"Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (Tears for Fears)

I was at the office recently for a quarterly planning meeting.  There were about 30 of us of varying ages, squeezed around a conference table, having lunch.  Somehow in the course of conversation, one of my colleagues started talking about 80s music, and this (very) young intern pipes up and says, "Wow, I wish, like, I was born, like, in the 80s.  It was, like, so much, like, fun and stuff!"
After I got done tossing her from the roof of the building*, I made my case that the 80s weren't so hot.  Honestly, they were pretty awful.  Everyone dressed like clowns escaped from a mental institution, and we had the hair to match.  Self-centeredness was status quo.  And the Russians were out to obliterate us, and vice versa.  Honestly, it was a decade of bad taste, greed, and fear that planted the seeds of our current decade of bad taste, greed, and fear.  (If you were alive in the 80s, I challenge you to name one fond memory that isn't somehow related to one of the following: a consumer product, a T.V. show, a song/album, or a film.  It's nearly impossible to do.)
I bring this up because I always found "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" from Songs from the Big Chair (1985) to be an astute commentary on the 80s.  (Quite a feat, I think, considering the decade was only half over when Tears for Fears wrote/released it!)
On the surface, it's an upbeat pop song with a danceable beat, memorable guitar solo, and singable chorus.  If you're not really paying much attention, you might think the refrain Everybody wants to rule the world is just some douchebag mantra that reiterates the 80s "I'm gonna get mine" mentality.  But if you listen a little more closely, you get that Curt Smith is delivering a warning about greed and powermongering.  In truth, the song is a lament.  It's about being full of hopes and dreams as young person in the modern world, but then coming to the stark realization that it all could be obliterated at the whim of one person tomorrow.
That was the reality of the 80s.  We were just trying to remain upbeat through the thick of it.

(*No 20-year-olds were harmed in the composition of this blog entry.)

"Head Over Heels/Broken" (Tears for Fears)

Tears for Fears seemingly came out of nowhere in 1985.  
Truth was, they'd been around for a number of years.  They even had a massive hit album, The Hurting (1983), under their belt in England.  But, here in the States, we were late to the party.  Nothing new.
Their breakthrough in the US, Songs from the Big Chair (1985), was a refreshing change for the pop landscape at the time: there were touches of New Wave and synth pop, but the moment you expected them to go full-on Kajagoogoo, their crunchy/funky rock side would come through, setting them squarely in Bowie Scary Monsters territory.  They also brought a cerebral approach to pop lyric writing that signaled they were thinking about more than living in the material world, which definitely set them apart from the all-that-glitters world of 80s pop.
Although it wasn't the first song I'd heard by the band, "Head Over Heels" was my fast favorite.  It had a confident groove and that classic "Hey Jude"-esque singalong portion that made it stick squarely in the brain.  
The song actually began its life as a link between the two parts of an earlier song, "Broken," which uses the same piano riff as "Head Over Heels."  The band debuted the "Head Over Heels/Broken" medley, live at London's Hammersmith Odeon (a.k.a. Hammersmith Apollo), in 1983.  In fact, the coda at the end of the 1985 album-version was taken from this 1983 live show.  (I'd always assumed that the "live" cheering at the end was the product of studio trickery and canned sound effects.  But it really is genuine crowd reaction to hearing the song for the first time.)