'90s One-Hit Wonders

It's the decade's minutiae that captivate us; everybody remembers Clinton being impeached, but the Trivial Pursuit winner remembers the last guy impeached before him. And what pursuit could be more trivial — or more fun — than the tracking the Pop chart history of those flash-bulb artists who rocketed up the charts . . . and continued right off them into the ether? The first, and most obvious, type of one-hit wonder recording is the novelty song. Everyone knew from Day One that "Macarena" was the last we'd ever hear of Los Del Rio. Or that Right Said Fred was not only too sexy for his shirt, but also too sexy for another hit.

The second type of one-hit wonder is the band/artist that produces their totally over-the-fence hit, which is not, strictly speaking, a novelty song, but one that the performer can never equal. Mazzy Star could cut another 50 albums and never lock into the lazy, paisley, nighttime groove of "Fade Into You," and Alannah Myles' "Black Velvet" captured the smoky rasp of dangerous love in a manner unheard on the American Pop charts for nearly a decade, since another one-hit wonder, Kim Carnes, released "Bette Davis Eyes."

The final type of one-hit wonder is that song that arrives from overseas and hypnotizes an audience for about three or four weeks. It can fall into either OHW Type I or OHW Type II, but it always carries an asterisk, because the artist in question often has other hits in his/her/their home territory. Eiffel 65 — whose name was generated at random on computer — had a wondrous Type I hit with the extended remix of the highly danceable "Blue (Da Ba Dee)."

It's still a little too early to work up a full head of nostalgia for the '90s, but when it comes time to begin comparing notes about the last decade of the last millennium, we'll probably be singling out these artists, rather than their more famous counterparts. After all, nobody reminiscing about the '80s says, "Remember Madonna?" Instead, it's "Remember Kajagoogoo?" or, better yet, "Remember Taco?" When we finally get all weepy about missing the '90s — and, oh, we will — it's the likes of Chumbawamba and Kris Kross who will pull at our heartstrings. These are the lights that shone ever so brightly for an instant, and then disappeared.