VH1's 100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders
VH1
VH1's special on the "100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders" is the sort of
programming in which the music network excels — stuff to watch while
you're folding your laundry on a rainy day and there's nothing else on.
Before you know it, five hours of cheesy pop ephemera have passed before
your eyes, and you're so distracted you haven't yet sorted your socks.
That's in part because a show featuring pop music's one-offs fits
in the always addictive category of Glorious Failure. By getting one big hit, these mostly male performers (as in, most
of the acts were men, not that they were hermaphrodites of a certain
degree) experienced astounding but essentially painful bouts with fame.
In essence, "100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders" was a way to do "Behind the
Music" for acts that didn't achieve enough to fill their own hour. It
was interesting to hear the backstory on Nick Gilder's 1978 smash "Hot
Child in the City" (No. 42) for two minutes, but for 60 minutes it would feel
like one of those lame Saturday Night Live sketches expanded into a
torturous movie, like Mary Catherine Gallagher in Superstar. The short bits
were enough to learn that
A) sometimes a talented, underappreciated
performer gets a hit out of nowhere and goes back to cultdom thereafter
B) some songs just capture people's attention at the right time, and get so
popular the act could never hope to top it or
C) even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.
The quick pace of the show, and the general lack of attention you pay
when watching VH1, distract you from why the particular songs
in the list were chosen. After all, if barely scraping the Top 40 was
enough to get Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's "It Takes Two" to No. 28, then how
could A-Ha's "Take on Me" get to No. 8 on the VH1 list when the band had a second single in the Top 40? (Win beer from your friends by naming the other song — "The Sun Always Shines on TV.") Apparently one can be a one-hit wonder with more than one hit. Also, it's fair to say that the early 1980s had its fair share of one-hit wonders, thanks to MTV just spreading across the hinterlands, but 1983 (11) and 1982 (9) alone constituted 20 percent of the list.
A little nod to the influence of its sister station, perhaps? More
likely, it was a recognition that most of VH1's demographic was in its musical
formative years in the early 1980s, although interestingly, 1981, the
year of MTV's birth, had no representation. In recognition of its
popularity in the young mother demographic — sometime, count how many diaper ads you see during a VH1 show, even "Porn to Rock" — 19 more one-hit wonders came from 1990-93, apparently the second Golden Age of Instant Irrelevancy.
That would explain why zero one-hit wonders came from the 1950s, and
only three from the 1960s — the garage rock scene of 1966 would have been
enough to fill out the whole list. So there's no "I Fought the Law,"
"Louie Louie," "MacArthur Park" or even "Sukiyaki," the only top 10 hit sung
completely in Japanese. But if VH1's list were about musicology, then Greil
Marcus, not William Shatner, would have hosted the show. This isn't
about arguing who should be on the list, and who shouldn't. Nor is it about
if Los del Rio's "Macarena" deserves the No. 1 slot over Soft Cell's
"Tainted Love." (Of course it does!) It's about having something pleasant and
quirky to pass the time, and maybe learning a little something along the way
while your mind is lost in household chores. So if you'll excuse me, I have
to finish pairing up my socks.
— Bob Cook (bobc@flakmag.com)
