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For any one of a bunch of reasons, commercial, artistic, mysterious, they have one big hit, but they don't have others. I'm Stephen Thompson. And I'm Linda Holmes. And today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're debating what is the best one-hit wonder of all time.
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and you covered the charts. You have always been a Billboard charts guy. How do we define a one-hit wonder? What is the fair definition of a one-hit wonder? Well, it's interesting because just the phrase one hit wonder implies that there are rules and they are rigidly applied. And if you have one hit and no others, you are a one hit wonder. It is one of the most. commonly misused phrases in music because artists get tagged as a one hit wonders when they have multiple hits. This drives me.
Berserk. You know who's not a one-hit wonder? Vanilla Ice. Animotion. Men Without Hats. Aha. These artists all had more than one. top 40 hit. In some cases, they had more than one top 10 hit. The other thing that I would argue would disqualify somebody as a one-hit wonder is somebody who like checks all the boxes of like if you look at the charts they only ever had one charting song and that song charted in the top 10 therefore they have to be considered
a one hit wonder, but if your cultural footprint is vastly larger than one song, I don't think you are a one hit wonder. You know who is technically a one hit wonder? The Grateful Dead. Fiona Apple. These are not. one-hit wonders and they often make lists of like the best one-hit wonders of all time or whatever but it's like come on man like okay yes
Technically, according to such and such rules of the road, they would qualify as a one-hit wonder. But you would never say Fiona Apple's cultural footprint consists of criminal. Well, and when people are talking about... That it's fun to talk about one hit wonders and like what one hit wonders do you remember or love? They're not talking about. I mean, if you say Grateful Dead, you're going to be kicked out of your cocktail party because you're you're the well actually person who's like.
Well, actually, my favorite one-hit wonder is Fiona Apple. It's unfortunate that Glenn Weldon is not here to do the voice for us because his would be better than mine. That was a good impression, Linda. That was a pretty good Glenn. Pretty good Glenn doing a snobby.
person at a party. Yes. Yes. I think there's one more rule that I don't necessarily know how to apply, but something that's worth considering is that there are artists who are considered one hit wonders who've had tons and tons and tons of hits in other countries. And what do you do about an AHA, which is one of the biggest bands in Norway for decades? Just because Take On Me is the song everybody remembers them for, and they also had another top 20 hit, they had long, long, very fruitful.
career. The group Tapau in the 80s had this huge hit called Heart and Soul. They were a classic U.S. one-hit wonder, but they were one of the biggest bands in Britain for years and years and years. I'm not sure entirely what to do with those, but it's worth also mentioning that in some cases, one-hit wonder is a U.S.
specific phenomenon that ignores the entire rest of the world. Right. I think there was a lot of that with British bands in the 80s, your Kajagoogos and stuff like that. Someone like Adele is very rare that a British artist is able to come.
overhear and then also, like, maintain that sort of status in a way. But I think these are good rules. I think these are good things to go by. And it's more or less what I was going by when I made my choice. Well, Stephen, since you've done the hard work of explaining the rules.
which, of course, are the most fun part of any discussion of this kind. I'm going to give you the honor of giving us your pick for Favorite One-Hit Wonder. You can go first. All right. Now, this is going to sound like a non sequitur. But bear with me. I want to talk quickly about jock jams. Yes. Love jock jams. So many one-hit wonders become stadium staples. Yes. Like somehow.
Cross over into stadium permanence, where they're constantly heard on the wind, particularly at sporting events. Who let the dogs out? by the Baja Men. Classic one-hit wonder. That's a jock jam. The Macarena. Is Macarena a jock jam? It was on a jock jam. All right, go ahead. You'll see people doing the Macarena in stadiums to this day. Thank you.
But I want to talk about one of the least appropriate and most unlikely jock jams of all time. It was a hit in 1998. Holmesy, you're going to know, you're going to sense where I'm going with this. I want to talk about Flagpole Sitta. Oh my goodness. By the band Harvey Danger. Now, Flagpole Sitta is a quintessential 90s song about feeling...
alienated from mass culture to the point where it literally includes the line, I don't even own a TV. Sean Nelson, who is the lead singer of Harvey Danger, Sean Nelson... writing a jock jam is like Glenn Weldon writing a jock jam. It's true. He's like a tortured intellectual, also just like an incredibly gifted songwriter. One of the reasons I want to talk about Harvey Danger is to recommend...
to people if you only know Harvey Danger for Flagpole Sitta. Harvey Danger never put out a bad song. They made three records and a compilation of kind of odds and ends and every one of those songs is great. That's a great band. Such. a great band. But the one song that crossed over, the one song that hit the Hot 100, the one song that most people remember Harvey Danger for is Flagpole City. Let's actually hear a little bit of it.
heard this in a stadium. I mean, it was Anna Jockjam's compilation. Okay, yeah, you're right. I guess I think of it more as like a karaoke staple, but yeah. And what a great karaoke song. It is a fun karaoke song. If we can just take a second to acknowledge that
the line, but if you're bored, then you're boring. That is such a great insight. And I think about that as a parent. I have quoted Sean Nelson to my kids. If you're bored, then you're boring is a great reminder and such a great... counterpoint to so much of as much as the song embodies a lot of 90s kind of nihilism and posturing and I don't know where I fit in and angst and all that.
Taking a step back and saying, if you're bored, then you're boring as a counterpoint to so much 90s music about like, I'm bored, I'm frustrated, I have nothing to do all day, is really jarring and makes this song stand out. But also you just listen to it and just... What a momentum this song has. What a jolt of energy it is. How excited I am every time it comes on the radio to this day. This is a great one-hit wonder by a great band. And you can just...
Really drop the proverbial needle anywhere in this band's catalog and you're going to hear something great. Yeah, this is such a good pick because this is exactly the kind of thing that I mean when I say like some bands, the fact that they're a one-hit wonder, even though they absolutely are.
has nothing to do with whether it's a great band that you should go and explore more of. When you're going jock jams, this was not what I was expecting, but I'm into it. There's so many ways to go. Yes, there's so many ways. Yeah. All right. Thank you very much. Stephen Thompson, flagpole sitter. Harvey Danger. Just go listen. Just go listen. All right, Aisha, you are up next. What is your pick? Okay, this is very hard to do.
I went through all of, you know, the Stevens list of what's the criteria. So that windowed it down a little bit. But then it didn't really because there were just so many that I wanted to talk about. I won't mention them in case one of them might be Linda's. We don't know. they are. So I went with one that I think is like a really, really true to the bone one hit wonder. I would be surprised if people who didn't live in the 80s.
know this song the only reason I know it is because my parents back in the day when you would tape songs off of the radio my parents taped like an entire two-hour block of the radio station, the New York radio station, WBLS, which always had on Sundays like an old-school soul R&B radio mix. And so we had this tape. probably from like 1990, 91, played it over and over. And this song was on it. And this song is called Mama Used to Say by Junior, a Black British...
R&B singer who literally only had this one hit in the US. Let's hear a little bit of it. Steven, do you know this song? I don't know this song. Oh my... Okay, so here's the thing. It reached number 30 on the Hot 100 in 1982. And it peaked at number two on the Billboard's Hot R&B Hip Hop Songs chart. But you might recognize it a little bit because it's been sampled a lot.
It's been sampled by Heavy D. It's been sampled by Warren G. And also Positive K's hit, I Got a Man. Speaking of. Yes. Another one hit wonder. Great one hit wonder. That song is amazing. Yes. A great one hit. one-hit wonder, but like, it's kind of like an updated version of the Shirelles Mama said that's like...
This is what my mom said, like, I'm taking all this to heart, but it's to this, like, incredibly funky beat with all of these, like, synth sounds going. You have, like, some percussion. You didn't hear it, but, like, the song starts with just, like, this... horns and there's that guitar riff and the music video go to youtube watch this music video this dude is dressed in like a suit and he's doing like some like
footwork and he's doing like some funky chicken stuff against this like very crude early 1980s drawings of like houses and stuff he just looks so joyous and happy and he's just like mama used to say and it's just like
And this is literally the only song I know by Junior. I know he's done other things and he seems to, speaking of like... artists who have one hit here and then are more famous in other places like he's kind of a legend you know in the UK so there's that but I just love this song and I wanted to pick a song for this that like
perhaps a lot of our listeners maybe are not familiar with, but that they should be familiar with. Because it's just fun. It's just a fun song with a little message about listening to your mother. Assuming your mother is telling you. Things that you should be learning. As soon as we're done taping, I'm immediately going to YouTube.
That's thing one. Yes. It's also interesting, like, I think of myself as such a child of the 80s in so many ways. My family got MTV in 1983, and I started obsessively transcribing the Billboard charts in 1984. wild how like if you had picked any song from 1984 I would be like oh that hit number 17 on the billboard 100 but because it was 1982 I'm like
Here There Be Dragons. Like, I didn't even know this song existed. And now I just want to, like, dig up Billboard charts from 1982 and listen to a bunch of stuff. 1982. Yeah. All right. So that was Mama Used to Say by Junior. Thank you very much, Aisha Harris. We were all given a good chair dance to that one. So it clearly got its claws in all of us very quickly.
All right. So when I was pondering what to pick for this, one of the things that I realized as I looked at, you know, various lists of one hit wonders, because you're always just trying to like spark your thinking, right? When I was a young person in the 1980s, I would say, there were...
A certain number of what I would classify as novelty hints. Oh, yeah. And I don't think we really have... novelty songs in the same way right you it's almost like a song that like somebody is singing and it goes viral on whatever video platform but it's not like on the radio like this was played on the radio With regular music. Yeah. I went with pure novelty. Hit it. Yeah, so that is General Hospital by the Afternoon Delights.
A band I'm sure that you are all familiar with. Oh, my God. Are they saying General Hospital? General Hospital. This is like the Pac-Man fever of soap operas. But it's like the story of General Hospital. I remember. Well, maybe. It's spelled General Hospital, T-A-L-E. They pronounce it General Hospital. Okay. So this song, that's the chorus, but the bulk of this song consists entirely of a spoken...
I don't want to say wrapped. That seems wrong. But it's the moment where, like, Blondie was doing rapture and stuff like that where, you know, and the waitresses were doing Christmas wrapping and the kind of talk singing, right? The plot lines of General Hospital. So this song came out in 1981.
And it's roughly the moment in which General Hospital is hugely popular, even more than like it was at other times. This is peak Luke and Laura. This is the Luke and Laura section. It captures a moment in time. And everything that was going on on General Hospital at the time. So you get these things that are like, she's not crazy. No, no, never. She just wants to get Dr. Jeff Weber, right?
It also manages to capture the moment at which Richard Simmons was appearing on General Hospital as himself. And so there's a little line about Richard Simmons is helping everybody get in shape. I went back and listened to this and I thought, if you took 1981 and you reduced it down to a single particle. The single particle would be this song. Unlike things that are timeless, this is...
Literally about what is on television at the moment the person writing the song has the TV on. It's like an award show when the host makes up the song. It's exactly like an award show. I mean, for one thing. It's disco is the other thing is in addition to being soap operas, it's pure disco.
That is disco. When disco was basically dead at that point, for the most part. Other than Donna Summer, I guess. Dying. Dying. Like, on the downswing, but like, obviously, as we all know, what we call the 70s was the... 70s and early 80s and what we call the 80s was 80s and early 90s etc so disco still was around but it was turning into this that's kind of the point and so I felt
That the Afternoon Delights, which is the name of the band that, of course, did General Hospital. I felt that they really epitomized for me the concept of the one hit wonder because. I can't imagine that it would hurt their feelings to be a one-hit wonder. One hit is one more hit than these people.
I guarantee you ever expect that. It's one more hit than I've ever had. Yeah. It's one more hit than any of us have ever had, right? One hit is one hit more than zero hits. And it's only one hit less than two hits. And that's pretty good. Yeah.
One thing I like about this is it's not just like there are some artists where it's like your one moment of genius, right? Like you only had one great song in you. That song was a hit and you couldn't duplicate it. That's the story of some one hit wonders. But then there are ones that could only have come out, as you said, Linda, in this carbon-dated sliver of 1981, where it's one hit.
And it's frozen in its time as opposed to you have made one timeless classic. And it's like disco is somewhat lost to time. To some degree, right? Disco as a current thing is lost to time. First wave disco. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, tell that to Dua Lipa like she did. Well, I was just going to say like disco, what I'm saying is like this version of disco is somewhat lost to time.
Soap operas, which still exist, people still love them, but as something that was currency at the level that General Hospital was when this song came out. Because I'm telling you. You have no reason to believe me if you were born after 1990, but they played this song on the radio. I believe that. It was number 33 on the Hot 100, a song with a... Plot summary of General Hospital was number 33 on the Billboard Hot 100. And I feel that unlike most bands, this band, again.
The Afternoon Delights is well served by being referred to as the one hit wonders behind the song General Hospital. I think this is amazing. I've never heard this before. And I'm so glad I know it exists now. Can't do better with a one-hit wonder than a novelty song. Bring back novelty songs. That's what I say.
All right. We want to know what you think is the best one hit wonder. Find us at Facebook dot com slash PCHH. That brings us to the end of our show. Aisha Harris, Stephen Thompson. Thank you so much for being here. You are both. Hit after hit after hit. Aw, thanks, buddy. Aw, thank you. This episode was produced by Hafsa Fatima, Liz Metzger, and Lennon Sherburn, and edited by Mike Katzoff. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy, and Hello, Come In provides our theme music.
Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all next time. I just can't cope. Without my soap. General Hospital. Donald Trump promised to change Washington, D.C., a place where there's an old saying that personnel is policy. That's why we have created a new podcast called Trump's Terms, where you can follow NPR's coverage of the incoming Trump administration from his cabinet secretary.
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