Top 10 Melodies of the 1980s

9. “Major Tom”, Peter Schilling. (1983). Written by Schilling.

You didn’t expect to see this song here, but let’s get right to the point. The soaring, melancholy-romantic melody of the chorus is the quintessential melancholy new-wave melody of all time, panoramically capturing everything about the style’s romantic spirit and predilection for the cin-ematic and the outsized, combined with its concern for human isolation and tragedy. It’s all in there, wrapped inside the cascading fall of “below us” and the hopeful, but ultimately tragic lift of “calling calling.” It is as “floating” and “weightless” as its own lyric suggests. Its contours borrow from the classical traditions of old Europe, and of course, it simultaneously invites you to sing along. And I haven’t even talked about the melody of the verse, which is a perfectly choppy set-up, with a sort of machinelike quality that seems to suggest the beeping, blinking computers that humanity was just then learning to live with on a daily basis, but of course never to trust.