29 January 2010
One-Hit Wonders: Top 5 on Friday

Filed under music

From Music Memoirs: Top 5 One-Hit Wonders

You know, a lot of people use the term one-hit wonder kind of mockingly, but I was thinking about this the other night, and I think it’s more of a wonder that musicians come up with more than one hit in a lifetime. When you consider how many people there are out there trying to make hit songs, and how hard it is to create something good (I know; I’ve tried), how does anyone succeed more than once? And the worst thing about it is that you know the corporate machine that pushes its product out through the mainstream media makes it impossible for what must be THOUSANDS of really good songs ever to be heard. Think about some of your friends who write songs: surely some of the good ones are better than a lot of the stuff that gets a shot at airplay.

Then you get musicians like Billy Joel, The Eagles, Pink Floyd, and Bob Dylan who seem to have gone decades at a time without recording a bad song, and it’s kind of mind-blowing. Even a guy like Steve Miller, who wrote a lot of bad songs surrounding each good song, still put out a greatest hits collection that’s impossible not to love.

Then I think about most of what I listen to on a daily basis, and I am reminded of the fact that most of those musicians have never put out anything that could be called a “hit.” These musicians somehow found success in their niche markets, but that doesn’t make any of them hits.

So it is with respect and not derision that I present this list of my top 5 one-hit wonders, because one hit seems like such a difficult, difficult thing to make! Please pardon my obvious eighties bias.

Whatever you think about rap, you have to admit that the sampling of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and The Who’s “Eminence Front” (I think!) in 3rd Bass’s “Pop Goes the Weasel” (1991) is brilliantly executed. It feels like such a natural part of this song that you sometimes forget this is even a sample. 3rd Bass was a smart group of lyricists and I really dug their style, even though I thought the video for this song was wholly inappropriate for MTV. It’s one thing to make a serious charge (racism in the music industry) but it’s another entirely to encourage violence on specific, recognizable figures. Still, a great, great song. This compression of the mp3 in the widget here is kind of bad: you lose a lot of the cooler sampling in the verses, so I encourage you to seek a better recording.

It might be unfair to call Paul Hardcastle a one-hit wonder, because he has had several hits in his native UK, but mention his name to almost anyone my age and you immediately hear, “19″ (1985). And that’s it. I always considered it kind of weird that this was a dance song; I mean, I love the juxtaposition of the grim narrative over the cool chimey beat, but would you really want to dance to it? And was that the point? Because if it was, I think a lot of people missed it. I suspect lots and lots of people got their groove on while this song was playing in clubs. Kinda sad. Still a great song, though.

If I haven’t already made it clear, I love Humphrey Bogart. I don’t mean I really enjoy his movies; I mean I love him. Bertie Higgins, with “Key Largo” (1982), tapped into that love, something I and apparently millions of others could relate to. It was somewhat exploitative, granted, but it also seemed sincere. I really think the persona of this song is someone who digs old movies on cold nights. When this song first hit, I just liked it as a nice song. I used to sing it in the hallways with one of my friends in seventh grade. Then in ninth grade I got into old movies and discovered Bogey for myself and the song took on a whole new dimension for me. I hear there’s a follow-up with some other Bogart film’s title, but I’ve never heard it and I’m not really that interested, to be honest.

It’s tough to explain why I think so highly of Ali Thomson’s “Take a Little Rhythm” (1980). I remember that when I first heard it, my family was driving to Kuilima on Oahu’s distant north shore for a weekend retreat with my mom’s coworkers. I had just completed my first week at my new private school; my sister, still in elementary, was still enjoying her summer vacation. I was feeling strange about my new life. The song came on the radio and I liked it immediately. We heard it twice more before we finally got out of the car seemingly hours later, by then familiar enough with it to sing the choruses. That song seemed to take off like a rocket, ubiquitous without warning, and then it seemed to flame out just as quickly, absent from the airwaves two weeks later as if it never existed. You know, I might check out Thomson’s other stuff because if it’s stylistically similar to this, it might be worth a spin.

I always got the Red Rockers mixed up with Red Rider, another band who could qualify for this list, I think. My classmate Kristy was into Red Rider, which is probably the source of my confusion. “Lunatic Fringe” is a good song, but it’s not nearly as good as the Red Rockers’ “China” (1983). Again, I don’t know why I like this song so much, but there’s a weird urgent longing (mixed with maybe some wistfulness?) in the chorus that doesn’t let go of me! Adding to the current appeal is the fact that Red Rocker John Thomas Griffith is now a member of Cowboy Mouth (whose awesomeness I have trumpeted in this space before) who covered “China” on its Easy album. If you were at the Cowboy Mouth concert at the Pipeline Cafe several years ago, that was me yelling for the group to play “China.” It didn’t.

This is my real number 1, but I don’t know if it qualifies as a hit because almost nobody I know remembers it at ALL. Bourgeois Tagg’s “I Don’t Mind at All” is one of my favorite songs, and the only people I know who remember it are the ones I’ve played it for. Ugh. This is an injustice. It’s such a great song. I have one of Larry Tagg’s solo discs and two of Bourgeois’s albums. Neither are as good as Yoyo. This album is going to disappear forever into obscurity and that’s sad because it’s too good for that!

2010-01-29  ::  me