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How did some of these songs actually become No. 1 hits?
Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh and Kane put the Billboard charts of the 1980s on trial in Episode 146 of Dancing With Ourselves: A Totally RAD 80s Podcast.
The mission sounds simple: take one questionable No. 1 hit from each year, examine the evidence, and decide whether the song deserved its place at the top—or whether America collectively lost its mind for a week.
But this is DWO, so before the musical court comes to order there are Chewbacca cake pans, vintage collectibles, windshield-wiper warfare, toddlers, technology, radio memories and the usual collection of conversational rabbit holes.
Then the prosecution begins.
Captain & Tennille bring “Do That to Me One More Time.”
Stars on 45 turns Beatles songs into an early-’80s mashup experiment.
Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder face questioning over “Ebony and Ivory.”
Patti Austin and James Ingram defend “Baby, Come to Me.”
Stevie Wonder returns with “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”
And then comes the prosecution’s star witness:
Starship — “We Built This City.”
From there the guys move through “Rock Me Amadeus,” “Shake You Down,” “Baby, I Love Your Way/Freebird Medley,” “Hangin’ Tough,” and finally cross the decade line into 1990 with “Ice Ice Baby.”
Along the way, the conversation becomes bigger than bad songs. What actually made a record No. 1 in the 1980s? How much came from record sales, radio airplay, promotion, movies, MTV and the machinery of the music business? Can an overplayed song still be great? Can a bad song create an incredible memory? And how much does nostalgia change the verdict forty years later?
Jeremy brings the music-history ammunition, Josh and Kane dig through the chart evidence, and Jimmy keeps asking the question that started the whole thing:
Was it actually a bad song—or are we remembering it wrong?
The episode closes by turning the question around and asking which No. 1 songs from the decade actually deserve to be remembered among the best. Jeremy immediately goes to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” while the conversation expands into Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston, The Police and other records that still survive the test of time. DWO_EP146_How_The_Hell_Did_This…
Recorded: September 22, 2026
Featuring: Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh & Kane
🎵 Episode Outro: “Saxual Intelligence” — Auditory Ecstasy
A NeuroWave Metal / Psy-Jazz / electronic fusion track closing out a show devoted to what makes music memorable, strange, successful—or impossible to explain.
So what’s your verdict?
What ’80s No. 1 hit never deserved the top spot—and what supposedly “bad” song will you defend forever?
Dancing With Ourselves — A Totally RAD 80s Podcast.
The actual episode explicitly establishes this “song on trial” framework and then repeatedly tests whether chart placement really represented lasting quality.
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