Summer Olympics Music That Takes the Gold
By Michael Jones | July 25, 2021
It’s time for the 2020 2021 Summer Olympics (postponed one year thanks to COVID, and probably should be postponed this year because of… well, COVID). Expect gold medals, national anthems, and even oiled-up shirtless flag bearers. (Petition idea: make this Tonga guy a part of every Olympics for the rest of our lives.)
Over the years the Olympics have given us some amazing pop music hits. From opening ceremony triumphs to theme songs to closing ceremony punctuation marks, the Summer Games have served a musical buffet for the past 40 years. Here’s a look at some of the pop music with deep ties to the global games.
1984’s “Reach Out” by Giorgio Moroder
You know him as the father of disco and the producer behind so many of Donna Summer’s early hits (new idea for a dance club night: the Donna Summer Olympics!). But the Olympics know him as the creator of the 1984 jam “Reach Out” which served as the theme song for the Los Angeles games. You want a sports montage? You’ll get that and much more, baby. Not only do we get gymnasts with streamers, muscly shot put throwers and enough long jumpers to fill a bus, we get juicy camp lyrics that make Jock Jams seem sedate.
You now hold the future in your hand.
You have come from everywhere across the land.
The stars are shining bright, make it yours tonight.
You know every wish you have's at your command.
Pulitzer-prize winning lyrics they are not. But there’s enough cheesy dopamine in these lyrics—especially when accompanied by the video—to make you feel like you can pole vault into space.
1988’s “Willpower” by Taylor Dayne
When she’s not singing at Mar-a-Lago (sorry, it’s just too fresh in our minds!), you can also find Taylor Dayne on the soundtrack of the ’88 Summer Olympics that were held in Seoul, South Korea. Right around the time Dayne hit it big with “Tell It To My Heart,” she was tapped by Clive Davis’s Arista Records for a song on the formal album of the Olympics, One Moment in Time. (And yes, we’ll be mentioning those words again in just a second.)
The song was called “Willpower” and while it’s not widely known in Taylor Dayne’s canon, it’s not a bad 80s bop at all. The lyrics have every Olympics cliché you could imagine with words like destiny, heartbeats, flames of fire, dreams of strength, and victory basically sewn together with Dayne’s belt of WILL...POWER.
Alas, you can throw all the words you want as well as the kitchen sink at a song, but when it’s on the same album as one of Whitney Houston’s iconic hits, you’ll need much more than willpower for people to notice it. And speaking of...
1988’s “One Moment in Time” by Whitney Houston
What is there to say that hasn’t already been said about Whitney Houston’s “One Moment in Time”? Here’s the thing with Whitney Houston: she was so good at singing everything—especially at this stage in her career—that she could literally have belted the weather forecast and it would have become a global hit. “One Moment in Time” is one of those songs that has already spanned generations, and will probably span another 200 generations, played at countless sporting events, competitions, American Idol auditions, and high school choral concerts. And what drunk person or theatre kid hasn’t sung it in a karaoke room waiting for that last verse to see if they can hold the note: “I will be…. I will be FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.” (No one, ever, will be able to hit that note like Whitney. No matter how many vodka sodas in their bloodstream.)
1992’s “Barcelona” by Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé
There’s some sadness in this because it marked the very last live performance of one of music’s most beloved and cherished voices, Freddie Mercury. But when you listen to Mercury and Spanish opera soprano Montserrat Caballé perform “Barcelona,” it’s like watching two legends having the time of their lives on stage. This performance is technically from 1988 (Mercury would tragically pass away before the 1992 Barcelona Olympics) when the Olympic flag arrived in Barcelona in anticipation of them hosting the games. But it stayed fresh for years and became the theme song of the ’92 games, further demonstrating that Mercury was among the most versatile voices ever to grace a stage.
1996’s “Reach” by Gloria Estefan
Giorgio Moroder isn’t the only artist allowed to have an Olympics song with the word “reach” in the title. Here we have one of Gloria Estefan’s classic hits, “Reach,” which she performed at the closing ceremony of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. It’s adult contemporary ooey-gooey earworm butter. Sure enough put this song on and you’ll feel like you can touch even the tallest cabinets in your kitchen.
Estefan was a sports music legend in the 1990s, performing during TWO Super Bowl halftime shows and these Atlanta games. And she knew what she was doing: this song (penned by legend Diane Warren) was a top 5 hit on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts and ended up getting nominated for a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Can’t reach much higher than that.
1996’s “The Power of the Dream” by Celine Dion
The ’96 Games in Atlanta didn’t just have one original Vh-1 Diva; they had two. Along with Gloria Estefan there was Celine Dion performing “The Power of The Dream” during the opening ceremony. The song didn’t really get released in many countries, but Dion—not known for giving shy performances—knocked the lights out in Georgia with this performance, joined by choirs from the Morehouse College Glee Club, the Spelman College Glee Club and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus. And no song on this list gives us lyrics that make absolutely no sense outside of the Olympics.
Feel the flame forever burn
Teaching lessons we must learn
To bring us closer to the power of the dream
As the world gives us its best
To stand apart from all the rest
It is the power of the dream that brings us here
But that’s also what makes Celine Dion an international treasure. Dion took the stage right as her 1996 album Falling Into You (the one that gave us “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” “Because You Loved Me,” and her explosive rendition of “All By Myself”) was flying off the shelves at your local MediaPlay (ah, the 90s), and it’s pure Celine goodness where she takes a ballad and all of a sudden starts hitting notes and ranges that could wake up the souls of athletes who performed at the very first Olympic games in 776 BC.
2000’s “The Flame” by Tina Arena
Tina Arena is one of Australia’s highest-selling artists, though Americans probably primarily remember her from her song “Chains,” which was a top 40 hit in 1994. In 2000 for the Sydney, Australia Olympics, she was tapped to sing “The Flame,” and here we get our second choir joining a pop singer for a performance (with kids wearing blue vests as far as the eyes can see. Yikes). Can Arena sing? Oh yeah, that’s evident (which makes sense that she’d later be tapped to play Eva Perón in Evita to incredible reviews). But this Olympics song? Well, it might be the least poppy of any of the pop songs that make this playlist. Maybe a bronze medal for this one, but there are some big notes that make it worth the listen.
2012’s “Survival” by Muse
We didn’t get much in the way of pop music for the 2004 or 2008 Olympic Games, but that changed for London’s 2012 competition. Oh sure everyone remembers The Spice Girls reuniting and performing (and some of us remember Take That reuniting and performing!). But technically another group had the theme song: “Survival” by Muse.
What did critics think of “Survival”? For that hot take, we’re going with The Guardian’s Adam Boult who possibly wrote the best summary of a song ever in describing his first listen of this Muse song: “It's a hilarious five-minute onslaught of camp, falling somewhere between Queen, Gloria Gaynor and a Monty Python sketch. Swelling strings, battle drums, ludicrous falsetto shrieking and chugga-chugga guitar channelling the Little Engine That Could. It's as insanely overblown as the Olympics themselves.” If that’s not a five-star review for some delicious pop culture trash, what is?!
2021’s “Remember This” by The Jonas Brothers
And here we find ourselves in the present day, thanking Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Hera or whatever Greek God watches over the Olympics, because we have been given another pop song to accompany the games. And it comes from the trio of Kevin, Nick, and Joe, known to heaps of screaming girls and gays as The Jonas Brothers. Their “Remember This” is part anthem to summer memories, part meditation on how fast life moves, and part cheeseball hooks that will have you randomly screaming “We’re gonna want to remember this!” while you’re chopping vegetables.
Used to pray for a moment just like this
There's a fire in your eyes I can't resist
Baby we're gonna wanna remember this
Baby we’re gonna wanna remember this
Now these lyrics could earn a prize because, come on, how often do you see the words “gonna wanna” paired together? The song is summer joy, and if it weren’t paired with the Olympics it would be the type of song that everyone graduating high school would play as they’re going to their Senior Proms or having that post-graduation party that lasts all night until the sun rises. And the JoBros are having a moment, because another one of their recent songs—“Leave Before You Love Me” with Marshmello—might be our song of the 2021 summer.
Now it just remains to be seen if we’ll remember these 2021 Olympics for their artistry, music, and athleticism. Hey, at a minimum, at least it’s an excuse to oil up a torso.
Got another Olympics pop music song you love? Sound off in the comments and we’ll add it to our playlists.
This article is based on the Stationhead playlist your Pop Trash Museum curators hosted a year ago, during the week the Tokyo Games were originally supposed to take place. Check it out here.
An unabashed 80s & 90s pop culture junkie, Michael Jones is a Brooklyn-based writer and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.