Throwing back to the week of April 3, 2004, we find Usher’s ‘Yeah!’ in the middle of its 12-week run at #1. In the second spot is another repeat, Chingy’s ‘One Call Away.‘
That brings us to #3, where 17-year-old rapper J-Kwon’s ‘Tipsy,’ an ode to underage drinking, casual sex, and misogyny camped out on its way to an eventual peak at #2. This was J-Kwon’s first and only hit, with follow-up single ‘You & Me’ topping out at #58.
I’ve gone 5,753 songs of the day and nearly 16 years without featuring an R. Kelly song, but that streak ends today. Long before the R&B singer was convicted of child sexual abuse, racketeering, and sex trafficking, he had a #2 hit the week of April 2, 1994.
‘Bump N’ Grind,’ in hindsight, reads a bit like a confession. “My mind is telling me no, but my body’s telling me yes,” he says in the song’s intro. “Baby, I don’t want to hurt nobody.”
Footloose (1984) is one of the great soundtrack movies, a kind of film we were treated to far more often in the 80s. Think Top Gun, Flashdance, Dirty Dancing, and any number of John Hughes movies.
Six of this soundtrack’s nine songs reached Billboard’s Top 40, and three reached the top ten. Of those, two made it to #1 — Deniece Williams’ ‘Let’s Hear it for the Boy‘ and the title track by Kenny Loggins, today’s featured Throwback Weekend song.
When Cher was last featured on Throwback Weekends, it was for her #1 hit ‘Half-Breed,’ which topped the charts in October of 1973. The video for that song found her dressed in a bikini and a Native American headdress.
Given that history, I was a little nervous when I saw that her next release, which reached #1 the week of March 23, 1974, was titled ‘Dark Lady.’ Fortunately, though the no-longer-acceptable word “gypsy” does appear a few times in the song, it’s nowhere near as bad as I feared.
The week of March 21, 1964, saw The Beatles dominating the top of the Billboard Hot 100. ‘She Loves You‘ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand‘ occupied the #1 and #2 spots, respectively, and a re-release of ‘Please Please Me‘ — which had bombed in the U.S. a year earlier — made it to #3.
In the #4 slot that week was ‘Dawn (Go Away)’ by The Four Seasons, a song that peaked at #3 during a six-week stint in the top ten. During that span, it was never topped by anything but a Beatles song.
