Billboard #1 Albums from 1988

A very close and possible death match between Faith and Hysteria. Otherwise, an appalling list, despite my affection for a few of the Anita Baker, U2, Tracy Chapman, and Steve Winwood singles.

Tiffany was the first cassette I bought.

Oh, whoops -- I do like Appetite....

Appetite.. it is for me

Landslide, maybe.

I do love Tiffany's "I Saw Him Standing There" and "I Think We're Alone Now."

appetite easy for me.

that steve winwood album is the sound of cheesy handclappy bar band rock, that shit was really popular with all my friends' dads.

don't you know what the night can do?

i liked back in the highlife (which ok yes my dad owned) but yeah, roll with it is a snooze.

off this list, g'n'r by a very long mile. (great singles off leppard, u2, tracy chapman.)

none of these

fuck a ilx

Giving You the Best That I Got - Anita Baker!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

but from these Tracy Chapman but what about those Pixies, Sugarcubes and Sonic Youth...

I'll help Faith to an easy, if distant, second place.

Appertite is the only one I've heard : /

I know Appetite is the real correct answer here, but I'm voting Hysteria for nostalgic reasons

I knew something in my life had changed when I bought the 12" of "Father Figure."

nations of millions
nations of millions
nations of millions
nations of millions

we should match the people in the picture with their favorite album

gold chain, hairy chest gotta be bon jovi
i'm having trouble with star trek t-shirt tho, winwood?

phto obv most likely to succeed

Out of these, "Hysteria" was the best one, but 1988 was kind of tragic, really (and "Hysteria" is from 1987 - not that 1987 was any better though)

but it was not #1 in '87, which is what this poll concerns.

xcuse me: #1 in '88, which is what this poll concerns.

Appetite. The vote maybe should be for #2, in which case I'd go for Hysteria, and after that, Faith.

..and after that, Faith. - "Father Figure" would rank highly among the best singles of that year, methinks.

"Monkey"!

Re. Faith: for my tastes there's too much of "I Want Your Sex", which was a pretty good single, but not good at 13 minutes of the album. It's hard for me to evaluate the album in light of that: the singles remain monumental.

A few years ago I discovered "Look At Your Hands" and "Hand to Mouth."

Faith no contest.

C-c-c-c-c-c-come onnnn

So funny that Appetite took a solid year to hit #1.

so did Hysteria, almost

Dirty Dancing by a mile.

So funny that Appetite took a solid year to hit #1.

yeah i remember i went home for the summer after freshman year with a cassette of it that i taped off my dorm floor's resident metalhead (because i liked "welcome to the jungle"), and it still felt a little secret -- none of my friends had it. but by the end of the summer "sweet child" was everywhere all the time and they were supahstars.

I love Christgau's Dirty Dancing blurb:

Five pre-Beatle classics plus six postmodern horrors equals the soundtrack to the world's longest rock video, a brutally depressing top-forty apotheosis. The comparisons are torture--revolting as the contempo material is, it sounds even worse in among the Five Satins and Mickey & Sylvia, who are in turn rendered unlistenable by the commercial manipulations that bring them back to commercial life. Even accessory before the fact Phil Spector sounds not just innocent but simple up against the technocratic ardors of Medley & Warnes's Grammy/Oscar-validated "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" or Eric Carmen's merely radio-validated "Hungry Eyes." The new songs epitomize AOR as CHR, turning everything rock and roll taught us about rhythm and emotion into the melodrama that prerock schlock left behind when it abandoned operetta and the drawing-room ballad. They're almost as good a reason to hate mass culture as Ronald Reagan. D

xgau is dr. morbius?

Wow, that Christgau blurb is precisely the sort of instinctive elitism that Carl Wilson's Celine Dion book systematically destroys. Anyway, the oldies he prizes on there are plenty melodramatic themselves, so I'm not clear on what values he thinks he's defending.

Appetite.

and I like "Hungry Eyes"!

Carl Wilson's book is incredibly valuable, but shedding light on something isn't the same thing as systematically destroying it.

Yeah, I'm not sure I understand your point, dad a. Xgau hates the new songs for themselves, and loathes them for how shitty they make the oldies sound. How is that elitist?

hahahaha this is probably a good place to mention that I finally saw Dirty Dancing for the first time last summer, at a friend's house while we were both on acid. it was, as you can just imagine, pretty incredible.

"Nobody puts Matos in the corner."

I was just floored. "Holy shit: this is like porn for 13-year-old girls!"

I mean, yeah, duh--of course it is. I just hadn't realized how blatant it would be, something that the acid really intensified. (As it did with the Cross Colours outfits all over VH1 Soul's New Jack Swing A-Z video special, which we'd watched right before.)

That description (xpost) makes the movie sound totally amazing. No wonder my mother wouldn't let me watch it when it first came on cable; instead, I went to my room and watched Emmanuelle on Showtime.

Dirty Dancing was my eighth grade soundtrack, and inescapable. I knew a girl who copied the lyrics to "She's Like The Wind" into a notebook. Hell, even I swooned when Jennifer Grey touched Swayze's bare chest in the "Cry To Me" sequence.

my local radio station at the time (in Tampa) played a parody version of "She's Like The Wind" called "She Passes Wind" which, to my fourteen-year-old self, was the best thing ever. Actually, it still is fabulous.

Carl Wilson's book is incredibly valuable, but shedding light on something isn't the same thing as systematically destroying it.

True, "deconstructing" is more what I meant.

Xgau hates the new songs for themselves, and loathes them for how shitty they make the oldies sound. How is that elitist?

The early rock songs on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack were "melodrama" and "commercial manipulations" and "mass culture" at the time they happened, just like the 80s songs on there that Christgau despises. The soundtrack makes sense as an argument for the contemporary songs as part of a continuum of schlock, he wants to see them as fundamentally distinct. Not liking them is fine by me, he gives some clear stylistic explanations why, but that last line (hating mass culture strikes me as an elitist position) seems like he's needlessly trying to elevate his distaste into something quasi-political.

He doesn't hate mass culture – he hates how the soundtrack has shaped a moment in mass culture.

It's like he has no faith in the power of the oldies top 40 songs he liked, if he thinks they can be sullied and "rendered unlistenable" by association with modern top 40.

if you were Bruce Channel, would you want Alfie Zappacosta's "Overload" following you on the radio station?

Definitely, if I had publishing rights to a song on a soundtrack that people might buy to hear Overload.

Yeah, Christgau really likes mass culture as a rule--it's where he's coming from most of the time. He compares the s/t to Reagan because they're both examples (to him) of where masscult goes all wrong, not because it's wrong to begin with.

Well, I'm not comfortable with badmouthing Anita Baker, but aside from her, I'd feel fully comfortable putting all these in a box and dumping them off the side of a tall building into the dumpster of crappy ass music. There were much, much better things to be listening to in 1988 for god's sakes. Try THIS THREAD or THIS THREAD.

I should add, though, that I've never owned an Anita Baker record, and I really have no idea if I would like her now over an entire album's length or not.

xposts: Thanks for the clarifications, I didn't get where Christgau's coming from but that makes sense.

I have fond memories of nearly all these albums. I'm tempted to vote for "Rattle and Hum" just for the hell of it, because I'm one of the only people on this board who actually likes it, but instead I'll be honest and vote for "Hysteria". And I love the "Dirty Dancing" soundtrack. To the 14-year old me, that was one of the best mix tapes I never made.

Hello, I'm calling for Anita Baker and the Giving You the Best That I Got album, because Democrats are dangerously weak on crime. Guns and Roses has voted against tougher penalties for street gangs, drug-related crimes, and protecting children from danger. George Michael and his liberal allies have a disturbing history of coddling criminals, so we can't trust their judgment to keep our families safe. This has been paid for by the AOR Soul/Jazz National Committee and Michael McDonald/Al Jerrau 2008 at ILXOR.com. Thank you, bye.

OK I'm now starting to wonder if Def Lep won't take second instead of George Michael. (Appetite is still gonna win, easy.)

it was, as you can just imagine, pretty incredible.

that's true without the acid too.

at the time, I liked the bottom half of the list a lot better than the top (probably still true), and surely would have said Appetite, which was by maybe my favorite band and one of only two on the list I've owned (with Hysteria, but now I gotta go with Rattle & Hum. i'm guessing it's the funniest of these humor-impaired albums.

(um, except for Dirty Dancing, maybe)

We should do these for every year (1989 had some real...doozies).

the girls in my class turned 12-13 in the wake of dirty dancing. it was much-discussed.

"(I've Had) The Time of My Life" was my 8th grade graduation class.

*song.

Bimble, you totally rule! :D

Appetite deserves to win, but I voted Dirty Dancing. Xgau might be all kinds of great, but dad a was right to check him like that. He is drawing a line between the sacred and profane, and he's on shaky ground. The trouble with old-fogey rock critics beating up on nu-music is that there's always that queasy element of kid-hatred in there--"you kids and yr infernal racket"--and if you're just gonna beat on the brats* then you shouldn't be reviewing pop music...

*admittedly, Mr C. is for the most part pretty good abt understanding the music of the younger ones, this is just a rare instance...

Hysteria for me. Now and at the time.

Faith vs. Hysteria

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I just heard my first Steve Winwood song today on the radio! He sorta sounded like a second-rate Phil Collins

Which song? I do like "Valerie."

man this was a horrible year

wow anita baker had a number 1 album in the states? and it *wasn't* RAPTURE?!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Giving You the Best That I Got - Anita Baker 4

You other 3 ilxors, call me!