Paula Abdul – Forever Your Girl: #661 of best 1,000 albums ever!

Why is Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl on my best 1,000 albums ever list?

Straight up, this album is catchy on a cellular level.

What does Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?

We all throw the term “catchy” around, and I for sure use it pretty loosely. There’s “bad catchy,” of course, that hook or jingle that gets trapped in your head, which becomes a doom prison as the music plays on a misery loop (example: you can take your baby back ribs back and keep them forevermore).

But mostly we tend to use “catchy” for things, and typically musical things, that are pleasing and make us want more of the same. There’s also something about hearing “catchy” music at a formative age when music is tremendously important to us, where certain musical styles, certain songs, and certain bands’ or artists’ output gets kind of hardwired into our creative DNA and becomes a part of our own fully matured take on art and the world.

Listening to The Doors for the first time at the age of 13 or 14 was like that for me, for sure. And in a lesser yet still important way, Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl also applies.

While doing research for the ole best 1,000 albums ever project, I revisited Forever Your Girl and I immediately kind of questioned myself along the lines of, “Do you really like this album or are you just feel nostalgic in some way when thinking about it or listening to it?”*

* Chuck Klosterman is the patron saint of asking precisely these kinds of pop cultural questions. For example, see: X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21^st Century.

The answer, as it turns out, is decidedly the former. It’s remarkable, when looking at the 10 songs on Forever Your Girl, how many of them were not just hits but huge hits, and how insanely (there’s that word again) catchy they are.

“Cold Hearted” is the best of them all, in my view. It’s got a hard funk pop dance beat that’s absolutely killer, and I defy you to listen to this song and then not walk around for a week or two humming along the lines of, “He’s a cold hearted snake, girl!” And it doesn’t hurt that Abdul puts her top-notch dancing and choreography skills to work on the rather sexy music video.

“Straight Up” was the biggest hit of them all – of Abdul’s musical career to date – and while it’s just a hair dated it’s got a snappy beat and a fantastic chorus.

“Opposites Attract” and the title track, “Forever Your Girl” are much more pop versus dance music, while “The Way That You Love Me” leans into a poppy R&B sound. The latter holds up best of the three songs, I’d say.