In praise of the one-hit wonder

 The one-hit wonder is pop’s true art form. Bill Drummond claims that he and Jimmy Cauty (in the guise of the KLF) were trying to elevate the one-hit wonder to the status of art with ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ in 1988. The idea was to smuggle it past the radar without anyone knowing that what had been created was actually a one-hit wonder before the fact, the purposeful self-conscious manufacturing of the track constituting its artistry (imposition of the will on the subject etc). I contend however that the one-hit wonder was art already. Why? Art is essentially about honesty.  A one-hit wonder doesn’t try to be anything, it simply is something. It sneaks through regardless of how it might be portrayed, other than in terms of the medium by which its availability is made apparent. It is also judged entirely in its own terms by the listener. The originators of these masterpieces operate in a kind of vacuum which engenders an attitude of innocence in creativity which practically guarantees their success. If you don’t try to make a hit when you create a record then you are much more likely to have one on your hands. The hits that people try to make are just standing in for the one-hit wonders while they are on holiday. One-hit wonders are the real hits and they always provide a unique insight into the public’s mentality in regard to pop. The appearance of a one-hit wonder is an event and we haven’t had one for a while.

There is an important distinction to be made between the one-hit wonder and the chart hit per se. One-hit wonders emerge seemingly from nothing and return to nothing. That is their beauty. They have little connection with artistic longevity. With the exception of the ‘seasonal’ one-hit wonder like the Christmas song (discussed elsewhere), a major law that governs the one-hit wonder is that once it has departed the charts its success shouldn’t be repeatable. It is a one-off, a mutation that cannot be recreated even by the most ardent geneticist Frankenstein. The one-hit wonder is ‘other’ and relies upon the consistent sameness of popular music to make its effect. People buy such records in droves because of the strength of their difference. Pop music is consumed habitually along with everything else that’s fun but average, like hamburgers, Merlot or Oprah. A lack of it in your diet gnaws at you. It was for this reason that Now That’s What I Call Music was invented in 1983 to offer a four-monthly über-dose of the stuff for those prepared to service their addiction in bulk.  Some of us can resist the dry bread and water of the music industry for much longer however.  We know that the generic and the routine provide fertile ground for the one-hit wonder, hence we listen and wait quietly, observing the calm seas of predictable pop, hoping to spot the blip on the horizon which announces, ‘One-hit wonder, incoming’.  

Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ was surely one of the most unlikely one-hit wonders of the last half-century. What provoked the British public to take this minimalist tour-de-force to No. 2 in the charts in 1981?? Based in New York, Anderson was hardly poised to crack the British pop-charts. Nor did she have ambition to pop stardom - she had been engaged in making ‘serious’ art for many years and certainly couldn’t have envisaged the British consumer of popular music taking up her work. She must have had an inkling though because she pressed up the seven-inch single herself (for One Ten Records) and initially sold it rather informally to people who contacted her directly by telephone to purchase it. All it took to create the demand for this single in Britain was for John Peel to give it exposure on his radio programme. Within days Anderson had received a telephone order for 40,000 copies. Radio-friendly it was not - over eight minutes in length (pressed at 33 1/3 on the seven inch to accommodate the time) with a vocoder processed vocal part more spoken than sung, the unfamiliar style came straight out of New York minimalism and the avant-garde.  It bore no resemblance to the popular music that held sway over the British charts at that moment (high climbing pop stalwarts that year included Shakin’ Stevens, Bucks Fizz and Kim Wilde). This brings me to another of the laws - every one-hit wonder sells for its own individual reasons and its audience is as upredictable as the likelihood of the record’s emergence in the first place. Perhaps in this case it was the fact that the record sounded so utterly contemporary in its conception and therefore rather alien to its audience. Granted it had its precedents: with its sampler-like looping of the monotonously repeating ‘ah’, the track was certainly in sync with dance music which was morphing from disco into house at that time. German bands like Kraftwerk had been essaying robotic repetition since the early 1970s and this had been reaching British ears gradually. Regardless of how much you think the public was primed by such developments however, ‘O Superman’ still sounds like no other record that has come before or after it - it is simply itself, a unique rather than contrived sum of its parts. The public were quite unable to categorize it and were not assisted by the marketing ploys of the music business in doing so. All the record buying had to do was decide whether they liked it or not.

Another essential one-hit wonder, Lieutenant Pigeon’s ‘Mouldy old dough’ (1972), has practically no vocal, with the exception of the gruff repeat of the words of its title. It is a different planet musically to ‘O Superman’. No artistic pretensions here (although it is interesting to note that the group evolved from an experimental outfit called Stavely Makepeace) and no pre-emptive awareness of potential of emergent technology to re-define the content of the pop track. The song is really a bizarre kind of marching band number - we hear a penny whistle at the beginning outlining a melody which to my ears has strong militaristic overtones. The bulk of the song is built around a slow thudding boogie-woogie-esque block chord vamp on two pianos, one of which is played with considerable gusto by band member Rob Woodward’s mother Hilda. Perhaps her presence was what ultimately swung it for the buyer.  Certainly Hilda’s appearance with the band on Top of the Pops in horn-rimmed spectacles and a witch’s hat contributed a novelty visual dimension lacking in most mainstream acts of this time. While undoubtedly unusual relative to what was floating around the charts in 1972, ‘Mouldy old dough’ probably doesn’t draw as much on the fascination with the alien that is prompted by Anderson’s track. It thrives more on synthesis of cliché - it nods to rock ‘n’ roll and jazz in particular with its ragtime cum boogie-woogie piano stylings which were very much back on the cards in the 1970s. However the melodic/harmonic evolution of the song has nothing to do with those genres and neither does the penny whistle tune. Once again you don’t really know what to make of what you’re hearing in terms of any kind of mental pigeon (pardon the pun)-holing and are forced to process the song in its own terms.

People love to hate the one-hit-wonder. This is because it jarrs with everything they hold dear about what music is or ought to be. The one-hit wonder raises questions about what is really going on beneath the heavily encrusted surface of taste that surrounds the mind of the listener. Deep down the despiser of the one-hit wonder knows that a small part of him/herself actually relates to what they are hearing. It unearths something that has been long dormant since he or she evolved their ‘mature’ musically-oriented persona in early adulthood.  The one-hit wonder frequently appeals to the playful and childlike in the listener, in effect challenging him/her to regress (the ‘Birdy Song’, also a No. 2 smash in 1981, has perhaps caused the greatest trauma in this regard). It is also anti-individualistic in its appeal - perhaps those that dislike one-hit wonders the most are ultimately perturbed by the idea that in responding to such songs they effectively situate themselves within the mass. It is interesting to consider this in the light of the view that has been put across throughout this article of the individualism inherent in the one-hit wonder itself.