love.
Every line hits: We’re driving around in our small towns, looking for meaning. We’re putting the tops up and going home. What else needs to be said? The seagull cries (made by a keyboard or Campbell’s guitar) throughout the song are us wailing against the reality of the world and what it would become. It’s pre-teen/teenage angst, but Henley sings it with no irony, no distance, no postmodern posturing. We knew it would be upon us sooner than we hoped. We already could see the adults: Overwhelmed, haggard, trying to take care of us, fighting some kind of battle we only understood when our dads punched the drywall.
“Summer” contains the single best lyric of the eighties as well, dropping in the third verse out of nowhere like a car crash:
“Out on the road today
I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.
A little voice inside my head said don’t look back
You can never look back.”
Henley weaves this ridiculous line like a master painter, selling it as straightforward truth that works on all the right accents of the song’s meter without lurching out of control. It took me years to understand what he meant: The Grateful Dead, ah, that’s it! I grooved to the line as a kid, something that sat there as a flaw in an otherwise perfect song. Now we know: We’re all sellouts, and the revolutions we pedaled meant nothing in the cold, harsh light of progress and consumerism. That’s the true legacy of the eighties as much as we want to go back.
The Video
And the video! So simple, it’s stupid: Henley superimposed over black-and-white moving images, like he’s David Byrne’s head in “Burning Down the House.” Henley turns away from the events behind him, gray and out of focus: Some kid dives into a pool, some lonely woman in sunglasses, the camera ever moving, and Henley looks back once to match the Deadhead lyric, and he breaks the spell.
At the end, he lumbers out of frame while life continues on the screen. The camera pulls back to reveal a put-on: The camera’s point-of-view seamlessly shifts to Henley driving away from the movie screen in a car. What the fuck! It’s brilliantly done, all in one cut. He slowly drifts through the same world originally projected behind him, his face now only visible in his rear-view mirror. It’s a beautiful, stunning transition. It means life goes on or something, and what’s past is past, but we’ll drive onward with our brave mask, and we’ll feel this time of transition, this reality, this regret until the end of our days. There is no need to smash us over the head with meaning. We just got it: Mood, lyrics, melody, texture, instrumentation – they say a lifetime’s worth of lessons in just under five minutes.
“The Boys of Summer” – song and video – is a fucking masterpiece.
Top 10 Pop Songs of the Eighties
- The Boys of Summer by Don Henley
- Everybody Want to Rule the World by Tears for Fears: It’s a close call between this and Simple Minds in the third spot, but Tears’ melodic gifts, aggressive bridge, Curt Smith’s expressive voice, and that searing guitar solo at the end calls to mind bucketfuls of perfect ‘80s memories. It’s also in a much better ‘80s film than The Breakfast Club: It scores our heroes’ triumph over the bad guy from Ghostbusters in the whip-smart/smart-ass comedy Real Genius.
- (Don’t You) Forget about Me by Simple Minds: Bender’s a dick even if the film still holds up, but the slow build, the snare eruption, the final la-la-la-la, the switch to a ride cymbal in the outro, the pleading lyrics that sound like broken promises we made to all the friends that fell along the way: What a great song.
- Something About You by Level 42: Simple, effective, low-key, romantic jam – a perfect slice of synth-pop nonchalance.
- Cars by Gary Numan: A haunting mixture of futuristic, dehumanizing keyboards and an organic, popping rhythm section helps Numan – an uncanny android here – deliver his message about private empires and human disintegration. The best use of the cheesy synth idiom in the entire decade.
- Don’t Dream It’s Over by Crowded House: Mournful, subtle, achingly beautiful.
- I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues by Elton John: Elton’s best song by a country mile seems to sum up something about his own life while striking a universal emotional chord behind expressive playing and some of Bernie Taupin’s most straightforward lyrics.
- Back on the Chain Gang by the Pretenders: A stunning guitar motif propels this chugging tune, sung by Chrissie Hynde in her usual captivating mix of odd phrasing and lived-in emotion.
- Always Something There to Remind Me by Naked Eyes: A beautiful melody backed by wedding bells and clever internal rhyming lyrics set the scene for a tale of how broken romance follows you everywhere. The way singer Pete Byrne modulates the phrasing of the chorus in the outro sounds like he’s trying hard – and failing – to come to terms with all this.
- Cruel Summer by Bananarama: Hey, The Karate Kid understood. This song, with its marimba-synth motif, sounds like summers where we had nothing to do but did everything anyway.