1992’s Matters of the Heart, its prospects augured by its generic title (when aren’t things matters of the heart?), bombed.įor her fourth album Chapman needed a jolt of electrical shockers. Crossroads, the 1989 followup to her beloved eponymous debut, tread water. Simply put, nothing she released after “Fast Car” - a change of pace and poised gesture of empathy in the Steve Winwood and Def Leppard-dominated summer of 1988 - stuck. In 1995, Tracy Chapman found herself in the limbo inhabited by former multiplatinum artists, uncertain whether the next album that barely ships low six figures will cause her label to drop her. Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly,” Jann Arden’s “Insensitive,” Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby,” Goo Goo Dolls’ “Name,” Natalie Merchant’s “Carnival,” among others, blanketed airwaves that spring only Carey’s perennial topped the chart, but top 40 radio acted as if the others had or would.Īmong the beneficiaries of this approach was a thirty-one-year-old Grammy winner for Best New Artist who seven years later saw her career given a momentum that her most famous hit could not have anticipated. Thanks to the industry’s waning interest in the single, airplay made sure that a dozen songs were blasting in the car all the time. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.ġ996 was the year when pop radio practiced death by saturation. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. I don’t want to hate songs to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance.
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