Now, i hate Internet Explorer with a passion^[1], for anyone designing websites, forum or blog themes it’s an absolute nightmare! The amount of tweakery pokery you have to go through to get some things to work … well it’s enough to make you scream. Which is why i praised the lord when Firefox came along. It seems like no matter what you throw at it, it just works. Or at least it did. I don’t know what in whore of Babylon hell they have done with Firefox 3 but on my pc it’s almost as unstable as Internet Explorer. It’s often crashing on me when i click on download links.

So now what? There’s Flock browser but that’s just a rip off of Firefox i think with a few social bits ‘n’ bobs bolted on. There’s Google Chrome which although is nice and speedy, it doesn’t display all websites properly. I guess there’s always Safari … but i’d miss my Firefox add-ons! *gahhhh!*. I hope they fix whatever the problem is and i know i’m not the only one having this problem with it. They should have left it as Firefox 2 – you know what they say, if it aint broke …

1. as does anyone in their right mind [↩]

I didn’t until earlier tonight a friend reminded me by asking the question, “what year did you first get into music?” Well i remember very clearly in 1984 my brother’s girlfriend (at the time) buying me two Culture Club albums. One was Colour by Numbers and the other was Waking Up With The House On Fire. Well that was it, the flamboyant George had me hooked! I started paying attention to the charts and what an amazing year it was for music.

1984 marked the high watermark of the “New Music” of the Eighties (see 1983-The Year in Music), and the British invasion was still a force to be reckoned with. In March, 24 of the Top 50 singles in the U.S. were by British acts. It was also a year when soundtracks produced one big hit after another; the Footloose soundtrack was the biggest of these, with Kenny Loggins, Deniece Williams, and the duo of Mike Reno and Ann Wilson all having Top Ten hits off the album.

Prince scored several hits, and reached the pinnacle of his career, with songs from the Purple Rain soundtrack, and Ray Parker, Jr. enjoyed a #1 hit with the theme from Ghostbusters — as well as a plagiarism lawsuit filed by Huey Lewis and the News. Tina Turner made the biggest comeback in rock history, Madonna introduced herself in her first (but certainly not last) incarnation as a “boy toy,” and Phil Collins and Steve Perry — of Genesis and Journey respectively — discovered just how successful you could be in a solo career if you followed a few simple guidelines: make your music danceable and MTV-compatible.

Critics, of course, deplored the paucity of “message” in the New Music, and many blamed video. But there could be no denying that the music industry, suffering so grievously in the late Seventies, was healthy again. And even people like Bruce Springsteen and Hall and Oates, while initially scornful of video’s importance to their careers, jumped on the bandwagon — and profited greatly for the compromise.

Stand-out songs of 1984
Karma Chameleon (Culture Club), Girls Just Want To Have Fun (Cyndi Lauper), Somebody’s Watching Me (Rockwell), Footloose (Kenny Loggins), Here Comes The Rain Again (Eurtyhmics), Thriller (Michael Jackson), Automatic (Pointer Sisters), Hello (Lionel Richie), Hold Me Now (Thompson Twins), Let’s Hear It For The Boy (Deniece Williams), Against All Odds (Phil Collins), The Reflex (Duran Duran), Time After Time (Cyndi Lauper), Borderline (Madonna), When Doves Cry (Prince), What’s Love Got To Do With It (Tina Turner), Missing You (John Waite), Drive (Cars), Ghostbusters (Ray Parker Jnr), Lucky Star (Madonna), I’m So Excited (Pointer Sisters), Purple Rain (Prince), Wake Me Up (Wham), I Just Called To Say I Love You (Stevie Wonder), The Wild Boys (Duran Duran), Like A Virgin (Madonna), Never Ending Story (Limahl), Smalltown Boy (Bronski Beat), Radio Ga Ga (Queen), Together In Electric Dreams (Georgio Moroder with Phil Oakley), I Want To Break Free (Queen), White Lines (Grandmaster & Melle Mel), Do They Know It’s Christmas? (Band Aid).

Maybe everyone says this when they get older but don’t you think music today is a load of shit compared to what it was? I mean there are some great songs out there but everything seems so sterile now and overly polished and perfect and gleaming. I can make lists galore of my favourite songs all through the 80′s and 90′s but once we get to the 00′s i start to struggle. I mean most dance tracks are songs lifted from the 80′s and 90′s anyway and nobody seems to have any uniquness anymore.

Well, this old fart is glad that he grew up and discovered music in the glorious 80′s! Click Read More for a list of the Top songs of 1984.