Agreed. The Rick Astley song really, truly is one of the not-so-bad ones from this list (I love UB40’s version of “Red Red Wine,” but it’s not from 1988). If anyone votes for “Never Gonna Give You Up”, I WON’T assume it’s a joke.
I reluctantly voted for “Sweet Child of Mine” – it’s not a terrible song, and it speaks both to the hair metal of the years immediately before, and to some degree to the Seattle-based stuff of the years immediately following.
GAH! Too much to choose from! I like too many of these songs!
I finally went with “Father Figure.” It reminds me of summer nights when I was a small SpazKitten.
Huh, I was wondering what year it was that I completely lost touch with the American cultural gestalt and it turns out it was 1988. Sure, I remember the novelty ear worm songs like “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” , “Kokomo”, and “Red, Red, Wine”, but not a single song on this list resonates with me. I’m sure I haven’t even heard 80% before. About all this year gave us in term of lasting culture was the Rickroll.
The songs I have heard of seem too slight to be worth a vote. I think I'm going to abstain.
So, what else was going on in far away 1988? Well, 30 megabyte hard drive prices had fallen to an affordable $300.00. The personal computer battles were still anybody's game -- Apple vs IBM PCs running OS/2 or DOS. You could, as I recall, build a '286 PC homebrew for a couple of thousand dollars running at an awesome 10MHZ. If you had the cash, you could upgrade to a 32 bit '386. America Online came into existence in competition with CompuServe. To connect to these services you could use your 300 baud modem, or possibly one of the blazing fast 1200 baud modems (but CompuServe charged more for the 1200 baud, as I recall).
How about everybody’s favorite, internet porn? Well, Usenet had you covered. If you had access to Usenet, you could go to, I forget, maybe rec.erotica.binaries or something like that and download images encoded using programs like binhex. There was a limit to the message size in Usenet articles, so you often had to cut and paste the ascii text from several messages together. And if the file wasn’t corrupted and you did everything right, in just five or six minutes, you could be perving out to some low resolution scanned image. (Remember, a 750K image would chew up a substantial portion of your hard drive.) The future was a great place to be. If you were interested, you could also exchange programs and utilities in the same tedious way.
By now, everyone had VCRs. You could rent movies at these things called video stores and people would while away entire evenings wandering down the aisles trying to find something interesting.
The CD vs vinyl debates were still raging, but you could see the writing on the wall. You could buy a Sony Discman for a couple of hundred bucks and listen to high quality music at your desk. If you wanted to make mix tapes though, you still needed cassettes. CD writers wouldn’t be affordable for the average person for almost another decade. Almost all records stores now had CD and Vinyl sections and the vinyl sections were slowly shrinking.
The Wiki article notes that the original single cut left out the rap section, whereas the '88 release left it in. Maybe the label figured that this rap thing all the ‘urban’ kids were crazy about was starting to take off and they may as well get in on the ground floor?
I’m not sure if this is the longest run between a song’s recording and its hitting #1, but if it isn’t it must be darn close. (Elton John had #1s in the '90s with “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” and “Candle In the Wind” which had both been released 20-25 years prior, but those were both re-recordings, and in the latter case with heavily altered lyrics, so I don’t think those count.)
According to the internets…
Yeeeeeesh! I know every year someone says it’s the worst, but this really is the worst. Even the George Harrison song is a throw away.
Gotta go with the buzzsaw voice of Axl Rose on this one. Even though I wasn’t a fan of the band or even that genre of music, I had to acknowledge the raw energy of the tune. And there wasn’t much else to choose from, IMO. I also like the story behind the breakdown at the end:
I would too, but I feel obligated to do my civic duty. For me, Bobby McFerrin would be the smoothest, mildest hell from this list.
Apparently this was in a year in which a medley of cover versions of an old Lynyrd Skynyrd and an old Peter Frampton song could reach number 1 on the American charts. I think there is a lesson for all of us there.
You’d think America would’ve learned that lesson back in 1981 when “Medley: Intro Venus / Sugar Sugar / No Reply / I’ll Be Back / Drive My Car / Do You Want to Know a Secret / We Can Work It Out / I Should Have Known Better / Nowhere Man / You’re Going to Lose That Girl / Stars on 45” went to #1, but apparently it did not.
In this, the year I graduated from high school, I went with Mr. Michael for the second year in a row, voting for the best song on his stellar solo debut Faith, “Father Figure”. Landing in a veryclose second place was Terence Trent D’Arby’s “Wishing Well” (off of his nearly-as-excellent-as-George’s debut record, Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby), and rounding out my top five from this list are “Sweet Child o’ Mine”, “Man in the Mirror”, and “Need You Tonight”.
Kid Rock’s Skynyrd/Zevon mash-up didn’t get to #1, so maybe we learned something.
#23, to be precise. It did, however, reach #1 in the UK.
I’d toyed with the idea of posting the UK number ones in each of your threads, just for a compare and contrast. After looking through the lists, and for reasons of national pride, I decided not to. My God, us Brits have had some really, really bad no 1 hits over the years. 
Like, really bad.
Well, I’m surprised. I remember the 80s positively for the most part and this is the year I graduated from high school (waves to Eddie F.) but jeez. There’s nothing I love on this list and several I hate. On the other hand, I think it was right around ’89 that I lost interest in the new music.
I’m going to give it to Got My Mind Set on You because that squirrel in the video was so good on saxophone.
This is the first time the top choice surprised me. The current leader makes my ears bleed.
The big difference between the US and UK charts is that the UK charts are sales only and don’t use airplay data (since the UK radio market is much smaller and more homogenous, and up until the early '70s was restricted by union guidelines in how much recorded music they could play in a given week), and remained so even in the period from the early '90s well into the late 2000s between when sales of physical singles died and the digital sales market took off and almost no one was actually buying singles. To this day, the UK #1 changes pretty much every week, a phenomenon which stopped decades ago in the US when Billboard started weighing airplay more heavily - there have been 31 #1s in the UK so far this year, compared to nine on the Hot 100.
Which means you get plenty of odd stuff that would never happen on the US charts, like “Killing In The Name Of” hitting #1 on Christmas week, 20 years after it was recorded, due to internet trolls.
Or Kid Rock.
Or a cover of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” reaching #1 in 2012.
Or a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” making #1 in 2008.
Or the Proclaimers’ “500 miles” making #1 in 2007.
I could go on like this all day.
1984 or so was when I started listening to radio & it must be my age and a huge hit of nostalgia; I truly love almost every song on this list & I have fond memories of most of the rest that I don’t outright love. There are only one or two that I wouldn’t sing along with at the top of my lungs.
Last chance to vote for a Beatle, and with only two or three other songs on this list that mean anything at all to me, this was an easy call.
I voted for Guns & Roses. Not so much because I love the over played “Sweet Child”, but because the first time I heard “Welcome To The Jungle” I had an eargasm like nothing I’ve had before or since and this will be the only chance to vote for GNR.