Conspicuously similar follow-ups to hit singles that became hits in their own right, but are now mostly forgotten because people only remember the first hit

Yeah, didn't read the thread title carefully enough--the Jackson 5 don't belong.

It's interesting just to talk about similar sounding follow-up hits regardless of whether they're remembered, though. I used to think Gary Puckett and the Union Gap's hits were very similar, but I don't know anymore. They sound fairly distinct to me now.

In a way, I'm not crazy about the idea that those three Jackson Five hits are super similar. I think, "Well, it's a genre." But the first two are in the same key and there are other similarities.

yeah things like that and "You Really Got Me"/"All Day And All Of The Night" seem out of the purview of this thread just because both songs are pretty successful and revered

I'm not willing to listen to it and check but I remember thinking ''Ends'' by Everlast was essentially the same song as ''What It's Like,'' with added spacey noises. Hard to really tell the difference between ''trying to rewrite the same song'' and ''act just has limited range of abilities.''

I love both songs, but Future's "Turn On The Lights" and "Neva End" were not only released back-to-back as singles but were both originally recorded in the same night. the latter was remixed with Kelly Rowland for the single, though, so that differentiated them a little bit.

Milli Vanilli followed the #2 hit "Girl You Know It's True" with the extremely similar "Baby Don't Forget My Number" which went to #1. It seems completely forgotten now, I don't think I've ever heard it since the late 80's, but everybody knows the first one.

Is that the case? Milli Vanilli is the "don't forget my number / love is stronger than thunder" band to me, and I can't even remember how "Girl You Know It's True" goes.
OK, last.fm play stats seem to support this theory, with "Baby Don't Forget My Number" only their 4th-most-listened to track! Weird.

Every Everclear song I've heard

― brimstead, Friday, November 22, 2013 12:05 AM (2 days ago)

This is otm

"Girl I'm Gonna Miss You" is truly the forgotten Milli Vanilli chart-topper, but "True" and "Rain" have definitely remained more famous than "Baby"

What was that a follow-up to?
Vengaboys- We Like To Party

"We Like to Party" came out after "Up & Down"

Ahh, then Wikipedia lied to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvujgcbaCF8

"Hot Rod Hearts," #15 follow up to Robbie Dupree's "Steal Away"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpk4-_ENCVw

Somewhat similar, clearly consolidating on success

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWLqxUgKGA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsqKdZ3JZ2k

I'm sure Europeans at least remember that Haddaway had a second big hit, besides "What Is Love", with "Life". But how many of you remember he followed it with a third hit, "Rock My Heart"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BdnVwqXXWU

Oops was the more famous song, wasn't it?

Strangest comment I've ever read on ilx.

ahah indeed. still is !

Would venture that the comments about Aqua and Right Said Fred are also strange.

Dire Straits, "Lady Writer". Practically a rewrite of "Sultans of Swing".

really? at this point i have basically no idea at all how 'don't talk, just kiss' went xp

Dire Straits, "Lady Writer"

Was this a hit? I've never heard of it.

it got to 28 in the netherlands tom, ffs keep up man

thanks to broken links and no descriptions, i can't tell if he's mentioned upthread, but...

chubby checker basically made his name doing this. in fact, there's surely other early rock n rollers who tried to milk the same dance tune for all it was worth before the next craze took over. like, bill haley's follow up to "rock around the clock" was "let's keep that clock a-rockin'" which was followed a little later by "the clock-a-doodle-doo rock"

Nillson - Everybody's Talkin' / I Guess the Lord Must Be In New York City

xps Don't Talk Just Kiss is not a great single in the cold light of 2019, but it really doesn't sound anything like I'm Too Sexy.

Scottish singer Aneka followed her UK No.1 single 'Japanese Boy' in 1981 with a song called 'Little Lady' that featured the same Japanese look and high-pitched vocals.

It didn't get anywhere, but fitted in perfectly on the kitschy German Musikladen TV show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs_ge4GzHKo

just listen to the first line in this song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5WSqWJ4obg

there was also this song which wasn't a single but I wish he had the balls to release it as one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQQN2COazQQ

I've always considered "Get Off of My Cloud" a far inferior version of its immediate predecessor single "Satisfaction". It did hit #1 in its own right but appears to be far down in the canon of Stones singles and I never seem to hear it on classic rock stations or whatever.

The Staples Singers "If You're Ready (Come Go With Me)," versus "I'll Take You There."

But how many of you remember he followed it with a third hit, "Rock My Heart"?

In the UK that was actually his fourth hit after the heart-rending ballad 'I Miss You' released a week before Christmas. Sad!

(xp) Always preferred "I'll Take You There" tbh.

I can never remember how "Wild Thing" and "Funky Cold Medina" differ from each other until I hear them back to back.

^Me neither, and I actually thought of that pair when I saw this thread title (but wasn't totally sure which came first!)

Tommy James: "I Think We're Alone Now" followed up by "Mirage", which is next-level in that the latter was built from playing the chords of the former backwards.

It’s funny that when you do this with the best song ever you still end up with a top ten song of all time.

Talking about Shannon following up
“Let The Music Play” with “Give Me Tonight”, of course.

(although I don’t think GMT is completely forgotten)

Petula Clark's "I Know a Place" may not meet all the criteria, but the lyrics are so similar, thematically, to those of its (almost more certainly better known) predecessor, "Downtown", that I doubt I could reliably identify which lines are from which.

I literally thought 'Only the Lonely' and 'Suddenly Last Summer' were the same song for years and had created some kind of Brundlefly mashup of the two in my head.

oh "I'll Take You There" blows its followup out of the water, no question there

Mmmmmmm....

Saw a recent interview with Francis Rossi where he talked about how he tried to make the second Status Quo single a bit but not a lot like the first (hit) single. Then he heard it on the radio when it came out, and went oops.

I do remember hearing it on the radio (a long while after) and yeah.

"Black veils of melancholy"

Good title, but.

Ten years from now:
PSY- Gentleman

― MarkoP, Thursday, November 21, 2013 11:56 AM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

just six years, but marko otm

Maggie May...You Wear It Well

... yes.

Sly & the Family Stone, "Dance to the Music" ---> "M'Lady"

... not forgotten though ... I hope.

It's not a follow up but I happened to notice the other day that "Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky (From Now On)" by Lee Dorsey is a crafty re-write of "Working in a Coal Mine".

“You Wear It Well” will always be remembered by those of us who watched TV in the late ‘80s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNxaCO65Bdk

It's not a follow up but I happened to notice the other day that "Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky (From Now On)" by Lee Dorsey is a crafty re-write of "Working in a Coal Mine".

That's probably the most obvious one, but Toussaint and Sehorn recycled licks from "Coalmine" in several other Dorsey sides ("My Old Car" among others).

Motorhead's "Motorhead" (taken from Hammersmith and a hit in 1981) sounds a lot like its immediate predecessor "Ace of Spades", but that's cheating because Motorhead had a very distinctive musical vision. Along similar lines I find it hard to tell apart Creedence Clearwater Revival's run of hit singles, but again I'm sure there are lots of blues-rock and punk-rock bands that had a run of near-identical songs simply because that was their style.

Eiffel 65 tried to follow up "I'm Blue" by spinning off the little blue chap in the video into a separate pop career as Zorotl, supposedly because they had access to the CGI model and why not. The song wasn't a hit and it's pretty dreadful but as with the rest of the band's records it sounds as if they had a set of samples loaded into their Akai and a bunch of sequences in Cubase that they tweaked a little bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdj0uuMxaeg

I bet you a million pounds if you went through Eiffel 65's hard drive all the songs would be called new(1).all and new(2).all etc. The Zorotl project is also notable for having a really old website that was launched in 2000 and still exists:
https://zorotl.com/

They tried to flesh out the character's backstory, but the world wasn't interested. The continued existence of the website implies that success is just around the corner, and perhaps one day the world will fall in love again with late-1990s novelty dance-pop.

The discussion up the page about Aqua made me feel old, because I enjoyed their music on the same level as Carly Rae Jepsen, e.g. it was incredibly professional dance-pop. Nowadays people only remember "Barbie Girl". It's as if people my age - people - are ashamed of their past. Sadly they never really transitioned from novelty band into actual bona-fide band-band, unlike e.g. The Cardigans, who started off as part of the lounge-pop scene but became an actual proper band.

There was an Aqua clone called Toy-Box whose first single was about Tarzan and Jane. I note that their seventh single was called "www.girl", but it was 2001, at which point the internet wasn't as novel as it had been in 1998 or so. While I'm writing this paragraph it strikes me that Ace of Base is a negative example, in that "The Sign" has largely overshadowed "All That She Wants", or at least it gets played on the radio more often, albeit not very often.

I remember that Phats and Small's follow-up to "Turn Around" sounded like a variation of that song with different vocals, but the next single after that was pretty good and is now totally forgotten as is Phats and Small. The Prodigy's "Breathe" has a similar production style to "Firestarter" but when people think about the band they generally picture Keith Flint in the video for "Firestarter". In fact The Prodigy's initial run of singles, e.g. "Charly" to "Wind it Up", sound a lot like each other.

Ace of Base might actually be an example, because their next single after "All That She Wants" wasn't "The Sign" but "Happy Nation", which sounds more like "ATSW" than "The Sign" does ("The Sign" wasn't originally even on their debut album, it was recorded after it came out and was added to its later printings), and which rarely gets played these days.