In the late ’80s, rap’s first creative golden era, Howie Tee was right in the mix, producing some extremely catchy tracks that never really crossed over to the pop charts. You can’t always pinpoint a pop group’s peak, but with Color Me Badd, the night of that In Living Color performance was pretty clearly the top of the mountain. After jumping out of obscurity with “I Wanna Sex You Up,” still their best-known song, Color Me Badd had made it to #1 with their second single “ I Adore Mi Amor.” Then, a few short months later, they were back on top with “All 4 Love,” their second consecutive chart-topper. The week that Color Me Badd sang on that In Living Color special, their debut album CMB went double platinum, on its way to triple, and their third single was the #1 song in America. Their music is very of its time, but it’s aged nicely, in a charmingly nostalgic sort of way. Color Me Badd’s success didn’t last, but it did foreshadow the sort of R&B that would truly take over the Hot 100 over the next few years. They were a multi-racial group, and their success seemed to point toward a world - one that has sadly never truly arrived - where racial lines between genres weren’t so oppressive. They didn’t rap, but they worked with rap producers, singing over sampled breakbeats. But Color Me Badd also sang about sex in plain, if clumsy, terms. Their harmonies had a clear decades-old precedent in doo-wop. Color Me Badd weren’t exactly an edgy group they were friendly and approachable, with the same kind of dreamboat camaraderie that had turned the New Kids On The Block into stars a couple of years earlier. In a way, that’s a nice little summation for the role that Color Me Badd played when they were on top. Color Me Badd never reached the level of Super Bowl Halftime performers themselves, but they did participate in a fun little insurgent moment where it became clear that culture was starting to change. That Halftime Show, like all the ones that came after, was a hyped-up spectacle and a crucial point of interest for the whole broadcast. A year later, the NFL, determined not to let anyone plunder their audience again, booked Michael Jackson to play the Halftime Show. Almost 29 million people flipped over to Fox to watch In Living Color, and many of those people never turned the channel back to the Super Bowl the game’s second-half ratings plummeted.
At the end of the special episode, Color Me Badd, the Oklahoma City R&B boy band who happened to have the #1 single in America that week, sang their debut single “ I Wanna Sex You Up,” which had come out on the New Jack City soundtrack the previous spring. A little clock in the corner counted down to when the game would start again so that nobody would miss anything. Every skit had something to do with football - Fire Marshall Bill blowing up the Goodyear Blimp, that kind of thing. That year, Fox had In Living Color, the hit sketch show that had debuted a year and a half earlier, running a special live Super Bowl episode. If you switched the channel from CBS to Fox that year, you would see something different.
But she was in there with two Olympic figure skaters, the men’s hockey team from the 1980 Miracle game, and the University Of Minnesota marching band. In 1992, the Super Bowl had Gloria Estefan, a genuine pop star, singing at the Halftime Show. For decades, the Super Bowl Halftime Show would just be a college marching band, or Up With People, or a college marching band with Up With People.
The NFL always booked entertainers for the Halftime Show, but those entertainers weren’t always A-listers. The Super Bowl Halftime Show wasn’t always appointment viewing. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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