More like R&B's Craftiest Plagiarists of 1986

Put on your sexiest bathrobe and crack open a wine cooler, baby. We’re headed back to the hump-happy world of 1980’s R&B, specifically the way it sounded in the year of 1986.

I bought Billboard Hot R&B Hits 1986 because I needed Timex Social Club’s Rumors and Nu Shooz’s I Can’t Wait, the latter of which definitely doesn’t belong on here. I’m gonna go with Mikey’s theory that licensing determines what ends up on compilations like this, but man, Nu Shooz really should’ve ended up on a New Wave collection instead; even a Billboard Hot Honky Pop 1986 would’ve been fine by me. They were about as genuinely R&B as Ace Of Base, a band that sounded awfully similar to the Shooz but were whiter than my ass after a long cold winter.

If you knew very little about 80’s music and happened to hear this, you might conclude that R&B was churning out a lot of Prince, Michael Jackson, and Marvin Gaye imitators back in the day. You’d also be righter than Orville and Wilbur, since two of these tracks (Freddie Jackson’s Tasty Love and Gregory Abbott’s Shake You Down) sound like blatant rewrites of Sexual Healing, with a little of Kool & The Gang’s flair thrown in to keep the copyright enforcers off their trail. Ready For The World, as was their habit, practically rape(s) Prince’s legacy with their stained sheet ballad Love You Down, and Meli’sa Morgan, who looks like a mad scientist’s effort to cross Oprah with an 80’s metal chick on the inside photo, literally does so with her criminally unremarkable cover of the Purple One’s Do Me Baby. I’m not sure who Rene & Angela were trying to ape with Your Smile, but again, I think I hear the little man from Minnesota’s sultriness being cribbed and refashioned in a most uninspired (and uninspiring) dance pop manner.

That leaves the following artists to man the guns, and I wouldn’t say that some of them were the most qualified of candidates.

El DeBarge’s Who’s Johnny is best remembered as the theme song from that painful Short Circuit movie, and while I hear little more than an effort to dilute Michael Jackson’s pop-by-numbers with the wispy mood of Disney, I suppose it’s alright to play for the kids. Oran “Juice” Jones takes things one step stranger by pulling a Jermaine Jackson impersonation with his dark and moody The Rain, a number that I’m inexplicably fond of yet don’t remember hearing before. Rumors and I Can’t Wait still sound capital, though they hardly deserve to sit around with such riffraff as those cited above. And then there’s Billy Ocean’s brontosaurus ballad There’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry), which doesn’t wear me out quite as much here, probably because some of the other songs do that more effectively. Just goes to show how beautiful a Plain Jane can look in a crowd of Hideous Henriettas.

This disc reminds me why listening to the radio back in 1986 was such a frustrating experience. For every decent song, you had to wade through tons of formulaic crap that was blatantly lifted from the handful of legitimate superstars that actually had a vision of their own. If you’re in the same position I was when I bought it (needing a few of the tunes and happy as hell to find them together), then you should invest in all forty-three minutes of its glory. However, if you’re wanting the best that 1986 had to offer, I’d look around a little first; after all, that was the year that produced Prince’s Kiss, Tina Turner’s Typical Male, TISM’s Defecate On My Face, and oodles of other songs far more worthy than some of the derivative awfulness that populates Billboard Hot R&B Hits 1986.