Wait, What?: The Forgettable Year Of Pop Music That Was 1990

Okay… the title is a massive exaggeration.

“Another Day in Paradise” and goddamn “We Didn’t Start The Fire” were lucky enough to have staying power after the 80s ended.

But while one half of 1990’s Hot 100 hits were pretty much great, the second half was full of very, very forgettable music.

Looking at the Hot 100 for that year made me realize that 1990 had it worse than 1974:

Whereas 1974 just had bad pop music, 1990 had forgettable ones.

They’re not good, neither are they bad, but people pretty much just forgot half of the hits the moment the clock hit January of 1991.

In fact, it had so much forgettable pop hits sandwiched between the actual memorable tracks of the year that three of the songs on that list don’t have actual Wikipedia pages at all!

Not to mention: the year was so drenched in controversy and overexposure that it makes sense to justify it as a terrible year for pop music. (There were some good dance tracks, though…)

Buckle up, because we’re going to the early 90s and looking back at the top 10 least remembered pop hits of 1990!

Oh, look: A former Number Ones entry. Now, let me tell you a little story about the early 90s.

Before this groundbreaking technology known as “SoundScan” was introduced to the Hot 100, Billboard had to tabulate their charts manually by getting their chart data from record stores. And because the 80s were a good time for any and every hit song to rise on top and reign supreme above others, it made sense why that hype would fade after the 80s fog receded.

That, of course, made way for barely-there, uninteresting ballads made by freestyle acts that would never have any cultural footprint outside of “it hit #1 on the Hot 100”. No one wanted that shit.

When the 90s were cleaning up the scraps of the 80s, it made way for a few leftover freestyle acts that knew the #1 spot was up for grabs because monoculture had died by then, and it was free real estate for record labels that wanted their signature acts’ ballads to hit the #1 spot.

Of course, ballads by Latin freestyle acts were what Billboard believed the people wanted in the early 90s, so a ton of the entries on this list will mainly be, you guessed it…freestyle ballads.

It sounds like a song that’d soundtrack a Jigsaw test where the goal is to not die from boredom. That, combined with the garbage-ass reverb, makes you wonder why it was forgotten the moment it left #1.

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Surprise, surprise. Another Latin freestyle hit. At this point, I might as well fill the entire list with ballads made by Latin freestylers and no one would notice.

It’s nothing dandy; it’s not Whitney Houston or anything, it is just plain boring. There’s nothing that makes it stand out. In fact, this is such a generic description of half the hits that WILL appear on this list that it might as well be used for every entry that this article will deal with.

Okay, the song isn’t that bad. It’s just a ballad filled with pure nothing, but at least the people who made it weren’t Nelson:

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That’s right. You read that correctly. Lou Gramm of Foreigner is on this list.

Like almost every entry on this list, Wikipedia has little to no information on the song other than just the song’s release and chart positions.

• No composition.
• No background behind the song’s making.
• Nothing.

That’s how you prove it’s a forgotten hit.

I wasn’t really around to hear this hit in real time let alone know this hit exists. In fact, it has 8 million streams on Spotify as of today, just 20 million less than Lou’s most-streamed single, Midnight Blue. By the way, the song is not dogshit. It’s pretty decent, but even with that compliment, at its best, the song is still forgettable.

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Forgotten freestyle ballad #3.

Compared to the rest of the freestyle ballads, the song is built around an electric guitar instrumental, making it stand out from the rest of the other freestyle tracks that released that year. However, that attempt at diversity to break the monotony failed hard and it ended up being forgotten anyways.

I, do, however give them points for trying something different than all the other forgotten songs on this list.

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Finally, an actual dance track on this list.

Unlike all the other dance acts who had to resort to making tedious, boring-ass ballads to vacate the top 10, A’me Lorrain managed to be forgettable while still having a vibrant dance track.

…I feel like I’m too harsh on every song that appears on this list, but this song is kinda decent…

No, just kidding. It sucks.

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Okay.

Remember when I said “the year was so terrible for any popular songs that three of the songs on the Year-End Hot 100 don’t even have a Wikipedia page of its own”? Well, I checked the Top 10 list and it seems to be the same case for this one.

Anyways, we’re getting to the big leagues: because this song has 341,480 streams for a song that was a top 10 hit in 1990. More will follow in this list.

Perfect Gentlemen seem to be this proto-Another Bad Creation entirely children vocal group that made it big with, you guessed it, a ballad. No one even remembers this shit. This song sounds so 90s, and that isn’t a compliment.:

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Now, you may be wondering why a song this obscure is this low on the list. Well, I don’t know either.

But I decided to ultimately rank it at #4 anyways because I want to.
This synthetic, tinny Jordan Knight-written ballad sounds like it wants to be obscured so badly for being this boring. But is the song even that good? No. Not really.

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This guy came around at the imperial era of new jack swing and immediately disappeared off the face of the Earth, leaving no cultural footprint this quickly.

Even Bobby Brown, an artist who will eventually appear on this list, managed to stick around this long in the year of obscure music!
And like the song Bobby’s been featured on, it’s a new jack swing track featuring a short rap verse and the theme of wooing a girl.

The song isn’t that bad, you could argue that it’s one of the better memory-holed tracks of 1990.

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Weirdly, the BIGGEST pop act of 1990 managed to have one of the most memory-holed hits of the year.

And that’s saying a lot for the year that was entirely built on now-obscure tracks!

And you couldn’t even call it obscure because it has more streams than almost every song I’ve ever put on this list, with 24 million as of today!

The song is….surely something. It’s not good, or bad, but it doesn’t make me angry as hell or upset. It seems to be doing something. I don’t think it deserves to be forgotten, but it sounds like it was doomed into obscurity the moment it left.

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And now…the most forgotten hit of the 90s.

• It has less than a million streams.
• It has less than 601K views on YouTube as of this list.
• And the only thing remarkable about the record is that it has a rap verse, one of the first in Hot 100 history, even.

In fact, it’s the first rap verse that took a song to #1 on the chart that didn’t come out of the mouth of a fictional, animated talking cat!

Some guy on Reddit said that “this song could play in a random grocery store at 10:35 PM and [he] wouldn’t know who [the f***] it was”.

See? That’s how forgettable this song is! But then again, I wasn’t really around to witness “She Ain’t Worth It” at the height of its fame (I doubt anyone born when it was were able to).

The song just disappeared out of nowhere after having 2 weeks on top of the #1 spot.

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