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Artist: The Goo Goo Dolls
Album: Dizzy Up The Girl
Release Date: September 22, 1998
Dizzy Up The Girl was one of those album from the 90s that influenced many a music geek from my generation, mostly as a result of its singles, which have all but reached modern-day classic status. I defy you to find someone between the ages of 15 and 50 who hasn’t heard “Iris” and/or “Slide”. Johnny Rzeznik and Robby Takac are master songwriters, tugging the heartstrings both with the grandiosity of “Iris” and “Acoustic #3″, a track whose beauty and simplicity stare you in the face from start to finish. As with much of The Goo Goo Dolls work, the heaier rockers don’t quite stack up to the ballladry, but the gap between the two is far from excrutiating.
On top of the long-term impact of this album’s existence on the radio, Dizzy Up The Girl has another, less obvious importance in the current musical landscape. This album fired an early salvo in the eventual death of the single in the pre-digital era. “Iris”, The Goo Goo Dolls biggest hit to date and the centerpiece of this album, stayed atop Billboard’s charts for a staggering 18 weeks. It was never actually released as a formal single. It’s appearance on the charts is officially listed as an album cut, which made it ineligible for the primary Top 40 chart (album cuts weren’t permitted on the chart till September of 1998; “Iris” began its chart run in May). With the help of No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak” a few years prior, “Iris” proved that an official single was no longer necessary to guage success, and airplay could propel a song to #1 all by itself. Faced with an opportunity to save some money right around the time Shawn Fanning was introducing a new software program called Napster, record labels slowly began phasing out the CD single. Eventually the rise of iTunes and other digital outlets brought the single back from the dead and in fact made it a bigger deal than the album once again, but “Iris”, along with some other factors, helped spur along a critical shift in the thinking of the record labels.
The Goo Goo Dolls – Iris [iTunes] (YSI)
==TJ==
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Album A Day, Goo Goo Dolls
Ha yeah…2nd cd I ever bought, age 11 after third eye blind’s first album
It’s interesting to contemplate how the relationship between singles and albums has changed in the past five decades. In the ’50s and ’60s, the birth of the rock era, most performers recorded four to six songs a year, one every couple of months. If they became hits, they were collected into an album later, along with their B sides, and probably some filler–covers of other artists’ hits, things like that.
Around this same time, the hit-makers of an earlier era–Sinatra, Dean Martin, folks like that–began going into the studio to record whole albums of new material, often with a specific theme: romance, jazz, big band, whatever. Arguably, these are the first “concept” albums.
Not until the Beatles began doing whole albums (and then releasing singles in anticipation of the album’s release) did the industry really shift to an “album-first” mentality…and then Sgt. Pepper and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds really cemented the concept album in the public mind…and it soon became common for album cuts to be played on the radio–and the idea of a single that existed outside the album format died.
It still hasn’t really come back in the form it had in the ’50s and early ’60s. Singles are still intended to be part of an album primarily, rather than stand-alones.
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