the best year of movie music

This has turned into a full-blown obsession for me. If I keep this in my head, there will be disasterous, brain-exploding results.

What year had the best movie music? There’s no doubt it had to happen between 1977, when Hollywood execs saw the success of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and ordered every director to get them a hit soundtrack, and 1997, when movie music died with My Heart Will Go On and no one recognized more than one song in the Oscar nominees for Best Original Song.

I can’t say I’ve gone over every year like I will my fantasy football draft list — but I’ve definitely taken a good look at it and come up with three finalists:

1984

Top 100 songs: 9, including seven in the top 25 and the #1 song of the year, When Doves Cry from Purple Rain

Soundtracks: Purple Rain, Footloose, two of the biggest soundtracks of all time

Random soundtrack: I’m absolutely shocked the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack doesn’t have any entries in the top 100. I just can’t believe it. OK, I just looked and for some reason, the songs charted in 1985 even though the movie and soundtrack came out in 1984. Weird. I’ll have to take a longer look at this later.

Random songs: No More Lonely Nights, Paul McCartney, Give My Regards to Broadway; The NeverEnding Story from The NeverEnding Story, one of Lionel Hutz’s biggest cases; the breakdance song at the end of Revenge of the Nerds.

Most random song: You’re the Best (Around), Joe Esposito, Karate Kid. It took, what, 20 years for it to become popular? But now everyone knows the total and utter awesomeness of this song. In fact, I think this will be next week’s MOVIE MUSIC BEATDOWN because I love it in two other recent things too.

1986

Top 100 songs: 13. We mentioned seven in the top 50 on Tuesday, plus no one called me on missing Kiss by Prince from Under the Cherry Moon. Five more in the top 100: Who’s Johnny by El DeBarge from Short Circuit (saw it in the theaters); Love Touch by Rod Stewart from Legal Eagles (saw it in the drive in); Spies Like Us by Paul McCartney from Spies Like Us; Living in America by James Brown, a second appearance of a song from Rocky IV (saw it at the Wyoming Valley Mall Cinema the day after Christmas); Sweet Freedom by Michael McDonald from the Running Scared soundtrack. Another, Stand By Me, was on the Stand By Me soundtrack and re-charted, but it’s not original so I didn’t include it in the count.

Soundtracks: Top Gun, Pretty in Pink and Rocky IV and all made the top 50 best-selling albums of the year.

Random good songs: It’s in the Way That You Use It, Eric Clapton, from Color of Money; Somewhere Out There, Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram, from An American Tail, an Oscar nominee; You Can Leave Your Hat On, Joe Cocker, from 9½ Weeks; Modern Woman, Billy Joel, from Ruthless People. 

Random cheese we can laugh at now: The Touch from Transformers: The Movie, and already mocked in Boogie Nights; So Far so Good from About Last Night; Back to School, Jude Cole, from Back to School; Dead Man’s Party, Oingo Boingo, from Back to School; Nothing in Common, Thompson Twins, from Nothing in Common.

Random soundtrack: One of, if not the best, random soundtrack of all time, Hoosiers. But what sets 1986 apart from all other years is the impeccable sound of one movie that epitomizes Hollywood’s utter need to have a soundtrack on every movie, no matter what: Rad. Only Karate Kid can match it in pure, unadulterated and shunned 80s cheese. From Thunder in Your Heart to Send Me an Angel, this soundtrack from the best so-bad-it’s-good movie of the 80s is nothing short of cheesy musical genius. No one involved with this thing should ever admit it today — but you can’t help but feel the need to go out and buy a BMX bike all over again after watching it.

1992

Top 100 songs: 7. I think. Plus a TV song too.

Soundtracks: The Bodyguard, though I will Always Love You didn’t chart until 1993 for some reason. Very underrated Boomerang and Waynes World. Aladdin popularized the current Disney formula — make a soundtrack with catchy kid songs, then make a movie around them.

Random songs: This is one of the first years of genre soundtracks. Singles gave us grunge hits (Would, Alice in Chains) and Reservoir Dogs went underground retro on us. The 1992 soundtracks gave us a glimpse of what soundtracks would look like from now on.

Random cheese: Can’t find one at first glance. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.

Random soundtrack: My favorite soundtrack and one of my top five albums of all time — Juice. There’s a reason this gets played on Fuse once or twice a month — because the music was so filled with freakin’ awesomeness.

Winner: 1986. There just doesn’t seem to be any comparison — 1986 blows everything else out of the water. It was the height of MTV’s video age, so every song had a soundtrack that had a hit that had a video that served as free advertising for the movie. And it worked since I remember seeing movies based solely on how much I liked the videos I watched on MTV every day.

Seeing as it’s extremely possible and almost a given that I missed something here, feel free to leave the mistakes/corrections in the comments, or e-mail me. Or, you can just leave a comment about how Rad is Talia Shire’s best BMX movie ever.

We’ll go back to links tomorrow after three days in the movie music netherworld. Sorry about that, but I’ve been losing sleep over this and had to put it out there.