So, the flow of new music is slowing down to a crawl and the music news front has seemed pretty stale these past couple of days. When business isn’t booming, it’s time to find fallback options, and thankfully the folks at Billboard mag have given us something fun to discuss today. Namely, the biggest one-hit wonders of the decade.
Now, let’s face facts. A hit single is lightning in a bottle for a lot of artists. It takes either a lot of talent or a great marketing job to maintain a career beyond a hit single or two. Looking through this list, you notice that the talent pool is a bit shallow. Most of these artists, quite simply, got lucky. Whether their song wound up being placed as the closing theme to the most popular show on TV while said show was at its’ peak (i.e. Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day”), or the artists were helped out by associations with Oprah (James Blunt), P. Diddy (Dream and Cassie) or Dr. Dre (Truth Hurts), in a lot of cases the success was due to something other than singular talent. Of course, there are exceptions, not to mention artists who may have been “one hit wonders” but aren’t flashes in the pan (like Macy Gray, Vanessa Carlton and Gnarls Barkley). However, a quick look down this list reveals very few instances of artists who deserved any sort of notoriety beyond that one lucky hit.
Enjoy the list…and the often horrid music that can only be expected from a list of one-hit wonders. Whoo boy. And I hoped to never have to hear “Bad Day” ever again.
