Forgotten Smash Hits From 1986 That Turn 40 This Year

While the 1980s may feel like they just ended to many older Americans, it's somewhat shocking to realize that even the latter half of the decade is now 40 years in the past. This also means that the pop culture of the late 1980s is now firmly "oldies" territory. Sorry, kids and teens who came of age in the '80s: the music that you grew up on, which seemed so hip, relevant, and futuristic at the time, is now way back in the collective proverbial rear-view mirror.

But let's not let this turn into a pity party about being old, or as old as the boomers were in the 1980s, whom the youth of that decade rebelled against and responded to with their pop and rock music. Instead, let's look back and reflect on all the great songs from the '80s, specifically those that came out exactly 40 years ago. This was a time in which the airwaves and MTV were dominated by the likes of Bon Jovi, Janet Jackson, Madonna, Prince, and Whitney Houston. The sounds of the time were synthesizer-driven, overproduced dance pop, smoothed-out soft rock, and slightly edgy arena rock. And while all those singers and bands are closely associated with 1986, plenty of songs by other artists have been forgotten. Here are five songs that were huge hits in 1986 that nobody seems to listen to anymore, let alone remember.

Maybe it's because it's an outlier of a solo hit from a member of an '80s band we completely forgot about, or maybe it's because its production — lots of synthetic horn stabs and sound effects — is severely dated to 1986. Or perhaps it's because it's tied to a mostly forgotten and only moderately popular 1980s comedy film with some unfortunate and now very problematic elements. At any rate, few people are bumping El DeBarge's "Who's Johnny" on their AirPods 40 years after it was first released.

"Who's Johnny" is the only Top 40 hit of El DeBarge's career apart from his involvement in DeBarge, his funk-pop group that included four of his siblings and generated hits like "Who's Holding Donna Now" and "Rhythm of the Night" in 1985. In the next year, El DeBarge grabbed the spotlight with "Who's Johnny," a song written for "Short Circuit," a comedy film about Johnny 5, an wisecracking sentient robot going on the lam from the military lab that birthed him. White actor Fisher Stevens co-stars as Ben Jabituya, an Indian character; an offensive stereotypical accent and "brownface" were both employed. A song that's explicitly about the plot of a movie that's fallen through the cracks of history, and perhaps rightfully so, just isn't going to get much airplay 40 years later.

When Daryl Hall and John Oates routinely scaled the charts in the late 1970s and 1980s, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that if and when Hall ever decided to try a solo career, he'd be quite successful. While the pair billed themselves as a duo with equal input, Hall was the primary singer and acted as the photogenic face of the act. After six No. 1 singles and 23 additional Top 40 hits, the duo took a break so Hall could go it alone. In 1986, he released the album "Three Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine," promoted with the single "Dreamtime."

The song sounded very much like what Hall had been making with Oates over the previous few years — "Dreamtime" was a showcase for Hall's impressive and soulful vocal acrobatics, which calls out above many layers of synthesizers, studio effects, and heavily processed guitars. It soared into the Top 10 in 1986, eventually peaking at a lofty No. 5. Hall would never see such heights again, at least not on his own. He reunited with Oates about a year later, and they kept charting hits until the early 1990s. 

Many of those Daryl Hall and John Oates songs continue to attract listeners more than 40 years later — "Maneater" has a billion Spotify streams, for example — while "Dreamtime," which might as well be a Hall and Oates song, has been listened to just over 2.5 million times on Spotify.

Billy Ocean, the richly voiced pop-R&B singer from the U.K., took three singles to No. 1 in the '80s. Two of those chart-toppers still garner big streaming numbers: the playfully flirtatious yet dated "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car," and the hypnotic, reggae-inflected "Caribbean Queen (No More Love on the Run)." The other part of the Ocean chart domination trifecta was the 1986 ballad "There'll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)."

Perhaps because Ocean recorded only one album between the end of the '80s and the late 2000s, "There'll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)" fell off the musical map entirely. While his other hits are straightforward and fun, this one is a sad song about sad songs. Despite the attempt of a clever angle, it's a slog of a ballad and a generic one at that, sounding so much like so many other mid-'80s soft rock radio fillers, which live on today in waiting rooms and pharmacy speakers.

By the time Boston's third album, "Third Stage," came out in 1986, the band's sound had become very dated. After two hit albums — Boston's first self-titled 1976 album was an absolute sales monster, eventually selling over 17 million copies – Boston mastermind Tom Scholz was content to fiddle with his songs for years in search of perfection. "Third Stage," particularly the lead single, the guitar ballad "Amanda," were relics of the arena rock era in a time when hair metal and keyboard pop defined mainstream music.

The public didn't care. The out-of-time "Amanda" went to No. 1 for two weeks in November 1986, the first and last time any Boston song would top the Hot 100. But the Boston comeback was brief. Not only did Scholz fail to keep the momentum going by not releasing another full-length Boston album until 1994, but "Amanda" had no staying power. The 50-year-old "More Than a Feeling" gets streamed about 10 times more often than does the 40-year-old "Amanda."

Chicago descended from a band into a bunch of rock stars that refused to work together. In the 1970s, it was a freewheeling and sprawling collective that deftly blended jazz with rock, then in the '80s churned out synthesized soft rock ballads designed to show off the almost alien voice of singer Peter Cetera, who went solo in 1985. In 1986, Cetera's first two non-Chicago singles both topped the Hot 100: "Glory of Love," the love theme from "The Karate Kid Part II," and "The Next Time I Fall," a duet with Amy Grant.

For "The Next Time I Fall," Cetera expressly wanted to use a singer who was just getting started, and he found his partner in Grant. Before she became a '90s musician we forgot about, Grant was a superstar in the Christian pop sector just getting her non-religious musical career going. "The Next Time I Fall" ascended the pop chart in December 1986, and despite the enduring appeal of Cetera's music both with and without Chicago, and Grant's many early '90s successes, the world quickly moved on from the one-week No. 1.