I'm well behind on my posts, boys, just too busy these days.  Wanted to respond to Kyle's eighties post, but perhaps there has been too much water under the bridge.  Briefly though, I'll say that the eighties were a period, like the zeroes, when commercial radio was pretty weak, but in my view anyway, the various alternatives to commercial radio were very strong, and almost, though not quite, defined it as a "good" versus "bad" era in music.     I could list examples but I suspect we all know most of them.   From where we stand now, I tend to agree that the eighties doesn't stand up well versus the decades before or after.   But history re-invents these things regularly.  I distinctly felt in the eighties, that the seventies was a grim decade, other than the salvation of punk and new wave at its end.   Prog rock, disco, soft southern cali rock, and the genesis of metal in a plethora of bad "hard" rock, these were all things that the punks rebelled against, and rightfully so.  And yet, strangely, now, the seventies feel like a fertile decade of pop and rock.  

Which brings me to my next point.   Derek and I had a few the other night, and began a classic blog discussion on eras in rock music.  Ultimately we boiled it down to this: Which single year should be considered the greatest rock and pop year of all time, and which releases from that year support your argument?   

Derek had a strong opinion (a year, I mean) Friday night, and since this was his idea for a post, I'll leave it to him to expand on it, assuming Saturday morning didn't change his thinking.  I will chime in later in the week after giving the whole thing a little more thought.