Weekend Diversion: 1983, Part 2

Back again with the second installment in a series of “Weekend Diversion” posts highlighting the Billboard “Hot 100” Number One pop songs of 1983. This week this series catches up: April 16, 1983 was the last week at Number One for today’s second video.

The video up top is today’s first song, “Baby, Come to Me” by Patti Austin and James Ingram, which was Number One in the USA February 19 and 26, 1983. The song was originally released in April 1982, and was on the “Hot 100” for only four weeks, peaking at Number 73 on May 8. The song was re-released in October 16, 1982 after it featured on US TV soap opera, General Hospital, and then hit Number One on February 19, 1983. All up, it spent seven months on the charts.

The song was on Patti Austin’s fourth studio album, Every Home Should Have One, which was released on September 8, 1981. Today, Austin is 72 years old. James Ingram had 40 Top 40 hits on the “Hot 100” between the early 1980s and early 1990s. Ingram died of brain cancer on January 29, 2019.

In addition to it being Number One in the USA for two weeks in 1983, “Baby, Come to Me” hit Number 38 in Australia, 3 in Canada, 9 in New Zealand, and 11 in the UK. No information on certifications was readily available.

Next up, it’s a song that, as the saying goes, needs no introduction: "Billie Jean" by superstar (or, maybe, super-superstar…) Michael Jackson, which was Number One for seven consecutive weeks from March 5 to April 16, 1983:



Where to even begin with this one?! Well, how about game-changing? Or, maybe revolutionary? The song was the second single from his sixth studio album, Thriller, which itself is the best-selling album of all time. The seven singles from that album—out of the nine tracks in total—were all Top 10 hits, with “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” both going to Number One, which helped the album become a mega best seller—in fact, in 2021, RIAA certified Thriller as being 34x Platinum.

The music video, too, was revolutionary, for a lot of reasons, not the least because it was originally rejected by MTV because they felt that black music didn’t fit in with their programming. Walter Yetnikoff, then president of Jackson's record company, CBS Records, threatened to pull all CBS music from MTV and go public “and fucking tell them about the fact you [MTV] don't want to play music by a black guy.” MTV caved and the music video debuted on MTV on March 10, 1983. It went on to become one of the most lauded and popular music videos of all time, and was, among other things, the first 1980s music video to achieve one billion views on YouTube (it’s currently at around 1.3 billion).

The director of the music video was Irish-British filmmaker, Steve Barron, who made many hit videos, including Toto’s “Africa”, which featured in last week’s “Weekend Diversion”. He also made the famous video for the 1985 hit by Norwegian band a-ha, “Take On Me”. The video for that song is currently sitting at 1.6 billion views. It turns out that he made a lot of music videos I liked.

I bought Thriller soon after it was released, and I saw videos of the album’s hits in gay bars in Chicago that featured music videos (at one point there were three such bars that specialised in music videos, and a couple others that played music videos at least sometimes). However, I wasn’t exactly a huge fan of “Bille Jean”. That was mostly because of the saturation airplay all the singles got on radio (which I listened to in those days), but I was also more into electronic 80s music, especially the sort usually called “alternative”, and, for me, “Bille Jean” seemed “too mainstream”, something that’s funny to me now.

In the years that followed, the media circus around Jackson moved from bizarre to serious, and he was sued over allegations of sexual abuse. For many people, including me, it started to feel a bit weird to play his music, not the first or last time that’s happened as an artist publicly faced some negative issue or other. However, for me, it wasn’t about controversies I didn’t know how to evaluate fairly, it was that he seemed so sad, and because of that, playing his music made me feel uncomfortable. Besides, by the 1990s, I’d moved on from Thriller, and never really got into his later music. By the time he died from “acute propofol intoxication” on June 25, 2009, I hadn’t listened to his music in quite some time (maybe many years?), unless I happened to have the radio on and one of his songs was broadcast, though by 2009 it was already quite rare for me to listen to the radio. Even so, Michael always seemed to be around somewhere—until he wasn’t.

I sometimes wonder what he would’ve created if he’d been happy his whole life, but maybe his greatest work was only possible because of his pain? In any case, I very well remember the energy and excitement associated with the release of Thriller and its many hits, including “Billie Jean”. I can remember those days when it was nearly impossible to go out in public without hearing one of his songs somewhere, and I’ve never really experienced anything quite like that again. There just aren’t any other artists or pop records that have been as large a part of the background music in my life.

No “Weekend Diversion” post about pop music would be complete without a mention of chart performance: In the USA, “Billie Jean” hit Number One and is certified as Diamond (10 million, including both sales and streaming). It was Number 4 in Australia (9x Platinum, both sales and streaming), 9 in Canada (2x Platinum, based on shipping only), 9 in New Zealand (Gold, sales only), and 8 in the UK (3x Platinum, both sales and streaming). Side note: This is the first time I’ve seen Wikipedia list certifications that specifically state it includes combined sales and streaming, though it’s probably been the case for a very long time—maybe I just never noticed?

In their own way, both of these songs were ubiquitous in my early 1983 life, though obviously “Billie Jean” was far more so. Be that as it may, I seldom think of either song (or the ones in last week’s post, either, for that matter). That’s not true, though, about other songs yet to come in this series.

Next week, even more of 1983.

Previously in the “Weekend Diversion – 1983” series:
Weekend Diversion: 1983, Part 1