EVERY Billboard #1 hit discussion thread 1958-Present

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by alphanguy, Jan 29, 2016.

  1. Cheevyjames

    Cheevyjames Forum Resident

    Location:
    Graham, NC
    Jump held two tracks from from hitting the top, Cyndi Lauper's debut single Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and the Rockwell/Michael Jackson tune Somebody's Watching Me. I might've done a terribad version of this tune for karaoke once...

     
  2. SITKOL'76

    SITKOL'76 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Colombia, SC
    She's only at #39 here but Madonna was getting ready to quite literally take over the world.
     
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  3. boyjohn

    boyjohn Senior Member


    I wish this had dislodged Jump for at least one week and made it to number 1 (it did make number 1 on Cashbox). Such a great song (an upbeat song but with a chilling message), and had been hearing it for months by the time it made the US chart. The German version was #20 on KROQ's top 100 for 1983 and it was in heavy rotation there for months. The German version is the way to go of course, the English version is just silly by comparison.
     
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  4. bartels76

    bartels76 Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    CT
    Did we not talk about another huge song/video that never hit #1 yet? Thriller- the last single from Michael Jackson's said album.

     
  5. The Slug Man

    The Slug Man Forum Resident

    Location:
    North Carolina
    "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"--shoulda/easily coulda been a #1. She seemed so "out there" at the time, even in a world with Boy George. Her thrift store fashion sense is a harbinger of an even bigger star who will have a #1 hit just before the year is out. However, the upcoming artist will be much more sexualized than Cyndi Lauper.

    "Thriller"--I remember seeing the debut of the long-form video and how "neat" it seemed, but it quickly got old. And then the song got old pretty quickly, too.

    "99 Luftballoons"--I could take or leave this one.

    "Somebody's Watching Me"--always catchy, kind of a guilty pleasure. Although it seemed like Michael Jackson was really "slumming it," singing backup for some guy called Rockwell.
     
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  6. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Give it another few months.
     
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  7. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I hate the English version.
     
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  8. Prior to "99 Luft Balloons" hitting #1 in Canada, UB40 achieved their first #1 here with "Red Red Wine" spending two weeks at #1 (& #18 song of 1984 up north).
    I picked up a cheap copy of UB40 Live a year or two earlier and loved it, but I found Labour of Love disappointing thinking it too soft. I did love "Red Red Wine" however. It was awesome to have them hit big, and the song is tremendously infectious. AM radio played the single version without Astro's toasting but FM always played the album version. I still think the single edit is pretty disappointing.

    "Red Red Wine" hit big in the USA in 4 years, but only made it to #34 upon its initial release.
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
     
  9. Jmac1979

    Jmac1979 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Louisville, KY
    In all fairness, you have stated in the past that Michael Jackson was never your cup of tea. For a lot of us who were younger (I'd say 13 and under), Thriller was magical and you'll see 45-50 year olds wax nostalgia about how they would come home from school and turn MTV on because "Thriller" was going to be shown at 4 pm or whatever. Obviously given the album doubled from 10 to 20 million sales in a few short months, obviously somebody out there liked that video, and it almost constantly tops "Greatest video ever" lists, and in the rare occasion it isn't #1, it's usually at least going to be in the top 5. I was too young to truly grasp Thriller-mania but even at that age I knew it was massive. If it hadn't been so popular (I don't count the single only going to #4 as any cause of alarm given the album was already approaching 20 million copies sold and was still #1 on the album charts) it wouldn't have been played as much, but it doubled the album sales in a few months time and it cemented Michael as the biggest thing since Beatlemania. This was certainly Michael's moment and we all were just living in his world at that moment there in 1984
     
    Last edited: Jun 1, 2020
  10. SITKOL'76

    SITKOL'76 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Colombia, SC
    Thriller was the #1 selling album of 1984 in the US, like any incredibly popular artist there are people who probably griped on about how they didn't 'get' him because they wanted to seem above the fray.

    If social media existed at the time there would have been tons of MJ hate, yet he would still be selling more than anyone else, 2,3x more.
     
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  11. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I had a couple of friends who spoke German - one was born in Germany and had a German mother - so we were primed to like Nena already. It was bizarre that we suddenly had this invasion of German, Dutch and other European acts. We'd never heard anything like it before, at least not in our brief lifetimes. Peter Schilling, Falco, Taco, Nena, Golden Earring, loved 'em all. Loved the German versions even if I hardly understood a word - they seemed so exotic and flowed better, and the singing was better.

    The partial collapse of corporate control of the pop charts let thru all sorts of stuff that would normally have been filtered out by the guys in suits. Who of course were more interesting in promoting the acts they signed than actually promoting good music, or finding out what audiences really wanted to hear. God forbid. MTV's interests were - briefly anyhow - diametrically opposite. They were desperate for anything that would get viewers to tune in and stay tuned in, and they'd play anything to see if it achieved that aim. And if it did, it went into heavy rotation. That was a democratic threat to a controlled marketplace.

    The suits must have been absolutely terrified.

    By this point they were definitely unleashing huge bucks on videos for established artists, reasoning (correctly) if their cash cows couldn't compete musically at least they could compete visually. Even that didn't always work, though.

    Speaking of which...

    The Thriller video got so...much...hype. I liked it well enough, but didn't need to see it five times a day. And to me it made Jackson start to feel very manufactured. This wasn't music. It was product.

    A rival act would drop a single in a few weeks that was the exact opposite, a work of stark genius. After three minutes, I knew who the real master of '80s R&B was, and it wasn't Michael Jackson.

    Sorry. Not sorry.

    That having been said, after not needing to hear "Thriller" itself for 30 years or whatever, I don't fast forward whenever it comes on now as part of some playlist. I guess I'm over the burnout. Ultimately, the hype damaged a decent song for me.

    The MJ hype machine just got worse from here on out. And so did the material, although he'd still prove capable of producing great work.
     
  12. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    This Is Spinal Tape is one of the greatest films about music ever made. It's also one of the greatest comedies ever made. Usually when what amounts to a skit is blown up into feature film length the results are dreadful, but Spinal Tap is the glaring exception to that rule. The film just gets funnier as it goes along. Apparently a bunch of bands (including Aerosmith) thought the film was specifically about them. Some got pissed. But allegedly most of it was just made up, or based on random rock anecdotes. Perfection.
     
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  13. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I think I defined VH and "Jump" as "metal adjacent", which seems a good description.

    It's often acts like that - which straddle a line to some new and under-represented genre on the pop charts - that kick down the doors for acts deeper in that genre to enter the mainstream. Having almost back to back hits with "Jump" and the similarly metal-adjacent "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" in '84 certainly helped harder rock's and metal's fortunes on MTV and the pop charts going forward. Labels always love to chase successes like that. "Hey, Yes of all bands just had a huge hit with an edgy, metal-y hard rock tune? And then Van Halen scored a #1 with a keyboard-laden hard rock tune? Get me a dozen more of those, fast!"
     
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  14. Jrr

    Jrr Forum Resident

    I am just reading a book about famous record producer Ted Templeman and a huge regret of his is DL Roth leaving Van Halen to do that silly (imo) ep which because Ted produced it, put him and Roth on the outs with Ed. Ted always hoped Hagar would just do the 5150 album and then he would leave and Roth would go back. Templeman got asked back to produce but like someone else here said, to him the magic was gone and he didn’t feel Van Halen was such without Roth, so he passed. I liked both singers, and material from both eras, so I don’t have a strong preference. But, I love Jump and that made me look into Van Halen and I became a fan because of that one song.
     
  15. Jrr

    Jrr Forum Resident

    You know, after not hearing that album in quite a while, and when I did it didn’t sound as I remembered, someone here had a sealed first press for sale at a fair price a few months ago. It is one hell of an album. First, after having it remastered a zillion times since it was first issued, all the life and dynamics have been sucked out of later versions. I couldn’t believe how much better the original issue just grooves, full of dynamics and punch...the louder you crank it, the more you want to. Later versions lost all that...it sounds wimpy. Thriller really is an incredible album, and so are the videos from it. People forget where things were then and inevitably a lot gets compared to more recent elements but back then, he wanted to be the very best he could be as an artist and his hard work shows when you crank up that album. The video was incredible for the time. Him getting a bit strange later on doesn’t change the incredible quality of that album in the least.
     
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  16. Hey Vinyl Man

    Hey Vinyl Man Another bloody Yank down under...

    There definitely were! I was in fourth grade when Thriller took off, and all my friends loved it. How early on you were able to say you had the album was a measure of how cool you were. By 6th grade (84-85) no one I knew admitted to liking him at all.
     
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  17. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    This bordered on criminal, because "Girls" might have been even more important than "Jump" when it comes to altering the pop landscape of the '80s. While there had been a slew of big hits from female acts in the early '80s - indeed, between "Call Me", "Bette Davis Eyes" and "Physical" they were becoming notably dominant when it came to having huge #1 hits - these were all legacy acts from the '70s (or really even before - Debbie Harry was at Woodstock and Kim Carnes kicking around Hollywood since the late '60s). Really big new female acts were pretty rare - Sheena Easton, Joan Jett, Irene Cara and Annie Lennox represented the only big #1s from non-legacy acts - and only Jett and Lennox represented something we truly hadn't quite seen before. There was the heavily promoted Laura Branigan of course, who certainly had the voice but - apart from "Gloria" - I never thought had good material up to this point, and from a personality standpoint she was a complete cipher. "Nice." But less fun to watch than even Sheena Easton. And Sheena had more hits including that Bond theme, which I liked at least as much as "Gloria" - and I don't usually like ballads. So...

    In stark contrast, Lauper's zany personality, gaudy thrift store fashions and airhorn of a voice was definitely something completely new, and "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" immediately iconic. It was a little New Wave, a little techno, and a pure blast of joy. Annoying too I suppose, but not "Mickey" levels of annoying. And the rest of her debut album She's So Unusual was packed with even better - and generally less-annoying - cuts, including several where Lauper toned it down a dozen notches and worked wonders. She also covered Prince just before Prince blew up, proof positive the woman had her ear to the ground better than most label executives.

    Remember what I just said about labels chasing success? Lauper's success was truly massive - she was sort of America's answer to Boy George when it came to flamboyant, attention-seeking pop acts - and "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" followed by the subsequent semi-truckloads of She's So Unusual flying off of record store shelves as hit after hit rocked MTV kicked down a lot of doors for new solo female pop singers, especially ones who had a great deal of range and tons of personality.

    And as @The Slug Man noted as well up above, one singer was better-positioned to take advantage of the door Cyndi kicked down than any other - fellow New Yorker Madonna. She was probably half the musician and singer Lauper was, but don't let that fool you. Madge had - almost from the start - arguably an even-better ear for material, and she was a better songwriter (many of Lauper's biggest hits were written by others, although one of her finest cuts from Unusual was a Lauper co-write and she re-wrote the originally misogynistic lyrics of her signature tune, turning it into a joyful anthem). Madonna's eye for fashion was also far keener - and far less rummage sale - than Lauper's, even if both of them looked like they'd turned a thrift store upside down to get their wardrobes. Lauper looked and sounded like the working class spawn of Brooklyn and Queens that she was, crass and loud and not particularly attractive. Madonna looked like trouble, like the girl your mother warned you about, or the girl you'd like to be if you thought you could get away with it. She looked like she got laid - a lot - and that she was good at it. And even if the components of her wardrobe looked cheap, the results still had a certain '80s luxuriousness to them. They were somehow aspirational.

    People didn't know it of course, but while Madonna might have been one step away from the streets while trying to make it in Manhattan, working donut shops for dimes, she'd also been Basquiat's lover just a year or so before, and was running around in Andy Warhol's orbit, rubbing shoulders up and down the socioeconomic spectrum of art damaged groupies who hurtled around the bewigged icon like the multitude of electrons careening around a uranium atom's nucleus. She knew what was hot visually and musically up and down and backwards and forwards. And then tell me this isn't the hand of fate intervening:

    Michael Rosenblatt, A&R, Sire Records: Mark Kamins told me there was this girl who had a demo and was trying to get him to play it over the dance floor. And he was going to have none of that – he didn’t play any demos. But he said she looked amazing, so I was trying to keep an eye peeled for her.

    A friend of mine had just signed a group called Wham! They were about to put out their first single, but before they put it out, my friend wanted them to see the New York club scene. So I was taking them to clubs on a Saturday night – I’m at the Danceteria second-floor bar with George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, and I see this girl walk across the dance floor and up to the DJ booth to talk to Mark. I figured she had to be the girl with the demo. So I walked up and introduced myself as an A&R guy, and we started talking.

    She came by on that Monday and played me that demo. It wasn’t amazing. But this girl sitting in my office was just radiating star power. I asked her, “What are you looking for in this?” I always ask that, and the wrong answer is “I want to get my art out,” because this is a business. And Madonna’s answer was, “I want to rule the world.” The next step was getting her signed. I had to play [her demo] for Seymour Stein.


    I liked Cyndi Lauper, but as important as she was to '80s pop, she was always destined to be road kill. This was pop Thunderdome - two divas go in, but only one comes out. And the one that came out had a weapon Lauper lacked - sex appeal - and wasn't afraid to exploit it in a way no woman, in the movie business or in the music business, had ever exploited it before. Coupled with an unerring sense of where the pop landscape was headed, Madonna proved to be an unstoppable force for nearly 20 years, easily the longest run of any pop act at that level and certainly the longest run for a woman. It was such an inauspicious beginning - I certainly dismissed her at first, although I grew to love Madonna years later, maybe the perfect little post-disco dance record - but it concealed the most relentlessly driven woman in show business, bar none. And there is nothing and no one more '80s than that.
     
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  18. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    The EP wasn't released until 1985, so this is jumping way ahead.

    The reason Roth did that EP the way he did was to avoid conflicting with the VH sound. I don't know what Templeman said in his book but Roth was still in good standing with the band at the time of its release. The problem was when the brothers wanted to do another album, DLR wasn't ready yet. So they got Hagar, whom they claim was their original choice anyway.

    We are getting too far ahead with this so i'll have a lot more to say about this when we get to 1986.
     
  19. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I'm still burned out on anything to do with "Thriller". And I wish I didn't have to hear it every stinkin' Halloween. It was also about the time people started wondering about Michael's emotionally stunted growth. On top of that, January 27, 1984 was when he was burned while filming a Pepsi commercial with his brothers. He didn't want to do it but was coaxed into it by them. Most people believe this sparked the beginning of his problems with botched plastic surgeries, hyperberic chambers, pain meds, reclusiveness, becoming estranged from his family, and media stories about his eccentricities.

    I disagree with you about the record labels and MTV. They became very corporate. The British Invasion II had lit a match under the fire of American artists and they had started to produce some fantastic work, the best of the 80s decade, IMO. The Pretenders, Brice Springsteen, Tina Turner, The Cars, Kenny Loggins, and others. The list is extensive. And newer artists were about to drop major records. You mentioned Prince. He was hard at work on a major motion picture. Madonna was hard at work with Nile Rodgers on her sophomore album. Good times to come! Just about every member of the Jackson clan had stuff coming out, and they were rivaled by the Minneapolis bunch. Even hip-hop and dance music were about to return to the scene in a major way. I'm looking forward to the discussions. Aren't you?:thumbsup:
     
  20. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I love a lot of the music to come, but it just feels like a step down overall from 1983. Much more polished and more corporate and noticeably less diverse. It didn't collapse overnight though - '84 and even '85 are both great, certainly compared to '81 and '82 - but a lot of the manufactured dross began creeping back onto the charts already. There was still tons of good music coming out, including a bunch from acts who'd broken thru in '82 and '83, but it would slowly begin getting less attention and charting lower as more pedestrian, corporate content got LOTS of attention.

    Also, if it weren't for Prince and Madonna, the core of mainstream pop would have been noticeably degraded from '83, even as early as '84. Those two really helped delay the overall rot at the top for several years. I don't want to jump too far forward, but by '87 I was already fast retreating into filling out my catalog of oldies, collecting exciting but not particularly popular current acts and leaving most contemporary pop behind again (pretty much for good).
     
  21. pablo fanques

    pablo fanques Somebody's Bad Handwroter In Memoriam

    Location:
    Poughkeepsie, NY
    During my radio days, whenever we’d interview a musician (ranging from Ozzy to Robert Palmer to Maynard Ferguson) one of us would always ask what their Spinal Tap moment was. Needless to say, every damn one of them had a story and it was always the highlight of the interview!
     
    Last edited: Jun 2, 2020
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  22. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

    Funny you should mention catalog. I got my first CD player in 1985 and started collecting oldies. I bought some good CDs by MCA, Sandstone and DCC Dunhill, all three mastered by Steve Hoffman, and horrible oldies CDs here and there with the FDS NR, but didn't really get into it whole hog until I discovered Rhino in 1988. They had just started issuing those Billboard Top R&R Hits CDs and over the moon. Two years later I was, like, totally stoked when they started doing the Have A Nice Day CDs. I was in heaven! I'll never forget the evening I bought an issue of Rolling Stone after work. I was sitting in the office reading it and there was an article by Gary Stewart or Bill Inglot announcing the new series. I walked out of the building with a big smile on my face. From that point all I could think about was getting those CDs! Someone was finally bringing my childhood back to me. I had felt that the whole world forgot about us 70s children.
     
    Last edited: Jun 2, 2020
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  23. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    It didn't help, either, that we are now at the timeline after the unfortunate accident (on Jan. 27, 1984) on the set of a Pepsi commercial which "Jacko" (as he would come to be called) and his brothers were filming at the time, where a pyrotechnics display on the sixth take went wholly wrong, going off prematurely and causing second-degree burns to his scalp (and losing some of his hair), and his jacket catching fire; even with his brothers helping put out the fire, his injuries were very serious. If he had begun to "feel very manufactured," from that point forward (as we will hear within a few years from this) his music would become more synthetic, artificial and too precious for its own good - and, shall we say, a bit too "Messianic." Or to put it another way, neither he nor his music would ever be "the same."
     
    Last edited: Jun 2, 2020
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  24. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    Funny, I wasn't on this page when I made my own comments about the post Jan. 27, 1984 world of Mr. Jackson, but in a way I seemed to have been saying what you just had.
     
    Grant likes this.
  25. MikeInFla

    MikeInFla Glad to be out of Florida

    Location:
    Kalamazoo, MI
    I never realized that was Michael McKean until many years later when I saw Spinal Tap perform about 20 years later. It was then I figured out "Hey, that's Lenny!". I never connected the dots. Fantastic movie.
     

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