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I'm going to call it officially: The mainstay of the music industry, the one-hit wonder, is dead and buried.
With the industry growing up, moving forward and expanding its business ethics, the burning star of our childhoods has had the proverbial fork of doom stuck into it.
It was somewhere in between the third and fourth "da da do do" of the Proclaimers' "5,000 Miles" that I realized that we have lost an American tradition. The power to have a hit song pounded into our eardrums by a record company until we don't even care who is singing it has slipped away. But what was it about these songs that jarred themselves in our consciousness and kept them there to this day?
With their catchy and unrelenting choruses and the mediocre guitar riffs that rattled our lives, these one-hit wonders burned an imprint onto our souls. This mark left on us is so potent that we know every lyric and melodic change to "Breakfast At Tiffany's" by heart and never even realize it is by a band named Deep Blue Something.
That is what made these run-of-the mill songs so great. They were the fast food of our musical infancy. They were not too good, but not too bad either, and when they were finished, you could crumple them up like an old cheeseburger wrapper and out they went.
But sadly, the music industry has moved on and seems to have taken business classes as well. Instead of letting a song stew with us all until we are ready for the next injection, record labels have found the concept of making musical groups last. Before we can get sick of the first song, the industry force-feeds us all a second, then a third and a fourth. Before you know it, we're all drawn into the cycle.
The industry now understands the power of money management. While it used to blow millions on a band for one song that was ear-catching, they do the same and barrage us all with song after song.
From what I can tell, Lou Bega was the last straw for the industry. With his perfectly mind-numbing "Mambo No. 5," the record companies had had enough.
While it wasn't noticeable at first, it is becoming easier and easier to spot this trick the industry is playing. Bands and groups that came post-Bega are not leaving the cycle of music.
Just look deeply, and you can see that groups like Linkin Park and Nickelback are sticking around to ride it out when they should have been pried from our minds by the rules of musical nature.
So why don't we bow our heads and remember the good times we had with our disposable friends from the eighties and nineties? As the casket is lowered into the musical graveyard, let us all join in a chorus of "Closing Time" by Semisonic - or whomever that song was by.
"Closing time, / Every new beginning comes from some others beginning's end."
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