acroyear | Today's AT40

is...April 23, 1988, 21 years ago. I'm 2 months from graduating and SO into senioritus, though my grades actually went up. Go fig.

Right now this happens while I do laundry and pack for 2 days in Jersey. Not even an interesting part, neither (yes, NJ has interesting places to go).

We review "last week" with

Where Do Broken Hearts Go
Devil Inside
Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car (I still don't get it)

And here we go with...

Paul Carrack - One Good Reason. Not bad, but not his best.
Times Two, a pop-rock duo that has the same "sound" as a while Milli Vanilli with a restrained Kenny Loggins accent, doing Strange But True. There's reasons stuff like this isn't played 20 years later...
Hall & Oats return to the top 40 with Everything Your Heart Desires. nice crooning, but not much more than that.
LL Cool J - Goin' Back to Cali. one I can really live without.
(Rico) Suave (remember this idiot?) covers My Girl in perhaps the most atrocious way possible, with the drumbeat stolen from that updated Lean On Me song.
Casey Rick Rolls us with the story of how he got the British government to subsidize Astley's goals of being a pop singer with 2000gpb.
Jermain Stewart reveals his future status of one-hit-wonder by giving us "Say It Again", a song that (yes, it was possible) sucks worse.

I'm not too fond of this era of 80sness, am I?
Bryan Ferry's Kiss and Tell, which I'd totally forgotten about since Slave To Love is pretty much the only solo song of his that gets any retro airplay today.
Another song that shows a band is destined to be a one-hit wonder, at least in the states: OMD's I Was Only Dreaming. Mind you, as I wrote earlier, I actually like this one more than If You Leave. Actually they had more hits as well, but nobody really remembers them now.
George Michael's One More Try, one I was pretty blase about. It didn't get much MTV air time, but then again, few videos did by then (and that was before The Real World would totally change the network into having nothing to do with music at all).

This golden age of, well, pop crap continues with Keith Sweat's I Want Her
Piano in the Dark from Russel & Eposito, a cheesy late-80s ballad of pointlessness, one of the best unintentional Gloria Estefan impersonations out there. really no winners this week so far.
John [not Cougar] Mellancamp's Check It Out. Better than most this week, but not really his own best.
Toto's Pamala is preceded by a story about how some claimed that the Wizard of Oz was an allegory for the populist movement of the late 19th century (Lion == William Jennings Bryan, Yellow Brick Road == Gold Standard, etc).
Scarlet & Black with You Don't Know, a song which, well, I don't know. I don't care to.
Henry Lee Summer with a particularly horrid bit of southern rock, I Wish I Had That Girl. This could have been sued by John Mellancamp just as easily as Michael Bolton was sued by the Temptations. The verse chords are almost indistinguishable from Hurts So Good (and the chorus chords are like John Fogerty)
Richard Marx sings of Endless Summer Nights, which I was about to go through being bored out of my mind north of Philly after my parents moved.
Morris Day (ex- of The Time) with Fishnet, sounding like the band was still together, style-wise, though with a touch of the same late 80s rhythms that would propel Bobby Brown to the top in '89.
The Deele prove the can't sing as well as can't spell their own name, with Two Occasions. I suppose 13 year olds might have liked this one...
White Lion gets their one big late-80s hair band rocker in, Wait

Foreigner with yet another guitar-less wonder (as in, I really wonder what happened to their guitars), I Don't Want To Live Without You
Debbie Gibson's Out of the Blue is on its way down from the top. Annoying as her music at the time was, at least she's evidence (along with contemporary Kylie Minogue) that you don't have to turn into a basket-case just 'cause your teen idol career is over.
Ok, NOW we have an excellent work of the time, Johnny Hates Jazz with Shattered Dreams. This one's been on high rotation in my 80s workout playlist.
And...back to the crap with Samantha Fox's Naughty Girls...bleh.
The third brit-pop song in a row, this one being The Pet Shop Boys' cover of Always on my Mind. Never really cared for this compared to others of theirs.
Rocket 2 U from The Jets. I said bleh before and I meant it.
Ice House with the infamous Australian mullet and Electric Blue, co-written by John Oats (I didn't know that before).
After a Bruce Springsteen sob story (yeah, right) about his low profile in school, the very un-glorious days, we get One Step Up. Talk about a guy fully qualified to diss any high school reunion invite he gets...This one bored me at the time, but today I'm hearing a little deeper into it. The acoustic guitar work is very Will Ackerman-ish.
Jody Watley goes back to reminding me why I hated the time, with Some Kind of Lover
Michael Jackson's former #1, Man in the Mirror. meh.

And into the top ten with...

...more crap: Taylor Dayne's Prove Your Love
Natalie Cole's cover of Pink Cadallac. boy we're not doing very well this week. 6 artists I like, and only 1 song I *really* like (and it was a one-hit-wonder).
The real Gloria Estefan with Miami Sound Machine, not that you'd notice with the ballad Anything For You. Actually, hearing it today I notice the band contributing in a very stylish, understated way, in the backing tracks, an aspect definitely missing in her early 90s "solo" hits.
Mall-goddess (at the time) Tiffany covers the Beatles with I Saw Him Standing There
Aerosmith's comeback continues with Angel
Pebbles's Girlfriend. bleh.
Casey reads off a whole bunch of critics praising Terrence Trent D'arby and Wishing Well as "the future of pop music", while I laugh my ass off at how history turned him into a one-hit wonder REAL fast.
Billy Ocean's Car falls from #1.
INXS hold onto their #2 spot with Devil Inside, tragically meaning that
Whitney Houston is #1 with Where Do Broken Hearts Go.

Gee, guess how much I liked 1988...