Songoftheday 12/3/18 - Love my love I regret the day you went away, I was too young to understand my love but now I realise my mistakes...
from the album janet. (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 airplay peak: #30 (one week)
Weeks in the airplay Top-40: 19
Today's song of the day comes from Janet Jackson, who landed the biggest single of her career, "That's The Way Love Goes", in the late spring and early summer of 1993. That song spent an incredible two months at #1 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 pop chart in America. Sometimes putting out a follow-up single while its predecessor is still peaking can prove disastrous, overshadowing the new cut and even producing a multitude of "one-hit wonders" (though Janet was way beyond that stage). Nevertheless, Jackson and her people did a very, very smart thing; instead of an immediate official single, they started to promote another cut from the just-released janet. album that wouldn't be available as a single. With their choice, the downtempo "Where Are You Now?", it was a nice alternative to the big hit without endangering her momentum until the official single (in this case, the dance jam "If") came out. Written by Janet with the Flyte Tyme production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the breezy soft-new-jack track got enough pop stations' airplay to send it into Billboard's Hot 100 Airplay chart top 40, even though it wasn't eligible for the Hot 100 outright (that rule would be rescinded by the end of the decade when all hell broke loose)...
"Where Are You Now" reached the top-30 on Billboard's Pop Airplay chart in July of 1993, eventually spending over nine months on the list. The song also slipped on to their R&B airplay chart, peaking at #66. (Another track from the set, "New Agenda", also made the R&B airplay list at #66 in May).
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And here's a short snippet from Janet's 2017 State Of The World tour, where she brought "Where Are You Now" back...
Up tomorrow: Alternative grungers are off the rails.
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