Every Billboard Modern Rock/Alternative #1 Single (Part 1: The 1980s)

My top 5 favorite songs from 1989 which appeared on the charts we discussed is most likely:
1. "I'll Be You" The Replacements
2. "Here Comes Your Man" Pixies
3. "Monkey Gone To Heaven" Pixies
4. "Fascination Street" The Cure
5. "Veronica" Elvis Costello

But there would be so many singles in the era I'd pop on a list! Tragically Hip! Urban Dance Squad! Concrete Blonde! Ramones! Cramps! David Byrne! k.d. lang! Connells!

 

Somehow this thread never pops up on the first few pages of the Forum when I am browsing. So, again, I am playing catch up.

Sowing The Seeds Of Love is one of my very favorite tracks - ever. It hasn't aged at all for me. I put it on a "favorites" playlist and still hear it pretty frequently for an almost thirty year old tune. I recently saw TFF perform live and Seeds Of Love was just a blast of bliss. I bought the CD single upon it's release and that is still my go-to as it's longer than any other version (as is the CD single of Woman In Chains).

So, late 1989 and I am digging on the six minute, mid tempo, psychedelic Seeds of Love when Lenny Kravitz releases a six minute, mid tempo, slice of psychedelia: Let Love Rule. It was a good time for that kind of music. And there was more to come in 1990.

The Psychedelic Furs were not psychedelic at all but the song House was pretty good. Not of the same quality as some of their amazing earlier tracks (The Ghost In You, Heaven, etc) but solid enough.

Ouija board was part of what I remember to be a string of cool Morrissey singles. Fun.

No Myth is an overlooked classic. What if I were Romeo in black jeans? How cool. Mr Penn would go on to have a low key but high quality career as a songwriter and composer of film scores. Good luck for him that the lovely and talented Aimee Mann was looking for someone to dance with.

Bye bye 1989. Not the most exciting year in alternative music, but some solid singles scattered throughout.

 

Make sure you join us in the '90s!

Every Billboard Modern Rock/Alternative #1 Single (Part 2: The 1990s)

 

I really need to review this entire thread, and the 90's thread too. I was a freshman in college in the fall of 1987, and I started on-air at the college radio station in the fall of my sophomore year (so right when the Billboard Modern Rock charts started).

I also worked on-air at a CHR (contemporary hit radio) FM station starting my junior year, that mostly played a mix of adult contemporary and top-40, with a good dash of college radio hits (the ones with a more Modern Rock flair to them). It was in a TINY market (a town of 30,000, a good 45-minutes drive from any city notably bigger) -- in upstate Illinois.