Albums As Hit Singles

Huey Lewis has been all over the Internet recently talking up the 30th Anniversary of his classic Sports album.  He'll be performing it in its entirety on tour and there 's a CD reissue coming.
But here's the most revealing fact in all his interviews.  He perceived Sports as an album of singles.  To him it was the band's last chance with Chrysalis records.
You remember when having hit singles wasn't a bad thing?  But the thing? This was the beginning of the era of multiple singles per album.  Thriller, Purple Rain, Born in the USA.  Almost every song a hit single.

The difference with Huey is that he didn't get the critical respect that others did.  To some Sports was just a bunch of disposable Pop music chart hits.  But noticed I said classic in my description of the album.  Only 9 songs, 5 singles, the age before CD's made everyone turn of 70 minutes of music they didn't have in them.

The critic's mostly balked.  While Robert Christgau gave it a surprising B+, Rolling Stone gave it a whopping 2 stars.  2 stars!  But that's no shock, seeing that albums like this were never going to top year end polls.

But I always loved the album.  And so what if the followup, Fore, was a 2nd rate imitation.  With Sports the buying public was right, and the initial and maybe continued critical resistance that may exist today were wrong.