What the Biggest Forgotten Album In History Can Tell Us About Pop Music
If I gave you three tries to guess which song holds the record for most consecutive weeks at number one on the UK singles chart, would you be able to get it? Maybe you’d think of “Shape of You,” Ed Sheeran’s immortal contribution to pop music (in the sense of a cockroach, not a deity), but the fourteen weeks of its reign were nonconsecutive. Maybe you’d think of Oasis and their many Britpop classics, but surprisingly, their singles seldom lasted more than a week on the top of the charts; “Wonderwall” never even made it to number one. Or, better yet, maybe you’d think of “Candle in the Wind 1997,” Elton John’s heartfelt tribute to the late Princess Diana — surely, such a song must have been a record-breaker. I’m afraid not. While “Candle in the Wind ‘’ sold phenomenally well upon release, it yielded the top spot five weeks later. It does, however, hold the record for best-selling single of all-time in the UK.
No, the consecutive weeks at number one record belongs to Bryan Adams, a Canadian (!) singer-songwriter, who in 1991 delighted (or terrorized, depending on whom you ask) the British Isles with his song “Everything I Do, I Do For You,” which claimed the throne for a whopping 16 consecutive weeks. It’s a record that may never be broken, especially considering today’s pop culture landscape, where mainstream tastes change by the minute. Back then, though, you had far less of a choice: The people wanted Bryan Adams, so Bryan Adams is what you got. The context surrounding the song, too, feels positively ancient: It’s a five-minute rock ballad that was written specifically for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, a motion picture starring Kevin Costner and Alan Rickman. A product of its time, no doubt.
Even so, there’s something odd about “Everything I Do” compared to other songs which have spent extended periods of time atop the UK singles chart. It’s not that the song is relatively old, or that it belongs to a dormant genre of music. It’s that the song has virtually zero cultural relevance today. Specifically, I’m talking about its popularity within my generation. People my age gravitate towards newer forms of music, but we also know the lyrics to classics like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (14 weeks) or Whitney Houston’s “I’ll Always Love You”¹ (10 weeks) by heart. Ask someone about “Everything I Do,” though, or Bryan Adams in general, and you’re bound to receive a blank stare. According to my highly informal research as a guerrilla sociologist, most of the comments on the music video for “Everything I Do” seem to have been written by middle-aged Hispanic women with a fondness for emojis. There’s hardly anyone close to my age. This is weird — even though YouTube is used by all demographics today, it’s still very much a young person’s playground. The absence of a teenager or college kid is a sign that something greater is amiss, like when animals hide for safety before an earthquake strikes.
But how did I end up in the YouTube comment section of a Bryan Adams music video in the first place? Like most, I was once perfectly content with not knowing who the Canadian dad-rocker was. In hindsight, I had it coming. I’m a huge fan of music production, and one of my favorite producers is Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange, who helped shape AC/DC and Def Leppard into the bands they are today. One month, I decided to binge through his discography, starting from the very top. Eventually, I got to Waking Up the Neighbors, the sixth studio album by none other than — you guessed it — Bryan Adams. On first listen, I remember thinking it was just alright: not great, but not terrible either. I thought I’d forget about it in a week. But those songs — they kept dancing in my head, beckoning me to come over and listen. It seemed like they were designed to be as catchy as possible. In particular, I remember being so mesmerized by the chorus melody of the song “Not Guilty” that I spent hours trying to dissect what made it so memorable and cathartic. Over the next few weeks, I listened to that same album several times, each encounter more enjoyable than the last. It got to the point where that album was all I would listen to. It was official: I had Adams fever. Or was I a Bryaniac?²
You might have thought based on my apparent obsession with Waking Up the Neighbors that it’s an absolute masterpiece, a transcendental experience. But honestly, parts of it kind of suck. For example, the lyrics are atrocious: “I don’t need a doctor, don’t need a nurse” / “Don’t need no prescription, baby, only make me feel worse,” Adams belts on “All I Want Is You,” with no hint of irony whatsoever. They’re fun to listen to, in a so-bad-it’s-good kind of way. The other lyrics aren’t this embarrassing, but they still fall under the umbrella of rock cliches so old that Chuck Berry would have considered them trite. Most of the tracks are way too long, and some of them aren’t necessary at all. There’s a pitiful attempt at political commentary in “Don’t Drop That Bomb On Me,” the album’s closing track, which is more focused on being as loud as humanly possible than crafting a message. “Does anybody feel just a little bit scared? / “Isn’t it about time everybody cared?” asks Adams, but that’s the extent of his observation. He makes no connection between atrocity and apathy, how we’ve become so desensitized to humanitarian crises that it makes more sense to ignore them and move on with our lives. Instead, he shows up with a wailing three-minute guitar solo to fade out an already six-minute song. I guess the target of that bomb was us.
And yet, I can’t help but admire its audacity, its sheer size. There are many justifiable criticisms of that album. But you’d be absolutely wrong to call it lazy. Waking Up the Neighbors is busy, almost to a fault, a characteristic that makes sense when you consider the album’s primary architect, producer Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange. In an interview, Adams recounts a time when he and Lange recorded 100 takes of a backing vocal for “Thought I’d Died And Gone to Heaven,” which they then layered on top of each other for maximum sonic density. When Adams asked if they were done with the song, Lange simply responded, “That’s just the left ear.” So it’s no surprise that every moment of the 74-minute album is filled to the brim with sounds — hand claps, backing vocals, guitars, synths, orchestra, and miscellaneous sound effects. But it’s also mixed perfectly, so that no one element feels overwhelming; every aspect of the song is in harmony with each other, all in support of Adams’s blistering voice, which sounds clearer and brighter than on any of his other records. Lange is the rare maximalist working in a genre that tends to prioritize rawness and simplicity. His style best explains why I like Waking Up the Neighbors, an album that adheres to and refuses to follow the classic rock-and-roll blueprint. Thematically, it’s about making love and having fun, but with how lush and vibrant the production is, you might think Adams is singing about something far more nuanced and delicate. The chord progressions are all from the blues rock canon, but Adams and Lange take much liberty in changing their shape, removing notes, adding others, and often departing from the original key only to come back to it a few bars later. It’s as if someone looked at a track from an early Rolling Stones record and thought, “How far could I take this two-minute song?” The answer, as it turns out, is across the country and back. And in pushing rock-and-roll to its absolute limit, Adams and Lange traverses through decades of pop music — from open-chord strumming to multi-track layering — in one album. No wonder I fell in love with its ambition.
Ironically, this means that “Everything I Do,” the most contemporary song on the album, sticks out like a sore thumb. You can tell that it was included last-minute after the record label realized its commercial potential. (Would the general public be interested in a collection of glossed-up rock-and-roll romps? Tough to say, if you’re a music executive). Of course, it went on to dominate every single chart imaginable and made Waking Up the Neighbors a blockbuster. But at what cost? Today, the entire legacy of that album is this big, sappy ballad in the middle, one so dated that its fans are nostalgic soccer moms. It’s unlikely the general public knows that the album is actually more akin to classic rock. The critics knew, but they hated it anyways; it was 1991, and the immaculate, bombastic rock that Adams does so well was going out of style. In less than a month, Nirvana would burst into the mainstream with Nevermind, bringing alternative rock to the forefront of pop culture. Had it been released even a year earlier, Waking Up the Neighbors might have a lasting impact on music history. Alas, it was unknowingly set up for failure. A standalone single that has nothing to do with its parent album, in tandem with a new musical zeitgeist, is apparently how you create — dare I say — the most forgettable album to have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide.
The more I think about Waking Up the Neighbors, the more I’m fascinated by its existence. When there’s an album that you love but nobody else seems to know, it’s usually from a small indie act yet to break out. They’re this precious little bundle of talent that is exclusive to you, and when they do inevitably become more popular, it feels distinctly uncomfortable — what was once yours is now being shared by millions of others. Maybe you start feeling more distant towards the band, and maybe you even move onto the next small thing. But what happens when this ‘unknown’ artist is Bryan Adams, one of the best-selling male vocalists of all-time? After eventually falling in love with his sixth album, I started scouring the internet, as I often do, for a place to discuss it. Imagine by dismay, then, when I found almost nothing, save for a small thread on an online forum that was more than a decade old. Reddit came up empty, and so did YouTube. It’s not even that people disliked Waking Up the Neighbors, as I occasionally saw — it’s that the album didn’t seem to exist. ‘Gaslighting’ is a term used too lightly nowadays, but I think it’s appropriate here. The exquisite production, marvelous key changes — according to the internet, these were figments of my imagination. This doesn’t feel so odd when I’m searching for information about a relatively unknown artist. With someone as big as literally Bryan Adams, though, it’s a different story. You could get away with thinking there was some enigmatic force working to keep this album in the shadows. Perhaps I was better off ignoring it, too.
But I couldn’t just walk away. I wanted to find a way, somehow, to salvage this album from the deepest recesses of its own damnation. More importantly, I wanted to understand it. To do so, I had to recall my initial resistance to the album. I liked it on the first listen, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit that — why? On the surface, the answer seems simple. My favorite artists are, to name a few, Stevie Wonder, The Strokes, and Kendrick Lamar, all critical darlings. Simply putting the name Bryan Adams besides them would be like adding graffiti to a Greek temple. The former three are bona fide artists; the latter man writes songs for movie soundtracks. (Stevie is also a soundtrack man, but he gets a permanent pass for writing Songs in the Key of Life). But this view didn’t add up with my personal tastes. In addition to acclaimed musicians, I enjoy listening to what many might consider vapid pop music. For example, I’m a fan of Ke$ha (yes, I had to include the dollar sign) and her glitchy electro-pop anthems. She isn’t a guilty pleasure; I have absolutely no shame in blasting her music at full volume. In general, I don’t care about the status of an artist as long as they produce music that fits my tastes. That Adams receives virtually zero attention from those who are ‘serious’ about music couldn’t have been a factor, positive or negative. So no — something else was the source of my shame.
Maybe the issue wasn’t prestige, but rather coolness. Liking Bryan Adams might be one of the most uncool things you can do, second only to liking Celine Dion. As Carl Wilson humorously (and accurately) observed in his book Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Dion has sold millions of albums worldwide, yet there seem to be no Dion fans anywhere. The same can be said of Adams. Sure, people have heard one or two of his songs, often unknowingly. But to be remembered and revered as a musician, you need either personality or artistry — and Adams fails, massively, on both fronts. A mild-mannered and quiet man, Adams is not one to go on talk shows or cause a storm on social media; he seems perfectly content with touring around the world, performing music. And said music is neither deeply personal nor cutting-edge; the farthest he’s ever ventured outside his rock-and-roll comfort zone is his seventh album, 18 til I Die, a laughable attempt at Latin music that arguably ended his relevance. This isn’t to say that Adams is shooting himself in the foot. If anything, I respect him for never once chasing trends or being someone he’s not. Nonetheless, his approach to life and music makes it difficult for anyone to form a parasocial relationship with him. There’s nothing to latch onto, in other words. As Gen-Z would say, it’s giving, well, nothing.
But again, the problem is that little of what I’ve said applies to me. Yes, I like it when artists have a unique identity, but I don’t mind Bryan Adams’ plainess, which to me actually makes him stand out. In the midst of thinking, I pressed play on Waking Up the Neighbors, at that point out of habit, and the first few notes burst in my ear. Then it hit me.
Generally, music criticism today takes on a holistic approach. It looks at every component a piece of music can have and evaluates it as being great, okay, or not-so-great. Notice the emphasis on the word ‘can’: If a song or an album is lacking in, say, artistic innovation, then points are taken off even if that song or album was never intended to be innovative. So to a modern critic, the greatest albums of all-time are the ones that do it all: albums like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Pink Floyd’s Wish You Here, which tell a compelling story against a backdrop of enjoyable and (at the time) unconventional sounds. This model of criticism mostly does work. But it has its blind spots. There’s a reason why an EDM record is seldom seen on Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums list. When you evaluate music using inflexible criteria, you tend to overlook genres that are less focused on the overall package and more interested in highlighting a single musical aspect. Plus, you inadvertently indicate that the latter is somehow a lesser form of music. We used to have this problem with hip-hop, as critics couldn’t fathom the idea of music without a conventional melody. Still, the holistic model persists. And as music has become more accessible due to the advent of streaming services, it’s been adapted by millions of music nerds worldwide, myself included.
What’s interesting is that as recently as 60 years ago, popular music wasn’t expected to carry much artistic merit. The songs heard on the radio were short, simple tunes concerned with love, heartache, and other mundane topics. It wasn’t until recording technology blossomed and bands like The Beatles came along that pop music became the foreground for sonic experimentation. Afterwards, it seemed like artists were trying to one-up each other by coming up with longer, grander collections of music; that the double album exploded in popularity during the early ’70s is no coincidence. If you’ve ever wondered why your parents’ music is inundated with minute-long saxophone solos and three separate key changes, there you have it. Lately, though, pop music has been slimming down — and, arguably, returning to its roots. Say what you will about TikTok. But its emphasis on brevity has undeniably changed how we consume and perceive music. I’ve never thought about this until now, but it makes sense why the younger generation is more likely to judge a snippet of music based on its “vibes.” TikTok, a social media platform, thrives on audience retention. Unless a song has something that immediately hooks the listener or develops its ideas in a short span of time, it’s bound to be scrolled away. The ideal TikTok bop is short, relatable, and contains a sparkling musical element that cuts through all the social media din.
This is surprisingly good news for Waking Up the Neighbors. Granted, some of the songs on it would have to be stretched out over the course of a dozen short videos. But if you think about it, the album is just one continuous vibe. It’s only concerned with having a good time and evoking a classic rock-and-roll atmosphere. And of course, it sounds phenomenal. Littered throughout the albums are small, yet dense explosions of sound that keep the listener hooked. You may not like the album, but I almost guarantee that it’ll never bore you. I now realize that my initial reluctance to endorse the album stemmed from my default holistic viewpoint. As an album that could be incorporating half-diminished chords or delivering a biting critique of society, it’s no good. As an album that sticks to its strengths, like skirting rock-and-roll conventions and coming up with arena-sized choruses, it’s a banger. But those very strengths could become roadblocks in the album’s path to a second life. Yes, it’s catchy, but not immediately so. The meticulous attention to detail only pays off once you get to the end of every track, because Adams and Lange emphasize progression above all else. In a world where skipping tracks takes less than a second, and where playlists are curated algorithmically, people may be unwilling to wait for the magic to unfold. Back when music listening was associated with a physical object, this wasn’t an issue; after all, you couldn’t just throw away a cassette you don’t like and summon a new one from thin air. Our relationship with music is different now, and for better or for worse, the opulent style of someone like Mutt Lange is antithetical to the speed and efficiency of Spotify and Apple Music. If Bryan Adams is ever to be back in the spotlight, we’d need to realign our attitudes towards music — and who knows how long that’ll take?
For that reason, I seriously doubt teenagers will stumble upon Waking Up the Neighbors and make TikTok dances out of it. In fact, a part of me doesn’t want this album to ever be relevant or popular, lest it be ripped away from my hands and violated by others. But also, part of me wishes that it wasn’t so forgotten. I said earlier that I wanted to rescue the album from its own hell; all this writing is my attempt to lend it a helping hand. I suppose I hoped that thinking about Waking Up the Neighbors would magically resurrect it, grant it a second life in the age of social media, just like how Miguel’s singing put Héctor back on the family ofrenda in the movie Coco. In the end, though, I was really doing it for myself. Bryan Adams crashed into my life when I least expected it, leaving behind a crater that won’t fully close. The impact had to be processed somehow, and in a way, penning an essay about music consumption and criticism is a cheap, reliable method of therapy. As long as there’s at least one person listening to it, Waking Up the Neighbors will exist, and it will be an album whose monstrous choruses, immaculate vocal harmonies, and unparalleled grandiosity I eagerly come back for.
- Houston’s version is a cover, yes, but a vast majority of people attribute the song to her and her only.
- None of these terms are official.
