The consequence for pop music is that you get fewer delightfully arbitrary thunderbolts like Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come on Eileen” (No. 1 in 1983) or a-ha’s “Take on Me” (No. 1 in 1985) or Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” (No. 1 in 1987, love the parentheses). And precisely because the artists in question did not endure as pop stars in the years to come (sorry), those hit songs come to define, and also perhaps explain, the years and indeed the whole decade in which they were briefly hit songs and those artists were briefly pop stars. This phrase one-hit wonder, despite being
...more
