US #1s of 1988

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.