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Our Favorite Gen X One-Hit Wonders
They gave us one perfect song, then disappeared from the charts. Here’s what happened next
9-minute read
(From left) Devo, Lipps Inc., and Sir Mix-a-Lot. Come for the songs you still know by heart, stay for the strange, funny and surprising stories behind them.
Kirsten Ulve
If you came of age during the late 20th century, you lived through a golden age of one-hit wonders. For much of the ’80s and ’90s, it felt like every week another mysterious band would arrive with one perfect song that would dominate MTV. Then after a few months, they’d vanish so completely you assumed everybody had gone back to their day jobs at the mall.
What actually counts as a one-hit wonder? There’s no official rule, though music historian Wayne Jancik once summed it up as an act that has won a position on Billboard’s national pop Top 40 just once. Most of us use the term to refer to an artist remembered in America for one hugely popular song.
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Either way, Gen X got an unusually large helping. Chris Dalla Riva, a musician, data analyst and author of Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves, found that the ’70s and ’80s had the highest proportion of chart-topping songs by artists who never had another major hit.
Disco helped get things rolling. “When labels started to see how popular it was, they all tried to score big with a disco hit,” Dalla Riva says. Then MTV kicked open another door. “You could be like Toni Basil, more of a dancer than a singer, and still have a smash with something like ‘Mickey’ just because the video was compelling.”
The artists behind these flash-in-the-pan hits weren’t failures. Most of them just went on with their lives after the charts stopped paying attention. Their songs, meanwhile, continue to ambush us in grocery stores and at wedding receptions, getting stuck in our heads until we finally wonder, Whatever happened to those people?
We found out.
“Funkytown” by Lipps, Inc.
The architect of “Funkytown” was Steven Greenberg, a name that sounds less like a disco visionary and more like an accountant who has some thoughts on your IRA. Lipps, Inc. (pronounced “lip-sync”) wasn’t a conventional band at first. It was Greenberg’s Minneapolis studio project, built around songs he wrote and produced with various musicians. Bored with Minneapolis and dreaming of moving to New York, he turned that fantasy into “Funkytown.”
For the vocals, he hired Cynthia Johnson, an experienced local singer and saxophonist who had already spent years with the funk band Flyte Tyme. In May 1980, “Funkytown” hit No. 1, where it stayed for four weeks, making Lipps, Inc. briefly unavoidable.
The duo didn’t last. Johnson joined the Grammy-winning gospel ensemble Sounds of Blackness and worked with legends like Aretha Franklin. Greenberg ended up staying in the Twin Cities. He ran an advertising agency and a record label and turned “Funkytown” into a licensing business that placed the song in more than 500 movies, commercials, TV shows, video games and other projects.
“Whip It” by Devo
Your first thought after hearing “Whip It” probably wasn’t, I bet this was inspired by a dense, famously difficult, 760-page postmodern novel I pretended to read in college. But that’s exactly where it began. Devo bassist and cofounder Gerald Casale latched onto the mock motivational clichés that Thomas Pynchon used in his 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, then packed the lyrics with empty American pep talk like “move forward” and “it’s not too late,” without ever explaining what exactly needed whipping.
The video came from an even stranger source. Casale recalled a weird story from a vintage men’s mag called Dude about an Arizona ranch owner who entertained guests by removing his stripper wife’s clothes with a 12-foot bullwhip. Devo re-created the scene with beer, guns, cheering cowboys and singer Mark Mothersbaugh wielding the whip.
“Whip It” peaked in November 1980 and would be their only song to crack the Top 40, but not because the band in the weird red-tiered hats had called it quits. They continued recording and touring, together and separately. Mothersbaugh went on to score Rugrats and several Wes Anderson movies, while Casale directed videos for Rush and Foo Fighters before starting his own wine label.
“Mickey” by Toni Basil
Toni Basil was already a dancer, choreographer, actress and occasional recording artist when she came across “Kitty,” a song by the British band Racey. She changed the gender, renamed the object of affection “Mickey” and added the cheerleader chant. Then she did what came naturally: She choreographed and directed the video herself, pulling out the same Las Vegas High cheerleader sweater she’d worn as a teen more than 20 years earlier. In December 1982, at age 39, Basil had a No. 1 hit.
By then, her résumé already included dancing in Viva Las Vegas, appearing in Easy Rider, choreographing for David Bowie, joining the pioneering street-dance troupe the Lockers, and helping David Byrne develop his twitchy moves for Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” video.
After MTV stopped chanting “Hey Mickey,” Basil went back to what she’d been doing all along. She choreographed for Tina Turner, Bette Midler and films. At 75, she taught Leonardo DiCaprio to dance for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Basil continued recording and released a second album in 1983, but “Mickey” was her only Top 40 hit.
“Come On Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners
In 1983, when pop radio was crowded with synthesizers and drum machines, Dexys Midnight Runners created a monster hit with fiddles, accordion, banjo and saxophone. “Come On Eileen” sounded almost aggressively old-fashioned. Its famous “too-ra-loo-ra” chant was borrowed from the 1913 song “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That’s an Irish Lullaby),” while the rest of the lyrics were mostly singer Kevin Rowland trying to talk Eileen into taking off her red dress. And Eileen wasn’t even real! Rowland later admitted she was a composite of the Irish Catholic girls he’d grown up around, invented partly to write about teenage lust and Catholic repression.
In April 1983, the song reached No. 1 in the U.S. The success proved much harder to sustain. After the group’s 1985 album Don’t Stand Me Down flopped, Dexys fell apart. Rowland sank into cocaine addiction, depression and bankruptcy, eventually losing his home. He went into rehab in 1993 and has been sober ever since. He gradually rebuilt Dexys, releasing acclaimed new albums in 2012 and 2023, and in his 2025 memoir, Bless Me Father, he called his younger self controlling and confronted the damage he’d caused.
“Don’t Worry, Be Happy” by Bobby McFerrin
The happiest song in America was made from seven Bobby McFerrins stacked on top of one another. McFerrin recorded every sound with his voice, without instruments, and finished the whole thing in about three hours. In September 1988, it became the first a cappella song to reach No. 1 and won three Grammys. Then George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign began using it without McFerrin’s permission. McFerrin publicly objected, announced that he would vote against Bush and declined an invitation to dinner. (The campaign stopped using the song and switched to “This Land Is Your Land.”) McFerrin has since dropped “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” from his own concert repertoire. He moved deeper into jazz and classical music, conducted major orchestras, became creative chair of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and developed “Circlesongs,” improvised performances in which he turns entire audiences into choirs.
“Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot
The most famous American song about a derriere began with a beer commercial and a grievance. Sir Mix-a-Lot was already a platinum-selling Seattle rapper with two albums behind him when he and his girlfriend, actress and model Amylia Dorsey-Rivas, saw a Super Bowl ad featuring Bud Light’s Bull Terrier mascot Spuds MacKenzie surrounded by extremely thin women. Dorsey-Rivas knew that beauty standard firsthand; as a teenager, she’d worked at a modeling agency, teaching runway classes to much thinner models while struggling to book jobs for her own curvy body. Mix decided somebody should tell the rest of America what it was missing. She supplied the immortal “Oh my God, Becky” introduction, and he supplied everything after it.
By July 1992, “Baby Got Back” was a massive hit. It sold 145,000 copies in one week, went double platinum within three months and won a Grammy. Mix had been at this for a while by then. Long before the hit, he was helping build Seattle’s hip-hop scene with radio DJ Nasty Nes. Mix kept recording, producing and supporting the city’s musicians and led a pandemic benefit that raised $1 million for struggling music venues.
“Whoomp! (There It Is)” by Tag Team
Before “Whoomp! (There It Is)” became unavoidable, Cecil “DC” Glenn was the DJ at Magic City, the Atlanta strip club where “Whoomp, there it is” was already part of the local slang. In 1992, Glenn and his Tag Team partner, Steve Gibson, built a song around the chant, and Glenn tested it during one of his shifts. People immediately started crowding the DJ booth to ask what they were hearing.
The major labels were less impressed. After “Whoomp!” was repeatedly rejected, Glenn borrowed $2,500 from his parents to press 800 copies himself. They sold out around Atlanta, and by July 1993 the song had climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Then Tag Team’s label, Bellmark, went bankrupt, kicking off years of legal fights over the song’s ownership and royalties. Glenn went back to DJing and later picked up acting and voiceover work. In 2020, the Geico insurance company brought Tag Team back for its commercial “Scoop! There It Is,” replacing the strip club chant with ice cream and sprinkles.
“What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes
The title “What’s Up?” never appears in the song. Linda Perry spends the chorus demanding to know what’s going on, which is perhaps the most 1993 thing imaginable. She wrote it while broke and frustrated with the state of the world. When the band’s producer turned it into something slicker, Perry told the label it sucked, then grabbed her bandmates during a studio break and rebuilt it in one rushed session. She did not receive a producer credit.
In August 1993, “What’s Up?” peaked at No. 14 and became 4 Non Blondes’ only Hot 100 hit. Perry left the band and began writing enormous hits for other people, including Pink’s “Get the Party Started,” Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” and Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?” She entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015, received an Ivor Novello award in 2026 and reunited 4 Non Blondes to record their first new album in 34 years.
And a Few More We Couldn’t Fit
Our list could have been much longer. Here are some more songs that briefly took over the radio, MTV or both, then followed Gen X around for the rest of our lives.
“Hot Child in the City,” Nick Gilder (1978)
Gilder drew inspiration from the runaways, would-be actors and other young people he saw after moving to Los Angeles.
“Magnet and Steel,” Walter Egan (1978)
Egan wrote a song about his infatuation with Stevie Nicks, who then sang backup on it.
“Pop Muzik,” M (1979)
M was the project of British musician Robin Scott, whose strange mixture of electronics, disco and new wave sounded suspiciously like the ’80s showing up early.
“Turning Japanese,” The Vapors (1980)
Despite the rumor that followed it for decades, singer Dave Fenton says it wasn’t about anything sexual but about being dumped.
“Tainted Love,” Soft Cell (1982)
Soft Cell rescued a Gloria Jones song that had flopped as a 1964 B-side and rebuilt it with synthesizers.
“99 Luftballons,” Nena (1984)
The song was conceived at a Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin, where guitarist Carlo Karges watched balloons float away and wondered what might happen.
“Relax,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1985)
The BBC banned “Relax” for its sexual content, which turned out to be spectacularly ineffective censorship.
“I’m Too Sexy,” Right Said Fred (1992)
Richard Fairbrass came up with the hook after taking off his shirt and dancing in front of a mirror at the gym he ran with his brother.
“Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm,” Crash Test Dummies (1994)
Brad Roberts built the song around three children who feel like outsiders, then refused to give their stories a tidy moral.
“Macarena,” Los del Río (1996)
The song began when Los del Río improvised a few lines for a flamenco dancer at a party in Venezuela. A later Bayside Boys remix added English lyrics.
“Tubthumping,” Chumbawamba (1997)
The anarchist collective wrote its great resilience anthem partly after watching a neighbor repeatedly come home drunk, fall over and yell for his wife.
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