Quick note: monthly rankings are based on weekly positions on the Billboard charts collected and scored. Rankings are in [brackets] and will correspond to the position on the playlist provided above. Some months not all songs are available to stream and cannot be made available for a playlist, so sometimes we pretend they didn’t exist, sorry.
Although this series is still in its infancy, this month was the first I have encountered that each week in March had a different single top the Billboard Hot 100. Gloria Estefan’s “Coming Out Of The Dark”[12], “I’ve Been Thinking About You” by Londonbeat[2], Amy Grant’s “Baby Baby”[3], and Wilson Phillips’ “You’re In Love”[1] all enjoyed a number one. However, it was “You’re In Love” that ultimately won out overall this month.
“You’re In Love” was the fourth single off of Wilson Phillips’ massive self-titled debut. There was no escaping the reach of this group. You could not avoid any of their singles on the radio or at the grocery store. There certainly was no break for me at home either, as my sister wore out her cassette of Wilson Phillips as well as Paula Abdul’s Spellbound (an album for another post in the future I’m sure).
As time has moved on, “You’re In Love” did not have the staying power as their other hits like “Hold On” and “Release Me”. I just realized as I’m writing this that the contradiction of these two titles is just too good to ignore.
One thing I’ve noticed while working on this project is how sharply the number one singles fall once they’ve been dethroned. Three weeks after starting the month atop the charts, “Coming Out Of The Dark” fell to position 28. The song will last one more week before dropping out of the top 50. Obviously the shifting in chart positions is to allow newer songs to take their place but it didn’t seem that noticeable until I began tracking.
Another thing that made me take note was the absolute chokehold Whitney Houston had on all of us back in 1991. With “Miracle”[46] making its debut she had three singles among the top 50, joining “All The Man That I Need”[44] and her version of The Star Spangled Banner[33] which was still charting highly in April.
Many songs debuted this month and several of them will enjoy much success in the months to come, so I’ll just focus on a couple that caught my attention.
Monie Love’s “It’s A Shame (My Sister)”[38] is a song I hadn’t heard in about 30 years. Sampling the song by the same name by The Spinners (which was written by Stevie Wonder), Love spits rhymes over the timeless soul guitar that still trickles through classic/oldie radio stations. Monie Love experienced moderate success and contributed vocal features for Whitney Houston (“My Name Is Not Susan” remix) and for Inner Circle (the group that you’d know that performed “Bad Boys”, the COPS theme song).
Salt-N-Pepa are currently in legal limbo with their record label and as a result has removed most of their music off of streaming services. Sadly, that means using your rotary phone and dialing up YouTube to watch/listen to “Do You Want Me”, one of their finer singles. My memory is certainly slipping as I could have sworn this came out in the mid-90s, but this did come out this month in 1991. Heavily featuring James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud”, “Do You Want Me” enjoyed a fair amount of chart time but failed to reach the heights that the following single “Let’s Talk About Sex” hit later on in the year.
Where I thought “Do You Want Me” came out later than it did, I was also shocked that “Mama Said Knock You Out”[50] by LL Cool J charted in April 1991. Again, I would have said in confidence that it came out a year or two earlier. At any rate, this behemoth of a track made a nice little dent in the Billboard Hot 100 for a few weeks. It’s important to note that while this track didn’t reach the top of the charts, the success that “Mama Said Knock You Out” was massive for a rapper.
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