Top 10 80s Songs That Got Way Darker Over Time

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The 1980s gave us neon lights, pop perfection… and songs with very dark secrets. From chart-topping hits to forgotten tracks, these tunes take on a disturbing new meaning once you learn the truth behind them. 🎧 Discover the lyrics, scandals, and real-life stories that turned catchy nostalgia into chilling revelations.  ⚠️ Warning: You’ll never hear these songs the same way again.

Transcript

00:00Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at 1980s hit songs that have come to be associated

00:12with tragic events, scandals, and coincidences. Just like Starting Over, John Lennon.

00:30I know time flies so quickly.

00:32Beatle-turned-revolutionary solo artist John Lennon was a master of mixing the sentimental

00:38with the eerie. It sadly wasn't long before Just Like Starting Over became more eerie.

00:44Lennon's chart-topping breakout for the 80s is a lively, ambient expression of love for wife and

00:49creative partner Yoko Ono through hardship. Not two months after the single's release,

00:54he was murdered right in front of her outside of their New York home.

01:02The swan song that opened the couple's final album in Lennon's lifetime thus inspired an

01:07interpretation of renewal for Ono after this unthinkable tragedy. Whether that's reassuring

01:14or melancholy, Just Like Starting Over holds a bittersweet place in fans' hearts, no matter what.

01:20My love, it'll be just like starting over.

01:26In the air tonight, Phil Collins.

01:35The dreamy electropop triumph In the air tonight has always had a chill running through it. Phil

01:41Collins' meditation on remorse and despair was so intense that some people randomly theorized it as

01:48eyewitness testimony. Over time, there developed this urban legend that the song was inspired by

01:54the singer-drummer's failure to intervene in a murder at a resort. Of course, Collins has gone on

02:00record as saying that he really wrote it as a response to the divorce from his first wife,

02:05Andrea Bertorelli. That personal touch does admittedly make the soft ballad's lyric feel

02:23more acrimonious. But after hearing the bogus rumor about In the air tonight, it's hard to unhear it.

02:30Tainted love. Soft sell. The hopping heartbreak anthem Tainted Love was originally performed by

02:42Gloria Jones in 1965. 16 years later, soft sell turned it into a synth-pop staple. The club scene,

02:57which particularly embraced the foreboding jam, was then gripped by fear after the AIDS crisis began

03:03the same year.

03:10Tainted Love became so entwined with this that Coyle, a band led by a same-sex couple,

03:15released their own cover in 1985 to benefit AIDS research.

03:25This even resonated with soft sell frontman Mark Allman, who came out as gay two years later.

03:31He may not have had the allegory in mind when he first did Tainted Love, but in a 2022 interview with

03:37Vulture, he called it a soundtrack for that scary time.

03:41It's had a life of its own, that song. It was in the American Guinness Book of Records. It was the

03:45longest ever single in the American Billboard Top 100 for a while. It's still played everywhere.

03:52Everywhere I go, I still hear it. It's on films, TV shows, our version, and people still have this

03:59great affection for it. Summer of 69 – Bryan Adams

04:11Sweeping nostalgia turned Summer of 69 into a signature song for Bryan Adams. Of course,

04:17there were those creeps who had a seedier take on the title, including Adams himself. In a 2008

04:24interview with CBS's The Early Show, he claimed the song really does allude to a sex act.

04:38But co-writer Jim Valance asserted that he envisioned an innocently sentimental anthem,

04:44with his drafts of Best Days of My Life mentioning the year 1969 only once.

04:49Each line of lyric kind of resulted from maybe a 10-minute chat about something. You know,

04:54first girlfriends, first kisses. I mean, you know, standing on your mama's porch. I don't know

05:01what Bryan was thinking about, but for me that was, you know, Betty Donaldson back in

05:07summer of 65. Adams retitled the track and made Summer of 69 the refrain, deliberately to promote

05:13the innuendo. The classic may still evoke fond memories for those who grew up between the 60s

05:19and 80s, but others may not want them to explain why.

05:29Hungry Like the Wolf – Duran Duran

05:39Honestly, a lot of Duran Duran's steamy hits have aged poorly as the mainstream social climate has

05:45evolved. Their international breakout Hungry Like the Wolf sounds particularly predatory just from the

05:51title. A 2007 cover by ska punk band Real Big Fish even opened with a spoken word analysis of the

05:57lyrics' violent implications. As they've gotten older, Duran Duran have opened up in interviews and

06:11writing about their scandalous heyday of hard partying. Frontman Simon Le Bon has, however,

06:17denied a 2018 allegation of sexual assault back in 1995. Duran Duran really haven't faced many

06:24serious scandals, but neither have they made any apology for the crass machismo once romanticized in

06:30songs like Hungry Like the Wolf.

06:40Leave Me Alone – Michael Jackson

06:50Media scrutiny followed Michael Jackson throughout his life. Finally,

06:54he wrote Leave Me Alone in response to public ridicule about his plastic surgery and such eccentric

07:00acts as adopting a pet chimpanzee. The headlines got much darker after the 80s. Jackson has been accused

07:06of serious sex crimes since 1993, leading to a 2005 trial that ruled him not guilty on 10 counts. All the

07:15while his reckless parenting style and medical issues horrified fans. The relatively light

07:27scandals that inspired Leave Me Alone were eclipsed by rumors and realities that only escalated tabloid

07:33harassments. They have haunted the Prince of Pop's overall legacy, to say nothing of his catchy plea for

07:40privacy. The world initially swooned with Every Breath You Take as a somewhat excessively intimate

08:00love song. There were surely some cynical listeners who thought the lyrics warranted contacting the real

08:06police. Well, despite the melody, the romantic interpretation was actually incorrect. In 1993,

08:14the police singer and bassist Sting told The Independent that the chart-topping Grammy-winning

08:19ballad is about a cruelly possessive lover. There's something about the song that is ambiguous.

08:26To some people, it's a love song. To other people, they think it's some sort of anthem for a stalker.

08:31So there's something a little off about it. I think that's its power. So I never contradict people

08:40about how they interpret the song. He actually wrote it as an allegory for the growth of media

08:45intrusion and surveillance in the 1980s. The song is still widely accepted as uplifting, so maybe people

08:52aren't watching Sting all that closely after all. The fact remains that he doesn't even hear much romance

08:59in Every Breath You Take. Let's Go Crazy – Prince and the Revolution

09:17His purple badness has been firing up partiers ever since Let's Go Crazy hit the scene. The party ended for

09:24those who really paid attention to the lyrics and Prince's shocking death in 2016. The song describes

09:31not letting the elevator bring you down, which was chilling enough after Prince told Musician

09:37Magazine in 1997 that this was a metaphor for the devil. Never mind that he died in an elevator of a

09:50prescription overdose almost 20 years later. Note how the song's last verse also speaks of resisting

09:56the temptation of pills. While we should respect Prince's wish to not let these coincidences and

10:02religious allegories bring us down, they do spoil the spirit of Let's Go Crazy.

10:07Cold-Blooded – Rick James It was a hot story when the always

10:19scandalous Rick James and Linda Blair dated. Everyone knew that the actress was the inspiration for the

10:24spicy title track of the album Cold-Blooded. What they didn't know about was the pain behind this

10:37tale of attraction and anger toward a girlfriend. James' 2014 posthumous autobiography GLOW opened up

10:44about Blair terminating a pregnancy in 1983 without consulting him. First of all, I heard that Cold-Blooded

10:50was about you. Is that true? Let me know because I love stories. What's it worth to you? Oh, mommy. I'm not sure.

11:03What is it worth? I would just love to know if that's true or not. He said it was. After finding out,

11:09he wrote cold-blooded as a way to process his complicated emotions. Blair and James continued

11:14dating until 84, having inspired a hit that listeners later learned was more cathartic than passionate.

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11:45What your mama don't see, your mama don't know, Gary Glitter.

11:54A number of Gary Glitter's scintillating anthems are distressing in retrospect. To be sure,

12:00what your mama don't see, your mama don't know, sounded pretty creepy when it was first released

12:05as a standalone single in 1980. It sounded very different 19 years later, when Glitter was first

12:17convicted of possession of disturbing material involving minors. He faced many more charges of

12:22abuse and inappropriate relationships after that, before being sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2015.

12:29The whole world now knows the truth about the man behind What Your Mama Don't See,

12:34another one-time classic that has been distorted by Glitter's terrible crimes. Perhaps it's for the

12:40best that this particular one has been largely forgotten. What are some other 80s classics that

12:54haven't held up under scandal? Let us know in the comments below!

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