#Paula abdul straight up greatest hits full
#Paula abdul straight up greatest hits plus

Greatest Hits: Straight Up!, at 18 tracks, is a bit overstuffed, but look at it this way: With this album in your possession, you will never have to own anything by Paula Abdul ever again. Although her reign at the top of the charts was quick (1989-1992), the singles were plentiful. So even though she’s now best-known as the slightly loopy (OK, very loopy) judge on Fox’s American Idol, there was a time when Paula Abdul was the most popular female singer in America. Her first hit singles rode the coattails of Jackson’s sound as hard as records by Pebbles, Karyn White, Jody Watley and a million lesser copycats did during the same period. Consequently, without Jackson’s dance/pop breakthrough, I don’t think Abdul would have ever decided to record an album. At that time Abdul was only known as a cheerleader for the Magic-era Los Angeles Lakers. The first and most obvious one is that Jackson’s breakthrough album, 1986’s Control, featured several videos choreographed by Abdul. These aren’t enough to offer a revisionist take on Abdul’s recording career – this hits set doesn’t smash conventional wisdom, it cements it – but as a summary of her years as a pop star, Greatest Hits: Straight Up! is as good as any hits disc could ever be.It’s just as easy to say Paula Abdul’s success wouldn’t have happened without Janet Jackson as it is to say Janet Jackson’s success wouldn’t have happened without Paula Abdul, and there are a couple of factors at play here. Straight Up! charts this career arc - minus the career revival, since she hasn’t recorded a comeback album, after all – with accuracy, generously sampling from all three albums, and if the selections from Forever Your Girl are undeniably still the highlights (and the reason to get this set) there are a couple of surprises along with the way, including how “The Promise of a New Day” and “Vibeology” stand as bright, colorful time capsules of early ’90s dance-pop and how slinky and seductive 95’s “My Love For Real” is. She stumbled through 1995’s Head Over Heels, as she tried to modernize her eternally chipper dance-pop, before disappearing from the spotlight until American Idol.

After that debut, her decline in popularity was pretty swift: her 1991 sophomore set Spellbound had four hits in “Rush, Rush,” “The Promise of a New Day,” “Blowing Kisses in the Wind” and “Vibeology,” but none of them were as big or as memorable as the singles from the debut, and when Straight Up works its way toward them, it starts to loose momentum, just as Abdul’s career did. That means that Straight Up has seven of the 10 tracks from Forever Your Girl, a pretty high ratio, but that’s only right that it dominates this hits compilation because these are the songs that Abdul’s fame was built upon. Abdul peaked early, with all of her biggest and best hits arriving on her 1988 debut Forever Your Girl, which contained “Forever Your Girl,” “Straight Up,” “Cold Hearted,” “The Way You Love Me,” “Knocked Out” and “Opposites Attact,” all of which are here, along with “One or the Other,” also featured here. Of these, not all of them are huge hits and some aren’t even that familiar.

#Paula abdul straight up greatest hits plus

It is what it says it is: a collection of her greatest hits, all 13 of her Billboard charting singles, plus five other album tracks.

#Paula abdul straight up greatest hits full

It’s kind of shocking to realize that it took Virgin and Paula Abdul six full seasons of American Idol to capitalize on her resurgence of fame, but they finally got around to exploiting her back catalog with the release of the 18-track Greatest Hits: Straight Up! in May 2007, just as the sixth season was about to draw to a close.