Pop Culture Happy Hour - The Best One-Hit Wonders

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Some bands are The Beatles and some singers are Beyoncé: Smash after smash, their legend grows. And some artists aren't. For any one of a bunch of reasons — commercial, artistic and mysterious — some artists have one big hit song, but they don't have others. But what makes for a great one-hit wonder? Today we're debating: what is the best one-hit wonder of all time.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Some bands are the Beatles. Some singers are Beyonce. Smash after smash, their legend grows. And some artists aren't. For any one of a bunch of reasons, commercial, artistic, mysterious. They have one big hit, but they don't have others. I'm Stephen Thompson. And I'm Linda Holmes.

And today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're debating what is the best one-hit wonder of all time. Joining us today is our co-host, Aisha Harris. Hello, Aisha. Hello to you both. I am very excited to talk about this with you. Neither one of you would ever be a one-hit wonder in my book. Stephen, since you are our music guy and you cover the charts, you have always been a billboard charts guy.

How do we define a one-hit wonder? What is the fair definition of a one-hit wonder? Well, it's interesting because just the phrase one-hit wonder implies that there are rules and they are rigidly applied. And if you have one-hit and no others, you are a one-hit wonder. It is one of the most commonly misused phrases in music because artists get tagged as a one-hit wonders when they have multiple hits. This drives me berserk. You know who's not a one-hit wonder?

Vanilla Ice. Animotion. Men Without hats. Aha. These artists all had more than one top 40 hit. In some cases, they had more than one top 10 hit. The other thing that I would argue would disqualify somebody as a one-hit wonder is somebody who, like, checks all the boxes of, like, if you look at the charts, they only ever had one-charting song and that song charted in the top 10. Therefore, they have to be considered a one-hit wonder.

But if your cultural footprint is vastly larger than one song, I don't think you are a one-hit wonder. You know who is technically a one-hit wonder? The Grateful Dead. Yeah. Fiona Apple, these are not one-hit wonders. And they often make lists of like the best one-hit wonders of all time or whatever. But it's like, come on, man. Like, okay, yes, technically according to such and such rules of the road, they would qualify as a one-hit wonder.

But you would never say Fiona Apple's cultural footprint consists of criminal. Well, and when people are talking about that it's fun to talk about one-hit wonders and like what one-hit wonders do you remember or love, they're not talking about. I mean, if you say Grateful Dead, you're going to be kicked out of your cocktail party. Because you're the well, actually, person who's like, well, actually, my favorite one-hit wonder is Fiona Apple. It's unfortunate that Glenn Weldon is not here to do the voice for us because his would be better than mine. That was a good impression, Linda. That was a pretty good Glenn doing a snobby person at a party. Yes, yes.

I think there's one more rule that I don't necessarily know how to apply, but something that's worth considering. is that there are artists who are considered one-hit wonders who've had tons and tons and tons of hits in other countries. And what do you do about an aha, which is one of the biggest bands in Norway for decades? Just because Take On Me is the song everybody remembers them for, and they also had another top 20 hit. They had long, long, very fruitful career.

The group Tapao in the 80s had this huge hit called Heart and Soul. They were classic U.S. one-hit wonder, but they were one of the biggest bands in Britain for years. years and years. I'm not sure entirely what to do with those, but it's worth also mentioning that in some cases, one-hit wonder is a U.S. specific phenomenon that ignores the entire rest of the world. Right. I think there's a lot of that with British bands in the 80s, your kajagooos and stuff like that. Someone like Adele is very rare that a British artist is able to come over here and then also like maintain that sort of status in a way. But I think these are good

rules. I think these are good things to go by. And, it's more or less what I was going by when I made my choice. Well, Stephen, since you've done the hard work of explaining the rules, which, of course, are the most fun part of any discussion of this kind. I'm going to give you the honor of giving us your pick for favorite one-hit wonder. You can go first. All right. Now, this is going to sound like a non-sequitur, but bear with me. I want to talk quickly about jock jams.

Yes. Love jock jams. So many one-hit wonders become stadium staples. Like somehow cross over into stadium permanence where they're constantly heard on the wind, particularly at sporting events. Who let the dogs out by the Baja men? Classic one-hit wonder. Yes. That's a jock jam?

The macarena. Is the macarena a jock jam? It was on a jock jam. You'll see people doing the macarena in stadiums to this day. But I want to talk about one of the least appropriate and most unlikely jock jams of all time. It was a hit in 1998. Holmesie, you're going to know, you're going to sense where I'm going with this. I want to talk about Flagpole Sita.

Oh, my goodness. By the band Harvey Danger. Now, Flagpole Sita is a quintessential 90s song about feeling alienated from mass culture to the point where it literally includes the line, I don't even own a TV. Sean Nelson, who is the lead singer of Harvey Danger, Sean Nelson writing a jock jam, is like Glenn Weldon writing a jock jam. It's true. He's like a tortured intellectual, also just like an incredibly gifted songwriter.

One of the reasons I want to talk about Harvey Danger is to recommend to people if you only know Harvey Danger for Flagpole Sita. Harvey Danger never put out a bad song. They made three records and a compilation of kind of odds and ends, and every one of those songs is great. That's a great band. Such a great band. But the one song that crossed over, the one song that hit the Hot 100, the one song that most people remember Harvey Danger for is Fly Pulse. It said, let's actually hear a little bit of it. But if you've ever heard this in a stadium.

I mean, it was on a jock jam's compilation. Okay, yeah, you're right. I guess I think of it more as like a karaoke staple, but, yeah. What a great karaoke song. It is a fun karaoke song. If we can just take a second to acknowledge that the line, but if you're bored, then you're boring, that is such a great insight. And I think about that as a parent. I have quoted Sean Nelson to my kids.

If you're bored, then you're boring is a great reminder and such a great counterpoint to so much of, as much as this song embodies a lot of 90s kind of nihilism and posturing and I don't know where I fit in and. angst and all that, taking a step back and saying, if you're bored, then you're boring as a counterpoint to so much 90s music about like, I'm bored, I'm frustrated, I have nothing to do all day, is really jarring and makes this song stand out. But also, you just listen to it. And what a momentum this song has. What a jolt of energy it is. How excited I am every time it comes on the radio to this day. Yeah. This is a great one hit wonder by a great band. And you can just really drop the proverbial needle anywhere in this band's catalog, and you're going to hear something great. Yeah, this is such a good pick, because this is exactly the kind of thing that I mean when I say,

like, some bands, the fact that there are a one-hit wonder, even though they absolutely are, has nothing to do with whether it's a great band that you should go and explore more of. When you're going Jock Jams, this was not what I was expecting, but I'm into it. There's so many ways to go. Yes, so many ways to go. Yeah. All right. Thank you very much.

Stephen Thompson, flagpole sita, Harvey Danger. Just go listen. Just go listen. All right, Aisha, you are up next. What is your pick? Okay, this is very hard to do. I went through all of, you know, the Stevens list of what's the criteria. So that winded it down a little bit. But then it didn't really because there were just so many that I wanted to talk about. I won't mention them in case one of them might be Linda's. We don't know what they are. So I went with one that I think is like a really, really true to the bone. One hit wonder, I would be surprised if people who didn't live in the 80s, know this song. The only reason I know it is because my parents, back in the day when you would tape songs off of the radio, my parents taped like an entire two-hour block of the radio station, the New York radio station, WBLS, which always had on Sundays, like an old school, soul, R&B radio mix. And so we have this tape probably from like 1990, 91, played it over and over. And this song was on it. And this song is called Mama Used to Say by Junior, a black, British

R&B singer who literally only had this one hit in the U.S. Let's hear a little bit of it. Stephen, do you know this song? I don't know this song. Oh my God. Okay. So here's the thing. It reached number 30 on the Hot 100 in 1982.

And it peaked at number two on the Billboard's Hot R&B hip-hop songs chart. But you might recognize it a little bit because it's been sampled a lot. It's been sampled by Heavy D. It's been sampled by Warren G. And also positive K's hit, I Got a Man. Speaking of... Yes, another one hit wonder. Great one hit wonder.

That song's amazing. Yes, a great one hit wonder. But it's kind of like an updated version of the Shirel's mama said. It's like, this is what my mom said. Like, I'm taking all this to heart. But it's to this like incredibly funky beat with all of these like synth sounds. You have like some percussion. You didn't hear it, but like the song starts just like this.

and there's horns and there's that guitar riff and the music video, go to YouTube, watch this music video. This dude is dressed in like a suit and he's doing like some like footwork and he's doing like some funky chicken stuff against this like very crude early 1980s drawings of like houses and stuff.

He just looks so joyous and happy and he's just like, mama used to say. And it's just like, Mama. And this is literally the only song I know by Junior. I know he's done other things. And he seems to, speaking of,

like, artists who have one hit here and then are more famous in other places, like he's kind of a legend, you know, in the UK. So there's that. But I just love this song. And I wanted to pick a song for this that like,

perhaps a lot of our listeners maybe are not familiar with, but that they should be familiar with. Because it's just fun. It's just a fun song with a little message. about listening to your mother, assuming your mother is telling you things that you should be learning. As soon as we're done taping, I'm immediately going to YouTube. That's thing one. Yes.

It's also interesting, like, I think of myself as such a child of the 80s in so many ways. My family got MTV in 1983, and I started obsessively transcribing the Billboard charts in 1984. It's so wild how, like, if you had picked any song from 1984, I would be like, oh, that hit number 17 on the Billboard. 100. But because it was 1982, I'm like, here there be dragons. Like, I didn't even know this song existed. And now I just want to like dig up billboard charts from 1982 and listen to a bunch of stuff. 1982. Yeah. All right. So that was Mama used to say by Jr. Thank you very much. Aisha Harris. We were all given a good chair dance to that one. So it clearly got its claws in all of us very quickly. All right. So when I was pondering what to pick for this, one of the things that

I realized as I looked at, you know, various lists of one-hit wonders, because you're always just trying to, like, spark your thinking, right? When I was a young person in the 1980s, I would say, there were a certain number of what I would classify as novelty hits. And I don't think we really have novelty songs in the same way, right? It's almost like a song that, like, somebody is singing and it goes viral on whatever video platform, but it's not like on the radio. This was played on the radio with regular music. Yeah.

I went with pure novelty. Hit it. Yeah, so that is General Hospital by the Afternoon Delights, a band I'm sure that you are all familiar with. Oh, my God. Are they saying General Hospital? General Hospital. This is like the Pac-Man fever.

of soap operas. But it's like the story of General Hospital, I remember. Well, maybe. It's spelled General Hospital, T-A-L-E. They pronounce it General Hospital. Okay. So this song, that's the chorus, but the bulk of this song consists entirely of a spoken. I don't want to say rapt, that seems wrong.

But it's the moment where, like, Blondie was doing rapture and stuff like that, where, you know, And the waitresses were doing Christmas rapping and the kind of talk singing, right? The plot lines of General Hospital. It started out in Port Charlestown where Frank Smith's mom used to hang around. No one could prove that he was a crook till Luke stole his little black book. So this song came out in 1981 and it's roughly the moment in which General Hospital is hugely popular, even more than like it was at other times. This is peak Luke and Laura. This is the Luke and Laura section.

It captures a moment in time and everything that was going on on General Hospital at the time. So you get these things that are like, she's not crazy. No, no, never. She just wants to get Dr. Jeff Weber, right? It also manages to capture the moment at which Richard Simmons was appearing on General Hospital as himself. And so there's a little line about Richard Simmons is helping everybody get in shape. I went back and listened to this, and I thought, if you took 1981 and you reduced it down to a single particle, the single particle would be this song. Unlike things that are timeless, this is literally about what is on television at the moment the person writing the song has the TV on.

It's like an award show when the host makes up the songs. It's exactly like an award show. I mean, for one thing, it's disco is the other thing, is in addition to being soap operas, it's pure disco. That is disco. When disco was basically dead at that point, for the most part. Other than Donna Summer, I guess. Dying. Dying.

Like, on the down swing, but, like, obviously, as we all know, what we call the 70s was the 70s and early 80s and what we call the 80s was 80s and 90s, et cetera. So disco still was around. but it was turning into this. That's kind of the point. And so I felt that the afternoon delights, which is the name of the band that, of course, did General Hospital, I felt that they really epitomized for me the concept of the one-hit wonder because I can't imagine that it would hurt their feelings to be a one-hit wonder.

One hit is one more hit than these people, I guarantee you ever, expect that. It's one more hit than I've ever had. Yeah. It's one more hit than any of us have ever had, right? One hit is one hit more than zero hits. And it's only one hit less than two hits. And that's pretty good. Yeah. One thing I like about this is it's not just like there are some artists where it's like your one moment of genius, right? Like you only had one great song in you. That song was a hit and you couldn't duplicate it. That's the story of some one hit wonders. But then there are ones that are like, could only have come out, as you said, Linda, in this like carbon-dated sliver of 1981 where it's one hit and it's frozen in its time as opposed to you have made one timeless classic. And it's like disco is somewhat lost to time to some degree, right?

Disco is a current thing is lost to time. First wave disco. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, tell her to do a leapa, like she did. Well, I was just going to say, like, disco, what I'm saying is like this version of disco is somewhat lost to time. Soap operas, which still exist, people still love them. But as something that was currency at the level that General Hospital was when this song came out, because I'm telling you, you have no reason to believe me if you were born after 1990.

But they played this song on the radio. I believe that. It was number 33 on the Hot 100, a song with a. Plot summary of General Hospital was number 33 on the Billboard Hot 100. And I feel that unlike most bands, this band, again, the afternoon delights, is well served by being referred to as the one-hit wonders behind the song, General Hospital. I think this is amazing. I've never heard this before. And I'm so glad I know it exists now.

Can't do better with a one. one-hit wonder than a novelty song. Bring back novelty songs. That's what I say. All right. We want to know what you think is the best one-hit wonder. Find us at Facebook.com slash PCH. That brings us to the end of our show, Aisha Harris, Stephen Thompson. Thank you so much for being here. You are both hit after, hit after hit. Oh, thanks, buddy. Thank you. This episode is produced by Hufza Fathema, Liz Metzger, and Lenin Sherburn, and edited by Mike Katzen. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy, and Hello Come In provides our theme music.

Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all next time. Cope. Without my soap. General Hospital.