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Two-Hit Wonders That Peaked with the Wrong Song
In music, as in life, the biggest isn’t always the best.
In the world of Top 40 pop, the term “one-hit wonder” can be misleading. Some of the musical acts we put into that category actually belong in another one: two-hit wonders.
The confusion is understandable. Occasionally, when we love them two times (just enough to send only a pair of their singles into the Top 40 of Billboard’s Hot 100), a music act’s biggest hit ends up overshadowing and overwhelming the other one. Casual Top 40-pop fans might forget the lesser hit even happened.
For instance, did you know that Vanilla Ice, Snow, and Eddie Murphy — who bought us the number-one singles “Ice Ice Baby” and “Informer” and the number two “Party All the Time,” respectively — all returned to the Top 40 of Billboard’s Hot 100 one more time? They pulled it off with, respectively, “Play That Funky Music” (number four), “Girl I’ve Been Hurt” (number 19), and “Put Your Mouth on Me” (number 27).
Whether you think of the artists below as one- or two-hit wonders, they all deserve to be best known for a song other than the one that gave them their highest-charting hit.
