Stylus Magazine’s Top 50 One Hit Wonders - Article - Stylus Magazine Page 1 of 9 Type Keyword Here... Today on Stylus Reviews October 31st, 2007 2007 Year-End Thoughts - Closing Time 2007 Year-End Thoughts - Writing About... 2007 Year-End Thoughts - I Humanize the... 2007 Year-End Thoughts - Notes Towards... Features October 31st, 2007 Pop Playground - Top 50 Albums of 2007 Pop Playground - Top 50 Songs of 2007 Movie Review - Stylus Magazine’s Top... or too long, the One-Hit Wonder has been the property of VH1-sponsored, eye-rolling “So Bad It’s Good!” irony and condescension. That’s a part of it, Recently on Stylus sure, but there’s so much more to the one-hitter than Los Del Rio. The OHW encompasses cultural anachronisms, paradigmatic oddities, Reviews inexplicable left-field successes, and give-it-all stunners, hits where the October 30th, 2007 artist couldn’t possibly follow them up and some hits where they didn’t even try. Sam Amidon - All Is Well Some of them deserve and embrace their One-Hit Wonder status, others would The Black Swans - Change! spend their entire careers trying to shed it. The great majority will never grace a Yo Zushi - Notes for “Holy Larceny” Stylus all-time list again. Soilwork - Sworn to a Great Divide October 29th, 2007 Who the One-Hit Wonder really belongs to are the people who were around for their Grizzly Bear - Friend EP fifteen minutes in the limelight. Consequently, the majority of singles on this list Charalambides - Likeness were hits between the years of 1990 and 1999, certainly the era in which most of Stars Like Fleas - The Ken Burns Effect our staff was the most impressionable to the culturally pervasive powers of the one- Origami Arktika - Trollebotn hitter. Nonetheless, we at Stylus would never purport to create a definitive list of the best One-Hit Wonders, as there are few musical mediums more personally Features biased. Hopefully, though, this list will be one of the first of its kind to give as much October 30th, 2007 credence to the “Wonder” part as to the “One-Hit” part of the phenomenon. Pop Playground - Top Reissues: 2007 Pop Playground - The Final Ever Stylus... Note: We probably should make the distinction here of what exactly we consider a Movie Review - Stylus Magazine’s Top... One-Hit Wonder. Well, firstly, we're going by US standards here, which is why you October 29th, 2007 might see America one-timers Right Said Fred here despite their incredible and Dead Letter Office - The Grieving incredulous continued success in Europe. Secondly, we're not holding the success of Seconds - Final Seconds a band's larger discography against their one-hit wonder status, so bands like The Movie Review - Stylus Magazine’s Top... Flaming Lips and the Butthole Surfers are still eligible for their one mainstream Article - The Bluffer’s Guide to... crossover despite the critical acclaim and cult fandom they received for their other work. And thirdly, a band really had to have had only one hit to be eligible here— Recent Music Reviews the definition of which is obviously tricky, but one which excludes outright acts like Vanilla Ice, Falco, and Men Without Hats, all of whom are normally considered one- Radiohead - In Rainbows hit wonders but in fact had follow-up singles that performed rather well ("Play That Prefuse 73 - Preparations Funky Music," "Vienna Calling" and "Pop Goes the World," respectively). That said, Phosphorescent - Pride there's still sure to be choices and exclusions that raise your ire, so let us have it if Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover you must. Hopefully there'll be at least a few we can all agree on. The Fiery Furnaces - Widow City Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala 50. The Honeycombs – “Have I the Right?” Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band... “Have I the Right?” boasts a brutal, senseless act of violence for a chorus, as the PJ Harvey - White Chalk bass thumps of the drums get married to what is supposedly the sound of the band Iron and Wine - The Shepherd’s Dog stomping on the floorboards outside the studio, and Dennis O’Dell has to put on his Ricardo Villalobos - Fabric 36 best carnival busker’s voice to make himself heard. Which he does, and it’s fucking Beirut - The Flying Club Cup terrifying. “rrrrggghhhCOME! RIGHT! BACK! I JUST! CAN’T! bear IIIT!” Someone Broken Social Scene Presents: Kevin... attempts to play guitar during this, but it’ll take a few listens for you to realize that. The Dirty Projectors - Rise Above Joe Meek takes ‘60s beat pop and pushes it to its absolute limit, making this a love The Go! Team - Proof of Youth song in that it sounds like an insanely furious orgy of fumbling, snogging, and Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam fondling in a delightfully sweaty candy-floss factory. Recent Movie Reviews [William B. Swygart] Stylus Magazine’s Top 10 Zombie Films... 49. The Flying Lizards – “Money (That’s What I Want)” The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising - David... Deborah Evans sounds petulant, robotic and faintly aristocratic on this famous Lars and the Real Girl - Craig Gillespie deconstruction of the old Motown favorite, while the "Random Brothers" squeak out Key Canadian Films by Women - Kay... counterpoint behind her. The world's most rickety guitar twangs and plucks away as Michael Clayton - Tony Gilroy someone slams a door repeatedly, and the track is interrupted twice for the UFO Oswald’s Ghost - Robert Stone from Space Invaders. And that's just on the single edit, to say nothing of the Control - Anton Corbijn double-length album version. This became a hit, evergreen fodder for ‘80s King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters -... compilations and a dance craze—all because for a little while there, jerky and quirky Boarding Gate - Olivier Assayas were cool, even if the Flying Lizards were Fluxus/Dada shit-disturbers. David Across the Universe - Julie Taymor Cunningham may well have been surprised at the response his brainchild got, but New York Film Festival 2007, Part IV - our charts are the richer for it. New York Film Festival 2007, Part III - [Ian Mathers] The Assassination of Jesse James by the... The Darjeeling Limited - Wes Anderson 48. Lord Tariq + Peter Gunz – “Déjà Vu” Shadows (Senki) - Milcho Manchevski Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz aren't terrible rappers, they're just not very good. That's what I realized when I recently revisited this '98 summer jam. But that beat: a snippet of Jerry Rivera's "Amores Como El Nuestro" (which Shakira shamelessly riffed on "Hips Don't Lie") raising the curtain for pronounced snares and the sparkling seduction of Steely Dan's "Black Cow." The intro's Spanish Harlem, the drums are the grit of the Bronx, the sample is the flair of uptown Manhattan, the sing-along chorus is Big Apple pride, and "Déjà Vu" is one of the best New York City anthems ever. [Tal Rosenberg] mhtml:file://J:\MediaClips\MediaClips_2008\MediaClips\Stylus Magazine’s Top 50 One ... 29/04/2010 Stylus Magazine’s Top 50 One Hit Wonders - Article - Stylus Magazine Page 2 of 9 47. Love and Rockets – “So Alive” Evidently it took Daniel Ash a whole decade to completely unlearn the lessons he was taught during his tenure with Bauhaus, but the wait was worth it. Love and Rockets’ “So Alive” is as great a song as “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” but for the exact opposite reasons—“Bela” was unbelievably chilling and distant, “So Alive” became a monster hit because it was so immediate and warm—in fact, it was fucking hot. Ash’s slithery moan, complemented by “Walk on the Wild Side”-borrowed backing vocals and the smokiest production set to wax since Marc Bolan first crawled out of his cage, lists a cadre of some of the darkest come-ons of the 80s, but the song is still best summarized in the four word chorus—“I’m alive / So alive.” Somehow, I think Bela would’ve approved of the sentiment. [Andrew Unterberger] 46. L7 – “Pretend We’re Dead” The compressed guitar hook would give our own Nick Southall the heebie-jeebies, but rarely have content and form met with such devastating effect, grinding the chorus’ leaden irony into listeners’ heads until we become the zombies that Reaganomics could never quite create. In the year that teen spirit started to smell, “Pretend We’re Dead” was a creepy letter from the front, with nary a wasted moment or hint of subtlety. Ah, youth. [Alfred Soto] 45. Natural Selection – “Do Anything” I love this song so much that I’ve written about it twice. The ascension of Prince’s “Cream” to the top of Billboard Hot 100 in the fall of 1991 kept this PG-13 rated slice of slather-pop at Number Two, which, I suppose, is appropriate. “Do Anything” is far from dirty, but it sure sounds like it—this is the aural version of teens suddenly discovering they could do far more than just make out (but not much more). A year after Madonna made ridiculous spoken-word pillow talk cool again, her backup singer Nikki Harris does it again. “Are you qualified?” she asks the young man with the slithery falsetto, as if she thought he really wasn’t. At least “Do Anything” suggests that its creators are willing to learn. [Alfred Soto] 44. The Chakachas – “Jungle Fever” Due to being the last decade in which hit songs were still allowed to not have words, the ‘70s produced the greatest number of totally anonymous one-hit wonders—Hot Butter’s “Popcorn,” Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven,” and Apollo 100’s “Joy” among them.