It had already spun off five singles, and three of them had gone to #1. I thought this was gonna be good.'” But in November of 1989, Abdul’s Forever Your Girl went quadruple platinum. I almost sent that one in with an apology - literally. Leiber later told Songfacts that he was both “embarrassed” and “bummed” at how the song came out: “I was really sure that I had completely missed the mark. Nobody expected “Opposites Attract” to become a single at all. At that point, there was no rapping cat on the song. Paula Abdul couldn’t return to Minneapolis to record, so Leiber went to LA, and he took out half of the Wild Pair’s vocals and put in Abdul’s parts. (Prince had originally written “ Kiss” for Mazarati before taking it back for himself.) Mazarati broke up after their 1989 sophomore album flopped, but DeShazer and Gunn kept singing together as the Wild Pair, and Leiber recorded them singing the entire song. Both DeShazer and Gunn had been members of Mazarati, a band led by Prince’s Revolution bassist Brownmark. Leiber recorded a demo with Bruce DeShazer and Marv Gunn, a duo who called themselves the Wild Pair. Initially, Leiber didn’t think of “Opposites Attract” as a duet, but fellow Minneapolis musician David Z, the guy who produced the Fine Young Cannibals’ “ She Drives Me Crazy,” suggested that the song might work better that way. Corfield told Leiber to put the song together as quickly as possible.
At the time, Abdul was still a choreographer trying her hand at a singing career, and her album was not a huge priority for Virgin, so that pitch was good enough. He played Corfield the beat that he’d just made over the phone, and he said that he had a possible song called “Opposites Attract,” a title he’d seen on an old paperback while browsing a used bookstore. During that phone call, Leiber pretty much came up with the pitch for “Opposites Attract” on the spot.
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Leiber had just bought a brand new MPC drum machine, and he was fooling around with it, trying to figure out how to program beats, when Abdul’s A&R rep Gemma Corfield called him and asked him for one more track. He’d already written two songs for Paula Abdul’s debut album, including the title track and eventual chart-topper “ Forever Your Girl,” before coming up with “Opposites Attract” at the last minute. Oliver, the son of legendary pop songwriter Jerry Leiber, had come up in the Minneapolis funk scene. “Opposites Attract” came from Oliver Leiber. Maybe a work of pure, overwhelming silliness helped change the course of pop history. So maybe this dancing feline loverman was a pivotal figure in mass acceptance of rap music. Rappers like Tone Lōc and Young MC had made big hits in 1989, but they hadn’t been all the way to the top. At the dawn of the ’90s, rap music was still just starting to break through on the Hot 100. Depending on how you define rapping, MC Skat Kat may have also been the first being, animated or otherwise, to rap on a #1 hit. But Skat Kat was the first cartoon character to rap on a #1 hit. Kirsher went on to establish the Archies as a studio act that couldn’t rebel because the characters weren’t real people. But the Monkees hated how they weren’t allowed to choose their own songs or play on those songs, and they eventually found a way to oust Kirshner from their show.
Don Kirsher had previously overseen the music on The Monkees, and he’d helped turn the actual Monkees into an act that was briefly bigger than the Beatles.
The Archies were the animated stars of The Archie Show, the adaptation of the Archie comics that had already been coming out for decades.
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After their novelty-hit success, the Chipmunks went on to star in comic books, cartoons, and a series of bafflingly popular CGI/live-action movies with David Cross in them.Īlong those same lines, the biggest hit of 1969 was “ Sugar, Sugar,” an insistent bubblegum banger credited to the Archies. Bagdasarian had discovered that he could speed his voice up on tape and make it sound squeaky and irritating, and this somehow led to a 60-year career for his characters Alvin, Simon, and Theodore. David Seville was really a Broadway actor named Ross Bagdasarian, and the Chipmunks were his creations. Way back in 1958, one of the very first chart-toppers on the newly introduced Billboard Hot 100 was “ The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late),” the novelty song credited to the Chipmunks and David Seville. MC Skat Kat wasn’t the first cartoon character to appear on a #1 hit. 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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