The title "One-Hit Wonders" does not refer to an especially potent brand of psychedelics, but rather the evanescent burst of the perfect pop song in what quaintly was called the Top 40 era. (As in "Radio plays 'em, record stores sell 'em, Billboard ranks 'em, and AT40 counts 'em down. I'm Casey Kasem!") The writers at The AV Club have their hot takes, but once the question's out there, there's just no way I could leave my choices out, right? Here's a few that jump out without thinking about it too much (or replicating The AV Club choices), so enjoy:
“My Boyfriend’s Back” – The Angels (1963)
When the early Sixties -- that's post-Elvis & pre-Beatles -- gave us the first wave of girl groups, it was inevitable that when the Aqua Net settled, there would be some divisions within those gaggles of harmonizing estrogen bombs. One division was obvious, given the times -- black v. white -- but one division was more thematic, using the girl group backdrop to offer social commentary on "good girl" and "bad girl" tropes. With a name like The Angels, can you guess where "My Boyfriend's Back" fell? And can you imagine being a young girl in the early Sixties being sold this line of shit, as social mores are beginning their seismic shift w/r/t sexual agency, body image, and religiosity? There's gonna be trouble, all right.
“Psychotic Reaction” – Count Five (1966)
You could really end the discussion of one-hit wonders by simply playing the majority of the 1972 psychedelic and garage rock collection Nuggets, so fecund are its wonders and joys. In fact, my first choice -- "96 Tears," by a collection of young male Mexican-Americans from Saginaw with the tremendous band name of ? and The Mysterians -- was snapped up by one of The AV Club writers. But my second choice was almost as easy. "Psychotic Reaction" speaks of infatuation as an uncontrollable disease of the heart and mind, but it's really the music that's most notable. Two songs fused into one -- chugging boogie splitting into psychedelic freak-out and back again -- convey the churning lurches of young love better than a thousand lyrics ever could, and you could dance to it. What could be better?
“Moonlight Feels Right” – Starbuck (1976)
It goes without saying that some atypical shit sneaked past the cultural gatekeepers of the Seventies, especially in the first half of the decade. But a wistful ode to heroin scored with synthesizer and xylophone -- simultaneously hitting the 21st Century and 19th Century demos -- will always stand out of the crowd. Of course, as a concrete operational youth grooving on this song whenever possible, I simply saw it as a loving paean to Luna. Only later did lyrics like "tricky French connection" and "the eastern moon looks ready for a wet kiss / to make the tide rise again" resonate and connect with growing understanding of opiate action and reaction. I just wish I could go back to thinking it was only about the moon.
“I Melt With You” – Modern English (1982/1990)
First, let's get something out of the way: this song was not a hit. It wasn't a hit when it was first released -- peaking in the lower reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983 -- and it wasn't a hit when the band re-recorded it eight years later. And yet, if you ask people to conjure a soundtrack to the Eighties in their heads, I'm sure this song would take the pole position. For a track that's supposedly about fucking during a nuclear holocaust, it's been a staple of weddings and commercials for a quarter-century. It launched a thousand floppy haircuts, and most likely killed the first iteration of the band. Not a small legacy for such a little tune.
“Unbelievable” – EMF (1991)
So what does this song have in common with the girl groups of the '60s? Well, if we revisit the girl groups of that era -- especially the black girl groups, whose vocalists often got their start in the church singing gospel or doo-wop -- what we see is a body of music with deep African-American roots growing in cultural and commercial impact, until a white male guitar-driven group with a specific look and sound helped send the African-American music back to the periphery of cultural consideration. As the Eighties turned into the Nineties, there was a much stronger overt African-American element -- an amalgam of house, techno, and hip-hop tailor-made for dancing -- in rock music than ever before, both in the U.S. and the U.K. (as in Jesus Jones and The Stone Roses).
The success of "Unbelievable" made it seem perfectly possible that the music of the Nineties will combine rock guitars, disaffected and deadpan nasal British vocals, hip-hop drum loops (in this case, courtesy of the 1974 track "Ashley's Roachclip" by The Soul Searchers), and a dash of Andrew Dice Clay. But just as this song reached #1 in the summer of '91, Metallica released their self-titled "Black Album," followed four months later by Nirvana with Nevermind. And just like that, white guys with loud guitars and easily imitated clothing and haircuts elicited a generational shift away from African-American music, just as the Beatles did almost three decades earlier. For a kid like me in love with black dance music, it was truly unbelievable.
“MMMBop” – Hanson (1997)
Going into 1997, the musical climate was pretty dour. In rock, grunge and post-grunge rock bands dominated the airwaves, while hip-hop was in the thick of the East Coast/West Coast rivalry that settled beefs with bullets rather than rhymes. The music industry was trying to push "electronica" as the next big thing, but it all seemed so serious; there was even a strand of electronica called Intelligent Dance Music, which was meant to be admired like a museum piece rather than enjoyed with utility. And then Hanson exploded in the summer of '97, with the help of the production duo The Dust Brothers, and the cultural tides shifted yet again. Having a #1 hit in over thirteen different countries will do that.
In my DJ days, I had somehow obtained a copy of "MMMBop" a few weeks before it was actively pushed to the public, and I played it to my crowd of randoms and regulars exactly three times in two weeks to minimal response. But once "MMMBop" made it to radio, that fourth time absolutely filled the floor, and did so for months afterward. And why wouldn't it? Three blond teenage boys and two producers graft a hip-hop beat onto a ballad with a chorus that was both nonsensical and canonical, and suddenly it was okay to dance and have frothy fun again. Sure, the DNA of "MMMBop" can be linked to every one of the late '90s boy bands, but you can't try Hanson for the crimes of a generation, can you?
“Crazy” – Gnarls Barkley (2006)
My first Coachella experience was 2004, and one of the artists I saw was Danger Mouse. DM was DJ'ing in a small tent -- Gobi, for the Coachellaheads -- in a full mouse suit in the California polo field heat. The tent was a quarter full, given that some big name indie rock band was playing the outdoor stage at the same time, and while I enjoyed it, I never thought that less than two years later, the guy in front of me would help create one of the most popular songs of the 21st Century.
"Crazy" is of a time -- I first heard it on a shitty MP3 on shittier speakers -- and timeless, launching countless cover versions spread with the speed of the internet. It's a stone-cold cinematic soul standard that launched the careers of the singer and the producer. And while both have gone on to different things -- television, record labels, production, alleged drugging and date raping -- they've never seen the mountaintop of "Crazy" again. That's what a one-hit wonder is at the essence: Out of an entire career, there's that one hit that leaves you in a state of wonder now and forever more. I wonder at the achievement, and I wonder what comes next.
“My Boyfriend’s Back” – The Angels (1963)
When the early Sixties -- that's post-Elvis & pre-Beatles -- gave us the first wave of girl groups, it was inevitable that when the Aqua Net settled, there would be some divisions within those gaggles of harmonizing estrogen bombs. One division was obvious, given the times -- black v. white -- but one division was more thematic, using the girl group backdrop to offer social commentary on "good girl" and "bad girl" tropes. With a name like The Angels, can you guess where "My Boyfriend's Back" fell? And can you imagine being a young girl in the early Sixties being sold this line of shit, as social mores are beginning their seismic shift w/r/t sexual agency, body image, and religiosity? There's gonna be trouble, all right.
“Psychotic Reaction” – Count Five (1966)
You could really end the discussion of one-hit wonders by simply playing the majority of the 1972 psychedelic and garage rock collection Nuggets, so fecund are its wonders and joys. In fact, my first choice -- "96 Tears," by a collection of young male Mexican-Americans from Saginaw with the tremendous band name of ? and The Mysterians -- was snapped up by one of The AV Club writers. But my second choice was almost as easy. "Psychotic Reaction" speaks of infatuation as an uncontrollable disease of the heart and mind, but it's really the music that's most notable. Two songs fused into one -- chugging boogie splitting into psychedelic freak-out and back again -- convey the churning lurches of young love better than a thousand lyrics ever could, and you could dance to it. What could be better?
“Moonlight Feels Right” – Starbuck (1976)
It goes without saying that some atypical shit sneaked past the cultural gatekeepers of the Seventies, especially in the first half of the decade. But a wistful ode to heroin scored with synthesizer and xylophone -- simultaneously hitting the 21st Century and 19th Century demos -- will always stand out of the crowd. Of course, as a concrete operational youth grooving on this song whenever possible, I simply saw it as a loving paean to Luna. Only later did lyrics like "tricky French connection" and "the eastern moon looks ready for a wet kiss / to make the tide rise again" resonate and connect with growing understanding of opiate action and reaction. I just wish I could go back to thinking it was only about the moon.
“I Melt With You” – Modern English (1982/1990)
First, let's get something out of the way: this song was not a hit. It wasn't a hit when it was first released -- peaking in the lower reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983 -- and it wasn't a hit when the band re-recorded it eight years later. And yet, if you ask people to conjure a soundtrack to the Eighties in their heads, I'm sure this song would take the pole position. For a track that's supposedly about fucking during a nuclear holocaust, it's been a staple of weddings and commercials for a quarter-century. It launched a thousand floppy haircuts, and most likely killed the first iteration of the band. Not a small legacy for such a little tune.
“Unbelievable” – EMF (1991)
So what does this song have in common with the girl groups of the '60s? Well, if we revisit the girl groups of that era -- especially the black girl groups, whose vocalists often got their start in the church singing gospel or doo-wop -- what we see is a body of music with deep African-American roots growing in cultural and commercial impact, until a white male guitar-driven group with a specific look and sound helped send the African-American music back to the periphery of cultural consideration. As the Eighties turned into the Nineties, there was a much stronger overt African-American element -- an amalgam of house, techno, and hip-hop tailor-made for dancing -- in rock music than ever before, both in the U.S. and the U.K. (as in Jesus Jones and The Stone Roses).
The success of "Unbelievable" made it seem perfectly possible that the music of the Nineties will combine rock guitars, disaffected and deadpan nasal British vocals, hip-hop drum loops (in this case, courtesy of the 1974 track "Ashley's Roachclip" by The Soul Searchers), and a dash of Andrew Dice Clay. But just as this song reached #1 in the summer of '91, Metallica released their self-titled "Black Album," followed four months later by Nirvana with Nevermind. And just like that, white guys with loud guitars and easily imitated clothing and haircuts elicited a generational shift away from African-American music, just as the Beatles did almost three decades earlier. For a kid like me in love with black dance music, it was truly unbelievable.
“MMMBop” – Hanson (1997)
Going into 1997, the musical climate was pretty dour. In rock, grunge and post-grunge rock bands dominated the airwaves, while hip-hop was in the thick of the East Coast/West Coast rivalry that settled beefs with bullets rather than rhymes. The music industry was trying to push "electronica" as the next big thing, but it all seemed so serious; there was even a strand of electronica called Intelligent Dance Music, which was meant to be admired like a museum piece rather than enjoyed with utility. And then Hanson exploded in the summer of '97, with the help of the production duo The Dust Brothers, and the cultural tides shifted yet again. Having a #1 hit in over thirteen different countries will do that.
In my DJ days, I had somehow obtained a copy of "MMMBop" a few weeks before it was actively pushed to the public, and I played it to my crowd of randoms and regulars exactly three times in two weeks to minimal response. But once "MMMBop" made it to radio, that fourth time absolutely filled the floor, and did so for months afterward. And why wouldn't it? Three blond teenage boys and two producers graft a hip-hop beat onto a ballad with a chorus that was both nonsensical and canonical, and suddenly it was okay to dance and have frothy fun again. Sure, the DNA of "MMMBop" can be linked to every one of the late '90s boy bands, but you can't try Hanson for the crimes of a generation, can you?
“Crazy” – Gnarls Barkley (2006)
My first Coachella experience was 2004, and one of the artists I saw was Danger Mouse. DM was DJ'ing in a small tent -- Gobi, for the Coachellaheads -- in a full mouse suit in the California polo field heat. The tent was a quarter full, given that some big name indie rock band was playing the outdoor stage at the same time, and while I enjoyed it, I never thought that less than two years later, the guy in front of me would help create one of the most popular songs of the 21st Century.
"Crazy" is of a time -- I first heard it on a shitty MP3 on shittier speakers -- and timeless, launching countless cover versions spread with the speed of the internet. It's a stone-cold cinematic soul standard that launched the careers of the singer and the producer. And while both have gone on to different things -- television, record labels, production, alleged drugging and date raping -- they've never seen the mountaintop of "Crazy" again. That's what a one-hit wonder is at the essence: Out of an entire career, there's that one hit that leaves you in a state of wonder now and forever more. I wonder at the achievement, and I wonder what comes next.
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