Pop Rewind: Summer Radio, 1991

Every year at this time, a number of entertainment publications ask for people’s memorable “summer songs”. Each year, the countdown of popular favourites changes and a number of them remain immortal. These include Will Smith’s (when he was still the Fresh Prince) “Summertime”, Alicia Keys’s “Fallin’” and Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love”.

But there are is also a subsection of summer songs that, if you hear them, can take you back to a very specific year, and often a time and place. These are the songs that were inescapable at the time, or were simply part of the mix you heard that year. This blog post is dedicated to jogging your memory of summer hits from twenty years ago: the year 1991.

The summer was part of the great early 90s recession in the wake of the S&L scandal, George Bush Sr. was in power, and female role models at the cinema included a kick-ass Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, and Thelma & Louise. Cell phones weighed five pounds on average and Apple was still pushing the Macintosh machine. The Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings were just about to kick off and the term “sexual harassment” became initially the catchphrase of the year, but quickly entered public lexicon and became an offence under employment law legislation. Times have indeed changed when your VCR was set to record Cheers, Roseanne and The Simpsons (although you likely are still doing that to the latter today).

For those of you old enough to remember, a number of these tracks listed were interchanged with Bryan Adams’s ubiquitous blockbuster “Everything I Do” from the Robin Hood soundtrack, Amy Grant’s successful gospel-to-pop crossover, Guns ‘n Roses’ double Use Your Illusion set and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”. While all of these artists have had long-term successful careers or at the very least remain instantly recognizable names (even Grant was referenced in a recent episode of 30 Rock), there are a number of other hits on the radio that summer that were there but you may not have remembered. They remain one-hit wonders and each has earned some recognition and fond memories. These sonic slices of joy deserve to be recognized, and some of them have sadly gone out of print. 

What’s memorable about this summer was that pop radio was carefree and joyful, and the grunge / alt-rock sound of Nirvana and Pearl Jam that came to define the 90s was still localized to Seattle, Washington. After 1991 and throughout most of the decade, summer singles were decidedly more downbeat and irony was required to turn street cred into a pop hit.

Here are five of the Blogger’s favourite singles and YouTube clips to jog your memory, or to give you a glimpse into what that summer sounded like, after the jump:

Babywoman: Naomi Campbell’s Recording Career

Album cover: "Babywoman"

Part of the fun in writing about pop art and high culture is acting as a cultural anthropologist. There are countless one-hit wonders in terms of music, books, films, and other media that at one point or another captured the public’s attention and may have been lost, forgotten, or just dimly remembered. What may have seemed like a gimmick or a high-concept lark may, in hindsight, prove to be highly-executed but misunderstood art, or just a bit of cheeky fun, as the Brits say.

Into the category of one-hit wonders falls supermodel Naomi Campbell’s 1994 album. Christened Babywoman, after one of her nicknames, Campbell’s album was an attempt to cash in on the British R&B-inflected dance music that was in vogue at the time. Artists popular at the time and to whom Campbell’s producers worked with and whose sound they emulated included M People, Eternal, Gabrielle and Soul II Soul.

The "Big Five", Vogue, January 1990

To understand the need of a supermodel to release an album, one had to recall the status in what became known as the era of the supermodel. From 1990 to about 1995, a small collection of the world’s top models gave rise to the term "supermodel". In particular, five were instantly immortalized in Herb Ritts’s iconic January 1990 cover of Vogue magazine. These women were the world’s top models, instantly recognizable and who were known by only their first names. They included Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Tatjana Patitz. Known as “the Big Five”, they were joined by Kate Moss and became collectively known as “the Big Six”. Their presence immediately elevated the tone and marketability of any product, and they were in-demand by every conceivable designer on the planet. Their status, visibility and near-ubiquity had the residual effect of helping to make fashion one of the most high-profile and serious global industries. Campbell, Evangelista and Turlington in particular were such close friends and so sought-after that they became another subset of the “Big Six”: they were known as “The Trinity”.

It was in this cultural environment that the idea of the multi-hyphenate entertainer first appeared. Although it was not uncommon for actors to also direct and write films, plays, and TV at the time, it was unusual for models to attempt a career in the arts and in business at the same time that they modeled. It was with much media attention, tempered with a good deal of curiosity, that Campbell released her debut single “Love and Tears”.