US #1s of 1989

Janet Jackson has always sounded anonymous to me, pretty much.

I can't listen to Miss You Much w/o thinking of the Weird Al vers. on Polka Your Eyes Out, and how that version is superior to the original.

man this list is depressing

either Bobby or FYC, I guess

Like A Prayer

the longer I look at this list the more I think "worst year ever" but then I remember 1) thrash and 2) 1989 THE NUMBER ANOTHER SUMMER

pop charts sucked in the late 80s imo

The year of my high school graduation; I was starting to believe myself outside the audience for pop music. Some of these songs make me cringe but I liked a lot of them, sometimes in spite of myself.

"If You Don't Know Me" is a perfectly decent cover but so unnecessary, and not great in its own right. Without the delicious backing vocal (which I believe is H. Melvin himself, but I could be misremembering) it would just be Hucknallian emoting over a ballad, adding little to the musical corpus.

"Eternal Flame" is one of Ms. Hoffs's better vocal performances, I think, but a kind of draggy song overall. I think her hottness made people underrate her as a singer.

Verily do I dig the groove of those FYC tracks but the constant falsetto of "Drives me Crazy" grates and threatens to turn it into a novelty. "Good Thing" is well nigh unimpeachable, though.

The classic rockers here - Rutherford, Joel, Collins - look so out of place here in among the boy bands and dance pop! I almost feel sorry for them, except that these tracks are among their poorest offerings. Only the guitar sound in "The Living Years" is palatable.

"Toy Soldiers" is not bad hookwise but so melodramatic as to seem corny in retrospect.

"Straight Up" rocks like a mofo and renders the other Abdul tyoons superfluous. I would say it also renders Janet's entire oeuvre superfluous, but I may be in the minority there.

Dangit, "Like a Prayer" is probably the winner here. It's held up well.

Not sure what I'd vote for -- liked a lot of these at the time, especially as a DJ in a Top 40 club (must own 12" versions of at least a dozen of them), but have not been in the mood for this stuff in I don't know how long, and lots that I liked at the time is barely tolerable now (and that includes Fine Young Cannibals). Would probably go with "Like a Prayer," which I denigrated for years as being too stuffy and now think sounds pretty great. I will say I'm probably the only person in the room who thinks the two Phil Collins records are among the more enduring pop records here. "Two Hearts" is a better Motown rip than "Good Thing." (I wonder if I'd still hate "Batdance" if I heard it again? My guess is I might be a bit more open to it though I loathed it at the time.)

Also: just me, or is this an exceptionally long list of #1s for a single year?

Also, also: is this list unusually heavy on ballads?

"Two Hearts" is a better Motown rip than "Good Thing."

otm

No one repping for Eternal Flame? Dammit, I will.

A lot of elements in this list: flame, wind, rain, fire.

Don't think I'd rep for "Eternal Flame," but I'd probably pick "Listen to Your Heart" over "The Look."

Bad English, "When I See You Smile"

I just watched the video for this. Seldom have I seen such hair.

horrible horrible list

Batdance ftw

FYC x 2

no way!

xp

I find the whole Batdance album weirdly fascinating and great so I have no hesitation in voting for it, although Like a Prayer is a pretty great song. FYC annoys.

er BATMAN album

"The Future" was fantastic!

"Miss You Much" always sounds anonymous to me; I certainly don't like it as much as "Alright," "Escapade," "Love Will Never Do (Without You)," and ten other Janet singles.

Agreed. "Alright" is very much my favorite off that album.

"Two Hearts" is a better Motown rip than "Good Thing."

De gustibus and all that. I vastly prefer Collins's "You Can't Hurry Love" to "Two Hearts." And he has way better R&B-flavored songs elsewhere in his solo catalog, esp. "Behind the Lines" and "Who Said I Would."

Except Lamont Dozier co-wrote "Two Hearts." I love the bridge and the oo-oo-oohs.

I didn't even know that! (about Dozier). And I was going to say, purely as a piece of songcraft (and regardless of the singer), I might even prefer "Two Hearts" to "You Can't Hurry Love," mostly for what I think Alfred is referring to as the bridge (or is it the bridge? the part that gets me is the ten-second musical bit coming out of the first chorus). I thought the drums in Collins' version of "You Can't Hurry Love" sounded pretty spectacular at the time, but the rest of it just seemed kind of pointless.

Oh crap, I somehow skimmed right past "Like a Prayer."

I would rep for so, so many of these -- Michael Damian, two of three Paula Abduls (voted for "Cold Hearted Snake") . . . suddenly I feel like I should have voted for Martika.

I also refuse to front as if Milli Vanilli was not pretty awesome

Loved MV at the time, definitely. I remember how pissed off I was when the scandal erupted: suddenly, I was not even allowed to play their records anymore, it was a really really weird thing (a week previous, I'd have to play some of their songs TWICE in a night; immediately after, kaput).

In an idea world we would have just switched to having famous middle-aged REAL MV singers walking around in the rain in spandex pants with their guts hanging out

I confess I don't have a strong memory of many Milli Vanilli songs, but I agree in principle that there's no reason the songs couldn't still be awesome once the jig was up.

Indeed, if one were feeling all pomo'n'shit one could decide that the songs were MORE awesome by virtue of their association with a big meta-joke that was in some way an ironic indictment of and/or comment upon modern Image-construction, starmaking, the music-industrial complex, etc. etc. etc.

no they were just awesome stupid fun

>>>Indeed, if one were feeling all pomo'n'shit one could decide that the songs were MORE awesome by virtue of their association with a big meta-joke that was in some way an ironic indictment of and/or comment upon modern Image-construction, starmaking, the music-industrial complex, etc. etc. etc.<<<

Don't know if I took it THAT far, but I did at the time strongly champion the idea that they should actually fight back hard on it, point out the hypocrisy of the situation, etc. (or at least give the finger in their next video during one of their dance routines).

correction: make that "awesome stupid fun dance routines."

My fondest memory of MV: deejays changing the lyrics to "Blame It on the Rain" to "BLAME IT ON HU-SSEIN YEAH YEAH" during the first Gulf War.

I vaguely remember that! I hope Rush Limbaugh isn't reading this. Wouldn't want to give him any ideas.

Pretty sure the MV track that would hold up best for me is "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You" with its part-and-parcel retread of Chris DeBurgh's "Lady in Red" beat.

(Unless the thievery happened in the other direction, though I don't think so.)

Would have been a neat trick for Deburgh to have traveled forward in time to bite off of Milli Vanilli!

Heh - I couldn't recall what year that came out, but I'm assuming it was '85/86.

Pretty sure it was late '86/early '87

Always appreciated <a href = "http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/rbmilli-91.php";>George Clinton's response</a> to MV:

"'We want to get the funk out of the two Milli Vanilli guys because we don't appreciate how the recording industry is treating the artists,' says proven foe of fraudulent funk George Clinton in the March/April New Funk Times (Ehrenstrasse 19, W-5000 Köln 1, Germany). Clinton notes that the Four Tops were the only Motown act who never 'had people sing lead and background' for them. 'Artist' can mean anything. Dancing is an art and pantomiming is, too--even lip-synching is an art! That's a hard thing to do--to dance and lip-synch. And it's hard to lip-synch when you are passionate 'cause when you get carried away and you want to pause it--'wait a minute'--, but the tape says 'Fuck you!' The tape doesn't want to wait.'" Passing off the duo's egomania as the inevitable fruit of their biz-determined charade, George hopes to repeat his reclamation job on the then scandalized, since high-charting Vanessa Williams. 'Once we finish with them, they'll definitely be sangin'! I mean, everybody can sing--even if it's only in the bathroom or a crowd.' Carsten Heyn, who manages the act now dubbed Rob & Fab, says they're currently in a European studio working up a late-summer single. He was sufficiently flattered by Dr. Funkenstein's plan to try and arrange a meeting last time his clients hit L.A., but couldn't make the hookup."

oops - link here: http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/rbmilli-91.php

"Good Thing" towers over everything else on this list. When I was a wee lad I'd always air-piano the Jools Holland solo. Rock!

This might just be the worst list I've ever seen on one of these polls. 1989
was an awful, awful year for mainstream pop music.

That being said, I'm going with Mike & The Mechanics' "Living Years"--subtle, poignant,
and holds up well.

(seriously: "Batdance" all the way)

Batdance is also perhaps the strangest U.S. #1s I can think of...

Those synths on "The Living Years" are as subtle as a sack of apeshit breaking your kneecaps.

"Girl I'm Gonna Miss You" bears more than a slight lyrical/musical resemblance to LL's "I Need Love."

First few times I heard Milli Vanilli on the radio, I just assumed they were another good new-jack-swing group. (Might have even thought one of their songs was Bobby Brown. They weren't really that far apart.)

has way better R&B-flavored songs elsewhere in his solo catalog

"Easy Lover"! (Okay, not exactly "solo", per se'. But still.)

That being said, I'm going with Mike & The Mechanics' "Living Years"--subtle, poignant,
and holds up well.

Haha, a friend frequently likes to point out that "The Living Years" is the worst song ever written.

pretty sure this was the year I got arrested twice

that's just how bad the pop music was

I kinda wanted to vote for "Batdance" because it's weird and silly and fun, but there's no denying "Like a Prayer" has meant more to me than any of these other songs.

on the bright side, the us did (barely) manage to be one of the few countries where the jive bunny single was did not go top 10.

― dyl, Monday, March 11, 2019

my abuela loved it #GlennMiller

My critical faculties break down (even more than usual) when it comes to this era, but it's hard to disagree with many of your Hague-bound picks (notable exceptions: Animotion, Surface). Glad to see Donna in good-to-great because where else could that song have possibly shown up.

Thank you for prodding me towards my 255-song '89 pop hit playlist. My workday just became a shade less painful.

the number of Facebook commenters who've liked that dinky Animotion song astounds me.

That's all they need
That's all they ask for
To see you peeved

I'm not like in love with it but it's dece.

that's the one recorded for the movie where Kim Basinger plays an alien with a talking magic purse

Huh, I guess I never picked up on those aspects of her Batman character.