'80s Club Hits

Grab your Members Only jacket or your best neon mini, and don't forget to mousse your hair — we're about to travel through time and space. Back to the day when club hits ruled supreme, when the ice-cool groove of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" brought out the moonwalker in mere earthlings and a Detroit girl named Madonna took a hooky dance-club "Holiday" and launched herself into the stratosphere. Take the iTunes time machine into Next Steps for a lot more where these came from.

Hey, it's crowded on that '80s dance floor. Look over there — it's funk-soul superfreak Rick James calling all nasty girls with the sexy shaker "Give It to Me Baby"; and in that corner we've got Blondie blissing out on their own brand of new wave rap with "Rapture." And over there? It's none other than Montreal's Men Without Hats with their synth-pop classic, "Safety Dance." The '80s may be over, but the decade's great dance tunes keep coming in our '80s Club Hits Deep Cuts.

Maybe we still don't know what the heck George Kranz means when he sings "Din Daa Daa," but we do know that it makes for one fine dance tune. Same goes for the electro-addictive "Living on Video" by Trans-X. Meanwhile, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam question the future in the early hip-hop pop cut "I Wonder If I Take You Home" and Spoons invest "Nova Heart" with a surfeit of new romantic panache.

If we were given to bold statements, we might say the '80s was the decade for great club hits. And with all due respect to Cyndi Lauper, it wasn't just girls who wanted to have fun. Everybody was on the prowl for a good time, and they could find it in the dance clubs, whether they wanted to feel the pounding house beat of Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam" pulsate through their bloodstream; ride the irrepressible, synth-pop beat of "Don't Go" by Yaz; or catch a gentle, sweet-soul groove with Soul II Soul's "Back to Life." Shoulder pads and one sequined glove may be gone with the fashion winds, but our '80s Club Hits will never go out of style.