One-hit, Wonderful.

Daniel Pewter's song "Bad Day" was named the one-hit wonder of the decade by Billboard Magazine, which makes me wonder if its better to be remembered for one bad day than for nothing at all?

He beat out "Lean Back", by the Terror Squad, and "Butterfly", by Crazy Town, for the honor (?). All of which proves a point I've been thinking about for quite some time.

All in all, this wasn't the best decade for one-hit wonders, at least not when compared to the nineties, which brought us the likes of "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by the Proclaimers, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Deep Blue Something, and "The Freshmen" by The Verve Pipe, to say nothing of "Steal My Sunshine" (Len), "Mambo Number 5" (Lou Bega), "Closing Time" (Semisonic), "She's So High" (Tal Bachman), "Save Tonight" (Eagle Eye Cherry), "What its Like" (Everlast), "Tubthumping" (Chumbawamba), "The Impression That I Get" (The Mighty Mighty Bostones), "Sunny Came Home" (Shawn Colvin), "How Bizarre" (OMC), "No Rain" (Blind Melon), "Insane in the Brain" (Cypress Hill), "Rump Shaker" (Wrecks-n-Effect), and even "Here Comes The Hotstepper" (Ini Kamoze).

Honestly, there were so many great one-hit wonders in the 90s, that if I had to pick only 50 songs to listen to for the rest of my life, probably 25 of them would be listed somewhere on this page.

(and yes, the general point of this post was just for me to rattle off my knowledge of 1990s music)

As for Powter, he has at least one more partial day in the sun. I was curious about what he has been doing since the release of "Bad Day" in 2005, and apparently he released an album last year (entitled, appropriately, Under The Radar). The only single on that album, "Next Plane Home", reached only #39 on the U.S. pop chart.

Then again, a sure sign that you will always be relevant in American pop culture is to have your song covered by Alvin and the Chipmunks:




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