Started from the Bottom: Week of 2/3/1990

Like most music enthusiasts, I love the Billboard charts—and like most music writers, I am constantly trying to think of different ways to look at and talk about pop music. In that spirit, I present a regular feature called Started from the Bottom, where I take a look at a random Hot 100 chart's lowest 10 entries. Are they classic hits on the way down? Future favorites just starting their run? Forgotten fun that never reached the highest heights? Come and take a look with me!

Hot 100 date: February 3, 1990 (Note: Billboard now paywalls vintage charts, but you can find an incredible wealth of issues of this magazine and many others at World Radio History.)

At the top: Blue-eyed soul howler Michael Bolton's "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You" holds the top spot for its third and final consecutive week. Behind it is Paula Abdul's cartoon cat anthem "Opposites Attract," which will take its place the following week and stay there for three weeks of its own. The rest of the Top 10 is primarily some flavor of atmospheric rock—from Rod Stewart to Skid Row, Aerosmith to Tom Petty—with a few dance cuts thrown in. (Also, Foreigner frontman Lou Gramm.)

At the...middle? So there's a really important reason I picked this chart: the late, great Biz Markie's breakthrough "Just a Friend" rises up this chart to No. 41, and will vault into the Top 40 the following week, where it'll eventually peak at No. 9. The Top 40 will never again lack a hip-hop song...until, shockingly, this week. Do any great rap singles linger on the fringes of this survey? Let's find out!

100. Madonna, "Oh Father" (previously peaked at No. 20)

Oh hell yeah, this chart butts up against another piece of music chart discourse this week! Over on BlueSky—the social microblogging app for people with enough emotional intelligence to get off Elon Musk's X, but not enough to not join a very similar site (I can say this! I know who I am!)—progressive rabbi Danya Ruttenberg asked her followers to name a great album from 1989, in her estimation "a perfect music year," citing The Cure's commercial hit Disintegration (which slams). From there, journalist Tom Scocca—who, to my surprise, resembles a hybrid of comedian John Early and the gangly guy Samuel L. Jackson shoots in the apartment in Pulp Fiction—took the prompt to task. "People need to stop retconning literally the worst era in American popular music history into something it wasn't," he wrote, next to a screenshot of Billboard's Year-End Hot 100, "just because there were also some amazing records that like 250 people happened to be hunting down and listening to."

Most of my peers are surely sick of relitigating this—I know I was by yesterday morning—but this take first comes off as shockingly ignorant of what the journalism and music distribution landscape actually looked like at the time. "Cult favorite" or "critically acclaimed" records with no Hot 100 imprint include the Pixies' Doolittle, released on 4AD (which at the time was distributed by Warner-controlled Elektra), or the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, released on Capitol (the same label as The Beatles). They were reviewed in magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin, which were read by much more people than read magazines now. (Sorry, true.) 1989's Hot 100 is also still two years off from the revolution of SoundScan, where all music barcodes were automatically tracked for sales charts instead of randomly calling up record stores, having them tabulate what they thought or said were their top sellers, and sort of averaging out a chart from here. That and the inexorable march of linear time mean enduring '89 singles—like, say, the title track to Madonna's masterpiece Like a Prayer—top out at No. 25 on the big board. (All of this pales in comparison to my hyperpoptimist argument that no year can be "the worst" for music if you, yourself, found something you enjoyed.)

With that ridiculous preamble, we have a 1989 straggler single rounding out this list. "Oh Father," the fourth of five singles from the aforementioned, brilliant Like a Prayer, is notable in the Queen of Pop's own chart history for abruptly ending an impressive chart run of Top 10 hits that began with "Borderline" in 1984. (Seven of them went to No. 1.) It's not hard to get why, honestly—after the pop bliss of the title track, "Express Yourself" and "Cherish," it seemed clear they wanted a slower, ballad-adjacent track, and for all its brilliance, Like a Prayer doesn't have as strong a one as True Blue's "Live to Tell," of which this feels like a sideways rewrite. With a different, slightly less off-kilter arrangement, it might've done a little better.

99. The Rolling Stones, "Rock and a Hard Place" (previously peaked at No. 23)

On what looks, in part, like the set from the video to The Police's "Synchronicity II," Mick, Keef and company score their last Top 40 hit, smoothly transitioning from aging-on-the-ropes rockers to comfortable legends thanks to a game plan that basically reads "INXS Lite."

98. Whitesnake, "Fool for Your Loving" (previously peaked at No. 37)

David Coverdale has an incredible career arc. The former Deep Purple frontman toiled away for several years on bluesy rock in his new band Whitesnake. One song he tweaked in particular was a 1982 cut called "Here I Go Again," re-recorded five years later and becoming the band's biggest hit; bolstered by its success, next album Slip of the Tongue featured another re-record of an even older 'Snake track. The weird, occasionally interesting aspects of Coverdale's music (the same impulses that inspire him to post tons of memes online and call unplugged shows "starkers") are mostly missing here in favor of glamfoolery and some inspired woodshedding by handsome guitar journeyman Steve Vai, who was ab0ut to make an improbable jump to solo rock instrumentalist.

97. Tina Turner, "Steamy Windows" (previously peaked at No. 39)

Featuring guitar and harmonica from "Steamy" writer Tony Joe White (the swamp-rock legend best known as the writer of Elvis Presley favorite "Polk Salad Annie"), this one is halfway between the grit of vintage Ike & Tina and the by-then very popular beer commercial blues style.

96. Paul McCartney, "Figure of Eight" (previously peaked at No. 92)

A somewhat plain pop-rock yeller from our most mulleted Beatle, "Figure of Eight" isn't bad, but it comes from the same album with four songs Paul wrote with Elvis Costello (none of which was as big a hit as the one Costello kept for himself). The single version was re-recorded with Macca's touring band and ran two minutes longer than the album version, which seems a bit much.

95. Don Henley, "The Last Worthless Evening" (previously peaked at No. 21)

From The End of the Innocence, an album that features two terrific examples of the former/future Eagle's sturdy soft rock (the title track, cowritten by Bruce Hornsby; the appealingly dramatic "The Heart of the Matter") and also two of the less good ones (the turgid "New York Minute" and...this). Henley's pinched lower register does the verses no favors, and such a title phrase doesn't exactly make you want to dig further in.

94. The Brat Pack, "You're the Only Woman" (chart debut)

Not a novelty single by the cast of The Breakfast Club, this Brat Pack was a New Jersey duo who had the good fortune to fall in with production duo Robert Clivillés and David Cole, who'd hit it big in a year or so as C+C Music Factory. I would love to know where the idea of "New Jack cover of Ambrosia" came from.

93. The Chimes, "1-2-3" (chart debut)

Another example of the kind of freestyle-adjacent dance that was slinking around the charts in the early '90s, and maybe on the more generic side. "1-2-3" would peak at No. 86 in America, but the trio (featuring British singer Pauline Henry) would score even bigger in the U.K. with a Top 10 cover of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" from the same album.

92. Paula Abdul, "The Way That You Love Me" (previously peaked at No. 3)

How big was Paula Abdul's debut Forever Your Girl? Released in 1988, the choreographer-turned-singer started hitting pay dirt in 1989 after "Straight Up" took off. It, "Forever Your Girl" and "Cold Hearted" would all top the charts, giving her more weeks on top than anyone that year. Before she strutted her stuff with MC Skat Kat for a fourth No. 1, Virgin Records decided to double back, reissuing the LP's second single, "(It's Just) The Way That You Love Me," which had stalled at an unfortunate No. 88 after lead single "Knocked Out" missed the Top 40 as well. This time, it would soar to No. 3, and while it sounds like a hybrid of "Cold Hearted" and "Opposites Attract," it got the job done. Dig that little synth horn counter in the chorus!

91. Jive Bunny and The Mastermixers, "That's What I Like" (chart debut)

We conclude our I-live-for-this chart slice with one of the dumbest things I loved as a child. Jive Bunny was a (where else?!) British concoction that saw a team of remixers bundle a bunch of early rock classics sampled and sequenced to a dinky drum machine beat. I played the heck out of my family's Jive Bunny: The Album cassette, which had no less than eight(!) medleys on two sides. "Swing the Mood" was the first single, a No. 1 hit in the U.K. and, in a case of mass psychosis west of the Atlantic, a No. 11 hit in America. "That's What I Like" would also hit No. 1 in England, as would the non-album holiday single "Let's Party," making Jive Bunny only the third act in England to put their first three singles to the top of the charts, after Gerry and The Pacemakers and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. America was a bit less resistant this time around; it settled for No. 69 on the Hot 100, which is still not bad for a ridiculous novelty.

As is customary whenever Jive Bunny comes up, I must always share the tale of when an unstoppable force (my affection for pop music detritus) meets an immovable object (my wife's tolerance for the fringier acts). In a fit of remembrance, I dug up "That's What I Like" and played it for her, marveling that, yes, this stuff was at some point a hit. She listened in absolute silence, and when the track ended, she looked me in the eyes and declared, "This is Jock Jams for losers," before walking out of the room as I roared with laughter.

Maybe that Scocca guy had a point after all.