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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
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
To your point, for I cited this article not long ago: https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/67227/chart-beat-chat
those "coming out of the dark" airplay/sales rankings you cite are from the old survey-based methodology, which were also still getting published at that time (until the june 8, 1991 issue). on the monitored airplay chart, which was getting published concurrently, it never got past #12. once the soundscan-based sales chart came out in the june 8th issue, it was basically already off the chart (briefly appeared at #74 afaict), with many older hits still lingering above. unlike most of the other #1s from this year, it also never ultimately received an riaa certification, so again despite its #3 survey-based sales ranking my guess would be that it didn't actually sell well.
― dyl, Sunday, 17 March 2019 22:48 (five years ago) link
three weeks pass...
Huh. I went back and listened to the 11 that did not ring a bell, and all but two or three of them, maybe, still did not ring a bell. However, most of the ones I didn't know were schmaltzy ballads, which was my least favorite style of '90s pop, so maybe I heard them and they went in one ear and out the other. An exception was Romantic by Karyn White, which I'm pretty sure I'd never heard but obviously rang a bell because of Jam and Lewis.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 12 April 2019 01:14 (four years ago) link
Also, these are all very good-to-great pop singles fuiud...
"Justify My Love," Madonna
"Love Will Never Do (Without You)," Janet Jackson
"Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)," C+C Music Factory featuring Freedom Williams
"Someday," Mariah Carey
"One More Try," Timmy T
"I've Been Thinking About You," Londonbeat
"Baby Baby," Amy Grant
"Joyride," Roxette
"I Like the Way (The Kissing Game)," Hi-Five
"Rush Rush," Paula Abdul
"I Adore Mi Amor," Color Me Badd
"Good Vibrations," Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch featuring Loleatta Holloway
"Romantic," Karyn White
"Cream," Prince and the New Power Generation
"Set Adrift on Memory Bliss," P.M. Dawn
"Black or White," Michael Jackson
― zama roma ding dong (Eric H.), Friday, 12 April 2019 02:14 (four years ago) link
Don't get me wrong, lots of stuff I love on the list. I'm just surprised there was so much I didn't recognize. Lots of second or third singles, it seems like, so maybe I had just tuned out some acts I didn't particularly like after the first single. I know for sure that even though I was still captive to what was on MTV and the radio, at least as far as free music goes, I had definitely started snobbing it up by now.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 12 April 2019 02:40 (four years ago) link
Interesting. I ran my list of songs I didn't recognize by my wife, who is 1 1/2 years younger than me, and she knew them all *except* the Karyn White song. Which again, is so in the Jam & Lewis mold that it sounds familiar even if you don't know it, so maybe she did know it.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 12 April 2019 02:58 (four years ago) link
I was curious, so I glanced back at 1990 and 1992, and I know almost all of those songs, or at least there are fewer I don't know by title. But also interesting is that in 1992 there are pretty much half as many hits as there were in 1990 and 1991, like 12 songs to the other years' 24+. I wonder which year had the most number ones and which year had the least?
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 12 April 2019 03:06 (four years ago) link
two years pass...
Man, every time I see lists of songs from the Interzone it wigs me out. From the end of 7th grade (summer of '90) to the beginning of my freshman year (fall of '91), we lived in four different cities, so it's like I'm seeing a mish mash of music from totally different eras. It doesn't help that I kicked off '91 bopping around to Amy Grant and wrapped it up moping out to Soundgarden. On the plus side, I can usually pinpoint pretty much exactly when a song was big based on where I was when it made the rounds.
I'd mostly stopped listening to top-40 radio by 1991, so most of these songs I didn't pick up on until years later when I heard them on adult-contemporary stations. As such, they weirdly feel like they're from the 2000s to me rather than 1991.
― Lee626, Friday, 16 April 2021 16:51 (two years ago) link