EVERY Billboard #1 rhythm & blues hit discussion thread

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by tomstockman, Mar 4, 2016.

  1. Grant

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

    Bounce back:

    1984 was when we started to see Motown desperate for success. We had Vanity break out on her own, and the sister group The Emotions. They started way back in the late 60s on Stax Records, and then got shifted to Columbia when that label was acquired by CBS in the 70s. A few years after they broke their association with Earth, Wind & Fire/Al McKay, and were dropped from the Columbia roster in the early 80s, they picked back up on Motown and released:

    Miss Your Love - The Emotions



    The song was decent when Sheila started out in her lower register, but then got whiny when she went to a higher key. It may have sounded good when she worked with EWF, but not here.
     
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  2. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Well I know that, but by this point he was abandoning the sound he'd created - Parade doesn't sound as much like 1999 or Purple Rain as Control does.

    André Cymone had been in his orbit, too. All the little Princelings began driving the evolution of the Minneapolis sound more than Prince was.

    I wonder if that ever pissed him off?
     
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  3. Grant

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

    Well, you'd have to define the Prince or Minneapolis sound. I'd say it's a moving target.
     
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  4. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    Whatever, this one proved that indeed Janet had arrived.

    Yet, these days, I hardly hear this one on the radio. They play her prior hit, and then the one that followed this, but . . .
     
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  5. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I agree, although it's the hit that definitely confirmed her as a star, you seldom hear it now.
     
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  6. Grant

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

    That's probably because oldies program directors of corporate flunkies probably look at the title and think it's sexually suggestive.
     
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  7. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    Somehow wouldn't surprise me if that were the case . . .
     
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  8. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
  9. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I kinda find "Nasty" to be a laugh - Janet's tough attitude and all - and it's maybe not the smartest song ever recorded, but it's also an expansion of the "Minneapolis sound" that Prince himself was increasingly abandoning. And the Prince influence on the song goes more than skin deep. I just realized those keyboard chord blasts all over the track, those weird chords of inquiry, are straight out of Joni Mitchell. Joni wasn't just an influence on Prince either - Janet herself is a huge Mitchell fan. I wonder if that's part of what drew Janet to Prince and the whole Minneapolis sound in the first place.

    [​IMG]
     
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  10. Grant

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

    Next #1

    There’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry) - Billy Ocean
    Week ending June 28, 1986 2 weeks



    A very unlikely song for the summer. Same with the Patti Labelle/Michael McDonald tune. I don't know. For me, slow, sad songs don't go with hot, summer months. That's just me, I guess.
     
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  11. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Agreed, really odd that this was a huge summer hit. Also went #1 on the pop charts. Boring and pedestrian as anything. Trinidad's answer to Lionel Richie was cutting way too close to Richie's adult contemporary treacle. We didn't want or need two of them.
     
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  12. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    The only thing missing, I suppose, was Mr. Richie's longtime co-producer James Anthony Carmichael . . .
     
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  13. Grant

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

    I'm thinking of just posting the next #1.
     
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  14. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    Don't be shy . . . :winkgrin:
     
  15. Grant

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

    Next #1 from the DeBarge family:

    Who’s Johnny - El DeBarge week ending July 12, 1986, 1 week



    No love for this one. From the film "Short Circuit".
     
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  16. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    I heard it "at the time," the thing that always popped up in my head when hearing it was Ed McMahon's "He-e-e-e-ere's Johnny" which opened every Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on the nights Carson even bothered to show up . . . 'course, you hardly hear this these days, the only track you hear now if you tune into oldies radio is "Rhythm Of The Night."
     
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  17. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    At least this sounds like a summer hit. But it's '80s annoying as hell. MTV played the crap out of it. Probably damaged DeBarge's career instead of helping it.

    "Ghostbusters" this thing ain't.
     
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  18. Grant

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

    I think of it as a teeny-bopper song. I never even saw the video until I posted the song here. I pretty much quit watching MTV in mid-1986, only hearing it in the background.
     
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  19. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Friday Night Videos played that DeBarge video a lot as well I think. I remember watching the show every Friday night on NBC with my roommate, assuming we weren't both out.



    And check out this video from their 3rd anniversary special in September of '86, including Whitney singing with Paul Shaffer!
     
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  20. pablo fanques

    pablo fanques Somebody's Bad Handwroter In Memoriam

    Location:
    Poughkeepsie, NY
    Clearly propelled by it’s use in the movie. Things will get better soon. I remember that era well
     
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  21. Grant

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

    Yes, the music will. I just looked ahead to the next year.

    But for that "Short Circuit" movie? I never rented it because it looked stupid.

    In an unrelated comment, by 1986, renting movies on VHS was the normal way for me to watch movies, having bought my first VCR a year earlier. I don't recall how long it took for feature films to reach the home video market in 1986.
     
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  22. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    The only thing I remember about the Short Circuit film - having had the misfortune of catching it on TV one day - was one of the characters, "Johnny Five."
     
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  23. pablo fanques

    pablo fanques Somebody's Bad Handwroter In Memoriam

    Location:
    Poughkeepsie, NY
    He WAS Johnny
     
  24. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I wasn't renting many videos yet, although I'd bought a couple. Had a Sanyo SuperBeta Hi-Fi deck, which was the best VCR I probably ever owned. Picture quality was superior to anything I saw from any standard VHS deck until maybe the DVD/VHS combo unit I got circa 2005.

    [​IMG]

    I was much more interested in taping things off TV for free than renting movies. At that point even on VHS there wasn't a ton of stuff I was interested in renting.
     
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  25. Grant

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

    Oh man! I went to town on both renting and recording stuff off the air. We had a little video rental store a few blocks away that had a nice selection of XXX porn. I felt creepy about it until I went to another store where the cute girl behind the counter was so cool about porn that she invited me into the back to see more. (How I wish that wasn't just a pun!)

    I started getting into copying movies. My buddy told me about a little Macrovision de-scrambler that worked great. Didn't even need it for copying the porn vids. :angel: But, for mainstream releases, yeah, it came in real handy. I found that Maxell, Fuji, and Scotch tape worked best for my purposes. TDK Super Avlyn, not so much. The BASF just went to sh-- after a few years.

    Getting this back to music, one of the first regular videos I rented was the "Compleat Beatles".
     
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