Those of us who came of age during that decade can hold this up as evidence that we were always good and fucked. When Bolton took the song back for himself, he earned the historic distinction of becoming the first chart-topper of the ’90s. In fact, Bolton had co-written the flavorless ballad “How Am I Supposed To Live Without You” many years earlier, and it had been a hit for a different singer as far back as 1983.

We should’ve never let this happen.īolton’s first #1 hit wasn’t a definitive ’90s song, either. But where guys like Foreigner’s Lou Gramm conquered the pop charts by delivering white-blues screeches over thudding power chords or glimmering keyboards, Bolton actually came to imagine himself as a soul singer, and that’s how he rose to temporary pop stardom. Bolton had served in the late-’70s hard rock trenches without any great distinction, and he always sang with the strained intensity of that era’s arena rockers. Bolton represented a wing of whitebread adult-contempo balladry that ran roughshod on the pop charts in the years before the ’90s really developed its own musical identity, but he was a relic of an earlier age.

This was not an especially inspiring start for a new decade.īolton is not a definitive ’90s figure, except insofar as he was hugely popular for a few years around the turn of the decade. And on the Billboard Hot 100, motherfucking Michael Bolton had the first #1 hit of the ’90s. At the North American box office, Driving Miss Daisy knocked Oliver Stone’s Born On The Fourth Of July out of the #1 spot and, a couple of months later, won Best Picture at the Oscars. merged to form one media mega-corporation, the FBI arrested DC mayor Marion Berry for crack, and the Panamanian narco-dictator Manuel Noriega, a former CIA informant, surrendered to the US Army. George Herbert Walker Bush was President of the United States.

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.

Mical bolton