Robbed hit of the week 6/27/22 - Aaron Tippin's "Kiss This"...

 

 

"Kiss This" - Aaron Tippin

from the album People Like Us (2000)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #42

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from country music singer Aaron Tippin, who was born in the Florida panhandle and grew up in South Carolina, before heading to Nashville to start a music career. He began as a writer, then was signed to RCA Records as a performer. Tippin's debut album was released in the beginning of 1991, with title track "You've Got To Stand For Something" as the lead single. Written by Tippin with Buddy Brock, the politically encouraging workingman's song climbed to #6 on Billboard magazine's Country Singles chart, while the You've Got To Stand For Something album hit #153 on the Billboard 200 sales tally and #23 on the Country Albums list, going on to sell over a half million copies. 

A year later, Tippin returned with his sophomore effort Read Between The Lines, which would become his most successful album, reaching #50 on the Billboard 200 spending over a year on the chart while getting to #6 on the Country Albums tally, and selling over a million records, his sole set to do so. Lead single "There Ain't Nothin' Wrong With The Radio" was also his biggest hit, spending three weeks at #1 on the Country Singles chart. That was followed by Call Of The Wild in 1993, with the first single "Working Man's PH.D" making it to #7 on the Country radio chart. There was a bit of a slump on his next release a year later, Lookin' Back At Myself, which failed to send a single to the country top ten (best was "I Got It Honest" at #15), but while the album stopped in the lower half of the Billboard 200 at #114, it continued his streak of selling at least a half-million copies.

Aaron rebounded in a big way in 1995 with his #1 country single "That's As Close As I Get To Loving You", from his fifth album Tool Box, and my favorite of his. The song also "bubbled under" the pop Hot 100 chart at #101, just missing having his first crossover hit. Nevertheless, it would be his final studio album for RCA, who released a Greatest Hits...and Then Some collection in 1997 but neglected to promote its two new songs at radio. 

Tippin moved over to the new country music label from Walt Disney, Lyric Street, who had just started and was about to have more success with acts like Rascal Flatts and SHeDaisy. His first single for the company, the midtempo "For You I Will", climbed to #6 on the Country Singles chart, and landed the singer his first crossover hit on Billboard's Hot 100 at #49 in 1999. A second single from the album, "I'm Leaving", also hit the Hot 100 at #87, while making it to #17 on the country radio list, but the album became his first to miss the Billboard 200 sales tally, while stalling down at #23 on the Country Albums list (the company wasn't as adept is selling records yet). 

Thankfully Lyric Street kept faith with Aaron, and he released his second set on the label People Like Us in the summer of 2000. The lead single from the record was "Kiss This", an infectious uptempo party number that strayed far from his usual serious fare. Written by Aaron with his wife Thea Tippin and Phillip Douglas, the title plays on avoiding the curse word that usually follows the phrase. Tippin plays narrator here, singing about a woman who's been cheated on drowning her sorrows, and when her man comes to ask for forgiveness and a kiss, the chorus ensues. It's sugar-cute but done well, with Aaron's booming voice the perfect vehicle to deliver the punchline. (It doesn't hurt that he has a rock-solid body as well.) With production by the singer with Mike Bradley and Biff Watson, the song brought Aaron back to his glory days on radio, and again flirted with having a top-40 crossover hit...

While "Kiss This" returned Aaron to #1 on Billboard's Country Singles chart for a third and final time for two weeks, the song stopped a pair of notches short of making the top-40 on the pop Hot 100 in October of 2000. Internationally, the single peaked at #3 on the Canadian Country chart. The People Like Us album, released in July of that year, went to #53 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and was his highest ranking on the Country Albums chart at #5, going on to sell over a half-million copies. 

The second single from the album was title track "People Like Us", which rose to #17 on the Country Singles chart and "bubbled under" the pop Hot 100 at #107. That was followed by the midtempo track "Always Was", which slipped on to the country top-40 at #40. His next record, though, would ride the jingoistic post-9/11 wave to my main series. 

(8/10)

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Here's Aaron flexing his muscles in a small concert in 2013..

...and an acoustic take for a radio gig two years later...