5 Rock Songs From 1984 That Sound Even Cooler Today

The classic rock of the '60s and '70s was well and truly gone by the time the mid-'80s rolled around. At the beginning of the decade, in 1980, Led Zeppelin broke up following the death of legendary drummer John Bonham. Bands like the Eagles and The Rolling Stones were still around but greatly diminished in cultural relevance, and new wave synth acts and spandex-clad hair bands were all the rage. But no matter that the golden days of classic rock yore were gone, the '80s produced its own cache of hits that we'll be blasting till the end of time. The year 1984, specifically, produced some songs that were not only cool for their time but also sound even cooler now, 40-plus years down the line.

But first, what do we mean by the highly subjective word "cool"? For the purposes of this article, a song is cool if it has some unique and creative qualities that make it stand out from other songs of its time. We're talking composition, song structure, position within the greater '80s rock zeitgeist and its subgenres, energy and attitude, and so forth. But for a song to make this article's cut, it has to not just have these qualities in general but also stand out more now than it did then.

On that note, 1984 was a particularly fine year for punk and granted us songs like "Lake of Fire" by Meat Puppets (which Nirvana covered in their 1994 "Unplugged" session), "Hare Krsna" by Hüsker Dü, and the bizarre and hysterical "Lady Sniff" by Butthole Surfers. We've also got a song from those most proggy of progsters, King Crimson, and even a surprising entry from U2.

Before descending into more outré picks, let's start with the most well-known and mainstream of our 1984 cool song picks: "Bad" by U2 off "Unforgettable Fire." It might be hard to remember that U2 was once an exciting, groundbreaking band and not the adult contemporary snoozefest that it is today. When the group dropped "The Joshua Tree" in 1987, it went from a semi-big Irish band to a global megastar. The band was eminently listenable, no matter that no one sounded like it. But the further back in U2's discography we go, which began with 1980's "Boy," the more unusual and creative they arguably get. With "Bad," they also produced a truly moving piece of music that also happened to be legitimately cool.

"Bad" works so well because it does what U2 does best: Produce a wall of trance-inducing, shimmering sound built around repetitive phrases, the Edge's pristine guitar tones, and a locked-in rhythm section. The song isn't radio-friendly because it requires patience as it builds and builds into a momentous outro centered on Bono's "wide awake" refrain (which also reminds us that Bono had some pipes on him back in the day). No matter the success of other songs from "Unforgettable Fire" (especially "Pride," a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.), "Bad" might just be the best song on the album. 

Unfortunately, "Bad" took a hit to its coolness even by 1985 thanks to that year's historical Live Aid concert. Musically, U2's performance is phenomenal, but it's hard to separate it from Bono's self-importance and pretentiousness (and all the kisses to fans). But by now, about 40 years later, it's possible to listen to "Bad" with fresh ears and hear just how superb it is. 

Thank the gods for weird musicians immune to the slings and arrows of public opinion. Does it make sense to allude to "Hamlet" in a piece about musicians who vomit, fart, spit, use bizarre voices, and deploy lyrics like, "Lady in my stinky pinky, rooty dooty do"? Well, that's your litmus test right there. If that line and its ribald absurdity made you blurt out laughing, then Butthole Surfers and its 1984 song, "Lady Sniff," are for you. If it didn't, you can stick to U2 circa the 2010s and '20s and go back to the comforting malaise of your gray-walled cubicle.

Butthole Surfers was definitely making a statement with its 1984 debut, "Psychic ... Powerless ... Another Man's Sac," even if that statement was, "Screw you, we don't care what you think." "Punk" in the most brazen and bizarre way possible, the band struck out with one crazed, ragged track after another. Some listeners were confused, others were irritated, and yet others were delighted, but regardless, the Surfers didn't give a you-know-what. And while "Woly Boly" and its hysterical, shaky singing comes in a close second, it's "Lady Sniff" that sounds cooler than anything you'd hear today, if only because it's so unmannerly in production and presentation, let alone subject matter. Who would even try such a song nowadays? 

Furthermore, what is "Lady Sniff" actually about? We could ask Surfer frontman Gibby Haynes, but that'd be missing the point. As he sings in "Lady Sniff," "Pass me some of that dumbass over there, yeah boy." Exactly right.

Folks familiar with Nirvana's 1994 MTV "Unplugged" session — a performance that the band was sure would fail, by the way — will be delighted with this choice. Yes, Meat Puppets released "Lake of Fire" on 1984's "Meat Puppets II" (also just "II"), a superb album in the punk sphere or otherwise. Fans might be annoyed with this song choice over another, lesser-known "II" track, but really, you stalwarts: Take heart. Now you know that other people are out there spreading the good Puppets word.

"The good word" is indeed an apt allusion for a song about the Lake of Fire, one of the Bible's more disturbing locales that folks often confuse with "hell," i.e., an amalgamation of numerous biblical and cultural sources. The Meat Puppets' song might not sound as terrifying as all that, but it does sound like fuzzy, low-tempo, psychedelic punk buried in an ocean of static flames. That's why we're calling out the studio version of "Lake of Fire" rather than later live versions, which tend to be uptempo and rocky, because the studio take's production values really sell it. It's an incredibly cool track about suffering in eternal, incredibly hot torment.

Also, let's not underrate the lyrics of Puppets frontman and guitarist Curt Kirkwood, who excels at lyrical rhythm and storytelling: "Oh, I knew a lady who came from Duluth / Who got bit by a dog with a rabid tooth / She went to her grave a little too soon / And flew away howling on the yellow moon." That's four lines to tell a whole, inventively worded, oddly funny tale. And "Lake of Fire" does this all in under two minutes, which invites you to listen again and again.

Regarded as true avant-garde musicians, King Crimson never really caught on as much as prog bands like Yes or Pink Floyd because they didn't write songs as much as they did large, sometimes unwieldy compositions. The band officially formed in 1968, disbanded in 1974 under guitarist Robert Fripp's leadership, and came back in 1981 with a new lineup (again under Fripp). Armed with new members, new '80s music tech, and new energy, the group made a series of three '80s studio albums, the last of which came out in 1984 and contained an ultra-cool song of the same name as its album: "Three of a Perfect Pair."

With all this backstory and musical history in mind, "Three of a Perfect Pair" takes everything one-of-a-kind about '70s King Crimson but condenses it into an accessible, roughly four-minute-long song. This compact version of evolved Crimson contains one-of-a-kind instrumental layering, vocal harmonizations, odd polyrhythms, and time signature changes, plus a weird eeriness that's hard to explain that settles into the texture of the song. This might go back to Fripp himself, a notoriously difficult-to-understand and difficult-to-work-with individual (by his own admission, per The Telegraph). To give the reader a sense of Fripp and his songwriting philosophy, he once said (per Annihilating Noise), "Music is the cup that holds the wine of silence. Sound is that cup, but empty. Noise is that cup, but broken." Well, naturally.

Easily the most challenging band and song on our list of cool 1984's songs, "Three of a Perfect Pair" at least isn't as impenetrable to the casual listener as earlier Crimson work. No matter how cool and unique it sounded back when it was released, it's even cooler and more unique now.

What do we get when we combine the Hindu mantra for the god Krishna with an often-overlooked '80s punk act that helped shape the face of '90s grunge? We get "Hare Krsna" off Hüsker Dü's 1984 album, "Zen Arcade." This LP consists of superb songwriting, top to bottom, and is as rough and thickly distorted as it is surprisingly beautiful and melodic. But for the purposes of this article, it's "Hare Krsna" that stands out, a song that shares a name with the somewhat infamous, cult-adjacent alternative lifestyle group. Both the song and the semi-cult are named after a mantra that goes, "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare." 

Those are the exact words to Hüsker Dü's "Hare Krsna" — most of them, at least. The only non-mantra words in the song come at its beginning: "Krishna walking down the street / Touching me with lotus feet / Going to talk to Radharani / Going to ask her for her money." Yes, that sounds condemnatory of the Hare Krishna movement. But more to the point: What other rock or punk rock song invites us to discuss such things? And even more to the point: What other rock or punk rock song invites us to discuss such things while retaining, musically, some semblance of the mantra it cites?

"Hare Krsna" even uses some shakey-shake percussive instrument that might be a traditional Indian Khartal Jhika Shaker — we're not sure. But no matter what, the song is super cool. The mantra has a sick flow, too.