Wonders!

I had this CD of one-hit wonders of the eighties. It was a freebie I got while working at a magazine a little over a decade ago. My wife, who loves eighties music, said with disgust that she only liked three of the songs, and one she had on the actual album, and shouldn't count because the artist had demonstrably more than one hit. So there you go.

But I got to thinking about that beloved and benighted decade of the eighties, and wondering if, as I had in the past, that decade had more one-hit wonders than the sixties did. The sixties was notorious at the time for hustling acts off and on the stage. A 1965 episode of The Flintstones ("The Masquerade Party") lampooned the phenomenon (and Orson Welles's War of the Worlds hysteria) when a band called the Beasties with a hot hit is thrown out of the record office to make way for the new band, the Way-Outs. And of course Tom Hanks's musical masterpiece of 1996, That Thing You Do!, is all about one-hit wonders, set in the year 1964. The film's band is even named the Wonders.

But to answer my question: Which decade had the most artists or groups with just one solid American hit? I have no recourse but to turn to Mr. Wikipedia, which of course has compiled a list of said wonders dating from the late fifties, located at this link.

So which decade comes out on top? It's a tough brawl. For every Standells ("Dirty Water") there's a Godley & Creme ("Cry"); for every ? and the Mysterians ("96 Tears") there's an Eddy Grant ("Electric Avenue"); for every Youngbloods ("Get Together") there's a Cutting Crew ("(I Just) Died in Your Arms"). The list represents enough musicians to populate a city.

And now, for your listening pleasure,
"Der Kommissar" by After the Fire.

The Wiki page didn't number the lists, and I don't have the patience to count them, so I pasted it into an Excel document -- my most productive use for Excel so far this year -- and it did the count. And the winner is....

It's not even close. The eighties had 105 one-hit wonders; the sixties, with 42, didn't even beat the seventies and the nineties, which each had 54. The eighties was an extraordinary decade for chewin' 'em up and spittin' 'em out, and also for non-musicians to elbow their way into a hit (Bruce Willis, Eddie Murphy, Patrick Swayze, even Rodney Dangerfield). It also mattered that the eighties seemed to be a huge jumble of emerging and departing pop music styles, an era where rap and punk crashed into disco and New Wave and rock, which fed the endless need for bands, while the sixties had hits from longstanding solo artists that your grandma loved who could still knock the Beatles off the #1 spot. When Sinatra and Como are still topping the charts, it leaves less room for the Surfaris of the week.

Of course, I have objections. XTC, for example, is listed as a one-hit wonder for the tiresome 1986 moan "Dear God" (#37), but the much superior 1989 "Mayor of Simpleton" was a hit that same decade (#15), and yet they never broke the top ten in the American Billboard chart. God knows how many other such errors are on this list.

Still, even allowing for such miscues, the sheer number of eighties one-and-done artists has to make it the top decade for the type.

It may seem sad to contemplate the fate of the one-hit wonder, the act that thought it had finally broken out of the pack and reached the big time only to plummet straight back into obscurity. But keep in mind that, as sad as it may seem to have only one hit, that's one more hit than most other bands ever get.