The elusive nature of the one hit wonder

Earlier, VH1 was playing one of its endless round-up programs, this one being about one hit wonders. I wasn't watching it closely, but more wandering in and out just to check it out while I did other stuff around the house. The very idea of the one hit wonder grates on my nerves. To be a one hit wonder is to be a joke of sorts, and to be labeled as one is to have your career all but called a fluke outright. Sure, your song will live on and on and on, danced to by secretaries on Friday nights in the night in crappy nightclubs until everyone who remembers the 80's (the decade of the supposed one hit wonders) gets too old to go out. You might even be a question on "Jeopardy" in 20 years! But no one even remembers your name (except aforementioned "Jeopardy" players) and despite the fact that you one wrote one single catchy tune, you have faded away completely. The common assumption on VH1 and in general is that most one hit wonders did not continue with a career in music.

The problem is that calling someone a one hit wonder is usually unfairly reductive. In a good number of cases, they are good musicians who have fine, long-lasting careers, but they only hit number one once. The Vh1 page for the program I saw today is a perfect example. Yes, that's Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo, alright. Sure, the Friday night secretary crowd may think of Devo as the cute band that did that catchy tune "Whip It" and then disappeared. But as I've ranted before, Devo is actually one of the coolest and most original bands ever. Just scroll through that list of one hit wonders, and a good number of them are pretty decent to very cool bands that fluked out and got a hit for no particular reason.

It's difficult to explain exactly why I am so irritated by the entire cutesy concept of the one hit wonder. The one hit wonder shouldn't make sense, especially in an industry that has emphasized full length albums over singles for 40 years. It's unlikely that there are so many musicians that generally don't make the grade but just once managed to write a song that was better than everything else out at the time. Sure, there are a few genuine historical examples of people who wrote just one really popular song as a fluke and then never did anything else, but generally it's because they had auxillary musical careers like the Big Bopper (radio DJ) or Toni Basil (choregrapher). Mostly it's just bullshit. Getting a number one hit is hardly the measure of a person's talent or even success, as much as we'd like to think.

I guess that's probably what bothers me. To think that there's anything to the concept of the one hit wonder, you have to believe that music is a really cutthroat, make or break industry. Either you make it with your platinum-selling album or you disappear into the mist and can barely make a living. The one hit wonder is usually perceived as someone who touched the dream and then disappeared. By portraying one hit wonders as has-beens, the belief that the main goal for musicians is a major label contract and a platinum-selling record is the main goal is perpetuated.

As anyone who knows anything about it really knows, hits are not a good measure of how well a musician's career is going. To be brief about it, major labels do everything in their power to play musicians for suckers. (I have nothing to prove it, of course, but whenever I watch that MTV show "Cribs" I am suspicious of exactly how many of those houses were bought with cash money and how many are gifts given to distract from crappy royalty percentages from record sales.) Everyone who knows anything also knows that it's a better bet to be a studio musician or to be in a band that isn't necessarily skyrocketing to the top of the charts but is also building a loyal fanbase and isn't blowing opportunities to put out multiple albums with respectable sales that keep you working as a musician. There are thousands upon thousand of examples that any decent music fan can cough up of people who are really great, really artistic, etc. who do well this way.

Everyone knows these things. And yet, flip on MTV or VH1 and there you'll see them--the next round of suckers. Sure, a few of them will actually do well and make a lot of money, for no explicable reason (No Doubt being my favorite example). Most will just make a bunch of money for the label and then become a footnote on a future VH1 show, if they are lucky and remembered at all. (Remember Frente? Yeah, I would have forgotten them if they hadn't mauled a really cute New Order song, too.) A few of them have real talent; if they actually worked on their skills while publishing on an independent label, they might actually carve out a good long-term career out of music.

People know these things and yet the call of the major label is often too hard to resist. I think that stuff like mocking people by calling them "one hit wonders" is one of the reasons why. The implication is that the only acceptable career is one that produces chart-topping hits, and even more, that you have to cough up hit after hit. And, of course, in order to scale the charts repeatedly you have to have a major label backing you.

Okay, I might be completely off my rocker and not a little paranoid about how all this ties into the way that major labels are screwing musicians. But beyond that, designations like "one hit wonder" are doing the audience a great disservice. By implying that someone's one hit song was a fluke, you convey the idea that the rest of their songs are for crap and not worth paying attention to. The audience is lulled into ignoring the majority of a band's work and therefore losing all context that could possibly give them any deeper meaning. This is no small thing; even hard core music fans fall into this trap. I cannot tell you the number of times that a friend of mine has gotten me into a band that I otherwise had habitually treated as a one hit wonder only to find out they were really fantastic.

The one hit wonder mentality has actually caused a number of people to reflexively think that any one band or musician can be reduced down to one song, too. The most obvious and grating example is how the Beastie Boys are perpetually reduced to "Fight for Your Right", though there's an even more upsetting trend in collegiate atmospheres of reducing them to an ode to sexism they have completely disavowed called "Girls". Lately, it seems like the only difference between a one hit wonder and a genuinely popular band is if the single compelled people to buy the whole album--hell, in our downloading age, the only difference is if the single compelled Entertainment Weekly to mention them on the cover more than once.

(In all this ranting, I'm not even going to go into how xenophobia contributes to the perception that some artists are one hit wonders. Suffice it to say, that "Take on Me", a single by a band that was widely popular for two decades in Europe, made #8 on this list of one hit wonders is a testament to the American pig-headed belief that we are the only people that count. As a rabid New Order fan, I cannot tell you how irritating it is that people think they are a cute but irrelevant relic.)

The whole thing reminds me of one of the endless debates I was exposed to as a lit major--can a writer who wrote very little, sometimes only one book, really be considered canonical? The favorite example of course is Harper Lee, who only wrote one book, the instant classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Or should someone have a body of work to point to in order to qualify? It seemed to me that the major fear was by letting non-prolific writers into the canon, then those who were there by virtue of creating many wonderful works would be easier to reduce to just one work. (Think of the very real possibility of Shakespeare being reduced to Hamlet and you see why this is a worry.)

To me, the whole debate was distracting from the real issue--why is there a canon to begin with and why is it so important to be on it? Calling something "classic" or a "hit" creates the same problems. The very existence of the divide between a hit and a non-hit separates the audience from a good number of songs they might like but are filtered out before they reach them. Incidentally, it creates a problem in the backlash, too, as people who reject the hit system are likely to disregard good songs just because they did become hits.

Do I have a solution that will make this problem go away? No, not really. There will never be way to get people out of the habit of judging a thing by its popularity. But it couldn't hurt to refrain from perpetuating the belief that people's careers and entire lives are made or broken by their ability to get on the Top 40 and stay there. I quite firmly believe there is a revolt underway in music that could potentially undermine and even destroy the death grip that the corporate bosses have on musicians. The best thing we can do as fans is continue making an effort to support musicians that are trying to make it outside of the corporate label/pop radio and TV system.