What the hell was wrong with everyone in 1986? What, was it the Challenger explosion? The Chernobyl disaster? And that weird thing in Cameroon where a lake suddenly emitted a large, suffocating cloud of carbon dioxide and killed thousands of people and animals all at once? And all the car bombs and plane bombs and plane hijackings, and that post office shooter in Oklahoma, and the Lebanon hostage crisis, and the failed deescalation talks between Reagan and Gorbachev and—all right. So maybe it makes sense that America was mostly just looking for a soft groove to which it could hold its knees and rock in front of very slowly. “That’s What Friends Are For” urging you to keep smiling and/or shining your way right into the similar greeting card platitudes of “I Miss You” and the gentle babble of “Say You Say Me”? It’s aural Xanax. We get it. Although, it still doesn’t explain Prince’s “Kiss” landing a good 12 slots behind Eddie Murphy and Rick James’ coke bender. No world is that messed up.
In 1986’s defense, beyond that whole living-in-a-perpetual-state-of-fear-and-trauma thing, there were some less benumbing things happening the lower down the charts you went—and not just the fact that apparently Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” The Bangles’ “Manic Monday,” Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love A Bad Name,” OMD’s “If You Leave,” Janet Jackson’s “Nasty,” and Run DMC and Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” among other vaunted ’80s classics, were all deemed pretty great that year, but not, y’know, “Party All The Time” great. Indeed, many of them even ranked well below El Debarge’s romantic ode to robot-fucking. But we digress.
Beyond that, even, there were actually some mildly revolutionary incursions being made onto the Billboard 200 from the less commercial worlds of thrash metal, punk, and what was only then starting to be called “alternative rock” (something that spurred Billboard to adopt its first Alternative Songs chart two years later). Albums by acts who were as opposite-of-Mr. Mister as Siouxsie And The Banshees, Public Image Ltd., Ministry, New Order, The Jesus And Mary Chain, and Hüsker Dü also made their way into Billboard’s lower echelons that year. And thanks to MTV and the just-launched Spin Magazine, the country’s rapidly spreading patches of cool kids were getting turned on to The Queen Is Dead and Life’s Rich Pageant, or Master Of Puppets and Peace Sells... But Who’s Buying? out in suburbia, where they could sneer at all the sheep blaring the Top Gun soundtrack.
In fact, you have to dig relatively deep to find great tracks that Billboard’s charts didn’t record this year: to the fringes of noise rock and dream pop; down to Senegal and Melbourne; over to the U.K.’s taste-making label 4AD; out to the progenitors of gangsta rap in Crenshaw and the Bronx, and of house music in Chicago. All of the songs below also wanted to party in 1986—if not all the time, then, at least, at the same time.