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OK I guess this would be the first “The pop charts are not as good as they used to be, mannn” kinda year
Maybe it's age, but that moment happened a good two or three years later for me.
― zama roma ding dong (Eric H.), Friday, 15 March 2019 13:11 (five years ago) link
I honestly think it was cool that Extreme went with an Everly Bros pastiche for their hit ballad instead of going the power ballad route.
― All along there is the sound of feedback (Sund4r), Friday, March 15, 2019 6:03 AM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
otm. i think "more than words" is a v good song tbh
― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Friday, 15 March 2019 13:20 (five years ago) link
PM Dawn by a country mile. Best of rest: C&C Music Factory, Janet Jackson and Prince (though hardly one of his best).
Never liked Justify My Love, something hollow and contrived about it.
Awful list in general.
― does it look like i'm here (jon123), Friday, 15 March 2019 17:50 (five years ago) link
The #2s of 1991:
Cathy Dennis, "Touch Me (All Night Long)"
Color Me Badd, "I Wanna Sex You Up"
Jesus Jones, "Right Here, Right Now"
Rythm Syndicate, "P.A.S.S.I.O.N."
Amy Grant, "Every Heartbeat"
Lenny Kravitz, "It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over"
Roxette, "Fading Like a Flower (Everytime You Leave)"
Natural Selection feat. Niki Haris, "Do Anything"
Bryan Adams, "Can't Stop This Thing We Started"
Boyz II Men, "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday"
― zama roma ding dong (Eric H.), Friday, 15 March 2019 19:04 (five years ago) link
Cathy Dennis, "Touch Me (All Night Long)"
Color Me Badd, "I Wanna Sex You Up"
Jesus Jones, "Right Here, Right Now"
Rythm Syndicate, "P.A.S.S.I.O.N."
Amy Grant, "Every Heartbeat"
Lenny Kravitz, "It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over"
Roxette, "Fading Like a Flower (Everytime You Leave)"
Natural Selection feat. Niki Haris, "Do Anything"
Bryan Adams, "Can't Stop This Thing We Started"
Boyz II Men, "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday"
a marvelous sequence; not one sucks
Polarizing reactions. my thoughts:
- There were a lot more songs on the radio then. vs today, I'm pretty sure the iHeart station down the street still has "Thank You Next" in their Top 10 at 10. In 1991 there was a new "Thank You Next" every 4-5 weeks. (By that, I mean a song you could tell would be remembered for decades as an artifact of the era, event-type songs widely associated with personal moments -- these songs obv still exist but I don't think receive excessive airplay as often and are thus not treasured as widely)
- "Bad songs" were shitty but at least fun to laugh at. I've sung "I've Been Thinking About You" at karaoke 3 or 4 times in my life because I think it's bad but also funny enough that it no longer sounds quite as bad.
- Many 12-year-olds in 1991 thought "Everything I Do" was a cool song, which I guess is sort of helping me understand how many 12-year-olds in 2019 don't hear Imagine Dragons as vicious eardrum stabbing
- I'm not old; YOURE old.
― billstevejim, Friday, 15 March 2019 22:23 (five years ago) link
PM Dawn by fucking miles. The MJ and Madonna songs are great too, but come on.
Is there any other year where one chart topper is better than all of the others by such a huge margin?
― thewufs, Friday, 15 March 2019 23:22 (five years ago) link
Also re: "Everything I Do," I was, I think, 8 when that song was a hit, and it was very popular in my peer group. I have no idea why. The movie tie-in? I don't remember Prince of Thieves being that much of a thing in third grade at the time.
― thewufs, Friday, 15 March 2019 23:24 (five years ago) link
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is something of a Forgotbuster, or at least it would be if it didn't have that song attached to it. It was definitely pitched as an Event, and was actually the second highest grossing film of the year, behind Terminator 2; we were still in the post-Dances With Wolves but pre-Waterworld era of Costner, after all. I saw it opening night with my mom (something I remember feeling embarrassed about when I ran into a couple of kids I knew from school in the theatre, which attests to the fact that sixth graders, at least, were into it) and liked it okay, though when T2 came out the following month, I'd all but forgotten why I ever cared.
I don't really hate the song, btw. The first minute or so, before it gets carried away into bombast, is sorta pretty, and its certainly less painful than that Bolton cover on this list. I'd gladly have it erased from history, though, if it meant we would have been spared the Bryan Adams/Sting/Rod Stewart monstrosity "All For Love."
― Timothée Charalambides (cryptosicko), Saturday, 16 March 2019 00:33 (five years ago) link
I really hated it but, yeah, lots of kids obv liked it. I feel like I remember my high school concert band playing an arrangement of it (as part of some kind of Prince of Thieves medley?) but I'm not sure if the timeline works (was in hs from 92-97, band from 92-95 iirc).
i was 8 in 1990. i remember sleeping outside one night that summer on top of a fort i had built out of logs and scrap wood with my cousin behind the doghouse. we had the radio on and "everything i do" came on and as i lay there looking up at the stars i thought it was the most beautiful thing i had ever heard and told my cousin so much.
― cheese canopy (map), Saturday, 16 March 2019 01:22 (five years ago) link
i cant...
i should know every one of these but even remember only
C+C
EMF
londonbeat
marky mark
prince
pm dawn
mj
just looking at the listnames i'm like "how can i not know this roxette? that HAS to be the correct pop answer?!
therefore: pm dawn (even though i am def not very into pm dawn).
― Hunt3r, Saturday, 16 March 2019 04:14 (five years ago) link
xpost Prince of Thieves does have another great droll Alan Rickman villain role, so it's got that going for it. Also the start of Peak Morgan Freeman, and the end of peak Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (as such). Absolutely def. the middle of peak Costner, who I think had just come off Dances with Wolves the year before, which might explain the Robin Hood hype.
― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, 16 March 2019 13:11 (five years ago) link
'91 is such a weird year for me because it was one (of many) in which my family moved to a new town and also the year I started high school, so the hits from earlier in the year (eg Londonbeat, Amy Grant, Extreme) and from later in the year (eg Bryan Adams, MJ, C+C) feel like sounds from completely separate worlds. To the extent that I don't even have to double check when they charted (my siblings and I regard discrete chunks of '80s-'90s pop history largely in terms of where we happened to be living when the songs in question dropped). Super weird to think that I was enjoying early Celine Dion singles in the same year I first smelled teen spirit, but it is so.
― Goody Rickels on the Dime (Old Lunch), Saturday, 16 March 2019 14:50 (five years ago) link
okay so the londonbeat song is definitely not 'bad'. i do remain very puzzled at how it managed to be this unstoppable worldwide juggernaut, tho, especially performed by an act so bereft of personality, identity or quirk. with most one-hit wonders one can at least easily understand what it is about the artist that managed to take their one hit to the stratosphere -- not so with londonbeat. (somehow i might prefer the 12" mix to the original.)
so basically this was the result of fake democracy! but i like it better this way. i like turnover. i like clutter. maybe democracy sucks after all. wonder if actual pop listeners/voters would have elevated my beloved "promise of a new day" to #1. on the other hand, if the first #1 actual listeners elected was "set adrift," that's a good result too. maybe democracy works. i'm torn.
the funny thing is that billboard published the modernized sales and airplay charts for many months prior to infusing them into the hot 100, so by perusing those old issues you can actually get a sense of how all the hot 100's supposed big hits were 'actually' performing. sorry to say that "promise of a new day" almost certainly would not have gone #1 had the modernized methodology already been implemented. if i were to bet, i'd actually guess that none of the following would have reached the top had the new tabulation methods been in place:
"Coming Out of the Dark," Gloria Estefan
"You're in Love," Wilson Phillips
"The Promise of a New Day," Paula Abdul
"Joyride," Roxette
"I Don't Wanna Cry," Mariah Carey
"Romantic," Karyn White
"I've Been Thinking About You," Londonbeat
"Cream," Prince and the New Power Generation
"All the Man That I Need," Whitney Houston
"When a Man Loves a Woman," Michael Bolton
(i put them in order of least likely to hit #1 at top + likeliest to maybe sneak in there at the bottom -- tho the test chart positions visible on the first nü-hot 100 chart strongly suggest that neither prince nor bolton would have made it had the implementation been earlier, both to have been blocked by "set adrift")
that's not to say that these songs weren't real hits: almost all of them got strong-tho-not-outstanding airplay. but most of them were pulling sales in the modest-to-pretty-decent range, which was not gonna unseat an actual smash like bryan adams's, which was the simultaneous number one seller and airplay hit for many more weeks than indicated by its hot 100 run. (the gloria estefan one is the one exception -- in addition to being a weak seller, it didn't even reach the top 10 in 'real' monitored airplay.)
― dyl, Sunday, 17 March 2019 22:21 (five years ago) link