today's AT40

[acroyear]

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

• 40 Culture Club's follow-up to that #2 is Miss Me Blind, which actually *starts* in the whole hot100 here at #40.  It's probably my fav CC song of all time.
• 39 a forgotten (certainly by me) country-rock track from Dwight Twilley, "Girls" (with support and production by Tom Petty).  Kinda trying to be a country version of Rick Springfield.
• 38 Queen's video remake of Metropolis, Radio GaGa.  To watch the audiences of their mid-80s concerts, including Live Aid, all do the clapping in this still gives me a buzz.  The song does kinda fizzle out at the end; they never really did give it a proper ending, and even live it goes on a little too long.
  
• 37 Chrissie Hynde and her Pretenders with Middle of the Road.  The video for this was taken from Dick Clark's new years 83->84, and is very primitive compared to how polished and high-tech the modern new years' shows are.
  
• 36 Paul Young's strangely dark Come Back and Stay, which I liked MUCH better than his cover of H&O's Every Time You Go Away.  Ironically, Paul Young would be the one to sing the aforementioned Radio GaGa at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1991.
  
• 35 ONJ's lost Livin' in Desperate Times.  Easily forgotten, trying to be as good as Twist of Fate but not coming close.
  
• 34 more of the polished new wave invasion arrives with The Thomson Twins' Hold Me Now
  
• 33 yet more new wave, Howard Jones's first hit, New Song
  
• 32 Manfred Man (the last one from Earth Band's original Do Wah Diddy lineup, though he was just the keyboard player and didn't sing lead on that hit at all), with Runner.  I always liked this one but it was rarely played.
  
  The Earth Band lineups included a lot of musical names including Jethro Tull's Clive Bunker and AC/DC's Chris Slade.  This song is sung by Chris Thomas who would also do work for Mike Oldfield (Earth Moving title track) and Alan Parsons (on Try Anything Once and the live tour, after the Project was dropped).  He would also be a singer (background vocals) at the same Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert.
  
  Hearing this again, I still love it.
  

• 31 Jacksonville (then still my home town but only for 4 more months...) and .38 Special, Back Where You Belong.  Well, I don't belong there anymore, but thanks for the invite. :)

• 30 Tina Turner remakes Lets Stay Together, which is rather forgettable...as in, I'd totally forgotten it.
  
• 29 Reflex sings about The Politics of Dancing, yet another new wave hit, though this time a one new wave hit wonder.  still gets a lot of First Wave airplay and has been a common earworm for me the last few months.
  
• 28 Sheena Easton, still pre-"Prince" and therefore still in her adult-pop ballad phase, with Almost Over You
  
• 27 Christopher Cross's top ten hit written years before but popular when swiped for Luke and Laura on General Hospital, Think of Laura.
  
• 26 Lionel Richie's 6th top ten, Running with the Night
  
  trivia: the most hits in a single year (in '83, Michael Jackson had 6) had been set by The Beatles (19 in 1964) but the biggest solo act was NOT Elvis, but actually Perry Como, with 15 in 1949.
  
  
• 25 Adult Education from Hall & Oats.  Strange song, rarely performed video at the time (rather risque, though nowhere near Girls On Film's notoriety).  I didn't like this at all at the time (I suppose I was too young to know what it was talking about), but it's grown on me the last few years.  There's very nice guitar interplay between Oats and future SNL leader G.E. Smith, driven by one hell of a bass riff from T-Bone.
  
• 24 K.C.'s Give it Up, which he should have done by then.  Horrid late-era disco, utterly anachronistic to the time.
  
• 23 Kenny Rogers tries to rock out a little with This Woman.  If "feels" like a Barry Gibb rif, so i'm gonna look it up and...YES!  How did the bee gees survive the post-disco era?  writing songs for everybody else!
  
• 22 Yes's Owner of a Lonely Heart.  Needless to say, this to me isn't really an "80s hit" to me, since I (re)became a Yes Fan by liking their whole catalog at once in 1987.  My dad hated it at the time, as most Classic Yes fans did.  I do tire of this one for being overplayed, even today.  I prefer It Can Happen and Hold On, though at the time my favs were Changes and Leave It.
  
• 21 Pop super-producer Richard Perry overseas The Pointer Sisters late hit Automatic.  In the 2000s, he oversaw Rod Stewart's conversion from pop-song superstar to ancient standards crooner.
  

• 20 The Romantics hear you Talking in your Sleep
  
• 19 Michael McDonald and Peabo Bryson's excellent Ya Mo Be There
  
• 18 the late Dan Fogleburg with The Language of Love, a pretty typical rock song of the time, same kinda riffs as Tom Petty, Huey Lewis, and Rick Springfield were doing at the time.
  
• 17 Christine McVie's Gotta Hold On Me
  
• 16 Kenny Loggins starts riding his movie-hit wave with Footloose, first of far too many hit songs from that soundtrack.
  
• 15 Genesis's first REALLY big hit, That's All.  Another I like and respect, but hear one too many times compared to others.
  
• 14 Billy Joel's An Innocent Man.  I liked the songs and videos of this album but didn't actually buy it until late 1985, along with Greatest Hits 1&2, both on vinyl.
  
  Trivia: the rock version of Blue Moon, 1961 from the Marcells, was the only "Moon" song to reach #1.
  
  
• 13 Duran Duran's New Moon on Monday wouldn't break that trend.
  
• 12 Kool and the Gang's Joanna, which got a LOT of airplay at the time, and almost no time on MTV.
  
• 11 The Eurythmics with my fav of theirs, Here Comes the Rain Again
  

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.