Clock strikes upon the hour and the sun begins to fade

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

19/06/88 : Whitney - Whitney Houston


Our fifth visit (four albums and one single) with Whitney and I suspect we know what we're going to get - three women in a row though, so well done to the sisters!  I'm also informed that "we" owned this, bringing us to six for the year.

Yeah, no surprises here - it starts with "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" (which I'm a fan of) and track four is "Didn't We Almost Have It All" - and the pair of them give you a good idea the general flavour of the album. "Where Do Broken Hearts Go" also stood out for me as particularly high quality and Whitney and her mum Cissy do a pretty good job with "I Know Him So Well". And whilst the other tracks are generally not so well known, the quality level is pretty consistent here - nothing stands out as not belonging. Yes, a whole album of Whitney is a bit much for me but that's more my fault than hers - if you're in the market for this kind of thing then she's certainly up there with the best of them.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on her 55th week of an impressive 101 week run, with it having spent the first six weeks at the top - somewhat surprisingly, it's only been back in the charts once since, for a single week in '99. The rest of the top five were the Nite Flite compilation (finishing up a run of four weeks at the top), Tracy Chapman, Fleetwood Mac and Bros with the highest new entry being The Moody Blues (#21) - I kinda assumed they were done by now but they've had 23 charting albums over the years (from '68 to '17).

Wikipedia has a massive amount on the album (463 milliPeppers) but a lot of it was how they had real problems finding time to record it because she was so busy after the phenomenal success of her debut album. I did however learn that IWDWS(WLM) was written by Boy Meets Girl, who we mentioned on a recent album visit - interestingly each song on this album was written by a different set of people. Critically, the album was well received for its general commercial appeal but there was a general "we expected more from her" feeling to a lot of the comments, which maybe feels a bit harsh for a second album. 

They weren't wrong about its commercial appeal though - there's a whole load of firsts for it, particularly in the US. She was the first woman to have an album debut at #1 and it "managed to linger atop the chart after its debut" (Wikipedia uses weird language at times) which hadn't been done since Stevie Wonder's Songs In The Key Of Life in '76 - she spent 11 weeks at the top in total. The singles also did OK over there, with four of them getting to #1, giving her seven consecutive #1s which is apparently still a record. It was also (somewhat surprisingly for me) the first album by a black female artist to top the charts in the UK. Globally, it got to #1 pretty much everywhere and sold 20 million copies - not bad I guess!

Because there's so many copies out there, you can pick up a decent copy on discogs.com for 75 pence but if you want a Japanese promo copy it'll set you back £154.91 - I have a sneaking suspicion I'll be able to resist. It's not really my sort of thing, but I have to admit it's done well - and I've definitely got a soft spot for IWDWS(WLM).

12/06/88 - One I like, even if I don't know why
26/06/88 - A bit of a disappointment

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I have never believed that we should just stick to football

Image
The latest in an occasional series of theatre reviews... Dear England : The Olivier Theatre  Well, this is different from the usual review in several ways - I wasn't on my own (because I was accompanied by the lovely Mrs Reed) and I was in the posh seats (because I was accompanied by the lovely Mrs Reed). Somewhat surprisingly, given the high football content, this was her choice - it originally ran a couple of years ago to great reviews, but has come back updated to take into account the last European Championships.  It was also a trip to a new theatre - I'd previously been to the Lyttleton Theatre at the National, but this was my first trip to the main theatre there. And very impressive it was too as we walked down to our very well positioned, comfortable and spacious seats (Mrs Reed does need her leg room).  The stage looked impressive too - but it gave very little clue as to what we were going to get.  As the lights went down, the top ring rose to display the Old...
Read more

Left you in Catford 'Spoons and you were all alone

Image
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #47 :  Dead Channel Sky - c lipping. Clipping frontman Daveed Diggs is best known for being in the original cast of Hamilton, and for all that this album is filled with noisy industrial rap, you can easily imagine it being successfully adapted for the Broadway stage. Dead Channel Sky is set in a cyberpunk dystopia not dissimilar to the scorched-sun “real world” of the Matrix, humming with janky tech and populated with fascists and freaky hedonists. Producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes render it in acid squiggles and revving breakbeats, while Diggs delivers his mutoid poetry like a prophet jacked up on some amphetamine he’s synthesised in a backstreet lab.  Somewhat surprisingly, this is our second visit with the pretentiously named clipping. - last time I described it as "unremittingly grim", so obviously I'm super glad to be back with them. Well, that was "interesting". The first track ...
Read more

I got caught compiling my own news

Image
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #35 :  SABLE, fABLE - Bon Iver If, as Justin Vernon recently suggested, this is the last ever Bon Iver album, it’s a beautiful redemption arc: a loving send-up of his anxious, myopic sad-sack self blossoms into a radiant appreciation of possibility, sensuality, risk. Everything Is Peaceful Love has one of the year’s best refrains: “Damn if I’m not climbing up a tree right now!”, giddy with thrill and absolutely no idea of what to do when you get up there other than enjoy the view. And while there are gorgeously passionate songs here, it’s the ones about gracefully letting go of an unviable love that really underscore the admirable humility in Vernon’s bowing out. I always feel like I should enjoy Bon Iver albums more than I do - they feel like they have the ingredients I need but come across a bit detached and miserablist for me to actually want to revisit them - but The Guardian suggests there may be hope for this...
Read more