Ooh, baby - gonna get to you, girl

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

12/08/90 : Step By Step - New Kids On The Block

Oh good - they're back.  I'm not expecting this to be as bad as our previous visit, but I also know this isn't the one that "everyone" loved so I'm expecting it to be still quite poor.  And no, we never owned it (6/21)

Well, it's not as bad as their atrocious debut, but it's still pretty much irredeemably shit.  I was actually quite impressed that "Happy Birthday" managed to stand out as being worse than the rest of the album, but then "Stay With Me Baby" comes along and blows even that away.  It features Donnie singing in a fake Jamaican accent - even back then this was, at best, a dubious idea but I suspect that any potential racial offence will be vastly overshadowed by the artistic offence it causes.

This week we're at #3 in the charts on its eightth week of a heinously long 31 week run, with it having peaked at #1 in its debut week.  The rest of the top five were Elton John, Pavarotti, Madonna and Phil Collins and the highest new entry is Vixen, all the way down at #20.

Wikipedia tells me this is their fourth album and it had advance sales of over two million copies, so it was always going to do well - and it did, getting it to #1 in the UK and US.  The title track was also wildly successful, getting to #1 in the US and selling three million copies globally.  What Wikipedia doesn't do is explain what was going on with that Jamaican accent...

"Customers also listened to" Hanson, Five, Backstreet Boys and *NSync - what a great collection of artists, eh?  But NKOTB are very close to the bottom for me (potentially Five are worse) and while this isn't their worst album, that's not in any way a recommendation.

05/08/90 - A peculiar album
19/08/90 - An enjoyable revisit

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