In February of 1990, Paula Abdul scored another major hit with "Opposites Attract" (featuring the Wild Pair). Remixed for its single release, including an opening from from "MC Skat Cat," the single spent 3 weeks at #1 and featured an impressive video with mixed live action/animation choreography between Abdul and her "Skat Kat" counterpart (actually The Wild Pair for everything but the opening rap.
Abdul dominated the pop charts in 1989, with her infectious and accessible dance pop and visually stunning music videos, most of which featured dance routines choreographed by the artist herself. After, "Knocked Out," an R&B #1 that almost made the top 40, "Straight Up" was her breakthrough single, and first #1 hit, followed by a second #1 hit ("Forever Your Girl"), then a third #1 hit ("Cold Hearted"), and then "(It's Just) The Way that You Love Me," which peaked at #3. This made her album, Forever Your Girl, the fourth album to generate four #1 hits, following Whitney Houston's Whitney, Michael Jackson's Bad (which had 5 #1s, still a record), and George Michael's Faith.
Paula Abdul's meteoric rise in popularity was not unlike what we saw over the past year for Lady GaGa, who similarly delighted music fans with her accessible dance pop and style, and like Abdul, scored an impressive string of major hits starting with "Just Dance," followed by "Poker Face," "Lovegame," "Paparazzi," and "Bad Romance." A sixth hit, "Telephone," appears to be imminent. Abdul continued her streak in 1991 with a second album, Spellbound, which delivered her biggest hit, "Rush Rush," a sixth #1, "The Promise of a New Day," and her eighth and last top 10 hit, "Blowing Kisses in the Wind." After that, Abdul's pop career went downhill fast, with a third album released in 1995 generating only a couple of moderate hits--a similarly I'm sure GaGa hopes to not replicate.
Entertainment Weekly, which is also looking back to 1990 this year since it's their 20th anniversary, did a nice piece this week on "Opposites Attract," including how the video was inspired by Gene Kelly and led Abdul to befriending the legendary performer.
Check out the Grammy-Award-winning video here (not embeddable). I'd forgotten about the tap-dancing bit at the end. How come nobody tap dances anymore?
3 comments:
ah that first Abdul album, i loved it, she really took of here when that 5th single "opposties attract" became her 1st #1 Oz single and the album finally took off! (I was like the Americans into it a whole year earlier!)
Oh and George Michael is the ONLY non USA artist to score four #1 singles from an album..yay! to George, forever George..damn i t i see him live in less that 12 days!!!:)
Great observation. I hadn't thought about it, but that's interesting. Since Forever Your Girl, I think just 3 other albums have scored 4 #1s on the Hot 100--Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation, Mariah Carey's debut, and Usher's Confessions.
Loving Paula - always did. Forever Your Girl and Spellbound were monster albums for me; utterly adored them. Rush Rush remains one of my fave songs ever - just adored the violin in it. Quite lovely.
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