Alas, Yorick Looks at the One Hit Wonders

One hit wonders - they've been around a while. Oddee says they are generally "novelty songs that are, to an extent, deliberately short-lived, recorded for humor or to cash in on a fad." But even in the Oddee list below there are clearly songs that were not recorded for humor or to cash in on a fad, so their definition is needlessly limited. And there are even some that I would argue really weren't one-hit wonders anyway.

But have a look at them, and see what the chief music critic at Alas, Yorick has to say about these tunes.

(Band - song)
1. Los Del Rio - Macarena (1996) Painful, a true national nightmare. Please think of the children before playing this one. And get your damn hands off my hips.

2. Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby (1990) Lots of rap is self-referential. Most rap isn't this bad. Be thankful this was only one hit.

3. Baha Men - Who Let the Dogs Out? (2000) A travesty. Put the dogs back in, please.

4. Right Said Fred - I'm Too Sexy (1991) OK, this was a novelty act. But dammit, it was really catchy. "I'm too sexy for this song." Genius.

5. Dexys Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen (1982) I don't think they meant to be a novelty act. DMR were a big thing in Britain, definitely NOT a one-hit wonder. And this song, admittedly overexposed on MTV, wasn't bad.

6. Joan Osbourne - One Of Us (1995) This was an odd tune, with its imagining God spending a life riding the bus like the rest of us. But I liked it. And Osbourne is still performing.

7. Nena - 99 Luftballons (1984) Okay, this song definitely hit a chord with the American public in the cold war days of the mid-1980s, with nuclear freeze movements all over Europe and the US and real concerns about nuclear war. But it was a good song, and Nena was big in her native Germany.

8. The Knack - My Sharona (1979) Great great song. And much more decorous than "Good Girls Don't".

9. Meredith Brooks - Bitch (1997) Never heard of it. Didn't get much airplay in Mongolia, apparently.

10. Survivor - Eye of the Tiger (1982) Truly awful, it was a relief that Survivor were in fact a one-hit wonder.

11. New Radicals - You Get What You Give (1999) Huh?

12. 4 Non Blondes - What's Up (1993) Sorry, don't know it.

13. Sinead O'Connor - Nothing Compares to you (1990) Painful. Like all of her music.

14. Bobby McFerrin - Don't Worry Be Happy (1988) You know, if you don't hear it every 30 seconds, this is a catchy little tune.

15. Minnie Riperton - Lovin' You (1975) She had a great voice. She died young, of cancer aged only 31. Maybe she wouldn't have had just one hit. Seems a bit cruel to include her.

16. The Cardigans - Lovefool (1996) I've heard some Cardigans' songs, but not this one. That's OK with me.

17. Soft Cell - Tainted Love (1982) A great song.

18. The Archies - Sugar, Sugar (1969) This definitely fits Oddee's idea of one-hit wonder. But what a great, sweet one hit this was! I used to sing this song in bed when I was a kid.

19. Europe - The Final Countdown (1986) I WISH this had been the only Europe song I'd ever heard, but unfortunately I was exposed to many. The best thing about Europe is they made Asia seem not so bad.

20. Lou Bega - Mambo No. 5 (1999) Apart from the fact that his last name is the same as a prominent cheese-making center in Australia, I have nothing to say. Oh, except that mambo snakes are highly poisonous, even though they are not found in Australia.

21. Aqua - Barbie Girl (1997) This song got Aqua into some trouble when Mattel sued over its rather sexual depiction of Barbie the doll. But hey - it was accurate, wasn't it? I mean, what are you supposed to think about a doll with 46-22-36 measurements? Exactly.

22. EMF - Unbelievable (1991) Unbelievable that I have never heard of this song. Probably just as well.

23. Eifel 65 - Blue (Da Ba Dee) (1999) Looks like a wonderful song judging from the title. Too bad I never heard of it.

24. The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony (1997) One of the bittersweet episodes in rock history. Great song, interesting video. Song features a short sample - repeated many many times - from the Rolling Stones' song "The Last Time." The band (or their management) failed to get permission. Big lawsuits, and the label that owned the Rolling Stones' back catalogue won 100% of the royalties from this, the Verve's first big hit after years in the biz. Band breaks up. A sad story.

25. Falco - Rock me Amadeus (1985) This was just fun. That's OK.

26. Spandau Ballet - True (1983) True ... ly awful. Sorry. I don't like real ballet, either.

27. Chumbawamba - Tubthumping (1997) This was a great song, but anarchist rock bands and corporate record labels don't mix well...

28. Haddaway - What is love (1993) And what is this song?

29. Des'ree - You gotta be (1994) You gotta be kidding me. Never heard it. I probably would have hated it.

30. Blind Melon - No Rain (1992) Blind Melon may have had more hits if their lead singer hadn't died of a drug overdose.

31. Ziggy Marley - Tomorrow People (1988) Not to be confused with Bob Marley, who was a one-hundred hit wonder.

32. Buggles - Video Killed the Radio Star (1979) The answer to a trivia question, "What was the first song played on MTV?" It was a fun bit of new wave.

33. OMC - How Bizarre (1996) How bizarre that I never heard of this song.

34. Lipps, Inc. - Funkytown (1980) Truly funky. Part of the disco section on the otherwise rock-and-roll soundtrack to my high school life.

35. Semisonic - Closing Time (1998) NOOOO!!! NOOO!!!! MAKE IT STOP!!! Lame tune and truly inane lyrics. I have spent thousands of dollars in therapy trying to get this song out of my head. And now it's back. Thanks, Oddee. Be sure to check carefully before stomping out that burning bag on your porch tonight.

36. A-ha - Take on me (1985) Interesting animation for its video. Otherwise, I could forget it happily.

37. Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Relax (1984) ZZZZZZZZZ... huh, what's that?

38. Church - Under the Milky Way (1988) Hmm, missed that one.

39. Deee-Lite - Groove is in the heart (1990) My local rock station must not have played this one.

40. Wild Cherry - Play that funky music (1976) OK, THIS one is NOT a one-hit wonder. Sure, this is the only thing we heard by Wild Cherry - and it was a GREAT song. But lead singer Donnie Iris was at least a FOUR-hit wonder. Before Wild Cherry, Iris was with a band called the Jaggerz (hi, Mick!) and they had a great song called "The Rapper." You'd know it if you heard it. After Wild Cherry, Iris went solo. And he had at least two more moderate hits, with "Ah Leah" and "Do You Compute", both GREAT songs. Iris was no one-hit wonder. In fact, I think I need a greatest-hits compilation by him.

41. Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians - What I Am (1989) Slightly repetitive... but not bad!

42. Carl Douglas - Kung Fu Fighting (1974) Definitely in the novelty category - but WHAT a song. Every boy in the sixth grade was high-kicking to this tune!

43. Gary Numan - Cars (1979) Electronica... slightly sterile. I've heard worse.

44. Gerardo - Rico Suave (1991) Que?

45. Toni Basil - Mickey (1982) The biggest problem with this wasn't the song (which at the very least gets credit for inspiring Weird Al's "Rickey"). It was the beefy cheerleaders in the video! Little known fact - they filmed this video on the cheap, and used some East German track athletes who had defected to America.

46. The Weather Girls - It's Raining Men (1979) I managed to miss this one. Good thing too, it would hurt to be hit by such big raindrops. (On second thought, I think I might vaguely remember this. Maybe.)

47. Afroman - Because I Got High (2001) Missed it.

48. Wheatus - Teenage Dirtbag (2000) This is a GREAT SONG. And the Iron Maiden geek teenage dirtbag gets the cute metal-head girl! What's not to like?

49. L. A. Guns - The Ballad of Jayne (1989) It is a wise policy to avoid hair metal bands.

50. Cornershop - Brimful of Asha (1998) This title doesn't even make sense to me unless it refers somehow to say an Indian singer like Asha Bhosle. Guess I missed it. Oh well.

Now, Oddee also missed some other one-hit wonders. Such as:

Flash and the Pan - Hey St Peter

Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin (wait, there may have been one other song...)

Satellite - The Hooters

Tell Me Why (I Don't Like Mondays) - The Boomtown Rats

The Monster Mash - Boris Karloff

Not Baaaad

The latest nugget from our friends at Netflix was that rarity, a New Zealand horror movie.

What do New Zealanders know about horror, you ask? Well I'm not sure. But they know about sheep, and "Black Sheep" featured carnivorous sheep terrorizing one rural New Zealand sheep farm.

"Black Sheep" features jokes about sheep farts, sheep shagging, sheep sheering, and even mint sauce - all that you'd want in a farcical horror movie. And "Black Sheep" hits the sweet spot - tense and funny.

Happy Australia Day

It's Australia Day, the day everybody celebrates the landing of the First Fleet at Sydney in 1788.

Well, the Aborigines don't celebrate it. They call it Invasion Day.

And many people in other parts of Australia don't care as much about it as in Sydney and New South Wales. For example, Western Australia was settled entirely separately and the First Fleet had no direct impact on that part of the country.

But still, it's a day for flying the flag, barbecuing, fireworks, and beer. And that's not bad.

Heath Ledger ... and the American Dream?

Like everywhere else, sometimes people write stupid crap in the Australian press. A good example appeared in today's Sydney Morning Herald about the death of Heath Ledger. Sophie Gee, born in Australia and now an English professor at Princeton (as in New Jersey, USA), had an op-ed published in the SMH (and at least one other Australian newspaper in Brisbane) about Ledger - "How the American dream shattered an expat fantasy."

She talks about the low-key life Ledger apparently led in Brooklyn, which is fine. But then she says Ledger "went native" and

"started living the American dream. And everybody knows how that ends.

It ends with Jay Gatsby, a self-made man, lying face-down in the swimming pool of his mansion on Long Island."

I re-read Gee's piece, wondering if I had missed a leap of logic. But I couldn't find one. It went straight from "happy go lucky Aussie expat" to "American dream always ends in death".

I don't get it. Not everybody living the American dream ends up in a tragic death. Really. Hell, let's throw a few names out there right now of people who by any objective standard could be seen as living the American dream (i.e., getting rich and famous doing something they love to do) and see how many of them died too early or tragically:

Oprah Winfrey - alive
Bill Gates - alive
Joe DiMaggio - dead, but he lived to a ripe old age
Steve Tyler - improbably still alive
Steven King - alive
Meryl Streep - alive
Bruce Springsteen - alive
Spike Lee - alive
Warren Buffet - alive

Okay, that's a small sample - but so is the fictional Jay Gatsby. I'm still not quite sure what point Gee had, apart from the sad fact that Ledger did die "an American blockbuster death" - which ain't the same thing as dying from the American dream.

Maybe this is supposed to be a broader critique of American society. Well, American society has plenty of things to critique, true - but if that was the point, Gee did not develop it at all well in her op-ed, since most of it was a simple recitation of the facts of Ledger's too-short career and sad death.

Or maybe Gee, herself living the life of an Aussie expat working in the arts and living in the USA, somehow fears that she too will be contaminated in some way by overexposure to life in America and could end up facedown on a bed dead of a drug overdose, like the unfortunate Ledger?

But that would be cheap speculation...

Heath Ledger

Unsurprisingly, the sad death of Australian actor Heath Ledger has dominated Australian media over the past day. Every major paper in Australia this morning had huge front-page spreads about Ledger's death (except the Australian Financial Review, which would only have put this on the cover if Ledger had died in the New York Stock Exchange instead of at home).

And there were lots of quotes from Australian figures about Ledger's death (Nicole Kidman, Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe (a New Zealander but he lives in Sydney), Cate Blanchett, etc) - not surprising.

But the Sydney Morning Herald had a weird to me para in its print cover story -"Only hours earlier, (Ledger's) Australian co-star in I'm Not There, Cate Blanchett, was nominated for two Academy Awards."

That just strikes me as an odd non sequiteur.

Cool Fun Questions!

I'm sure you've all heard about Tom Cruise's fun Scientology pep talk appearing all over the web. What I thought was cool was an assortment of questions that Scientologists apparently ask people when they are assessing their personality. How many of THESE (courtesy of Radar) can you answer "yes" to truthfully? I have some commentary...

Have you ever enslaved a population?

Have you ever debased a nation's currency? Uh, well I played poker with Mongolian cash instead of poker chips, does that count?

Have you ever killed the wrong person? (I've never even killed the RIGHT person!)

Have you ever torn out someone's tongue?

Have you ever been a professional critic? No, but we're ALL amateur critics, right?

Have you ever wiped out a family?

Have you ever tried to give sanity a bad name? Every day.

Have you ever consistently practiced sex in some unnatural fashion?

Have you ever made a planet, or nation, radioactive? WTF?

Have you ever made love to a dead body? WTF?

Have you ever engaged in piracy? You mean, copying somebody else's CD? Or are we talking Blackbeard here?

Have you ever been a pimp?

Have you ever eaten a human body? Not knowingly.

Have you ever disfigured a beautiful thing?

Have you ever exterminated a species? Not knowingly.

Have you ever been a professional executioner? Yeah, I just moved here from Texas.

Have you given robots a bad name?

Have you ever set a booby trap?

Have you ever failed to rescue your leader?

Have you driven anyone insane? Apart from my parents and family and friends, you mean?

Is anybody looking for you?

Have you ever set a poor example?

Did you come to Earth for evil purposes? Hell I dunno, ask my mom. What am I, Clark Kent?

Are you in hiding? (yes)

Have you systematically set up mysteries? Okay, I don't even understand this one.

Have you ever made a practice of confusing people?

Have you ever philosophized when you should have acted instead? This one I could perhaps plead guilty to, depending on what they mean by "philosophized".

Have you ever gone crazy?

Have you ever sought to persuade someone of your insanity?

Have you ever deserted, or betrayed, a great leader?

Have you ever smothered a baby? Am I under oath?

Do you deserve to have any friends?

Have you ever castrated anyone?

Do you deserve to be enslaved?

Is there any question on this list I had better not ask you again? This one.

Have you ever tried to make the physical universe less real?

Have you ever zapped anyone?

Have you ever had a body with a venereal disease? If so, did you spread it? "A body with venereal disease?" How many bodies do you think I've ever had? Far as I can tell, it's just this one.

Alas, Yorick Warns You Away from Bad Movies

Recently the mail dude dropped the latest Netflix offering in our mail box. It was a 1991 movie called "Slacker." It is supposedly a cult classic, and introduced the word "slacker" to the language, in the sense of the young people in the early 1990s "characterized by apathy, aimlessness, and lack of ambition."

Now, those are people I can relate to, so I sat down to watch it with some expectation that it might be a good movie.

Here is a plot summary: somebody (with one or two exceptions, a young person) delivers a soliloquy to somebody else while they walk around until he/she/they pass somebody else who is talking, and the camera sticks with them. All shot on a hot and sunny day near the campus of the University of Texas, in Austin, some time around 1990. (The walk-and-talk thing reminded me of West Wing, except West Wing had good dialogue and actors.)

There is no danger of a spoiler here, because to spoil implies that a movie has a plot twist or development, or indeed even a PLOT, to give away.

Now, I don't mind watching an aimless movie once in a while, and I am quite happy to watch a movie with essentially zero action (the most action I saw was a group of brats kicking a Coke machine to get a brown fizzy drink for free) and lots and lots of talking. Heck, I even liked the chatfest movie "Coffee and Cigarettes."

But I couldn't get into this for what I think are two reasons but may in fact be flip sides of the same coin - bad dialogue and bad acting.

These twenty-something slackers spoke in a way that is completely alien to how REAL people speak, in completely formed paragraphs. They didn't sound like they were speaking, they sounded like they were RECITING.

And almost immediately I could tell this movie used a lot of people who are not really actors. They certainly could have delivered the lines better, but even getting Clive Owen and Meryl Streep into this would have still left them with a clunky dialogue.

The cuts from one scene to another were pretty rapid. At first, I thought it was a shame because we moved onto the next characters before I could generate any feel for the character. But as the movie went on, I was GLAD for the cuts because by then I didn't WANT to get any closer to these clowns.

In one scene, a boom mike briefly dropped into the shot. That doesn't bother me much, the movie looks like it was all done in single takes.

But again, the dialogue and situations were absurd. One old goat comes home to see a skinny young dude in his house. Skinny young dude (SYD) reaches into the back of his shorts and pulls out a gun. Old goat (OG) says "you don't need that" and reaches out and takes it away from him. OG points out a photo from the early twentieth century on his wall and proceeds to lecture SYD about how the assassination of President McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz was a political act and how we could use a hundred people like Czolgosz now. SYD listens respectfully to the lecture, stays for dinner with OG and OG's daughter, and eventually returns to the car where his two partners in crime berate him for failing to return with a television.

OG also says he was unfortunately off campus the day in 1966 when Charles Whitman got up in the University of Texas' tower and killed 14 people. I was fervently wishing Whitman had killed OG so we wouldn't have had to endure that conversation.

That was not the worst, lamest, or most poorly acted scene.

The FUNNIEST thing I saw was a bit of an accident only funny because of the timing in watching it. It was a "Ron Paul Libertarian for President" sign on the side of a truck.

I see references on the tubes we affectionately know as The Internets that mention "Slacker" in the same sentence as "sex, lies and videotapes" and "Clerks." DO NOT BE FOOLED. Yes, all were independent movies made at a time when such things were less common and got less exposure than today. But the other two are orders of magnitude BETTER than "Slacker."

"Slacker" is to "sex, lies and videotape" and "Clerks" as Biff Pocoroba is to Johnny Bench. Both were major league catchers, but Bench set the standard for slugging and defense among modern catchers, while Biff merely had a catchy name.

If this is on your Netflix queue, change it now. You should thank me.

A Requiem for Flashman*

George Macdonald Fraser has died of cancer, aged 82. Fraser, you may or may not know, was the author of the Flashman series.

If the previous sentence has no meaning for you, I pity you and I envy you. The pity is because you have never had the pleasure of reading about the exploits of Harry Flashman, the pre-eminent cad of the Victorian era.

And I envy you because you can, if you are wise and immediately take my advice and seek out the Flashman books, still experience the first thrill of reading about Harry Flashman and laughing until it hurts. AND you can laugh your ass off while simultaneously learning (whether you like it or not) about a great deal of 19th century history.

Fraser was not REMOTELY like his character, Flashman. Fraser was decent and honorable. And that's what makes Flashie so fun - although a cavalry officer in the British army during his long career that covered much of the 19th century, he was no gentleman. He was an incorrigible cad and a bounder. He stole, he lied, he fornicated, he stole, lied, and fornicated some more. And whenever possible, he tried to avoid danger. Which he was very poor at, because inevitably his stealing, lying, and fornicating would get him into greater danger.

But fortunately for him, Flashie had the gift of appearing to be bold, bluff, and sincere and so he was a hero to most everybody he met like Queen Victoria. Only a few suspected his true nature - shrewd types like Abraham Lincoln, Lord Cardigan, and Otto von Bismark, who made Flashie quite uncomfortable. But you are in on the joke. And what makes Flashman tolerable (these books are presented as if they were his memoirs, written in the first person in his extreme old age) is that he knows EXACTLY what he is and he doesn't try to hide it or excuse away his roguish behavior.

I could go on for pages but I won't. Try the Flashman books.

* Yes, I know it was Fraser who died, not Flashman. I do understand the difference, and if I met Jason Alexander on the street I wouldn't call him George.