I'm fed up 'cause all you wanna do is criticize

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

20/11/88 : Hearsay - Alexander O'Neal


This US R&B kinda sound was very popular over here at this time and, whilst I didn't hate it, I was always intrigued as to who was actually buying it - maybe listening to a full album of it will help clear up the mystery.

Hmmm - no. It's certainly not terrible, but it's all very samey for me and massively over-produced to boot. I recognised "Criticize" (with a zee, obviously), but apart from that it just slid past me without me overly paying attention to it - except for the fact that the album is set out as taking place at a party, with various random (and extremely annoying) conversations between some of the tracks. Seriously, who thought that was a good idea? Alexander has a nice voice, but apart from that I'm very meh about the whole thing and mystified by its popularity.

And boy was it popular - we're at #14 in the charts this week on his 69th week of a 96 week run, with it having peaked at #4 in its 36th week. All most perplexing! The top five this week were Kylie, a Cliff best-of, Yazz (a new entry) and best-ofs from Dire Straits and The Human League, making this the first week this year to have only three compilations in the top five and the next highest new entry was Brother Beyond (#15).

Wikipedia tells us it's his second album and it's (over) produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, which didn't massively surprise me. There's a load of text in there explaining how the concept of the party (sorry, soiree) was actually really neat and how all the songs are really deep - you can imagine my eyes rolling as I read that. But not as much as when I read the critical reviews - apparently this is like the best album ever and the production is perfect. And, if anything, the retrospective reviews are even nicer - I wonder if we're all listening to the same album. Commercially, somewhat surprisingly, it did way better here than anywhere else, with #13 in Sweden being its next highest placing and it only got to #29 in the US - it sold more here than it did over there.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent copy for a quid but, and I find this quite hard to believe, you can pick up an unopened longbox version (the US CD packaging - I never understood why they did that) for £450! I just feel I've missed something major about this album because whilst I didn't hate it, I really don't see why everyone loved it so much - particularly over here. Weird!

13/11/88 - Better than it should be 
27/11/88 - Average material, not in the slightest bit elevated

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