top 10 hits that no one remembers

The modern rock chart was curious.

Kite is the best song EVER and I don't think I've gone two weeks in years without hearing it at least once. But in the UK it petered out at #44. A big shame.

I was thinking about Venus by Don Pablo's Animals only yesterday. I still have it on 7", one of the first singles I ever bought at 9 years old. I assume it was made by one of those Italian Eurodance super-producers under an alias but can't find much info about it at all.

Out of curiosity I researched the Billboard top 10 for each year since I started listening to radio (being really old that would be 1966.) It took me until 1986 to find one I have no recollection of: "I Miss You" by Klymaxx. By 1991 it's 4 of the top 10. By 2001 I can't recall any of them.

"I Miss You" got A/C play well into the '90s. It may be gone now.

Chances are if I heard it I would remember. Ringing no bells. Love "Meeting in the Ladies Room" though.

There's a little two-note percussion motif/hook in "I Miss You" that has stuck in my head all these years.

Imagine the R&B sonic inverse of 'Meeting in the Ladies Room' and you have 'I Miss You'. There's no other way to say it, and I can't deny it.

Okay, listening now and I have never heard "I Miss You." In 1986 my consumption of pop radio/MTV/VH1 was pretty much nil though, and my limited exposure to R&B was via dancefloor bangers rather than quiet storm stuff.

I don’t recall that song either. There was a period where some R&B songs hit the top even though MTV barely played the videos for them.

It hit #3 on the adult contemp chart, so it was pretty huge. Maybe I heard it in a dentist's office...

Klymaxx earned their own Behind the Music where the success of "I Miss You" led to precisely the kind of intragroup conflict you'd expect.

I remember it. and years later it wound up on a "worst breakup songs ever" countdown on VH-1

First time hearing “kite”

Gorgeous

yikes - did not know about this!

https://www.stereogum.com/2152457/klymaxx-say-the-wrong-klymaxx-was-inducted-into-women-songwriters-hall-of-fame/news/

Is Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr's Theme from Mission Impossible the only 90s worldwide top 10 hit - including in the US! - to not be on Spotify? Sometimes feels that way.

Such was its significance at the time that Orbital and Moby were also commissioned to put spy themes through the big beat blender and achieve some of their best single sales ever.

It's available where I am in Canada:
https://open.spotify.com/album/62qBtOk1Nzn6y8h4gE0t72?si=cMlaskP4QZyEdJbNDdUl8Q

It took me until 1986 to find one I have no recollection of: "I Miss You" by Klymaxx.

Being very honest here: this was the song that permanently drove me from top 40 listening. Which is pretty weird in retrospect, but something about hearing it a fair amount in 1986 got under my skin in a bad way; given I was a nerdy 15 year old I am not sure why, but I think I was finally done with a certain kind of easy listening/adult top 40 glop that had just gotten worse throughout the decade. Keep in mind I had been essentially listening to top 40 actively and regularly since 1980/1981 so this was a big move for me at the time! A logical sidestep given the time and place (Southern California_ might have been KROQ or rather 91X given I was in San Diego, but I was unsure about all that too as yet. I essentially took a year away from anything beyond random MTV viewings and things I overheard in favor of a lot of books and some random vinyl purchases, then moved into my classic rock phase in 1987 for a year (all while taking in other things as I did), got my first CD player, went to college in 1988, joined the radio station there and started reading alt-weeklies etc. etc. But "I Miss You" really was the catalyst that shocked me out of where I was at! So call it my weird origin story I guess?

It's available where I am in Canada:

Hmmm, strange it isn't worldwide

(I'm in the UK and it isn't here)

Ned, that's marvelous.

^^^ seconded. Just came here to post that one person's song they've never heard in their life is another's straw that broke the camel's back.

one main's ceiling is another man's floor

Truly one of the most strangely influential songs of my life. (And if I had only heard it once or twice I doubt I would have cared but it got a LOT of play and I was so sick of it. Just thinking about the chorus causes a Pavlovian shudder response.)

Yeah, that Klymaxx song eclipsed their two other hits, none of which I remember:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiMUVPWE7ec

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHg_8-1EBPI

My trajectory is probably similar to Ned's. Top 40 > Classic Rock > the good stuff that defined what I listened to for the rest of my adult life.

The song that I remember singularly responsible for driving me down the radio dial from the top 40 station to the Classic Rock station was... Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" (a song I don't have strong feelings about today, but I think it was extremely over-played on my chosen top 40 station, and for some reason it just drove my 13 year-old self crazy). The song has probably been in "classic rock" circulation for decades by now.

I didn't mind "I Miss You" specifically but there was something about 1986 that broke me too -- the combination of shlocky ballads, horrible Prince copycats, and somnambulant AOR drove me away from following music for about 2.5 years, which is an eternity for a 12-14 year old kid.

Neither you nor Ned are wrong (esp about the categories you cited), but I'll insist 1986 was a wonderful year for pop in every genre.

That's intriguingly counterintuitive from my personal experience but yeah, 1986 feels like a 'problem' year in my head still, just thanks to the personal vector. I figure a lot of it is down to the quality of local stations (or lack thereof) depending on where you were at, compounded by an MTV that was starting to calcify the more it was ingrained. Essentially you had to make your own steps, and mine were ultimately backward for a while. It was never completely the case -- that same top 40 station had a Saturday night dance party block that avoided DJ chatter much and was also where I first heard "Blue Monday" -- random overhearings of "Bizarre Love Triangle" soon after helped tie the two together and so forth. But these were examples of me hearing something in specific and with intent more than not, where before I just had top 40 on by default.