#100 the week of April 6, 1996
What was #1? “Because You Loved Me” by Celine Dion, in its third of six straight weeks at the top of the chart.
“Ain’t Nobody” by Rufus and Chaka Khan* is an all timer. At its base level, it’s a post-disco love song, but what makes “Ain’t Nobody” special is the variety of elements pulled from other genres. There’s a buzzing hard rock guitar that doesn’t arrive until the second verse, reggae drum fills, and gospel backing vocals, all tied together by a percolating synth loop. It still feels fresh 42 years later. It would be a fool’s errand to try to cover it.
*“Ain’t Nobody” topped out at #22 on the Hot 100 in 1983, but reached the top spot on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
And yet, Diana King wasn’t even the first diva to attempt to put a new spin on “Ain’t Nobody.” In 1994, British singer-songwriter Jaki Graham cut a a perfectly adequate remake that swapped the iconic synth line with a ‘90s style house music piano and not much else. If I heard this out in the wild, I’d dig it, but have no desire to revisit it. The only notable things about this version are that its video was directed by Antoine Fuqua and that it hit the top spot of the Bubbling Under Hot 100.
It’s time for an important digression about Billboard chart minutia. If that kind of thing is likely to bore you, skip ahead two paragraphs. Billboard has a ton of song charts. There are the various genre charts that have changed over time, depending on what genres are still active concerns. The most important chart* is the all-genre Hot 100, which tracks the top hundred songs of the moment based on an arcane combination of sales, airplay, and streams.
*For future reference, any usage of the term “failed to chart” in Warm 100 columns applies just to the Hot 100.
And then there’s the weirdest Billboard chart: the confusingly named Bubbling Under Hot 100. Officially, these are top 25 songs of the moment that have not yet cracked the top 100. It is pointedly not spots 101-125 on the Hot 100 because it doesn’t include songs that have fallen from that chart; only songs that haven’t reached the big list yet. The theory being that we should keep an eye on these songs because they might break big. There are a few iconic songs that never broke out of the Bubbling Under; in fact, the record for longest time on the Bubbling Under is held by Pearl Jam’s “Alive,” which spent 61 weeks there without ever getting higher than #7.
Diana King is my favorite kind of artist, the rare two hit wonder. One hit wonders are a dime a dozen, but it’s a whole lot rarer for someone to score two hits and have the American public say “Thank you, that’ll be all.” They* first charted in 1993 with the dancehall banger “Shy Guy,” (#13). “Ain’t Nobody” was the second failed follow up to the surprise success of “Shy Guy.” A track called “Love Triangle” failed to chart, while “Ain’t Nobody” dragged itself across the line to #94. They squeezed out a second proper hit in 1997 when their cover of “I Say A Little Prayer” reached #38 largely off its placement in the Julia Roberts romcom My Best Friend’s Wedding. A follow up track, “L-L-Lies,” stalled out at #71 and that was the end of Diana King’s Hot 100 history.
*In 2018, King announced they identified as non-binary and has exclusively used they/them pronouns since 2022. Additionally, after coming out as a lesbian in 2012, they became Jamaica’s first prominent out musician.
King’s cover of “Ain’t Nobody,” isn’t a bad song in a vacuum, but it suffers in comparison to the original, and feels dated where the original feels timeless. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. Rufus and Chaka Khan get your attention by repeating the synth hook for 25 seconds before dropping the drums, Khan’s vocals come in about ten seconds later. King spends nearly 30 seconds crooning an original vocal intro reminiscent of the one on the long version of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.” A further ten seconds are spent on establishing the generic trip-hop rhythm that has replaced the iconic synth hook. It takes a full 40 seconds before King sings the opening lyric and the song proper finally starts. This change of pace absolutely saps the song of its ear catching oomph. I’m all for covers doing something different from the original, but given that King’s vocals don’t stray too far from Khan’s blueprint, it’s not different enough.
It doesn’t help that it sounds incredibly dated. The vocal intro and trip-hop arrangement, as well as the piano fills and a breathy talk-sung verse all identify this as a mid-‘90s, and not in a good way. At some point in the future of this column, when we roll the right song, we’ll get a better chance to explore the “fling it on the wall and see if it sticks” approach the music industry took in the waning years of the 20th century*. Until then, I can theorize that the reason youth culture skipped a 90s revival and jumped straight to reviving Y2K and post-9/11 styles was due in part to the “end of history” optimism of that era not jiving with our modern era of multilevel crises.
*Textbook examples: 1) “How Bizarre” by OMC, a light hip-hop song from New Zealand based around an acoustic guitar and mariachi horns with goofy lyrics essentially about nothing. 2) “Cotton Eye Joe” by Rednex, a country-techno remake of an old American folk song, recorded by a bunch of Swedes-for-hire. 3) Hell, there was even a swing revival science is still trying to explain.
All of this is to say, that by so firmly pulling from the stylistic choices of the mid-‘90s, King’s cover must have sounded fresh and new at the time, but feels dated now. The original could easily be played alongside “Espresso” or “Good Luck, Babe” without anyone batting an eye: the King version would be a throwback. Their version is also a tad reserved at times, whereas the joy of the Rufus original is the way all these disparate genre elements come together. It’s not a bad cover, King is in great voice and the chorus will always hit, but it has no reason to exist other than as an attempt to ride the tailcoats of an already classic song.
Rating: 5/10
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