Five facts related this particular playlist (or at least this particular year):

-I’d consider 1980 to be the year I officially became a music fan. America’s Top 10 debuted that year, and I watched every chance I got, starting a life-long obsession with lists. Seriously, there was a point in my life when I wanted to be a statistician. NERD CREDENTIALS, yo.

-Truthfully, I don’t remember much of a hubbub regarding “Rappers Delight” or, really, any hip-hop prior to Kurtis Blow’s “Christmas Rappin'” and “The Breaks”. Those were the first rap records my family brought home, and while I was under the impression that the genre was something new, I was also 4. So everything was new. There was nothing in my world at the time that marked hip-hop out as something that would eventually change music.

-Andrew Coleman lived across the street from me. My grandparents would have house parties during the summer, and I remember Andrew brought over his 45 of “Another One Bites The Dust” and left it there. He never got it back. Andrew was a major fan of “new wave” music at the time. His favorite bands were The Police and Devo. This was, uh, not common in my neighborhood at the time. To this day, my favorite band of all time is The Police. Thanks, Andrew, for planting that seed. Also–Andrew’s dog was named Sting. I’m sure someone will have a joke about that.

-Two lasting TV moments from 1980: seeing Michael McDonald singing “What A Fool Believes” on the Grammy Awards (with The Doobie Brothers) and hearing my grandmother joke about McD’s unusual closeness to the microphone…and seeing Prince perform on American Bandstand and being thoroughly confused. Is that a boy? Is that a girl? He has long hair. But he has a mustache. But he has an earring. I feel like Prince confused a lot of folks back then.

-John Lennon’s murder was the first celebrity death of my life that got a lot of news. Elvis died when I was less than a year old (and I was still in the hospital anyway). I’m not sure I knew who John Lennon was at the time. I did know who Paul McCartney was (“Coming Up” was a massive hit), but I’m not sure I put together the fact that he and John were in a band together until I saw the “Yellow Submarine” cartoon on TV the following year.

Anyway, here’s my 1980 playlist. We’re still heavy in disco and post-disco boogie mode, but there’s a fair amount of top 40 pop (thanks Casey Kasem and Solid Gold) as well.