Bon Jovi had just made a world-crushing breakthrough with Slippery When Wet, and when they followed that album up with 1988’s New Jersey, they did everything they could to re-bottle that lightning. You can’t blame Bon Jovi for putting out a song like “I’ll Be There For You” when they did. But in the context of its moment, there was nothing exciting about the song. “I’ll Be There For You,” Bon Jovi’s fourth and final #1 hit, is a perfectly satisfying arena-rock jam, a song that can still incite mass singalongs. The band was still hugely popular, and they were still cranking out hits more reliably than their poodle-haired peers, but they weren’t surfing on the zeitgeist anymore. In that context, less than three years after their big breakthrough, Bon Jovi sounded tired. Bobby Brown and Paula Abdul and Roxette and Fine Young Cannibals and a reenergized Madonna all made #1 hits with songs that felt fresh and new and exciting. Many of those great songs spoke of changing times. There are some deeply wack chart-toppers in that era, but there are plenty of great songs, too. New and different sounds - new jack swing, house, rap - started making serious inroads into pop consciousness. One of those beautiful moments came along in the first half of 1989. But when those moments happen, they’re beautiful. You can’t forecast them, and you don’t know when they’re going to arrive. Those moments of pop inspiration, where the charts suddenly seem fully energized, happen for all sorts of different reasons. Maybe a few one-hit wonders channel fresh sounds into mass entertainment and then disappear, their jobs done. Maybe a few established stars switch their styles up and find new life. Sometimes, we get these brief and glorious flurries of action and activity, where ideas that have spent years building under the surface suddenly break through and take over. Other times, though, pop music moves fast. That breakthrough, combined with the similarly game-changing success of Janet Jackson’s Control, signaled that a whole new generation was about to start deciding the fate of the Hot 100. After Bon Jovi, Whitesnake and Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard and Poison all had their own #1 hits, and a new era began. Their monster hit Slippery When Wet blew the doors open for glam metal and for a particular kind of rowdy energy that simply hadn’t had a real shot to conquer the Hot 100 before. This was an era of gloopy balladry and self-satisfied smarm, of Starship and Mr. ![]() That, I would argue, is what was happening in 1986, before Bon Jovi came blasting through with “ You Give Love A Bad Name.” That year, most of the dominant pop hits were overblown treacle. ![]() Sometimes, the pop charts go through periods of deep, stultifying stasis, just waiting for something new to come along and kick some dust up. ![]() In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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