![]() ![]() (She should’ve gotten a songwriting credit for adding the “Oh Mickey, you’re so fine” bit, the part of the song that everyone remembers, but she didn’t.) Thus, “Kitty” became “Mickey.” But Toni Basil took “Kitty,” switched its genders around, and added a stupidly effective cheerleader-chant refrain. Their giddy 1979 stomper “Kitty” was not one of those hits. (They also wrote Exile’s 1978 American #1 “ Kiss You All Over.”) One of the Chapman/Chinn song factory’s clients was Racey, a sort of glam/power-pop hybrid who had a few UK hits in the late ’70s. Their highest-charting single, 1980’s “Whip It,” peaked at #14.) But for the first single, Basil covered a song from the very end of the UK’s bubble-glam era.īefore Mike Chapman became a chart-topping producer for American bands like Blondie and the Knack, Chapman and his songwriting partner Nicky Chinn cranked out hits for UK glam-pop groups like the Sweet and Smokie. ![]() ![]() At the time, Basil was dating Devo’s Gerald Casale, and the album features three Devo covers, with Devo working as Basil’s backing band. Word Of Mouth is a pretty good piece of twitchy, hook-centric new wave. When she recorded her first album, 1981’s Word Of Mouth, Basil actually directed videos for every song on the LP. Given that Toni Basil’s “Mickey” fucking rules, MTV did the world a favor.īy 1980, then, Toni Basil was comfortable singing, dancing, acting, choreographing, and filmmaking. And it created an environment where a song like Toni Basil’s “Mickey” could become a smash. It largely booted sleepy adult-contempo ballads from their place of dominance. MTV introduced bright, zippy new sounds into an American mainstream. And yet this new development was a unilaterally good thing, at least from a chart watcher’s decades-later perspective. ![]() #THE MONKEES BEST OF ZIPPYSHARE MOVIE#It damaged entire generations’ attention spans, and it went on to unleash a great many plagues upon the world: Reality TV, the institution of spring break, Pauly Shore’s movie career. MTV was shallow and coked-out and, at least at the beginning, racist as all hell. The advent of MTV is one of the great inflection points of pop music history, like the sudden boom of disco or the advent of the streaming era. Record-label execs must’ve been staggering around, dizzily struggling to process the new reality, learning that everything they’d known was now wrong. This choreographer managed to pull off this coup thanks to a flashy, memorable music video that actually predated MTV itself. Most of America had no access to cable in the early ’80s, but within a year and a half of MTV’s first day on the air, a middle-aged choreographer could score a #1 hit with a chirpy, revved-up novelty that a whole lot of people assumed was about anal sex. But then, in August of 1981, MTV launched. At the dawn of the ’80s, most of the acts who hit #1 were established stars of one sort or another - Michael Jackson, Queen, Pink Floyd, Blondie - with occasional flukey late-disco one-offs like “ Funkytown” sneaking through. It took a little while, but the arrival of MTV wreaked absolute fucking bedlam on the pop charts. 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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