Does anybody else wonder whatever became of the one hit wonder? Why this generation hasn’t had a Survivor or a 4 Non Blondes or even a Dexy’s Midnight Runners?
I thought we might have had one in Desiigner, his mega-hit Panda having sat there by its lonesome for a good six months but alas, he dropped his debut mixtape last week, and while it might not be the most groundbreaking sound, it looks like he’s sticking around for a while.
It seems as though the one hit wonder’s golden days of the 90s and the early 00s are gone; the days where an artist would put out a song that would throttle the charts senseless only to completely fade into obscurity almost immediately after.
Most of the time it would be because their music was largely garbage (looking at you, Alien Ant Farm) and their success was based on some kind of tacky novelty (looking at you, Los Del Rio) but people are still creating music that’s equally as garbage today (looking at you, Meghan Trainor) without disappearing.
Having never really thought about it much until now, I wanted to try to understand why one hit wonders have become so few and far between in the 21st century and what has changed to bring us to this bittersweet state of affairs.
It’s rather difficult to spot a one-hit- wonder any way but retrospectively, meaning we may have already seen some come and go and we just don’t know it yet. There’s no real timeline for writing an artist off as a one hit wonder, look at Robin Thicke, who most people had already dismissed as one after 2002’s When I Get You Alone (that one where he samples disco Beethoven and rides a bike in the most infuriating way possible) only to come back over a decade later with the infectiously reptilian Blurred Lines, a song that has one hit wonder written all over it.
Apart from Psy and his truly horrific Gangnam Style, there are just so few that I can recall from the last ten years off the top of my head.
The blame for this can be filtered through a number of channels. The meteoric rise of social media in this time is one of them. Where in the past artists have completely disappeared with barely a trace even after releasing a chart-topping hit, it’s damn near impossible for one to do so these days if they don’t want to. Sure, there are a lot of artists who have one song that vastly outperforms everything else they’ve ever done, but they won’t disappear completely – they basically can’t.
A one hit wonder is more than an artist with one hit, but an artist with one hit and nothing else. People like whiny power poppers Wheatus or Crazy Town (whose eighth member was ‘piercings’) in the early 00s, because neither of them had access to the kind of free, visibility-enhancing platforms that exist today like Facebook or Twitter after Teenage Dirtbag and Butterfly had been and gone and they were pretty stumped as to how they were going to replicate their runaway success.
Maybe if they did, more people might have paid attention to the release of their follow-up material. It’s difficult to picture anyone but diehard Wheatus fans (surely the first recorded use of that phrase in history) getting excited or even knowing it was happening when they released their next single A Little Respect a year later, they had such very limited avenues to promote it. In a nutshell, social media is the entire reason Soulja Boy exists and Afroman does not in 2016.
The ease with which these artists are able to create their own music, on a whim as a result of cheap and effective and ever advancing technology helps to keep them in the game as well. When major labels stopped handing Vanilla Ice despicable amounts of money back at the turn of the millennium, he didn’t have the option of buying a MacBook and a microphone and spitting his corny as fuck bars over hand-crafted corny as fuck GarageBand beats in an effort to resurrect his career independently instead of living off those Ice Ice Baby checks and having to get into the real estate game. And even if he could have afforded his own studio with all those royalties, where was the platform to release his music like the one that exists now?
Music streaming services are another big reason, swathes of people foregoing illegal downloading and building their own music collections themselves and instead now having it fed to them, playlist by playlist. Electronic music databases like Spotify and Youtube give an unprecedented permanence to music. You may struggle to find an obscure record from a back alley punk band from four decades ago but literally anything that is uploaded online is there for life to be accessed by the average consumer with the click of a button, a concept that was unheard of back when people like Eiffel 65 or Soft Cell were surgically inserting their signature songs into people’s cortexes.
The unprecedented accessibility of music that these streaming services provide is insane when you stop to think about it. I can still remember a time when discovering new music or even just being able to listen to the music you already loved (if you couldn’t afford to buy as many CDs as you wanted) involved either listening to the radio or waiting for Saturday morning Rage.
Consuming music via these formats meant that a lot of people were limited to hearing just one hit single from an artist and having to decide from there. Maybe if those generations had Spotify, where they would now have access to Deep Blue Something’s entire discography (they somehow have four albums!), they might have bothered listening to more of it than just Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
All of this has not only changed the way we share and consume music but, from a business standpoint, it’s changed the way artists are managed. The huge fat ocean of profits the music industry once enjoyed from record sales has long dried up, the Internet burst that bubble soon after its arrival, meaning any money record labels do spend in helping artists to create music has to be spent ever so wisely.
People like Meghan Trainor might sign enormous record deals to make garbage music, but its garbage music that still has a huge market. Where was there to go for someone like Lou Bega once that Mambo Number 5 hype wore off? Unless there’s some vast untapped reservoir of mambo fans out there I’ve never noticed, it was nowhere but down. There’s no way Mambo Number 5 happens in a 2016 where the music industry’s purse strings are tighter than ever before. If it does happen, it’s as a YouTube viral video.
You can see how we have arrived at where we are today. If you hate one hit wonders then this is the ideal world for you. As much as I hated some of the rancid garbage that’s gone big from years gone by like The Ketchup Song or Cotton Eye Joe (you haven’t lived in rural Australia unless you’ve danced to that at your graduation), other one hit wonders like Return Of The Mack and What Is Love and Tubthumping still stack up there among all time party exploders.
It was perfect. One song was really all we ever needed from Mark Morrison and Haddaway and Chumbawumba and a whole lot of other artists the likes of which we’ll never have again. They live on as a testament to artists flying too close to the sun, something it seems everyone is too scared to try anymore.
I detest that I now live in a world where you can no longer simply condemn artists like Redfoo or Iggy Azalea to the fires of one hit wonder-dom and not have to be confronted with their presence on a near-daily basis, but I mainly feel for future generations, who will never know firsthand the joys that some of these songs can bring.
I’m thankful that at least my children will be able to turn their noses up at certified bangers like Baha Men’s Who Let The Dogs Out?, Fountains Of Wayne’s Stacy’s Mom or Sisqo’s Thong Song and give me merciless waves of shit for having lived through a time when these were not only commonplace, but completely acceptable.
Image: Lou Bega/Youtube