Music Dorks Anonymous: Founded This Week In 1989.
I’d like to take this opportunity to point both of my faithful readers to the glorious return of one of my favorite online features, the Chart Flashback column on Entertainment Weekly’s website. Every few weeks or so, EW blogger and music aficionado Whitney Pastorek lovingly takes Billboard’s top 10 singles of that particular week from some random year over the past few decades, revisiting each song with highly entertaining combs of varying fine-toothedness. [Thanks to YouTube, she is also able to provide the often dubious videos for each song in her column.] Sometimes she offers her opinions on how well a song and/or its video has held up over time. Frequently she’ll throw in personal anecdotes or memories she has attached to a song. And every once in a while, she’ll just sum up a song in one word and give it a grade. For this particular edition of her column she has chosen to evaluate the top 10 singles of this week from 1989. This is exciting to me for a few reasons.
First of all, 1989 was my favorite year in pop music. It was sort of a random transition year from the hair-sprayed ubercheese-that-knew-it-was-cheese of the 1980’s to the hair-gelled ubercheese-that-thought-it-was-cool of the early 1990’s. As you’ll see in her column, crap acts like Milli Vanilli and New Kids On The Block (sorry Amy!) cross paths with more streetwise acts like Bobby Brown and Neneh Cherry. Throw in some veterans like Natalie Cole, Bette Midler, and Donna Summer, and you’ve nearly rounded out quite a wacky top 10. I LOVE THAT SHIT! Today? A top 10 like that would NEVER happen. Sad.
Also, for a period of time in middle school and high school I was kind of obsessed with the top 40, even going so far as to create my own weekly lists and countdowns. (If I hadn’t done so before, I have now completely outed myself as a dork. But a music dork, which isn’t quite so bad, right? Lovable, even?) Along with this obsession came a fascination with the charts in Billboard magazine. I ended up getting a subscription for a few years while I was in high school, but this week, with this particular top 10, is the first issue of Billboard I ever purchased.
The reason I remember the top 10 from this particular issue is because it was the week that "Cry" by a Welsh band called Waterfront peaked at #10. Nobody - Whitney included - remembers this one-hit wonder, but it spent so much time at the top of my own weekly countdowns that it ended up becoming my overall #1 song of 1989, and I was thrilled that it managed to graze Billboard’s top 10. Perhaps even more significantly, "Cry" was the very first cassette single (remember the "cassingle"?) that I ever purchased. These watershed acquisitions of my first cassingle and my first issue of Billboard came within mere minutes of each other. We were on a 7th grade end-of-the-year trip somewhere downtown and we went to Union Station for lunch. Pretty exciting, with its food court and its train schedules and its SAM GOODY! It was there that I bought the cassingle for "Cry" (as well as the cassingle for "Let The River Run" by Carly Simon). Shortly thereafter I wandered into one of the train station’s comprehensive magazine stores and picked up my first ever copy of Billboard. I think I spent all of my lunch money on these purchases. No Sbarro’s for me, thankyouverymuch! Despite the now obvious red flags which somehow evaded this 11 year-old audiophile’s wide-eyed gaze, my heart grew ten sizes that day.
So without further delay, I invite you to take a trip back in time. Get a Gumby-do like Bobby, prepare to dine with the Fine Young Cannibals, and check out Billboard’s Top 10 Singles for the week ending June 24, 1989.
Maybe you’ll thank me in 8 more years.