Do you really want to love me forever?

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

20/05/90 : Forever Your Girl : Paula Abdul

Assuming this is the album that has her half-decent tracks on it, then I'm imagining some of it will be half-decent but the rest of it will be bang average.  And if it's not got the half-decent tracks on it, then why on earth am I being made to listen to it?  And no, we never owned it (7/33).

Yup, it's got "Opposites Attract" (which a re-listen downgrades to be quarter-decent) and "Straight Up" (which probably gets up an upgrade to at least 60%-decent) on it, so some of it was bearable.  But the rest of it struggles to make the grade of bang average if I'm being honest.  It's all very sub-par Madonna-be - someone must have really pushed this one hard to make it as successful as it was.

We're at #5 in the charts this week on her third week of an eighteen week run, with it having peaked at #3 in its first week.  All of which feels very generous to me, so imagine my surprise when I saw it was actually her third run, having already enjoyed sixteen and five week visits in '89.  The rest of the top five were The Carpenters, Big Country (a new entry), Phil Collins and UB40 (Labour Of Love II, which I safely ignored after having listened to the first one) and the next highest new entry was The Pretenders (#19).

Wikipedia tells me I'm being harsh to say someone pushed it hard - it was a very slow burner indeed.  Paula was well known as a choreographer but decided she fancied being a singer, so spent her savings making a demo - which got her signed to Virgin.  They didn't exactly push the boat out for her though, making the album on a budget of $72,000 and, from the sounds of things, kinda leaving it to fend for itself.  It entered the US chart on July 23 1988 and did indeed fend for itself...

...because 64 weeks later, it got to #1!  By the time she'd finished, she'd got (at the time) the most successful debut album ever, 4 US #1 singles, #3 in the US '89 year end chart, #6 in the '90 year end chart and global sales of 12 million copies.  None of which means the album is actually any good, of course - but when did anything like that ever matter?

"Customers also listened to" Janet Jackson, Tiffany, Exposé and Taylor Dayne - I'd completely forgotten about Taylor!  I hadn't forgotten about Paula though because she's managed to keep her profile up over the years - but on the basis of this album I won't be looking to raise my awareness of her.  However, it was interesting reading about how successful it was - I'd no idea she'd done quite so well.

13/05/90 - Nice voice, shame about the songs
27/05/90 - Just no

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