One Hit Wonders of the 90s (Part 32)

Hello, dear reader. I have a favour to ask you. The original post begins after all of the asterisks, if you want to skip this.

Now that the One Hit Wonders of the 90s series is over, I'm not going to be doing my weekly revisiting of all these posts (I had to do that to add the new post to the bottom). Thus, I won't be able to catch any broken picture links or deleted videos any more. Yet I want these posts to be as good as possible.

Please, if you happen upon one of these posts, or if you take a walk through a whole bunch of them, let me know if you find anything that doesn't work. You can leave a comment, or you can send me a message using that handy "Contact Me" page linked above.

Also, feel free to let me know what you think of the post or any of the videos!

Thank you.

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I hope you enjoyed last week's post from my past self. Imagine my surprise (and horror) to find that, when I reached the future I had been talking about, it really wasn't any different than what I was experiencing then. Hell, there weren't any rocket packs or air cars! I couldn't believe that so little had changed in such a long time.

I mean, people still care about what Paris Hilton does. What's up with that?

Anyway, with the NFL football season starting up, things are going to be a bit hectic on Sundays from now on. I'm hoping that there will be no disruption in the regular programming, but I just thought I would warn you in advance. We've got NFL Sunday Ticket, so I get to watch my Steelers play every week! Yes, even on a Bye week, because they are just that good. In crisp, clear High-Definition too! What could be better?

Ok, yeah, Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream might be, but other than that?

Oh, and just as an aside. If you watch Larry King Live on CNN, don't watch it in HD. His wrinkles have wrinkles!!!

With all that taken care of, it's time for the usual nonsense that passes for the slight bit of intelligence shown on this blog. Namely, the weekly one-hit wonders post! That grab bag of bad music, bad puns, bad jokes, and bad moods. And if they are that bad, why do I do this every week?

Because I'm bad. That's why.

As usual, you can find the list I'm taking these from here, but don't get ahead of me! I don't want to be in the line of fire if you have any gaseous incidents.

Here we go!

1) Imani Coppola: "Legend of a Cowgirl" (#36)



Ok, I have absolutely no memory of this song.

That's not totally a bad thing, as it gives me a massive feeling of "eh."

I do like the video, though. Who hasn't been working some boring job and fantasized about being hauled up from the ground by a pack of silver-painted, Speedo-clad men?

I know I do it every day.

And then she starts to have a seizure!

What? Oh, that's dancing? What is this "dancing" thing you talk about? I see no evidence of it here.

Actually, the song kind of grew on me as it went on, but I think that might be mainly from the beat, which was largely sampled from a previous, "good" song.

So there you go.

2) Fiona Apple: "Criminal" (#21)



(Yay, Vevo!!!)

Wow, there's a lot of semi-nudity in this video, isn't there? Funnily enough, I'm not intrigued.

Anyway, it's hard to imagine Fiona Apple as a one-hit wonder, because I seem to remember she was all the rage back in the late 90s. However, she has only had a few hits on the "Modern Rock" chart and this is her only basic Top 40 hit. In fact, one of her later albums charted at #7, though no songs actually hit the charts.

Colour me mystified.

But anyway, this song is ok, but the video was really controversial when it came out. You can probably guess why. She famously said "I decided if I was going to be exploited, then I would do the exploiting myself"

She did a good job of that!

3) Something for the People: "My Love is the Shhh!" (#4)



I must have stopped listening to pop music by this time, because this thing reached #4 and I never heard it!

How annoying does it have to be, to call a phone sex hotline and get a song about love instead? C'mon, ladies! It's this guy's $3.99/minute that you're wasting! Sure, you've got good voices, but somehow, I don't think that's why he called.

Maybe it's just me, though.

This is actually a pretty good song, though. I can see why it went so high in the charts.

I'm confused. What does "Girl, you'll never find another 'uh' as good as this?" Because, you know, I'm such an innocent soul that I couldn't think of anything that could mean.

And I notice the women are saying "love" there. Social comment on the different priorities of the sexes?

You make the call.

Note: As an ad on the side of this video on Youtube, there was the trailer for the new movie, Devil, from M. Night Shyamalan.

He just had a movie out this summer. Don't tell me they're giving him free rein to put out two bad movies a year now!

4)Chumbawamba: "Tubthumping" (#6)



(Yay, Vevo!!!)

Now this song I remember! Who could have missed this, if you were paying any attention whatsoever to pop music?

I remember really liking it, and then getting so sick of it that I wanted to hurt something.

But I got better.

Did they just get away with saying "Pissing the night away" on national radio stations? Good for them!

This British band was pretty big in the UK, but for some reason this song made it over here too. Now that I'm removed from the massive over-exposure of this song, it's actually kind of cool again.

Then again, it did make Rolling Stone's (rag!) "Top 20 Most Annoying Songs" list, so I see I'm not alone!

I love this from their Wikipedia entry:

"Chumbawamba gained some notoriety when, provoked by the Labour government's refusal to support the Liverpool Dockworkers Strike, they performed "Tubthumping" at the 1998 BRIT Awards with the lyric changed to include "New Labour sold out the dockers, just like they'll sell out the rest of us", and vocalist Danbert Nobacon later poured a jug of water over UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who was in the audience.

A few weeks later Nutter appeared on the American political talk show Politically Incorrect and advised fans of their music who could not afford to buy their CDs to steal them from large chains such as HMV and Virgin, which prompted Virgin to remove the album from the shelves and start selling it from behind the counter."

Oh, those wacky Brits!!!!

5) LSG: "My Body" (#4)


LSG - My Body
Uploaded by Momo59-93. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

What weird video effects!!! And then audio ones too! And then back to video effects!

What? That's real muscled and toned skin? Sorry, my mistake.

I love it when a song is subtle. But I think this one is too subtle, as I can't figure it out whatsoever.

That being said, I actually kind of like this song. And I have no memory of it, which is another Top 10 hit where this is the case. I guess my move away from pop music was almost complete by this time. I had totally turned my back on it.

Ok, my back isn't quite that cute, but you get the picture.

6) Tonic: "If You Could Only See" (#11)



(Yay, Vevo!!!)

Ok, I vaguely remember this song, so maybe I wasn't totally ignoring it.

Did hotel rooms still have black & white TVs in 1997? That's just so weird.

You don't hear the word "manipulations" in enough songs anymore.

I actually really enjoy this song. It's got a pretty good beat and the singing isn't too bad. He sounds vaguely British though Tonic is an American band.

Anyway, chalk this up as a win for me! It's a nice way to lead into the end of 1997. A normal song, with normal singing, normal music, and the normal narcoleptic falling asleep listening to it.

7) She Moves: "Breaking All the Rules" (#32)



(sorry for the video quality. The only one I could find that I could embed)

Ok, I lied. What a bad way to end 1997. This song just doesn't do it for me. It's kind of silly, the video's even sillier. Yeah, the women are hot, but that doesn't help when you're not watching the video!

This song doesn't break any girl-group stereotypes at all, and it sounds like something from the 80s, actually. Something really bad from the 80s.

And it even features horrible dancing!

Seriously, three hot women want in a club and the bouncer wants to kick them out? What's up with that? (Yes, I realize I'm saying that a lot today, but it's a truly mystifying day).

And to top it off, dancing on toilets!!!!

The apocalypse has officially happened.

So we end 1997, not with a bang, but with a whimper. We only have two years left in this magnum opus of a blog series! Think I can keep it up until the end?

1997 was a good year. I made my move to Seattle, on the road to marriage and emigrating to Canada. What was the popular reaction to this move?

But it worked out very well for me. It was a life-changing year.

Too bad the music didn't keep up with it.

Anyway, I'm off to watch some NFL action! It's time to start my day.



Or...maybe I'll just go back to bed.



One-Hit Wonders of the 90s
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16
Part 17
Part 18
Part 19
Part 20
Part 21
Part 22
Part 23
Part 24
Part 25
Part 26
Part 27
Part 28
Part 29
Part 30
Part 31
Part 32
Part 33
Part 34
Part 35
Part 36
Part 37
Part 38
Part 39
Part 40