20 Biggest Songs of the Summer: The 1980s
Summer movie soundtracks and MTV faves reign over the summers of the Reagan era


The Eighties were an age of big hair, bigger snare drums and massive hits. Music videos gave rise to a flashy new class of pop stars, and left behind the baby boomers that weren’t fit enough to strut it on MTV. Meanwhile, the hit-packed soundtracks of pop-savvy flicks like Flashdance and Purple Rain kept pace with the escalating box office grosses of the summer movie season. Here are the biggest summer jams from ’80 to ’89, dictated by peak chart positions and total length of run on the Hot 100. We’ve also ignored all the non-summery adult contemporary ballads (our apologies to the likes of Richard Marx and Peter Cetera).