Clock strikes upon the hour and the sun begins to fade

Continuing my trip up the list of the most streamed songs for each year.  

1987 : I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) - Whitney Houston

Well this is a proper choon by someone at the top of their game - I'd pick either this, "How Will I Know" or "Greatest Love Of All" as her best moments because I find "I Will Always Love You" a bit too much.  I don't remember the video but I imagine it involves her bobbing her head around whilst belting out some fine high notes.

It's 4:51 which makes it our third longest track so far - which is kinda odd because it doesn't "feel" like a long track.  The video (choreographed by Arlene Phillips), like Wham and Bon Jovi's efforts, starts with fans crammed into a studio pretending they're at a gig, but this moves on to just shots of Whitney singing and dancing in a multitude of outfits, accompanying by various men (who are slightly better at dancing than me!).  Amusingly, Whitney's video has more make-up than Wham's effort and more hairspray than Bon Jovi's - it has also been watched over 399 million times on YouTube, which is quite peculiar given that not a lot actually happens.  It's fine, but it's not like there's anything there to drag you back to it...

Wikipedia has a LOT on this track (247 milliPeppers) and tells me it was written by George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam - two names I've never even heard of (they also write "How Will I Know").  The critical reception was strangely muted at the time - everyone seemed to be "this is just more of the same", which doesn't seem like the worst thing she could have done.  The commercial reception was pretty wild though - it got to #1 in loads of countries, sold 6 million copies in the US, 1.8 million over here and over 10 million globally.  At which point the critics changed their minds and gave her the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance Grammy (and probably claimed they loved it all along).

There's not a lot more of interest in there other than that the US 12 inch version featured five versions of the track and nothing else, which feels like a bit of a rip-off to say the least.  There's no mention of any cover versions though - didn't we have one recently (or was that "How Will I Know?").  secondhandsongs.com comes up with Dame Edna Everage (fortunately, this doesn't seem to exist on the internet), David Byrne (quite well done), Jessie J (it's very Jessie), Fall Out Boy (a decent effort), Glee (not nice) and Scouting For Girls (they murder it) were the only names I recognised on there.  

Despite (or maybe because of) it's obvious American-ness, I'm not at all surprised to see this take the year - it feels pretty timeless and has some top notch warbling on it.  But obviously I'm going to check out the competition anyway - the top five selling singles of the year here were Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" (that must have been close to winning due to a certain internet phenomenon), Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (really?), Whitney, Bee Gee's "You Win Again" (hmmm) and T'Pau's "China In Your Hand" (a fine 80's track!).  

Other tracks that jump out of the UK charts for me are Level 42's "Running In The Family", Boy George's "Everything I Own", Freddie Mercury's "The Great Pretender", Mel & Kim's "Respectable", U2's "With Or Without You", "I Still Haven't Found..." and "Where The Streets...", Prince's "Sign O' The Times", Fine Young Cannibals' "Ever Fallen In Love", The Smiths' "Sheila Take A Bow", Wet Wet Wet's "Wishing I Was Lucky", The Firm's "Star Trekking" ("it's life Jim, but not as we know it"), Pet Shop Boys' "It's A Sin" and "Always On My Mind", Heart's "Alone", New Order's "True Faith", Black's "Wonderful Life", MARRS's "Pump Up The Volume" (way ahead of its time), George Michael's "Faith", The Proclaimers' "Letter From America", Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is A Place On Earth" and The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl's "Fairytale Of New York" (which we all know should have taken the year!).  Some great tracks in there, but I'm not sure it counts as an all-time classic year.

The best selling song in the US in '87 actually came out in the previous year - The Bangles' "Walk Like An Egyptian", which I'd never have guessed as a winner.  The rest of the top five are "Alone", Gregory Abbott's "Shake You Down" (which I don't remember at all), Whitney and Starship.  The rest of the chart did actually turn up a few ones I missed in the UK - Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now" (I like it, OK?), Suzanne Vega's "Luka", Michael Jackson's "Bad" and The Pretenders' "Don't Get Me Wrong".

But I'm happy for Whitney to take the year - it's all a bit American but it's not like it's the first track to suffer from such things.  And there's no doubt that Whitney had some proper pipes on her when she was in her prime and these were very much her prime years

1986 - Good song, bad hair
1988 - Fine, but not a winner for me