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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top 10 Countdown Show. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a dive deep into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top 10 songs of the year according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts that were published at the time in the music industry’s leading trade mag, Billboard. This week on Chartcrush we’re counting down 1994, one of the last years before the internet transformed how we shop, get our information, and, eventually, how we mostly communicate with each other.

Only 13% of Americans were online in 1994, almost all on OSP’s: “online service providers” (CompuServe, Prodigy, DELPHI, America Online), and accessing those via (at best) 28.8 kilobit per second dial-up modems over regular phone landlines.

Websites and browsers existed, but didn’t take off ’til the free version of Netscape Navigator came out in ’95, then Microsoft’s Internet Explorer later in the year. The Web usually gets the blame for ending the American monoculture: that core set of Pop hits, movies, TV shows, opinion leaders et cetera that almost everyone knows. But in reality, the Pop culture menu was already getting pretty unwieldy by the start of the ’90s.

In music, the Sony Walkman had killed AM Top40 in the early ’80s as Pop migrated to FM, which has better sound, but just a fraction of the reach of AM, geographically. MTV held things together for a while, but by the late ’80s, Rap and Modern Rock from America’s inner cities and college campuses, respectively, were selling so many albums that Billboard had to give them their own separate charts: the first new genre charts since Mainstream Rock in ’81. And MTV created Yo! MTV Raps and, for alternative, 120 Minutes.

But the final nail in the coffin of the monoculture was in ’91 when Billboard ditched its 50 year old system of weekly retail and radio surveys and revamped the charts to reflect actual retail barcode scans and independently monitored radio spins. Turns out their survey panels had been more than a little biased in favor of Boomer artists and sounds, which had kept the illusion of a monoculture alive, but at the expense of emerging GenX sounds, Alt Rock and Hip Hop, and in Country, Neo-Trad.

All kinds of wacky leftfield stuff started making the charts after Billboard flipped that switch, but by ’94, the year we’re counting down here on this week’s Chartcrush, another chart problem was eroding the Hot100’s credibility; namely, it was still a singles chart, not a songs chart, and with the demise of the 7-inch vinyl 45 after 1988, well, who wants a cassette or CD with just two songs on it like a 45 has? Same effort as an album to get it in and out of the player, right?

I mean, labels still made them, and some folks did buy them, but by far the ones that sold best were in genres that already had a tradition of putting extended Dance or alternate mixes of tracks out on 12-inch vinyl. There the new formats were a solution, not a problem, and so-called “maxi-singles” were hot items at retail, with mixes not out anywhere else. So once the 45 went bye-bye, Hip-Hop, Dance and R&B had a huge advantage on the Hot100 over song-is-the-song genres like Rock and Country with Billboard keeping its singles-only rule.

In ’95, that really came into focus when a song hit #1 on the Pop Airplay chart for eight weeks, but was ineligible for the Hot100. The Rembrandts’ theme song from NBC’s hit TV show Friends, “I’ll Be There for You:” not out as a single. You had to buy that album. After that, people started saying the Hot100 was broken, and lots more examples over the next few years, so for ’95 ’til Billboard finally rescinded its singles-only rule at the end of ’98, our Chartcrush shows use the Airplay charts to compile our rankings.

Now ’94 did have one top 5 Airplay hit that wasn’t eligible for the Hot100, Counting Crows’ “Mrs. Jones.” That would be our #10 song if we were going by the Airplay chart, but other than that, Airplay and Hot100 were still mostly in sync in ’94.

#10 Ace of Base – Don’t Turn Around

Both year-end rankings, for example (Hot100 and Airplay), have three songs in the top 10 by the same act: needless to say a very rare occurrence! Elvis Presley in 1956, The Beatles in ’64, Bee Gees in ’78 and these guys with our #10 song in ’94. That’s it ’til Usher notched three in 2004.

But the group was a flash in the pan: everywhere one minute; where-are-they-now file before they even knew what was happening! Color Me Badd, Kris Kross, Vanilla Ice and Sinéad O’Connor: others with similar story arcs in the first half of the ’90s. At #10, here’s the first of the three hits we’ll be hearing this hour by Swedish Reggae Pop Quartet Ace of Base: “Don’t Turn Around.”

Ace of Base had a song in the top 10 on the weekly chart from October 16, 1993 to September 10, ’94, 48 weeks. That’s a record for the ’90s that not even the decade’s top Hot100 act Mariah Carey could match! “Don’t Turn Around,” their third hit on the calendar, peaking at #4 for four weeks in the Summer and the #10 song of 1994. We’ll be hearing their two even bigger smashes from earlier in the year straight ahead here on our 1994 edition of the Chartcrush Top 10 Countdown Show.

#9 John Mellencamp and Me’shell Ndegeocello – Wild Night

But first we have a bit of ’70s and ’80s throwback for you at #9: ’70s because the song was first a hit in ’71 for the guy who wrote it, Van Morrison (off his album Tupelo Honey); ’80s because it’s that decade’s top-charting Heartland Rocker, the #6 artist of the ’80s adding up all his Hot100 chart points.

The song missed the top 10 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 at #15, but only because the tail end of its chart run (15 weeks) was after their November 26 cut-off for the ’94 chart year, not counted. At Chartcrush with the benefit of hindsight and not having to get an issue done before New Years, we get to factor songs’ full chart runs, and then we rank them in whichever calendar year they racked up the most points.

He seems almost out of place on a ’94 playlist, let alone a top 10 countdown, but numbers don’t lie! In the top 10 for 13 weeks, peaking at #3 for two in September, it’s John Mellencamp, formerly John Cougar, teaming up with Neo-Soul Bassist Me’shell Ndegeocello on “Wild Night.”

There’s a harder rocking version of “Wild Night” on John Mellencamp’s ’94 album Dance Naked, also with Me’shell Ndegeocello on bass, but it was the toned down semi-acoustic version we just heard at #9 on our Chartcrush Top 10 Countdown for 1994 that was the promo single sent to radio. Mellencamp’s first top 10 since “Cherry Bomb” in ’87, and as it turned out, his last.

#8 Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories – Stay (I Missed You)

Our #8 hit also had an acoustic version on the single, dubbed the “Living Room Mix:” Rock, Pop and Country acts doing what they could in the mid-’90s to catch up in the singles market with Hip-Hop, Dance and R&B where 12-inch singles had been a thing for years. In this case, though, radio played the main version from the album, which was a soundtrack: that’s the only soundtrack cut in the countdown, and the first song by an unsigned artist ever up ’til then to hit #1. From Ben Stiller’s GenX-defining movie Reality Bites, at #8 it’s Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories, “Stay (I Missed You).”

Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories, “Stay (I Missed You)” from Reality Bites. Loeb had written the song a few years earlier, about being in love with someone who lacks the maturity to reciprocate, perfect for the movie. So when star Ethan Hawke who lived across the street from Loeb in New York, heard it and gave the demo to Ben Stiller, that was that. By the way, Hawke also shot the video for “Stay,” right in Loeb’s apartment.

#7 Mariah Carey – Hero

At #7, the Diva who was the #1 Hot100 act of the entire ’90s decade with the biggest of her three charting hits in ’94: the second hit off her 1993 blockbuster album Music Box. The first, “Dreamlover,” our #3 song of 1993. It’s her eighth #1 hit since she exploded onto the charts in 1990 with “Vision of Love,” of course, Mariah Carey, still with hubby, mentor and label CEO Tommy Mottola in ’94 doing the down-the-middle Adult Contemporary Diva thing on “Hero.”

I mentioned Ace of Base’s streak with one or more hits in the top 10 for 48 straight weeks in ’93 and ’94. Well at the same time, Mariah Carey was racking up 39 straight weeks with her string of three hits off Music Box making her second on that ranking. “Hero,” the second of those, #1 for four weeks December ’93 and January ’94 and #7 on our Chartcrush Countdown of ’94’s biggest hits.

She did even better in ’95 and ’96: 42 weeks in the top 10 with the three hits from her next album Daydream.

“Hero,” written by Mariah and collaborator Walter Afanasieff for Gloria Estefan to do for the 1992 movie Hero starring Dustin Hoffman and Geena Davis. Tommy Mottola vetoed that though, insisting Mariah to do herself, which of course she did. Luther Vandross’ “Heart of a Hero” was what wound up in the film, but that didn’t chart.

#6 Ace of Base – All That She Wants

Next, the hit that started it all for the year’s top chart act, not just in the U.S., but their first big European smash too, and the one legendary A&R man and Arista Records Founder/Honcho Clive Davis heard vacationing on a yacht in the Mediterranean in ’92. Even though it was peak Grunge back home, he knew he had to break this synthy Euro-Ragga-lite act from Sweden stateside. Hey, that’s why he was Clive Davis, right? At #6, Ace of Base again, with “All That She Wants.”

Well we’re counting down the top 10 hits of 1994 here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush and that was the second of the three Ace of Base hits in our countdown, “All That She Wants,” #6. No, she doesn’t want another literal baby; she’s just looking to move on to the next guy: common misconception with that song; they’re Swedish, English isn’t their first language!

Group founder Jonas Berggren, his singing sisters Jenny and Linn, and Ulf Ekberg all hailed from blue-collar Gothenburg on the West coast of Sweden, a Heavy Metal town, and although he wasn’t a Rocker at all, Jonas got the group’s moniker tweaking the title of Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades.”

Things got rolling for them after they sent their demo tape to Stockholm-based Producer/DJ Denniz PoP, who’d produced the record they built their whole sound around, Nigerian-Swedish Singer Kayo’s Reggae-lite “Another Mother.”

So Denniz pops the tape into his Nissan’s cassette deck for the drive home and it’s a big yawn for him. But then he can’t get the tape to eject! So two weeks of repeated listening gets him thinking about how he can mold their track “Mr. Ace” into a hit. The result? We just heard it, “All That She Wants,” their breakthrough, #1 on all the European charts. From there, Clive Davis reissues their 1992 album Happy Nation in the U.S. with two new songs as The Sign, and it goes 9-times Platinum and is Billboard‘s #1 album of ’94.

#5 Toni Braxton – Breathe Again

And speaking of Arista Records, in 1990 they put out a single by a Baltimore-area Sister Act that only barely scraped the R&B chart, but the guy who ended up running Arista in the ’00s, Producer Antonio “L.A.” Reid heard it. He and his partner Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds had just signed TLC to the Arista subsidiary they were building, a mashup of their names, LaFace Records, so they didn’t need another Girl Group, but they were in the market for a Diva to compete with Whitney and Mariah, and the oldest of the five sisters fit the bill, so it was bye bye Braxtons, the Girl Group, and hello Toni Braxton, solo act.

Her 1993 debut sold 10 million, topped the album chart and got her and LaFace three Grammy Awards including Best New Artist. At #5 it’s the second hit off the album: “Breathe Again.”

“Breathe Again,” #5 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1994’s top 10 hits. Toni Braxton’s second top 10 peaking at #3 for three weeks in early ’94 right after “Another Sad Love Song” made it to #7 in the Fall of ’93. Both those hits, written by Babyface and produced by L.A. Reid, Babyface and Daryl Simmons. Toni’s sophomore album Secrets in ’96 did even better than her debut and gave her a pair of #1s, “You’re Makin’ Me High” and “Un-Break My Heart:” one of the top Pop Divas in a decade of Pop Divas.

#4 Celine Dion – The Power of Love

And at #4 we have another, dubbed by Billboard among others the “Queen of Adult Contemporary” because no Female has scored more #1s on the AC chart all the way back to 1961, 11, and our #4 song is her third. But it’s also the first of her three #1s on the Hot100, all mid- to late-’90s.

The song had already hit #1 in the U.K. in 1985 for the Singer-Songwriter who wrote it, Jennifer Rush, and it was a top 20 AC hit for Air Supply in the U.S. that same year. Then Laura Branigan charted a version on the Hot100 in ’87 making it a bona fide modern-day standard! But it was this Singer who got to drop the mic on it when her version went to #1 for four weeks in February and March. At #4, Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love.”

The lead single from her album The Colour of My Love, Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love,” produced by David Foster fresh from doing Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” which was 1993’s biggest hit. Foster went way back with Celine to the ’80s when she was cutting albums in French and little known outside her native Quebec, and he produced half the songs on her first English album in 1990. But “Power of Love” was her first Foster-produced hit. In ’96, they did it again with “Because You Loved Me.”

#3 Ace of Base – The Sign

OK, at #3 on our 1994 edition of The Chartcrush Top 10 Countdown Show, the best-selling single of the year and the song Billboard named #1 on its year-end Hot100.

Why isn’t it #1 on our Chartcrush ranking? Well, starting with the switch to actual retail barcode scans and monitored airplay for compiling the charts in ’91, Billboard also changed its ranking method for most of its year-end charts to summing the raw sales and airplay counts that had accumulated through the year instead of a formula based on weekly chart positions. And why wouldn’t they? It’s more accurate.

That raw data, though? Locked away in Neilsen and Billboard‘s vaults so we couldn’t refer to it even if we wanted to. Actually, though, we don’t want to because one of our main value propositions here at Chartcrush is ranking every year, ’40s to the present, using the exact same ranking method that’s based on Billboard‘s published weekly charts. And since that proprietary underlying data doesn’t even exist before Billboard‘s switch to Soundscan for barcodes and Broadcast Data Systems for radio spins in ’91, ranking based on chart positions is the only way to stay consistent.

So we’re sorry Ace of Base, but there were two songs in ’94 with stronger chart runs than your biggest hit, so it’s #3, not #1. But hey, you still get an historic three songs in the top 10 on the year, same as in Billboard. It’s the new original they were working on when Clive Davis brought them to New York to brainstorm about repackaging their album for U.S. release, and they used the title for the album as well. At #3, “The Sign.”

Ace of Base’s second and biggest U.S. hit, #1 for four weeks March into April, pushed to #2 for the four weeks that R. Kelly’s “Bump ‘n Grind” was on top, and then it reclaimed the top spot for two more weeks in May, “The Sign.”

1993 was Reggae’s big year on the U.S. charts: Inner Circle’s “Bad Boys” (the them of Fox’s hit show Cops), Snow’s massive hit “Informer,” UB40’s even more massive “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Billboard unveiled a dedicated Reggae chart in ’93, and Alternative radio was on board too. So Clive Davis interrupting his Mediterranean vacation to sign Ace of Base in ’92, not as leftfield a move as it might appear at first blush.

And it sure as heck paid off. “The Sign” was everywhere in ’94. Stephanie Tanner’s Band Girl Talk even did it on ABC’s sitcom Full House, and later when Trey Parker and Matt Stone needed a song to epitomize the mid-’90s for an episode of t heir Comedy Central hit cartoon South Park, “The Sign” was a no-brainer. But Ace of Base faded fast, only making the top 10 one more time after 1994: their cover of Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” in ’98. And that was it.

For his part, though, Producer Denniz PoP got backing from Arista’s parent company BMG, built Cheiron  Studios, brought in wannabe Glam Rocker Max Martin, and together they made Cheiron the epicenter of the late ’90s Teen Pop explosion. Backstreet Boys, one of their first projects. Sadly, Denniz died of cancer in 1998 at just 35, but Max Martin, one of the top Producers of the ’00s and ’10s after crafting Britney Spears’ breakthrough “..Baby One More Time” in ’98.

#2 All-4-One – I Swear

At #2 in our Chartcrush Countdown of 1994’s top 10 hits, another David Foster production. Recall that he also helmed Celine Dion’s “Power of Love” we heard at #4 and Billboard named him the year’s top Singles Producer.

Here he is pulling a Mitch Miller (the early ’50s Producer who got Tony Bennett to do Hank Williams’ “Cold Cold Heart”) remaking a recent Country hit into a #1 Pop hit with a version of John Michael Montgomery’s “I Swear” by a Black L.A. Vocal Quartet. Atlantic Records President Doug Morris had the idea and set it all up, but Foster did produce it. At #2 it’s All-4-One’s “I Swear.”

Kentucky Singer John Michael Montgomery’s original of “I Swear” was #1 on the Country chart for four weeks and even got to #42 on the Hot100 in 1993, but All-4-One conquered the Hot100 with their version six months later, stayed at #1 all of June and July, 11 weeks, and took home the Grammy for Group Pop Vocal Performance. #2 here on our Chartcrush Top 10 Countdown for 1994.

Their next big hit was also a Montgomery cover that peaked on the Hot100 six months after the original on the Country chart: “I Can Love You Like That” in ’95. For a while it seemed like All-4-One might be the next Boyz II Men, but nope. Their last Hot100 entry stalled at #30 in ’96 while Boyz’ continued scoring massive hits…

#1 Boyz II Men – I’ll Make Love to You

…including our #1 song, their biggest hit yet, which is saying something! “End of the Road,” #1 for 13 weeks and the #1 song of 1992.

But then in ’94, after Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” replaced All-4-One on top for three weeks, their next chart topper tied Whitney Houston’s then-record of 14 weeks at #1, and it’s the #1 song of 1994 using our Chartcrush ranking method that goes by weekly chart positions.

Over at Billboard, it was #1 the last week of the ’94 chart year, November 26, with 17 weeks still to go in its run. Not counted, so it’s #3 on the year but had they been, the song likely would’ve beaten Ace of Base’s “The Sign” for the #1 spot on their year-end Hot100 as well. Again, at Chartcrush, for our rankings we factor every record’s full chart run, and at #1 for 1994? It’s Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You.”

Philadelphia’s Boyz II Men on good ‘ol Motown with the #1 song of 1994, “I’ll Make Love to You.” Billboard described their sound in ’94 as “guys next door” and a counterbalance to “the aggressive nature of this year’s music,” alluding there to the tension between R&B and Hip-Hop, which boiled over in early ’94 when a Black Women’s group barricaded a Nobody Beats the Wiz store in DC that was selling Gangsta Rap records, got big headlines, and helped initiate House and Senate hearings into Hip-Hop lyrics.

Despite all that (or maybe in part because of it), Gangsta Rap albums by Snoop Dog, Ice Cube, Easy-E and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony all made Billboard‘s top 100 albums of 1994, still with almost no airplay outside big cities, and in ’95, a Hip-Hop watershed when Billboard named Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” the #1 Hot100 single of the year.

So that’s our top 10 countdown here on our 1994 edition of Chartcrush. Again, our ranking based purely on chart positions on Billboard‘s weekly Hot100, while Billboard, starting in 1992 was adding up actual sales and radio spin units from behind-the-scenes to get their year-end rankings.

So, some differences in ranking positions within the top 10 comparing our ranking to Billboard‘s, most notably, the shakeup at #1 where we have Boyz II Men; Billboard had Ace of Base’s “The Sign.” But the songs in our top 10 vs. Billboard‘s sync up pretty well: nine in common: all except the one we have at #9. John Mellencamp’s “Wild Night,” which missed Billboard‘s top 10 at #15 on the year because they didn’t count the tail end of its run, which spilled over into their 1995 chart year.

#16 Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Sting – All for Love

Instead, at #8, Billboard had a second soundtrack cut besides Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You)” that’s in both ours and Billboard’s top 10s. From The Three Musketeers, it’s Bryan Adams, teaming with fellow Boomers Rod Stewart and Sting on “All for Love.”

Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Sting’s “All for Love,” Billboard‘s #8 song of 1994, that title riffing on the Three Musketeers’ motto “All for one, one for all.” We’ve got that one at #16 on our Chartcrush ranking for 1994.

Adams, something of a Soundtrack god in the ’90s. “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, #1 in 1991, “All for Love” in ’94, and then, “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” from the offbeat Johnny Depp rom-com Don Juan de Marco in ’95. All #1 hits.

And that’s gonna have to wrap things up for our 1994 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. If you like what you heard and you want more, check out our website, chartcrush.com, for a written transcript of the show and a link to stream the podcast version online, plus killer extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the top 10 songs. We do that for every year, ’40s to the present, and it’s all on the website. Again, that’s chartcrush.com.

I’m Christopher Verdesi, your host. Thanks for listening, and be sure and tune in again next week, same station and time, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

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