Why is Jody Watley so forgotten as an artist?

[TMC]

She had two massive albums and had three top 10 hits on both of these albums. Nowadays, she doesn’t even get 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Why do you think she’s fallen so much in popularity?

[Hawkee]

When Jody Watley debuted in 1987 as a solo artist after being known in Shalamar many people thought Madonna and Janet Jackson had competition but when Jody Watley made her debut many people saw that she was different than Madonna and Janet Jackson but when her self-titled debut was released in 1987 Looking For A New Love was her first hit and inspired the most popular catchphrase in movie history "hasta la vista baby" that was from The Terminator from 1984. But what made Jody Watley's debut album unique was that it is an all-dance album with no ballads and that was what Jody envisioned her album to be. In 1989 when Larger Than Life we saw Jody Watley have hits with Friends "not the sitcom" Real Love and Everything which was Jody's first ballad that she scored a hit. But in my eyes Everything is not a ballad but more of an uptempo song but Larger Than Life was still a strong album and at the time of Larger Than Life's release Jody had new competition when Paula Abdul became popular and people also compared Jody to Paula. But when Jody's career went downhill was when she released her Affairs Of The Heart album in 1991 and that album had only two singles released from it and part of the reason why that album sold poorly was because MCA lost it's president of it's R&B division and Affairs Of The Heart should've had more promotion. The same thing happened with Jody's 1993 album and only three singles were released from it and when that happened Jody Watley left MCA. We would never see her again until the release of the album Flower in 1998 "which never saw a release in America but can be found on Apple Music" and that album had Jody going for an lite R&B sound and produced one single Off The Hook but another Jody Watley song If I'm Not In Love was a ballad that was first covered by Kathy Troccoli and then Faith Hill that became known. But since her album Midnight Lounge was released in the 2000's you haven't seen much of Jody Watley except for an appearence in a celebrity edition of Catch-21