it was very clean, not low-cut and trashy like Madonna.
November 7, 2020 7:36 AM   Subscribe

November 7, 1987, Tiffany's cover of I Think We're Alone Now hit #1 on the Billboard Charts. The cover of the Tommy James And The Shondells song from 20 years before was propelled to the top by a tour of shopping malls. This oral history of The Beautiful You: Celebrating The Good Life Shopping Mall Tour is a great little distracting read for a weekend morning.
posted by hippybear (32 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
at the time, i was pretty dismissive of pop music - even good pop music. in retrospect, i am fond of a lot of these sugary melodies. a stroke of brilliance to use malls as small all-ages venues. it was a very particular time and place, that.

it takes at least a medium sized city to support non-bar small venues, so the malls, nice.
Tiffany: I have a stepfather who kind of looked at this as . . . something that could pay his rent.
jfc stage parents.

she sounds remarkably positive and grounded for having spent formative years surrounded by shitty family and music-biz sharks.

good find, ty.
posted by j_curiouser at 8:37 AM on November 7, 2020 [1 favorite]


I saw Tiffany as part of the NKOTB mixed tape tour last year. I never really paid much attention to her stuff apart from I Think We're Alone Now, but she was a highlight of the show.
posted by Kris10_b at 8:44 AM on November 7, 2020 [3 favorites]


i can't find a link, but ages ago i read a scathing essay about hollywood stage parents, the system, and child performers. the admonition to parents was, "look. in the *entire* history of hollywood, two kids grew up without profound injury: ron howard and jodie foster. two. stop it."
posted by j_curiouser at 8:45 AM on November 7, 2020 [5 favorites]


It has been nine years since I posted my very brief Tiffany anecdote.

I liked this cover back in the day and still do.
posted by maxwelton at 8:49 AM on November 7, 2020 [1 favorite]


My favourite karaoke song.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:16 AM on November 7, 2020


This is really good.

But not as good as Debbie Gibson, "Only In My Dreams."

I was 16 in 1987, I spent a lot of time at Montgomery Mall where the girl I liked worked at the Sbarro's, and my authority in this matter is very great.
posted by escabeche at 12:00 PM on November 7, 2020 [9 favorites]


Can I tell you a little secret, just you, me and the Internet Archive? I love Tiffany's "I think we're alone now" without reservation or shame. It hit when I was 15, at the perfect time for nostalgia, and it's a perfect pop culture encapsulation of the 80's. A song sung by a girl who looked like she went to my school. Also, I may or may not have had a small crush on Tiffany from watching her video.

Edit: Debbie Gibson, too! Thanks for the extra flashback, escabeche. :-)
posted by Kevin Street at 1:10 PM on November 7, 2020 [2 favorites]


Ahhhh.. a trip back to my tween years. It just made me smile. Interestingly, we had cable, but I never watched it because the only box was downstairs and we couldn't watch TV out of earshot of my parents. My dad sure the hell loved Showtime though.

Also, Debbie Gibson :)
posted by kathrynm at 2:14 PM on November 7, 2020


By the way, this song came out about a month after Joe Biden suspended his 1988 presidential campaign. He seems to have made a decent comeback, maybe now it's Tiff's turn?
posted by escabeche at 2:33 PM on November 7, 2020 [6 favorites]


Gotta give a shoutout to this long-ago cover by speicus for MeFi Music.
posted by Pallas Athena at 2:52 PM on November 7, 2020 [2 favorites]


My local college radio is playing a recent new cover. It's credited as
"I think we're alone now - Billie Joe Armstrong - Of Green Day" Like plenty of people were afraid nobody would know who that was.

And it's a fine cover and all but not really as good as Tiffany's, and it's even very similar to hers in some respects. So it's too straight to even feel like punk. It's weird but I do like when pop songs become famously covered, and Tiffany is a great example of that.
posted by SaltySalticid at 3:52 PM on November 7, 2020


I still wear my concert shirt from Debbie Gibson's Electric Youth tour from time to time. :)

I had forgotten the entire "Tiffany vs. Madonna" mindset that was present at the time, but that was a thing that came rushing back reading that article. Tiffany was clean cut, Madonna was wearing lingerie and a Boy Toy belt buckle.

The 80s were an interesting time, and the competing white woman pop star thing was totally A Thing at the time that I'd forgotten.
posted by hippybear at 4:23 PM on November 7, 2020 [1 favorite]


Musical Kiss / Marry / Kill: 1987 Girl Pop Cover Songs round:
Tiffany - I think we're alone now
Kylie Minogue - the Loco-Motion
Bananarama - Venus
Vote on your phones! additional charges may apply.
posted by bartleby at 5:05 PM on November 7, 2020 [1 favorite]


was totally A Thing at the time that I'd forgotten.
Competing pop stars goes back to the Veronica / Betty archetype, it's never stopped:
Which one's Tiffany, Which one's Debbie?
Which one's Christina, which one's Britney?
Which one's Ariana, Which one's Selena?
(I can't fathom pop music anymore, but)
Which one's Addison Rae, which one's Charli D'Amelio?
posted by bartleby at 5:47 PM on November 7, 2020


In the early 2000s, I was on the streets late at night near a college campus when a guy who very obviously was not a college kid approached me out of the blue and asked me if I knew where to get pot. I demurred on answering that question but we struck up a conversation and it turned out he was the sound person for Tiffany's "College Promotional Tour" that was playing the campus the next day. And as it turned out, I was providing part of the sound system he'd be using.

The next day, the song he chose to test the sound system was Nine Inch Nails' Closer To God, which is a reworking of the song Closer, which among other things starts with intentional distortion that sounds like either electronics or speakers being pushed too hard (IIRC, it was done by overdriving Neve 1073s). As the sound system blasted this at ~110dB, he quickly ran over to me to assure me that he hadn't just blown up the sound system.

I ran the lights for the show that night - Tiffany was very nice to both staff and attendees and did a good show, but I came away not entirely sure what the goal of the tour was. This was after college students had stopped paying for music and it was a free show for attendees. Maybe the student association paid a small fee that covered some of the travel costs, but it felt like someone was losing money on the tour.
posted by Candleman at 6:23 PM on November 7, 2020 [6 favorites]


One of my favorite music trivia facts is that the song that displaced Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now" as #1 was Billy Idol's "Mony Mony"...which was also a cover of a song originally by Tommy James and the Shondells.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:53 PM on November 7, 2020 [12 favorites]


I loved the original and also love Tiffany's remake from 2019. The story of the tour is amazing. Thanks, as always, hippybear.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:57 PM on November 7, 2020


I've always liked Weird Al's cover: I Think I'm A Clone Now.
posted by Monochrome at 7:10 PM on November 7, 2020 [7 favorites]


I like the Tommy James version better, but honestly the song itself is not my favorite flavor of Bubblegum.

she sounds remarkably positive and grounded for having spent formative years surrounded by shitty family and music-biz sharks

I think she was the first teen celeb I heard of filing for emancipation at 15 or so, and even back then it was obvious that she was being exploited. Way more than Debbie Gibson, who had a beneficial image as a songwriter.
posted by rhizome at 7:25 PM on November 7, 2020 [3 favorites]


Thanks for the post.

I was pretty sure this came out a few months earlier than google tells me it did. Must be thinking of the wrong girlfriend, or the wrong girlfriend's favorite girl artist from that 87-88 era.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:46 PM on November 7, 2020


I was talking about this song and Tiffany a week ago! My most distinct memory of this song, which I LOVED as a tween when it came out, besides that sexy video where they just kinda rolled(?) in the grass, was my mom coming home with a Debbie Gibson cassette telling me she would prefer I listen to Debbie. Because Debbie listened to her mom. That went about as well for my mom as you would predict. I didn’t even get the whole Tiffany vs Madonna thing. Wild.
posted by Hopeful and Cynical at 8:32 PM on November 7, 2020 [1 favorite]


I had totally forgotten about the song and then it pops up in the Netflix Umbrella Academy and prompted a little walk down memory lane.

I remember the song being massive - you couldn't go anywhere and not hear it. At the time I didn't care for it, or for any top 40 material, really. But hearing it again after such a long time I realized that young me had done a disservice to the song when it first came out (and to top 40 in general) because it's a perfect pop song. Catchy, lyrics about something that everybody has thought and wanted at some point in their lives, well produced....

Anyway, here's the link to the Umbrella Academy scene. It's well done and particularly effective at 2:08 or thereabouts.
posted by ashbury at 9:14 PM on November 7, 2020 [1 favorite]


My favourite version of this is the 1989 cover by UK punk band Snuff.

Incidentally, Snuff were part of the reason Fat Wreck Chords were set up.
posted by MattWPBS at 4:57 AM on November 8, 2020 [1 favorite]


One of my favorite music trivia facts is that the song that displaced Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now" as #1 was Billy Idol's "Mony Mony" yt ...which was also a cover of a song originally by Tommy James and the Shondells.

Sadly, Joan Jett’s “Crimson and Clover” had been released some five years earlier. It would have been glorious to have three of their songs on the charts at the same time, twenty years after TJ & the S made them famous.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:31 AM on November 8, 2020 [1 favorite]


I was 18 and in college when Tiffany, Debbie, Menudo, and NKOTB were popular with the younger ones, and the other girls in my dorm ruthlessly ragged on the one girl who liked that style of music. If she'd kept it to her Walkman, it would've been one thing, but she blasted it on weekends before quiet hours on her boombox.

I may not have cared for those particular acts, but I wasn't about to make fun of anybody's taste/maturity level, not when I had a big-ass poster of The Monkees on the wall over my desk.
posted by droplet at 6:59 AM on November 8, 2020 [3 favorites]


Previously.

She can belt out a tune. She seems happy. Good for her!
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 10:29 AM on November 8, 2020 [4 favorites]


"I came away not entirely sure what the goal of the tour was. This was after college students had stopped paying for music and it was a free show for attendees. Maybe the student association paid a small fee that covered some of the travel costs, but it felt like someone was losing money on the tour."

Candleman, when someone is on tour the artist gets paid regardless of whether attendees pay or not. Artists don't show up without a deposit, either, and many won't go on stage until they've been paid in full.

There are any number of ways to do it - guaranteed amount, guaranteed plus portion of the gate, etc - but having book dozens of artists in the early 2000s, some of which were done in the exact same 'for the student association with free attendance' circumstances, it's like buying any other entertainment service: you pay the entertainer.

Tiffany's management isn't going to book a date where she loses money. I've witnessed numerous events, as a performer and on the other side, where the event itself lost thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars. As a performer, I got paid, and on the other side I saw the artists get paid.

Strangely enough, some of the nastiest experiences I had as a performer getting paid were from packed venues, and some of the easiest were from venues that had clearly lost their shirts on the event.
posted by jordantwodelta at 11:39 AM on November 8, 2020 [3 favorites]


I remember enjoying the very specific and it seemed quite affectioned joke about Tiffany in the character of Robin Sparkles, the Canadian mall heartthrob and one-hit wonder, in the TV comedy How I Met Your Mother, and her hit Let's Go to the Mall. Cobie Smulders, the actress who played Sparkles' older alter ego, revisited it recently in a COVID edition
.
posted by running order squabble fest at 12:51 PM on November 8, 2020 [2 favorites]




My core sample dates to the Lena Lovitch version.

For Tommy James my fave track is 'Crystal Blue Persuasion'.
posted by ovvl at 9:29 AM on November 9, 2020 [1 favorite]


Candleman, when someone is on tour the artist gets paid regardless of whether attendees pay or not. Artists don't show up without a deposit, either, and many won't go on stage until they've been paid in full.

I spent two decades in concert production (as indicated by the whole "I was providing part of the sound system and ran the lights during the show" thing), I know how it works, but thanks for the condescension. There are definitely times that the artist or their management company (who will bill it back to them) are the ones footing the bill, particularly in the case of a comeback or rebranding tour, both of which would apply to a Gen X teen star trying to appeal to the Millennial set. At the time, huge parts of the industry hadn't caught onto the fact that you couldn't have a money losing tour make sense because of increased CD sales. So the question was who was holding the bag in this specific case.

Man, if all of the talented bands I saw lose money trying to make it could have just refused to go on stage until they'd been paid in full (and had gotten paid for it), the music world would be a lot richer for it.
posted by Candleman at 12:47 PM on November 9, 2020 [1 favorite]


I wasn't trying to be condescending, just providing my point of view as a booker and working musician.

With regards to your last paragraph, there's a big difference between a band/artist with talent, and one with business sense (or at the very least a manager with business sense looking out for them, instead of taking advantage of them). As I'm sure you know, the industry is predatory and makes a lot of money off of someone who'll get up on stage without money in their pocket first, or leverage over the promoter afterwards.
posted by jordantwodelta at 8:22 PM on November 9, 2020


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