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Plethora of Pop’s Rate-A-Record

1984’s Cruel Country Summer

Distinctions and Discretions in the pop charts

Terry Barr
4 min readJun 19, 2023

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Photo by Shifaaz shamoon on Unsplash

1984. Could Orwell have known that this was the year Country crossovers on the pop charts died?

Or if they didn’t exactly die, they barely held a pulse-worth of moments, mainly because Lionel Richie had so many tunes in Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 that it hardly left room for other Pop people like Springsteen and Elton John, though Cyndi Lauper elbowed her way through the crowds in a pretty big way.

No one could top Prince, though, for the #1 song of that year. Do you need a moment to think? What do you consider the anointed one’s greatest hit? I’ll always remember playing that song for one of my freshman classes during a quiz, and I thought one guy was just about to bust a few moves regardless of the time limit on his questionnaire.

Ok, let’s hit it:

If that were the only song of ’84 we have, I’d cry happy tears.

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Terry Barr
Terry Barr

Written by Terry Barr

I write about music, culture, equality, and my Alabama past in The Riff, The Memoirist, Prism and Pen, Counter Arts, and am an editor for Plethora of Pop.

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