US #1s of 1988

Rick the Roller had a second #1 hit? Anyway, this is so "Wishing Well" it ain't funny.

haha out of all the years you pick the one that is obv gonna get rick rolled

what can you do? it had to come up sooner or later

"Never Gonna Give You Up" is probably in the better half of these songs anyway

i'm so super torn between "Wishing Well" and "One More Try." Both awesome on opposite ends of the awesome spectrum.

Someone convince me to go one way or the other.

baritone sax solo

The first twenty seconds of INXS's third finest moment fells the opposition with a kick drum to the balls and a guitar chop to the neck. The rest is additional, unnecessary cruelty.

Red Red Wine muufuckaaaas. They used to play it at dances when I was in high school, incongruously enough (I'm 24) I just looked it up on YouTube and there's versions mislabeled as Bob Marley, making me fear the future of the human race. I should have voted for Rick!

"Don't Worry, Be Happy"

^

WAS A NUMBER ONE JAM

nostalgia smooths alot of nonsense here, not a great year at a glance but these would hit me pretty fresh in 2009. have to hear one more try again, that was the torchey ballad right? the way you make me feel and where do broken hearts go coming round the stretch

Billy Ocean.

That's a lot of no.1s. Gave it to INXS, ahead of TTD and young Rick. GnR get enough love elsewhere.

Is "Baby, I Love Your Way / Freebird Medley" as good as it sounds?

Sigh. I wish I could get excited about something here, but I really can't. The thought of that Billy Ocean song makes me laugh now. I'm surprised that I can't remember what that Winwood song sounded like, but not sure I want to remember either.

I think I'll just cast a vote for McFerrin as a rebellion against everything else.

This is rock hard. I like "Together Forever" better of the two Rick Astley tunes. Neither of the Michael Jacksons are in my faves. Whitney is kinda hard to overlook. I almost wanna vote "Red Red Wine" on the strength of the song rather than the UB's slightly whiney version. Ditto "Baby I Love Your Way". I'm seriously torned.

Baby I Love Your Way/ Freebird Melody is a great record. Kind of a Miami synth light pop sound, male and female vocals. I went with TTD though.

It was hard to go against Guns, but I must have heard that song so many times, most recently during a football game last weekend.

going inxs on this

Surprised by the "Wishing Well" love, when clearly "Sign Your Name" is superior.

Every George Michael single here is GOLD, especially "Monkey" (in its Jam-Lewis remix version) and "One More Try." "Love Bites" is the best of the power ballads listed.

Went with "Michael."

*er, "Monkey."

"Sign Your Name" is a good point, I forgot about that one.

Also, god help me, but I like Cheap Trick's "The Flame" a little.

wowo way u make me feel v sweet child o mine

heavy

I like "Together Forever" better of the two Rick Astley tunes.

ditto

Wishing Well
just ahead of Father Figure and INXS

y'all know that it's really gonna be "sweet child 'o mine" that's gonna win this thing, right?!?

Cheap Trick can mostly go suck ass, but I have a good friend who adores them, so go figure.
I love the Dream Police but otherwise it is the SUXXORS.

Anyway what about Sade? What was she doing in 1988? Reverend? She could be the peacemaker here, right?

Sweet Child o' Mine can suck ONE GREAT BIG DICK in 1988. I will sic Mark E. Smith on your ass. Don't even go there.

John D.??? Talk some sense into these naive dudes. Please.

I like Sade's "Paradise," but it didn't even hit the Top Ten.

I know, dude, and to be honest, I feel like some unknown force wanted me to vote for UB40 "Red, Red Wine" but I just couldn't do it. I really felt some pressure in my mind to vote for that one. But the truth is I didn't enjoy UB40 last time I saw them live and I met a Rastafarian reggae dude recently who adores the Smiths and he was at least willing to sympathize as to my reasons why I didn't enjoy UB40 live.

Brian Eno sounds so nice in my ears right now, though. God he sounds so good in my ears.

I'd have gone with "Sign Your Name" had it hit #1.

But please tell me I won't be the only "Man in the Mirror" vote.

Bimble if you think you can get John D to join in your hatred of Cheap Trick you are sadly mistaken. Also your hatred of Cheap Trick is sadly mistaken. I'm being nice but I mean it.

I voted "Wishing Well" before reading anything else here. No other song was playing for me in my last semester of lol college.

This list explains why I feel absolutely no nostalgia for 1988, even though those were my salad days.

I'll take Will to Power, no contest.

I prefer Will To Power's 10cc cover, and their original material ("Fading Away," "Dreamin'"), all of which was played ad nauseum on Miami radio (weren't they from Miami? Don't know).

defend the indefensible: "kokomo" by the beach boys

Will to Power were Miamians. Vocals: Bob Rosenberg & Maria Mendez.

thinking about "wishing well" if only for the awesome video

http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/2299/rickrollastleyux0.jpg

so many classic jams on this thing, though nostalgia (this was the year I first started paying concerted attention to pop) means I even love shit like "Kokomo" and "Look Away."

I WILL BE UR FATHER FIGURE PUT UR TINY HAND IN MINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

tempted to vote never gonna give u up but father figure is the jam of JAMS imo

that pie chart is inaccurate

cant embed so just copy pasta this

youtube.com/watch?v=T0z2TWkwD6M&fmt=18

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im a true blue full blown balls to the wall devil may care metal head and yet i must state with great emphasis that is a great tune

I think I might vote INXS. Probly the best tune off easily their best rekkid.

"New Sensation" > "Never Tear Us Apart" > "Need You Tonight" > "Devil Inside" > "Mystify"

No.

http://content-resources.sympatico.ca/content/channels/speedzone/images/music/20070418/all/GeorgeMichael-FatherFigure.jpghttp://content-resources.sympatico.ca/content/channels/speedzone/images/music/20070418/all/GeorgeMichael-FatherFigure.jpghttp://content-resources.sympatico.ca/content/channels/speedzone/images/music/20070418/all/GeorgeMichael-FatherFigure.jpg

inxs then ub40

Anyway, this is so "Wishing Well" it ain't funny.

― ::cannon:: (The Reverend), Saturday, January 3, 2009 3:51 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

See, INXS had way better records than Kick in Listen Like Thieves and The Swing. New Sensation is not even their best song, Don't Change is.

Can anyone give me a you tube video of Cheap Trick with the white suits on in 1979 doing "Dream Police". I'm kindof traumatized trying to find this.

See someone repped for INXS, though! It's like DOOOOD "Need You Tonight" is not EVEN going to BEGIN to explain the wonderful INXS songs to be had. I'm serious. They had better records didn't they, redmond? Let's join the club, man. They had so much better fucking records.

i've been SBing everyone who indicates they will vote for anything besides Father Figure

No doubt, anyone bothering to investigate further will discover the wonderful joys of Shine Like It Does and the Nile Rodgers remix of The Original Sin.

80's Babies, I love you but you have to hear this:

I'll look for the Nile Rodgers version, thanks redmond.

This is where I point out Will to Power is Miami DJ Bob Rosenberg, who did edits on the first 2 Live Crew album, and this 1985 gem:

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f185/PappaWheelie/R-362721-1196608845.jpg

There is no link, motherfucker.

That song and video seem totally contemporary in 2009.

I am going to get really upset in a minute if someone doesn't help me.

Pappa I'm going to harass you.

"Wishing Well" is such a terrible fucking overrated song. I'm voting for "Wild Wild West" because it's so bad it's good. "Gimme gimme wild west. Gimme gimme safe sex"!!

i hate you

a common lament

Pappa I gave you a phone call and you better answer, motherfucker. What the fuck is that record and why don't I have it? OH, I hate you.

SONGS THAT ARE WORSE THAN "DON'T WORRY BE HAPPY":

Wishing Well
FUCKING RED FUCXKING RED WINE FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER
every George Michael song on this list
Love Bites (one of the forst songs I ever remember hating!)
Kokomo

SONGS THAT ARE BETTER THAN MAYBE THE SECOND OR THIRD BEST SONG ON KICK:

Wild Wild West
GOMYDGIMC
Sweet Child O' Mine
Groovy Kind of Love

And "Seasons Change"

AAAAAAGH
please not "Seasons Change" that song from my senior year of high school
what lady group did that? Do I want to know? Please no no no don't remind me. Thanks.

Red Red Wine is a great song, UB40's version of it is easily the best, and I suspect this Mr Snrub character doesn't know very much about great music.

Alfred are you out there? Do you like this?

Red Red Wine is a great song, UB40's version of it is easily the best, and I suspect this Mr Snrub character doesn't know very much about great music.

Wrong, wrong (well, actually I've haven't heard any others), and... uhhh... probably.

I always figured that indie & rap owned 1988, but Christ if there weren't a slew of terrific pop singles that year. This is a very difficult choice.

Yeah 1988 destroys most of the previous US #1s threads.

Voted "One More Try". "Red Red Wine" is also classic, but not at all from 1988.

This is down to "Get Outta My Dreams" versus "Red Red Wine" for me. But I just looked it up and it turns out the "Red Red Wine" that was a hit in 1988 is the one with the godawful "red red wine make me feel so fine" part - whereas the plain old one I love came out in '83. So it goes to Billy Ocean.

voting Will To Power (though it's not their best single); these would also be in my top ten:

Tiffany, "Couldv'e Been"
Expose, "Seasons Change"
Michael Jackson, "Man In the Mirror"
Billy Ocean, "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car"
Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine, "Anything For You"
Debbie Gibson, "Foolish Beat"
Michael Jackson, "Dirty Diana"
Guns N' Roses, "Sweet Child o' Mine"
Poison, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn"

Don't know what surprises me more, that Wild Wild West hit #1 or that I'm voting for it.

i just realized that the reason Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up" sounded familiar the first time I ever heard it as a teenager was because the Escape Club totally bit that shit when I was a kid.

xp^lol this whole list is a lot of nostalgia ive never reminsced abt b4...i remember dubbing a lot of htese off the radio -- definitely wild, wild west and look away. i was 9

the Gloria Estefan ballad is by far the best: it's as straightforward as MOR gets. "Foolish Beat," though, would sound better if she sung it; she coulda handled that nice chord change in the middle of the chorus.

Can somebody remind me why "Red Red Wine" hit #1 five years after its initial release? I'm assuming it was included on a soundtrack?

"Need You Tonight" would have been my pick in 1988, but I'm sick of it these days. I'll probably pick "Love Bites", although I'm tempted to pick Billy Ocean because his 80's singles are madly underrated (it took me 20 years to realize how great they really were).

Odds of a random lurker rickrolling voter bloc = 2:1

it was on the cocktail soundtrack, yeah?

Nope ... it seems they re-recorded and re-released it in 1988 (I actually didn't know that these versions were recorded years apart). But re-recordings aren't uncommon -- I still don't understand how it ended up being a lot more popular the second time around.

(I don't even remember it hitting #1 that year ... this is a strange gap in my memory that I can't explain!)

TTD or GNR.

According to the Billboard Book of Number One Hits, a programming director in Phoenix started replaying the song in the summer of 1988 when he and two of his staffers decided the song should've been a bigger hit. Other stations started doing the same, and it snowballed.

(that was re "Red Red Wine," sorry)

"Father Figure" and "Sweet Child o' Mine" feel like movies or 50-mile drives: you start out in one place, and you end up getting dropped off far off five minutes later.

I would've thought "Fast Car" made it to No. 1, but I guess it's a top-tenner.

Whereas "Wild Wild West" is like driving around the county dump unable to find the exit.

I don't get why everyone loves these singles and hated on the 1984 list, the songs of which to my mind were 1000000 times better. But that's because I'm older and was more interested in graduating college and getting a job. For me 1988 was all driving around in various vans listening to various hip-hop tapes.

I went with "Father Figure", because it confused the hell out of me in 1988 and now I'm nostalgic for that feeling, for how weird it is when pop makes you feel things you've never felt before and have no words for.

'84?

2000 was better then both

had 2 b there, young bro (lol I think I was 8 or so, but I still hit 23 on the clicker for MTV whenever mom was out of earshot)

haha i had to stealthily watch mtv and the box (a vastly superior music vid channel, if you guys aren't familiar) too. i remember being like 11 and seeing britney in "oops i did it again" and being like whoa whata going on down there :p

I went with "Father Figure", because it confused the hell out of me in 1988 and now I'm nostalgic for that feeling, for how weird it is when pop makes you feel things you've never felt before and have no words for

That sounds good - explain further please (unless it's sleazy)

explain further please (unless it's sleazy)

haha i had to stealthily watch mtv and the box (a vastly superior music vid channel, if you guys aren't familiar) too.

I wouldn't know "Thuggish Ruggish Bone" note for note if it weren't for The Box.

It's not sleazy as far as I can tell. In "Father Figure" the topic is an impossible task: to become someone else's father! To do "anything you had in mind": anything! And it's not clear that these are demands made by the one being loved: the narrator just wants to give them, out of love. To want to give impossible things: what desire, what love! In early adolescence I struggled to understand what it would be like to love that way. What I was writing about earlier was a nostalgia for that struggle to understand love, particularly love of this kind.

If Guns & Roses wins this thing, I'm gonna be so mad.

But they're gonna do it anyway, aren't they?

I'll have to listen to this George Michael track. I don't remember it, honestly.

it is a song about holding tiny hands

this was the year I first started paying concerted attention to pop

Ha, me too. GnR seems best right now though I like "The Flame".

Poor Winwood. He was out of it for like a decade, then did this very polished, overproduced "comeback"
album with top people like Nile muthafuckin Rogers. The songs were about as good as anything else he'd done, really, and they charted well but have not held up. That is not a cool record to like, I suppose partly because of the dated sounds and because it was aimed solidly at the Top 40. As if Blind Faith etc. were a purely artistic enterprise. But I remember digging his sad, vague voice and burbly PPG synth sounds.

"Roll With It" is an especially problematic track - it is exactly the kind of retro-soul pastiche (horns! standup bass! lots of tambourine! ethnic people for added authenticity!) that is all over the place just now, but because of its cultural moment it's shelved under Dad Rock or some such.

(But, that said, "Need you Tonight" and "Wishing Well" are far better songs than "Roll With It".)

It's kind've hard to believe that "Two Hearts" came out after "Groovy Kind of Love."

It's hard to believe how (briefly) big Steve Winwood was (the album also hit #1). The singles from this era are innocuous, though. I prefer "Valerie" and the 1986-era stuff.

but because of its cultural moment it's shelved under Dad Rock or some such.

More because he was 40 when it came out, I'd think.

wow I like so many of these songs

fuck the Whitney songs and "Kokomo", tho

Looking back at the list I realize that 1988 was the last year in which I listened to the radio.

Yeah, this was when I transitioned from solely listening to top-40/whatever records my brother brought home to whatever albums were on the college and dance charts in the back of Rolling Stone and Spin.

"Roll With It" is a fucking jam, and it was probably my favorite of these songs that I was actually aware of at the time. I was 6 years old in '88, and the songs I definitely heard back then were mainly Winwood, Billy Ocean, George Harrison, the Escape Club, and 2 of the Jacko songs.

I have "Got My Mind Set On You" to thank for serving as my Beatles gateway drug.

Whitney's "So Emotional" is the least emotional song of all time.

http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z128/ericzieg/rickslash.jpg?t=1225478145

I was an artist-in-residence at a state university this past fall, and two of the freshmen (likely born in '90) dressed for Halloween as Slash and Rick.

'88 TOP 40 LIVES ON.

i was so hopin that was a scan from a actuall '88 picture

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Voted for "Need You Tonight" because a) to me it's the best of INXS -- the kind of easy-going menace presented here never surfaced in the more straightforward "New Sensation" or the oddly peppy given its title "Devil Inside" and b) I associated it with beginning to listen to good old WHFS 99.1 in Wash, DC and breaking out of the classic rock cocoon I'd lived in up to that point -- hearing it in my car and suddenly GETTING THE POINT that rock music could do something more than lie around being classic. Of course it then became a huge hit and was on the regular radio stations too, but I stuck with HFS.

Strongly considered "Wishing Well" and GnR here too. Can't hear the Billy Ocean as anything but a joke and considered voting for "Wild Wild West" before I realized I was thinking of "Don't Look Down" by Go West.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

!

fuckin' ILM and its goddamn rickrolling obsession.

who was the bright boy who gave "Where Do Broken Hearts Go?" one vote.

Hah, I am also curious about the "Kokomo" fan.

ARUBA JAMAICA OOOOH I WANNA TAKE YA

J0hn D., amirite?

Haha I probably would've voted for "Never Gonna Give You Up" if I hadn't voted GNR. But what a not-very-good winner.

George Harrison, "Got My Mind Set on You" - 0 votes. This makes me sad. I feel like this was in a lot of peoples' top 5 choices, and yet..

Eh, "Need You Tonight" probably would be my #2 after TTD. It's kind of a boring, telling pick, but I have no problem with it.

for a minute I thought it was Kool Moe Dee "Wild Wild West" which was one of my fave songs at the time

Tiffany, "Could've Been"
Expose, "Seasons Change"
Debbie Gibson, "Foolish Beat"

^^^ LOL, middle school dance

Aside from the rickroll, I agree with the top 3, in order, an ILXPoll first for me.

But see, the Rick Astley song is genuinely better than most of these tracks.

missed this poll, but 88 was a great year innit

(would have voted for inxs)

poison (but I've never heard the will to power)

bump

J0hn D., amirite?

no, mine was "Man in the Mirror"

I stand corrected.

Weird results. I like "Seasons Change" a lot more than the INXS at the top, which sounded corny & forced even in '88.

Oh, I just missed this one. WOuld've voted for Terence Trent D'Arby who not only performed "Wishing Well" on SNL (2/13/88) but came back and did "Under My Thumb" as well!

http://image.listen.com/img/150x100/1/2/3/6/506321_150x100.jpg

lol eleven years later I correct this chart.

I cannot believe those two songs beat "Sweet Child o' Mine".

Apparently, it surprised me 10 years ago too.

I was thinking the other day that the "Sweet Child o' Mine" intro is a really good string-skipping exercise, then learned that Slash originally came up with it as a string-skipping exercise.

fyi, Keith Sweat’s “I Want Her” is Great to Awesome

Rick Astley would win this poll in a landslide with younger generations.

lol eleven years later I correct this chart.

Wonderful wonderful year for balladry (as encapsulated in my prior poll: Greatest Billboard Top 40(-ish) Ballad (1988 edition)).

Chicago's "Look Away" video might be peak half-assed-plot-and-scenes-from-a-movie-I-don't-recognize indulgence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uKLTtVqQpE

Also peak DX7 preset.

But where does "Need You Tonight" rank? ("So Emotional" is also missing, but I know where that one goes in your book.)
― dorsalstop, Monday, March 11, 2019

on the '87 list

Ah, right.

My god, what a terrible collection of songs that is for the most part.