“I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston
The 1987 megahit that has become the lasting image of peak Whitney Houston.
It's the end of the week, and I want to send everyone off into the weekend with the best vibes possible. That’s why the Daily Music Picks newsletter features a weekly segment called Fun Song Fridays! Regardless of era, genre, or style, the criterion is simple: it must deliver the joy and excitement we all need in our lives.
You can access the entire Fun Song Fridays archive here. A playlist featuring the songs covered with this segment is coming soon!
Hello! 😊👋
Welcome to a new edition of the Daily Music Picks newsletter!
Today’s music pick is the 1987 megahit that has become the lasting image of Whitney Houston at her peak.
Genre: Pop, R&B
Label: Arista
Release Date: May 2, 1987
Vibe: 💃🪩🕺
Here it is—one of the greatest “feel-good” songs of all time, sung by one of pop’s most decorated vocalists.
By the time “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” dropped as a single in the spring of 1987, Whitney Houston was already a star, primed for another major hit. George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, the duo who had penned “How Will I Know” for Houston, were invited by Clive Davis to write another song for Whitney, the album that would spawn four No. 1 Hot 100 hits and cement her legacy as a legit pop icon.
After Davis turned down “Waiting for a Star to Fall,” which later became a success in its own right, Rubicam says the inspiration came from a specific emotional place. “I pictured somebody single wishing that they could find that special person for themselves,” she explained. “It wasn’t, ‘I wanna go down the disco and dance.’ It was, ‘I wanna do that dance of life with somebody.’ That was the thought behind the song.” That inherent reliability, buoyed by one of Houston’s sharpest vocal performances, is vital to the song’s transcendent appeal. You hear lines like, “I need a man who’ll take a chance/On a love that burns hot enough to last,” and you feel your heart rate increase at least a little bit. Her loneliness is tinged with excitement at the potential of meeting “the one.”
Since its initial release, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” has sold over 7 million copies, won Houston a Grammy, and, with production that leaned into glittering synthesizers and drum machine rhythms, continues to influence pop songwriting to this day. It’s not only one of the most 80s-sounding 80s songs out there (with respect to the Reverend Rick Astley) but also one of the best singalong dance tracks ever produced. It’ll surely continue to grace party and 80s revival playlists for decades, if not centuries, to come.
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