Take On Me

One of pop's most perfect machines, and it took three attempts to get right. The synth riff — that cascading, bell-bright sequence — is a genuine earworm of the highest order, hooked onto a driving bassline and a snare that cracks with LinnDrum precision. What elevates it is the arrangement's restlessness: nothing repeats for long, the pre-chorus lifts, and then Morten Harket's falsetto arrives on the final "in a day or two" like a rocket clearing the atmosphere, a leap of two and a half octaves that no one has ever quite convincingly imitated. Beneath the sparkle the lyric is oddly plaintive — a plea from someone with no confidence at all, admitting the words are clumsy and asking only not to be left behind. That gap between euphoric surface and anxious content is the song's secret engine. The rotoscoped video, a comic-book romance drawn frame by frame, gave MTV one of its defining images and made three Norwegians global stars almost overnight. It's a song for pure motion: driving, running, a kitchen at eight in the morning — and for the private ritual of attempting that final note alone and failing, cheerfully, every time.