Day 5: One Hit Wonders

At my school, many teachers will decompress at the end of the day by hanging out for a few minutes after the students leave, either on the front sidewalk if the weather is nice, or inside the front entry. Today one of the topics bouncing around was trying to label the best one hit wonder of the 80s. Now, not every person on our staff was actually alive during the 80s so they probably wouldn't have had much to say on the subject, but there's a good number of us who came of age during that glorious decade, and we had a lot of shared reference points to discuss. Coincidentally, the topic of one hit wonders of the 80s has been brought up by people around me two other times in just this past week.

Tonight I'm going to run down a quickly-assembled list of ten of my favorite one hit wonders from the 80s. I think this is probably a good representation for me because they're all coming from my iTunes library, and if it was a song I liked enough to put it in my top 10, I'd probably have downloaded it by now. But the definition of what makes a one-hit wonder is kind of tricky. To save time, I'll just say that I'm going with the idea that these songs were really the only significant musical moment these artists had as far as chart success or radio airplay. They all probably released follow-up singles to capitalize on the success of their big hits, but most people probably wouldn't recognize any of those other songs as readily. Also, I'm sure there are songs on this list that many people would question as to whether they could actually be called a hit, but if I heard it on the radio stations I was listening to a lot when it was out, it left enough of a fingerprint on me that I decided to include it. After all, this list is "favorite" one hit wonders, not necessarily "most widely-recognized."

As always, in no particular order: 

*"Take My Breath Away" by Berlin. Sure, Berlin released a few other songs that never went anywhere because they weren't all that memorable, but in the summer of 1986 you couldn't walk through a mall without hearing this song coming at you from three different directions.

*"Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. I did the research here - the song, which feels on the verge of being in the 70s, was released in 1980 (unlike "Cars" by Gary Numan or "My Sharona" by The Knack, both of which probably would have made this list had they been eligible). It's a bouncy little pop song with a melancholy touch, and taken in historical context can now be seen as something of a eulogy. 

*"Ah! Leah!" by Donnie Iris. Maybe the name doesn't ring a bell, but if the song came on classic rock radio now, I'm betting most people would remember it. Donnie Iris had another minor hit years later, "Love is Like a Rock," but if you had to be reminded or told that song even existed? Back to the one hit wonder.

*"Goody Two Shoes" by Adam Ant. Since this song is something like 90% of a simple drum beat that we could hammer out easily in the junior high band room before the director and his coffee cup showed up, we loved it. I still love it now.

*"Fantasy" by Aldo Nova. This was an early-80s hard rock staple. For some reason it was always better if the DJ didn't skimp out on the ominous introduction with the helicopter sound effects before the main riff kicked in. 

*"The Final Countdown" by Europe. I don't anticipate a lot of argument about this one.

*"Epic" by Faith No More. Again, you'd probably know it if you heard it, and in the summer of 1989, I heard it all the time. Anyone who drove past my car when the windows were rolled down heard it. 

*"Kiss Me Deadly" by Lita Ford. A lot of people may have forgotten about this one, but since it always gets played when my cousins get together with a basement full of musical instruments each summer, it doesn't at all feel dated to me.

*"Lunatic Fringe" by Red Rider. Another band that literally only had the one big radio hit, and then seemingly dropped off the face of the Earth. Or went back to Canada. 

*"I'm An Adult Now" by The Pursuit of Happiness. This might actually be one of my favorite one-hit wonders, if it can even be called that. It got a lot of rock radio airplay in 1988 even if it probably never really was much of a hit by any measure, but I included it here anyway because I've always thought it was a drop dead hilarious song. It merits a position on this list just for the line "No more boy meets girl, boy loses girl / More like, Man tries to understand what the hell went wrong." Here's a link to the video, in all of it's truly 80s awfulness, if you're curious: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSDF8VvU13M