Did Motown Confusion Cause Biggest Single Leap into the Top 10 of the 1980s (and of Diana Ross’ Career)?

Even Billboard called the 49-10 move of “Upside Down” on Aug. 9, 1980, “startling.”

(August 10, 2025) – Forty-five years ago this week, Diana Ross flipped the Billboard Hot 100 on its head.  Her funk-fueled hit Upside Down didn’t just climb — it vaulted 39 spots, from No. 49 to No. 10 on August 9, 1980, a time when that kind of move was unheard of.  No woman had ever made a bigger single-week leap into the Top 10, and no song by any act would match it for the rest of the decade.

The move was so rare in that pre-Nielsen-SoundScan era that Billboard called it “startling.”  But behind the jump was a story of some Chic production drama, Motown indecision, and a delayed promotional blitz that yielded immediate results once it (finally) happened.

The Chic Mix, the Remix, and the Fallout

When Motown released the album Diana in May 1980, it was already a project wrapped in drama.  Producers Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of the disco supergroup Chic had delivered a sleek, disco-infused set that carried many of the band’s familiar sounds, but Ross — warned by friend and NYC radio legend Frankie Crocker that the “too Chic” sound could end her career — wasn’t pleased.

Ross and longtime Motown engineer Russ Terrana reworked the entire album: speeding up tempos, tightening arrangements, trimming instrumental breaks, lowering string sections, and re-recording her lead vocals to make them more prominent over Chic’s vocalists and musicians.  The irony was that, in doing all of this, Ross and Motown made the album more sparse sounding, which had been a Chic trademark the previous three years. Without trying to, they actually succeeded in making a better Chic album than the two producers Rodgers and Edwards had done in more than a year (or ever would again as leaders of the Chic Organisation).

Rodgers, upon hearing the remixed version of Diana, was “shocked” and “furious” as he recalled in an interview to Billboard in its June 14, 1980, issue.  He called Motown, at first requesting his and Edwards’ production credits be removed out of fear that the Chic masterminds’ names would be associated with work that wasn’t theirs.  Cooler heads ultimately prevailed — the Chic team kept their production credits, while Ross and Terrana were added in fine print as “remixers” on trade magazine ads like this one.

Two Singles, No Clear Priority

In the album’s early promotion, those same ads had one glaring omission: the title of a lead single. For nearly a month after release, Motown hadn’t chosen one.

Without a label directive, Black radio DJs began picking their own favorites, while pop radio — skittish in the post-disco climate — largely ignored the album’s funk-driven tracks.  Meanwhile, club DJs quickly championed two songs: “I’m Coming Out” and “Upside Down.”

By late June, Motown had quietly prepared both for single release, assigning catalog numbers (“I’m Coming Out” as M-1491, “Upside Down” as M-1494).  Based on that sequence, standard practice would have been to release “I’m Coming Out” first and hold “Upside Down” until later in the summer.  In fact, given the song’s title and message, along with Diana’s striking new appearance and shift in musical style, “I’m Coming Out” just screamed being the first single heralding Ms. Ross’ arrival in the new decade.

Then, in a sudden reversal, Motown switched priorities and rushed “Upside Down” to radio and record stores in mid-to-late June — a full month after the album had already been selling strongly.

The Slow Build — Then the Explosion

By early July, “Upside Down” debuted modestly: No. 82 on the Hot 100 and No. 70 on the Soul chart. While it climbed cautiously at pop (82-71-59-49), it exploded on Soul (70-33-7-3), powered by club play and R&B radio.

The Diana album was already a Top 10 seller on both charts, her highest-charting LP in four years (it ultimately ended up being her biggest seller).  Pop radio, however, still hadn’t fully committed — likely because of the initial uncertainty over which track to push and the lack of a coordinated pop promotion campaign from Motown… not to mention the deepening backlash against disco or anything approaching it.

That likely changed during the week that fed the chart of August 9, when Motown’s pop promo team — knowing that the song had tested extremely well with Black audiences and club goers — appears to have launched a concentrated push, likely phoning pop stations nationwide to announce that “Upside Down” was a huge seller in their markets and that program directors would benefit from adding the song to their rotations immediately.  That week, it was named Billboard’s top “National Breakout” on the Singles Radio Action chart — a sign of having been just added to a large number of pop stations and gaining sudden, widespread airplay.

Result: the biggest single-week leap into the Top 10 by a female in Hot 100 history to that point — and the biggest such leap of any song during the 1980s.

From 49-10…to No. 1

Four weeks after its historic move, “Upside Down” became her fifth solo No. 1 (out of five top tens) reaching the summit on September 6, 1980.  It would sell a million copies and go down as the biggest solo hit of her career, and her second-biggest overall — including her Supremes hits — after her 1981 duet with Lionel Richie, “Endless Love.”

In Billboard’s August 9 coverage, longtime chart columnist Paul Grein marveled at the 49-10 leap, calling it “startling” and “most surprising” and (correctly) predicting it would top the chart.  He also noted the rare feat of the Diana album being a Top 10 seller before the single broke big at pop, as well as the irony that “Upside Down” was outperforming other Chic-related singles out at the same time — including their own “Rebels Are We” and hits by Sister Sledge and Shelia & B. Devotion — perhaps adding salt to Nile and Bernard’s earlier wounds.

Aftermath

Motown’s flipped plan paid off in the end.  “Upside Down” was a massive hit, and “I’m Coming Out” — released just two months later — became another top ten hit (albeit her first to not go all the way to No. 1).  The enormous success of the album and its two singles gave Ross a lot of leverage in her bid to renegotiate her contract at the end of 1980.  She wound up leaving Motown and signing with RCA in 1981 for a then-record $20M, a figure Motown could ill afford. 

And any lingering hard feelings about the remixed album didn’t derail Ross or her relationship with Nile Rodgers.  Ross, having left Motown for RCA, reunited with Rodgers in 1989 for her Motown return album Workin’ Overtime.

Forty-five years later as chart geeks and Diana freaks (like yours truly) commemorate the anniversary of one of history’s greatest Billboard moments, it’s easy to imagine Ross and Rodgers raising a glass over their chart triumph.  Remix drama aside, they had turned the charts “Upside Down” — and made history doing it!

DJRob

DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff!  You can follow him on Bluesky at @djrobblog.bsky.social, X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog, on Facebook or on Meta’s Threads.

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