Next — "Too Close"
The greatest innuendo-hiding-in-plain-sight of 90s radio: a bouncy R&B smash unmistakably about dancing too close ("you're making it hard for me") that daytime radio played all year without blinking. It spent five weeks at #1 and finished as Billboard's #1 single of 1998.
Next formed in Minneapolis in 1992: Robert "R.L." Huggar and brothers Terry "T-Low" Brown and Raphael "Tweety" Brown. Kay Gee of Naughty by Nature signed the trio to Divine Mill, his imprint under Arista, and their debut album Rated Next arrived September 30, 1997, led by the single "Butta Love." "Too Close" followed as the second single on January 27, 1998 — produced by Kay Gee over a sample of Kurtis Blow's 1979 "Christmas Rappin'," a bouncing club groove with a chorus that was unmistakably about grinding on a dancefloor and its physical consequences.
That was the whole joke, and everyone was in on it except, apparently, radio programmers: "you're making it hard for me" rode morning shows, school dances, and grocery-store speakers for the entire year. The song spent five non-consecutive weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the R&B chart, went platinum, and finished as Billboard's year-end #1 single of 1998 — the biggest hit of the year, hiding its punchline in plain sight. Rated Next eventually climbed to 2× platinum on its back.
Next scored another R&B #1 with "Wifey" in 2000, but "Too Close" is the one everybody remembers — the song a whole generation slow-grinded to at homecoming before realizing, years later, exactly what it was about.
Similar items
Usher — "You Make Me Wanna..."
The love-triangle confession that made 18-year-old Usher a star: seven straight weeks at #2 on the Hot 100, held off the top the whole time by Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997." The video — five Ushers dancing in perfect sync inside a white-and-purple circular room — became his visual signature.
Dru Hill
Baltimore's harmony-stacked R&B quartet — Sisqó, Nokio, Jazz, and Woody — behind late-'90s slow jams like "In My Bed" and "Never Make a Promise." Named after the city's Druid Hill Park, they were one of the defining male R&B groups of the era, right up until Sisqó's platinum-blond "Thong Song" solo fame both lifted the group and splintered it.
Wyclef Jean — "Gone till November"
A drug runner's goodbye letter set to strings performed by the New York Philharmonic — the tenderness wrapped around an unsentimental story is the whole song. Released in late 1997 from The Carnival, it hit #7 on the Hot 100 and proved a solo Wyclef could carry a hit without the Fugees.
Mariah Carey
The voice: a five-octave range and that signature whistle register that became the sound of 1990s radio dominance. Columbia executive Tommy Mottola heard her demo tape at a party in December 1988, signed her, and launched a decade-long reign that would see her become the first artist whose first five singles all reached number one, and close the 1990s with fourteen #1 hits and Billboard's Artist of the Decade award.