Heard ya didn’t miss me, well I’m back!!!!

1)Ace Of Base - “The Sign”
SONG: We all remember this, but I didn’t know it was at the very top of that year. Okay, the shift between the minor-key synth riff and the major-key chorus is admittedly sort of slightly artistically valid and unusual for a hit like this. Give them that. Their Swedish accents mysteriously pop up in the final verse. Drum sound is one rung up the ladder from “Casio keyboard.”
VIDEO: Blonde girl looks about ten years older than the other three. Dude with flat-top has stern look on his face. Everybody does silly hand gestures and dance moves that are silly silly silly. Gratuitous edgy shots of people making out. Some weird ankh symbol floating around.

2)All-4-One - “I Swear”
SONG: It’s preferable to hear young black guys singing this than Michael Murphy Montgomery or whatever the hell his name was. The original country song is absolutely putrid, the biggest stinker in 1990s country music that isn’t “Achy Breaky Heart,” I hated that damn thing when I was 9. Too bad they used the icky Modern EGP adult contemporary keyboard tone, which doesn’t improve things much.
VIDEO: Los Angeles cityscape shot through dusty brown filter that makes me want to spray the screen with Windex, that’s an Ebert paraphrase. I keep waiting for the bus from that same year’s Speed to go blazing past.

3)Boyz II Men - “I’ll Make Love To You”
SONG: Plain vanilla adult contemporary R&B ballad. I wonder if the “take off your clothes and throw them on the floor” lyrics were anything controversial back in 1994. I can’t think of anything else to say about this song.
VIDEO: The acting bit at the beginning takes up like 40 seconds. I should note at this point that it really did seem like all traces of the 1980s were eradicated from music videos, I was seeing stuff like that up through 1993.

4)Celine Dion - “The Power Of Love”
SONG: Boring adult contemporary monster ballad. I suppose it took skill to sing it at least. This is a song covered by several other people, but I’m not familiar with Jennifer Rush or Air Supply or anything like that. At least she doesn’t do any of those silly
VIDEO: Nondescript stuff, just Celine sensually hugging herself in some fancy mansion somewhere. Blue-filtered close-ups of her eyes. Nothing terribly steamy.

5)Mariah Carey - “Hero”
SONG: Boring adult contemporary monster ballad. Wait, no, there’s no “monster,” it’s just piano. Maybe a little louder towards the end. I suppose it took skill to sing it at least. There’s no chance in hell that I will ever voluntarily listen to this song ever again or even remember how it goes. It’s as vanilla as it gets.
VIDEO: Just her on a stage. Her hair looked nice. (Walter White voice) So there’s that.

6)Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories - “Stay (I Missed You)”
SONG: Boring simple acoustic singer songwriter pop-rock song sung in a needy voice. Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville blows this shit off the fucking stage.
VIDEO: I like her glasses. Video is just her walking around an apartment. She’s not very good at acting for the camera.

7)Toni Braxton - “Breathe Again”
SONG: The “breathe again, breathe again” chorus is okay, probably because it reminds me of a few Cocteau Twins songs. Too bad you only hear it like twice in the song. Bland otherwise. Sorry, Toni Braxton fans on Music Babble, but today is not your day.
VIDEO: Black and white. Toni in a wedding dress running around a courtyard with a Shining type hedgemaze, albeit a swirly one.

8)Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Sting - “All For One”
SONG: From the Disney Three Musketeers movie that I haven’t watched in about 32 years. Wait, I mistakenly thought “All For One” was the name of the group…no, that was those other guys from earlier. Stupid of me huh? I remembered the song even less than the movie, because it’s just more adult contemporary. It doesn’t have interesting verses, nor an interesting chorus. Holy shit was this a year for bland pop ballads. Maybe I should do a recent year next instead rather than wade through ten more of these fucking things, I’m really starting to regret these posts.
VIDEO: First minute is bad acting with Rod pretending to call Sting “String.” The rest is the guys’ faces, with Bryan Adams’ acne scars getting seemingly the least face time, even less than Rod Stewart’s bronzed snout. Rod wasn’t even 50 in this video, I guess I’d always thought of him as old.

9)Ace Of Base - “All That She Wants”
SONG: After all those hideously boring adult contemporary ballads I was actually grateful to hear this fake lily-white reggae song with crummy fake percussion that I’d been hearing in supermarkets for years without even knowing it was the same people as “The Sign.” I like the note they hit when they sing the word “tan.”
VIDEO: Crappy nostalgic yellow filter over the camera to make it look like Ace Of Base survived the Dust Bowl or something. Nothing interesting happens in it. At least I could laugh at the video for “The Sign.”

10)Ace Of Base - “Don’t Turn Around”
SONG: Another fake lily white reggae song, in fact it just sounds like a crummy, inferior version of the one I just got done listening to, right down to the similar chorus–I think that Nickelback rewriting their own hit was the most egregious example of this, but I’m also reminded of how Rick Astley’s second biggest hit, “Together Forever,” has the same chord sequence in the chorus as his first biggest hit, you know the one. And these two songs landed right next to each other?!? What were the odds?!?
VIDEO: Nondescript. The band sitting in a house looking laughably forlorn.

LOOKING AT THE REST OF THE CHART:
The only thing in the top 50 that I’m genuinely a fan of is Beck’s “Loser,” straight at #50. I am extremely grateful NOT to listen to “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” or “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That.” It would have been hilarious if my actual pick for the best album of 1994–Hex by Bark Psychosis–had been a “hit.” The highest ranking actual “rock” song by an actual 90s rock act is “Shine” by Collective Soul, which I guess I can stand.