Started from the Bottom: Week of 2/6/1988
This bottom 10 of a random Billboard Hot 100 has every kind of hairstyle you'd want.
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 free 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 classics just starting their run? Forgotten fun that never reached the highest heights? Come and take a look with me!
Hot 100 date: February 6, 1988
At the top: Teen pop star Tiffany scores her second chart-topper with "Could've Been," bumping INXS' "Need You Tonight" off the top spot. Exposé's downtempo jam "Seasons Change" will peak at the top in two weeks and is currently at No. 4 alongside hits by The Bangles, Roger Troutman, Bruce Springsteen and Prince. (Also, a beautiful woman is born in New Jersey.)
I have failed you by not really offering an opinion on "Weird Al" Yankovic's perfectly pleasant parody, "I Think I'm a Clone Now." I regret the error.
- Tiffany, "I Think We're Alone Now" (previously peaked at No. 1)
Interestingly, Tiffany holds up both ends of the Hot 100 this week. I feel like, for whatever reason, we haven't afforded Tiffany the same limited level of post-peak, ultimately genuine poptimist respect we gave to Debbie Gibson. This could have something to do with Tiff's biggest hits being mostly covers, or this could be because I know more Gibson fans. (Also: which one of them is Mario and which one is Wario?)
A fair amount of Déjà's first album - other than "You and Me Tonight" - was written and produced by keyboardist Monte Moir, the lone white guy in The Time.
- Déjà, "You and Me Tonight" (previously peaked at No. 54)
I love, love, love when I find an underrated track this good with a wild story to match. It starts out with a group called Aurra, featuring three recent ex-members of funk group Slave: co-founder Steve Washington and vocal duo Curt Jones and Starleana Young. In 1986, "U and Me 2 Nite," a one-off single by a studio band called Deja Vu, found its way to Aurra; their version became a U.K. Top 20 hit. Almost immediately after, Jones and Young got into a dispute with Washington and eventually jumped ship to form Déjà, their own splinter splinter act. Déjà re-recorded an even better version of "You and Me Tonight," which was always kind of like a funky "Don't You Want Me" with a he-said she-said lyrical narrative, but here has a slick, much less dated sound. I love it, and hopefully this makes you give it a spin!
Remember what they took from you (guys with wild hair texture, videos with parrots for some reason).
- REO Speedwagon, "In My Dreams" (previously peaked at No. 19)
You'll never hear a bad word from me about REO Speedwagon's big, earnest hits of the early to mid-'80s like "Keep On Loving You," "Take It on the Run" (all of Hi Infidelity is pretty good, actually) and "Can't Fight This Feeling." But the group's final Top 20 hit suffers slightly for not really sounding like them: not until two minutes in do we get those classic vocal harmonies or Gary Richrath's guitar work (he and drummer Alan Gratzer left after this album), leaving half the track to sound like a Kevin Cronin solo demo.
I am not that deep of a Yes aficionado, but I seriously doubt many of their songs have harmonica solos.
- Yes, "Love Will Find a Way" (previously peaked at No. 30)
In a more ideal world, Yes' superb "Owner of a Lonely Heart" would be their sole pop outlier in a career full of idiosyncratic progressive rock from a constantly-changing ensemble of players. "Love Will Find a Way," and in some ways its parent album Big Generator (1987), is that exception to the rule: working with the same line-up as "Lonely Heart" (plus-or-minus producer Trevor Horn, who left midway through the project, leaving band member Trevor Rabin and engineer Paul DeVilliers to pick up the pieces), "Love Will Find a Way" is a pleasant mainstream lite-rocker that might've been more interesting if Rabin gave it to Stevie Nicks, as was originally intended.
The hair! The sweater! Sting-o's not afraid to be a Doofus here.
- Sting, "We'll Be Together" (previously peaked at No. 7)
I love this goofy song, a sore thumb amid the pop profundity of Sting's sophomore solo set ...Nothing Like the Sun. Originally written for a Japanese beer commercial - by Gordon's estimation, in the time it took to sing it - this tune proved that Mr. Serious could still write a hook or a melody with little provocation and even less analog instrumentation.
Smoke one for the record buyers in '87/'88 who had to be like "Yeah - Wa Wa Nee" to a stereotypical record store clerk.
- Wa Wa Nee, "Stimulation" (previously peaked at No. 86)
A No. 2 hit in their home country of Australia, "Stimulation" doesn't do much for me like follow-up hit "Sugar Free" (a U.S. Top 40 hit) does. Both suffer from what I call Video Complex Disease (VCD), that thing where a post-MTV song suffers when you know what the artist looks like. Close your eyes and you'd think these guys came from Minneapolis and didn't have Nik Kershaw haircuts.
I don't know if band members get mad if their group is named after one guy, but a name like "Don Dokken" kind of seals the deal, right?
- Dokken, "Burning Like a Flame" (previously peaked at No. 72)
It's been a long time since I committed episodes of I Love The '80s to memory, but I don't recall Michael Ian Black making some hacky joke about Dokken releasing a single called "Burning Like a Flame" and making a video where they play heavy metal firefighters. And that's a shame, because this chorus whips. Dokken were perhaps not as hot as Poison or weird as Twisted Sister, but I'm going to give them some respect right here.
"(Love Theme from Leonard Part 6)" is a wild parenthetical even if that title means nothing to you. If it does, you probably went "oooh" or "gahhhh."
- Peabo Bryson & Regina Belle, "Without You" (chart debut)
A perfectly pleasant R&B duet somewhat undermined by the fact that it's the love theme from Leonard Part 6, a film so notoriously bad that its star, story writer and producer - who from 2018 to 2021 was imprisoned for a highly-publicized string of sexual assault charges - publicly advised people not to see it. "Without You," written by Motown legend Lamont Dozier, only got as high as No. 89 on the Hot 100, but Bryson and Belle would reunite for a much bigger movie hit four years later.
Marx's "sexy video man" bit is doubly funny when you consider his two extreme stints as a wife guy: once to actress Cynthia Rhodes, who he met on the set of his debut video "Don't Mean Nothing," wrote "Right Here Waiting" about her, and married her for 25 years; and once to former MTV VJ Daisy Fuentes, whom he married a year later and posts a lot about.
- Richard Marx, "Should've Known Better" (previously peaked at No. 3)
Another purportedly cheesy man I will never say a bad word about: Richard Marx's songs rule to heaven! I love every one of his singles - this one is probably my favorite - and respect his journey from session vocalist to star. You gotta check out this extremely sensual video: Richard possesses a smolder that resembles the reaction of a parent who already told you twice not to stand on the coffee table. What a song!
That chorus! Those drum fills! This is what music sounds like in my head 90% of the time.
- The Alarm, "Rain in the Summertime" (previously peaked at No. 71)
The Alarm is part of a musical continuum I'm quite fond of, what The Waterboys coined as "The Big Music" - anthemic but not overbearing, spiritual but not always religious, technically glorious but reverent of the natural world. A lot of mostly European, soaring-guitar '80s groups (U2, Big Country, The Call, Simple Minds) slotted nicely into this continuum at some point or another, with varying forms of success. (The Alarm frontman Mike Peters at one point led Big Country after the untimely passing of founder Stuart Adamson.) This one just soars, and makes me even want a little rain in the summertime, though I'm quite content with the way the seasons are now.