Seven Straight: Whitney Houston's Unbroken Run at #1, 1985-1988
Start with the number, because the number is the story. Between October 1985 and April 1988, Whitney Houston released seven singles and every one of them went to #1 on the Hot 100. Not seven hits. Seven number ones, one after another, with nothing in between that fell short. Pop careers don't usually work like that. Even the biggest acts drop a single that stalls at #4 and everyone shrugs. She didn't give anyone a reason to shrug for two and a half years.
The setup was almost too neat. She was Cissy Houston's daughter and Dionne Warwick's cousin, raised inside gospel and soul the way other kids are raised inside a family business. Clive Davis signed her to Arista and took his time building the debut, which finally arrived in 1985. In this archive her first appearance is a modest one: "Hold Me," a duet with Teddy Pendergrass, debuted on June 9, 1984 and peaked at #46. Then "You Give Good Love," her first single under her own name, entered the chart in May 1985 and climbed to #3. A fine start. Nobody looking at a #3 peak would have guessed what came next.
The First Three: 1985 and 1986
"Saving All My Love For You" debuted on August 17, 1985 and reached the top a little over two months later, on October 26, 1985. It replaced "Take On Me" by a-ha, which had held the spot for one week, and it lasted exactly one week itself before Stevie Wonder's "Part-Time Lover" moved in. One week at #1 sounds slight. It isn't. Look at that autumn's sequence and you'll see a chart in a hurry: "Oh Sheila," "Take On Me," Whitney, "Part-Time Lover," the "Miami Vice Theme," each getting a single week before the next one shoved it aside. The top of the Hot 100 in late 1985 was a revolving door, and she got through it on a slow, grown-up ballad about an affair. That is not the kind of record that was supposed to win the week.
"How Will I Know" was the opposite kind of record, a bright, bouncy thing built for radio, and it took over on February 15, 1986. Here's my favorite detail in the whole streak. The song it displaced was "That's What Friends Are For" by Dionne & Friends, which had run four weeks at the top. Dionne Warwick, her cousin, handed her the #1 spot directly. One family, back to back, at the summit of American pop. "How Will I Know" stayed two weeks, then gave way to Mr. Mister's "Kyrie."
Then came "Greatest Love Of All," which is the one people argue about. It's a big, slow, declamatory ballad, the kind of song that either moves you to tears or sends you reaching for the dial, and in 1986 it did the former for a great many people. It reached #1 on May 17, 1986, following the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls," and held for three weeks through May 31. That was the longest stay of the entire streak. Madonna's "Live To Tell" finally ended it on June 7. Three number ones from a debut album, three different kinds of song, and she wasn't done.
The Second Album Does It Again
Second albums are where streaks go to die. The material is thinner, the pressure is worse, and the audience has usually moved on to somebody younger. Whitney's second album arrived in 1987, and its first single was "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)." It debuted on May 16, 1987 and hit #1 on June 27, 1987, taking the spot from Lisa Lisa And Cult Jam's "Head To Toe." Two weeks, June 27 and July 4, then Heart's "Alone" took over for three. That made four in a row, and the sound had changed. This wasn't a ballad. It was a shout of a record, all synthesizer bounce and that enormous voice pushed right to the front, and it made the earlier hits sound almost restrained.
"Didn't We Almost Have It All" went back to the ballad, and back to #1, on September 26, 1987. The record it replaced is worth pausing on: "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" by Michael Jackson with Siedah Garrett, which had spent one week at the top. So the biggest star of the decade returned to #1 and was moved out the following week by Whitney Houston. She held it for two weeks. Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again" followed on October 10, which tells you something about how wide the format still was in 1987, and Jackson's "Bad" got its own turn at #1 on October 24, three weeks after she left.
"So Emotional" gave her the sixth. It debuted on October 31, 1987 and reached the top on January 9, 1988, ending the four-week run of George Michael's "Faith." One week only, and then George Harrison's "Got My Mind Set On You" took the spot on January 16. Look at the neighbors again: George Michael, Whitney, George Harrison, Michael Jackson, INXS, each with a week or so. The chart was churning as fast as it had in 1985, and she was still the one who kept coming back.
The seventh and last was "Where Do Broken Hearts Go," which reached #1 on April 23, 1988, replacing Billy Ocean's "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car." Two weeks, April 23 and April 30. Terence Trent D'Arby's "Wishing Well" ended it on May 7. And that, quietly, was the end of the streak.
Where It Stopped
The record that broke the run was "Love Will Save The Day," which debuted on July 2, 1988 and peaked at #9. A top-ten hit. For most singers that's a good summer. For her, after seven straight, it read as a comedown, which tells you how badly the streak had warped expectations. "One Moment In Time" followed in September and peaked at #5, and then, in this archive, she went quiet on the Hot 100 for most of 1989, surfacing only for a duet with Aretha Franklin, "It Isn't, It Wasn't, It Ain't Never Gonna Be," which stalled at #41.
Add it up. Seven consecutive #1 singles, thirteen weeks at the top between them, spread across two albums and two and a half years. None of them stayed longer than three weeks. That's the part that gets lost when people tell the story. She didn't own the chart the way "Hey Jude" owned the autumn of 1968, parking at #1 for two months and daring anyone to move it. Her weeks were short. She kept getting them anyway. Consistency, it turns out, is its own kind of dominance, and in a decade whose top spot changed hands almost weekly it may have been the only kind available.
Think about what the streak was up against. The list of records she displaced and was displaced by reads like a roll call of the late 1980s: a-ha, Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick, Mr. Mister, Pet Shop Boys, Madonna, Heart, Michael Jackson, Whitesnake, George Michael, George Harrison, Billy Ocean, Terence Trent D'Arby. Synth-pop, arena rock, Motown royalty, a Beatle. She went through all of it with a voice and a set of songs that, on paper, belonged to an older, slower tradition. The 1980s were supposed to be about production. She made them, for a while, about singing.
The archive lets her have one more before it closes. "I'm Your Baby Tonight" debuted on October 20, 1990 and reached #1 on December 1, 1990, ending Mariah Carey's three-week run with "Love Takes Time." One week, then Stevie B's "Because I Love You (The Postman Song)" took over on December 8 and held through the last chart of the year. That makes eight number ones and fourteen weeks at the top within these pages. The symmetry is hard to miss: the singer who took the spot from her cousin in 1986 was, by 1990, taking it from the next big voice in line. Careers pass the spot along. Whitney Houston's contribution was to hold it seven times running without once letting go.
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