These are all nice and currently somewhat famous as much as tracks from that era go.
The question here, and most of this stems from the deephousepage reference elsewhere in this thread, is that in the actual 80s tape recordings (I've got an archive of most of them) from say WBMX or WBLS or any contemporary first hand accounts, I don't see these tracks playing prominently.
The more heavily played are things we may find less interesting today such as Pamala Stanley - Coming Out Of Hiding https://youtube.com/watch?v=M6G8dKgsEG0 ... catchy 80s pop, ok. You listen to the old recordings and this song comes up frequently. Also Bobby Orlando's dozen songs that all sound the same come up a lot (the flirts, divine, ronnie griffith, i spies) probably because their similarity in bpm and key made them versatile toys for the 80s dj.
Our perception of the past through the lens that the modern world "as a context" creates defines a narrative that we impose on the events.
I'm interested in I guess two things here. From simplest to hardest
1. What's the perceived reality of who heard/influenced what and why do we tell ourselves that
2. What's the actual reality and where's the evidence?
We have the mighty Memex machine at our fingertips and can immediately call up forgotten songs from far off lands with a few twitches of our fingertips. A Japanese synthesizer album from the 70s, a bollywood orchestration from the 60s and say a funk song from the Bronx in 1971, immediately recognize a through line and claim "aha, these are connected". But how would this fiction be possible in "before the internet" days? Records traveled, ok, Goa beach parties were real, sure. But I want to be careful in trying to remove my "person of the future" context in trying to understand the past
For instance, there's a bunch of Mexican knockoffs of italo disco tracks in the 80s and they could get away with it because Italy and Mexico are far away from each other.
I wrote an article about this 4 years ago, let me quote it:
The 1987 Mexico release Trebol – TI - 71161, produced by J. Brenner of Mannequin, "Boom Bam" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqLt7SwaN90
is a nearly 100% knock-off of the 1986 Italian release SQ 87504, produced by Miki Chieregato and Roberto Turatti, of Paul Lekakis, "Boom Boom":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0ovsnO7Akg
So yeah, that's an example of the context warp.
Now given that, who actually heard and owned what and how it happened is tough. Famous people know how important origin stories are and so they tend to not be great self documentarians. It makes the whole thing tricky especially since not very many people take this as obsessively as I do so the records are continually destroyed and altered
