Best One Hit Wonders
Settle it: two at a time →One hit wonders are acts whose chart history in the United States comes down to a single unavoidable song, and this list ranks the ones that hit hardest and lasted longest. Entries qualify on the strength of that one record: chart peak, weeks in rotation, and whether the song still turns up at weddings, in stadiums and in memes decades later. The top belongs to songs that outgrew their moment, from a rotoscoped 1985 video to a Grammy Record of the Year winner, rather than the fastest-burning novelty smashes.
Ranked by 2 people · 15 items
How the opening order was chosen
The opening order is the order I added the items in. Every ballot moves the ranking from there.
A sensible ranking starts with chart performance, then discounts anything that worked only as a dance craze. That is where the top turns contentious: Macarena's 14 weeks at No. 1 outmuscles everything else on raw numbers, while Take on Me and Somebody That I Used to Know are the two records people still put on by choice.
Never Gonna Give You Up - Rick Astley is first on the 2 ballots cast so far.
Global Ranking
Stock Aitken Waterman's production topped the UK chart in 1987 and held No. 1 in the US for two weeks from March 1988. Astley landed a second Hot 100 chart-topper that June with Together Forever, yet rickrolling, the bait-and-switch link meme that spread in 2007, left him a one-song artist in practice.
On November 3, 1990 it became the first hip hop single to top the Billboard Hot 100, a genre milestone attached to an act nobody wanted holding it. Robert Van Winkle first denied lifting the bassline from Under Pressure, and Queen and David Bowie were later added to the writing credits.
The Bayside Boys remix of a 1993 Spanish flamenco-pop record spent 14 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 between August and November 1996 and went on to log 60 weeks on the chart. Antonio Romero and Rafael Ruiz had been working as a duo in Andalusia for decades before an American remix and a line dance found them.
Norway's a-ha reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 on October 19, 1985 with the third recorded version of a song that had already failed twice. Steve Barron's rotoscoped pencil-sketch video won six trophies at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, including Best Direction and Most Experimental Video.
Wally De Backer built the track around a guitar figure sampled from Luiz Bonfa's 1967 instrumental Seville, and credited the Brazilian guitarist as co-writer. It finished as Billboard's year-end No. 1 song of 2012 and won Record of the Year at the 2013 Grammys, the only entry here with that hardware.
Nena's German-language original peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100 in early 1984, blocked from the top by Van Halen's Jump, and the band cut an English rewrite issued as 99 Red Balloons. Its Cold War premise, stray balloons read as an incoming attack, gave it weight most imported pop hits lacked.
Richard Ashcroft cleared a sample from an orchestral Rolling Stones cover, and Allen Klein's company still took every songwriting royalty the record earned until Jagger and Richards handed the credit back in 2019. The band split before it could follow the record up. It matches Somebody That I Used to Know as writing built on a borrowed figure, but Gotye kept his author's share.
Kevin Rowland rebuilt the band around fiddles and dungarees for this one record, and America never asked what else he had. In Britain, Geno had already topped the chart, so the one hit label only fits on this side of the Atlantic. It loses to Take on Me on video craft, but nothing here shifts a wedding floor into double time faster.
Damaso Perez Prado's 1949 mambo instrumental supplied the horn line, and Bega added the roll call of first names that carried it to No. 3 on the Hot 100 in 1999. It led off the album A Little Bit of Mambo, and nothing he released afterward came near the US charts.
Get the Knack sold like a Beatles record in the summer of 1979, and the press turned just as fast, printing Knuke the Knack pins before the second album landed. The riff outlived all of it. Doug Fieger spent the rest of his life confirming that Sharona was a real person, and she was.
Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood had been putting out power pop since 1996 before this single reached No. 21 in 2003, by far their highest US chart placing. The 2004 Grammys then nominated them for Best New Artist, nearly a decade into the band's career.
Marc Almond and Dave Ball turned Gloria Jones's 1964 northern soul single into a synth-pop standard that hit No. 1 in the UK in 1981. In America it peaked at only No. 8, but logged 43 consecutive weeks on the Hot 100, an endurance record on that chart at the time.
A British anarchist collective formed in 1982 climbed to No. 6 on the Hot 100 in late 1997 with a pub singalong about getting knocked down and getting up again. The group kept its politics after the windfall and finally split in 2012 after 30 years together, an unusually long run for an act remembered for one chorus.
The record that opened MTV on August 1, 1981 had barely grazed the American chart two years earlier, which means the Buggles qualify on prophecy rather than sales, and Trevor Horn walked off to produce much of British pop's next decade under other people's names.
A Trinidad-born singer working in Germany cut a eurodance track that Saturday Night Live later bolted to two head-bobbing brothers, and the sketch now owns the song more than he does. Rickrolling did the same favor to Never Gonna Give You Up. The meme pays the rent and erases the man.
