No matter how hard I try, you keep pushing me aside

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

14/03/99 : Believe - Cher

This will be an interesting one - I have a strong suspicion it will have the one decent track on it and the rest will be nonsense, but let's see.  Whatever it's like, I've certainly never owned it (19/42).

Well, she certainly doesn't leave anything to chance making the decent track both the title and the opening track - and, I know it's cheesy, but it's still a fine track indeed which sounded very good through headphones.  "Strong Enough" is also a decent enough track - to be honest, none of them taken by themselves are terrible tracks, but none of them are great either.  I'm afraid the whole album does prove to be somewhat of a Euro disco endurance exercise - you feel like you're trapped in a cheap Spanish bar with no hope of parole.  It was only 44 minutes long but it felt like at least a couple of hours...

We're at #7 on the charts this week on her 20th week of a 45 week run and somewhat surprisingly this is as high as it ever got (the single was EVERYWHERE!).  The top five this week were Stereophonics (a new entry), The Corrs, Robbie Williams, Lauryn Hill and Whitney Houston and we have two more new entries in the top ten with the slightly odd combination of Britney Spears (#8) and Kula Shaker (#9).

Wikipedia has more than I expected (223 milliPeppers) but most of it seems to be saying "well, at least it did better than It's A Man World (her previous album)".  Allegedly, it wasn't actually all that bad but it bombed commercially so a change of direction was required - Cher wasn't convinced that auto-tuned Euro disco was the way to go, but boy was she wrong on that front, because most of the rest of the entry is about how successful this, her 22nd(!) album, was.  The critics were nice enough about it, although our old mate Robert Christgau "ranked the album as a choice cut, which means that the reviewer believes there is a good track on an album that is not particularly good", which feels fair enough to me.  But whatever me or Rob think, the public went mad for it with it getting to #1 in a load of countries (although only #4 in the US), becoming the top selling album of the year in Germany (seriously?) and selling over ten million copies globally.  If ever there was an album surfing the wave of a successful single (which was the best selling single in the UK this year and also sold over ten million copies globally), this is it...

"Customers also listened to" Christina Aguilera, Ace Of Base, The Spice Girls and Right Said Fred - the links are somewhat tenuous there for me.  Overall, this is an odd one because it's a terrible album without any terrible songs on it - I struggle to imagine too many people have ever sat down and listened to it all the way through more than once.

21/03/99 - Another disappointment
07/03/99 - Another enjoyable revisit

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