today's AT40

is...March 3, 1984 (25 years ago!), probably the year I most paid attention to pop.  I've not blogged this one (I have a later March '83, but not this one), so here we go.  As noted in that one, real rock was slowly taking over from the late pop before Madonna would start a brand new "dance" culture.  Here, we're in the new wave craze at its most popular and polished.

One thing I note looking at this now (as of #12) is how I *didn't* buy a lot of these on '45 compared to that 1983 set a few weeks back.  Most of my spending cash at the time went to comic books (two stores in the area, and back-issues of the then #1 series Teen Titans were expensive on a 13 year old's budget).  My parents gave me a hook-on bike-radio for Christmas, am-only, and there was an am pop station (the types that stopped existing within 5 years) so I got my fix that way, followed by MTV as soon as I got home, instead of buying the songs.  *Everybody* biked if they didn't take the bus.  Some of my teachers weren't too happy with me having the radio (which I did take with me rather than leave on the bike to get stolen).

I'd even generally stopped taping songs off the radio as for whatever reason, Y-103's playlist started to suck compared to this am station but the am station's quality wasn't worth taping.

I stopped biking when we moved to DC.  It simply wasn't something people did to get to school, not sure why.  Bikes parked in school parking racks were targets for theft, not examples of healthy living.  It didn't help that NoVa has far more hills one has to bike over than the mostly flat Florida plains, and my bike wasn't a 10-speed but a large-scale dirt bike.

The other thing is that some that I really liked my dad liked too (The Thomson Twins, for example) so he would get them instead, on album of course, though he did that more once in DC and having the Waxie Maxie's on his lunch path in Crystal City.

last week

• 3 99 Baloons
  
• 2 Karma Chameleon
  
• 1 Van Halen's Jump
  

( and we start this week with... )

Now into the top ten we go...

• 10 Speaking of Huey Lewis and the News, here's I Want a New Duck Drug
  
• 9 Shannon, Let the Music Play, which I never heard on the radio (that am station never played it, being more oriented to the pop-rock side than the dance/early hip-hop scene) but got a lot of play by the local DJ the social groups I was in hired for dances.
  
• 8 The Police, knocking down candles in their final year ('86's greatest hit doesn't count), with Wrapped Around Your Finger.
  
  Send in the Clowns, a long distance dedication, is another song I just don't get.
  
  
• 7 Rockwell's Somebody's Watching Me, currently back on the airwaves as a commercial
  
• 6 Culture Club's Karma Chameleon, once a #1, is on its way down.
  
• 5 The late John Lennon, Nobody Told Me, the last single they'd release with him until Free as a Bird was assembled by Yoko and the surviving Beatles for the Anthropology releases.
  
• 4 Michael Jackson's Thriller is introduced by an excerpt of Eddie Murphy's impersonation.
  
• 3 Cindy Lauper's first hit, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
  
• 2 Nena's 99 Luftballons.
  
  There was a show on PBS that would teach phonics and grammer by playings videos with lyrics as subtitles, highlighting in blue what they were emphasizing, like "verbs" or the schwa sound.  They did 99 Luftballons in the German emphasizing nouns where the blue highlight was kinda pointless: all nouns in German are capitalized so they already stuck out.
  
  so staying at number one...
  
  
• 1 Van Halen's Jump!

Though I don't understand how anybody can call them a "Heavy Metal" band considering how much keyboard plastic is made famous here...

Reviewing past AT40s, I find that Say Say Say which was #1 a mere 5 weeks earlier, is entirely out of the countdown.