National One-Hit Wonder Day: Patch Picks The Worst Of The Best

CONNECTICUT — Today is National One-Hit Wonder Day, celebrated on Sept. 25 each year since its founding in 1990 by music journalist Steve Rosen. He started the event to help remember artists who had their proverbial "15 minutes of fame."

There are several different interpretations of what constitutes a one-hit wonder, including some involving sports, science and other amazing feats. For the purposes of this column, having been a DJ for more than 30 years, we are going with the criteria of a recording artist having a number one record on the Billboard charts and no other songs making the top 40.

Patch editors in northern Connecticut looked at that criteria and fashioned a list of the worst one-hit wonders to top the chart. We limited the date range to the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, when we were both in school and eventually on to college. It was an impressionable time, when our young ears were subjected to some of the worst dreck ever recorded on vinyl.

In an era when many Hollywood performers (Vicki Lawrence, Rick Dees, David Soul) tried their hand at singing and some inexplicably achieving success, we have consciously omitted them from this listing. By selecting these particular years, we avoided having to mention two of the worst songs ever to hit it big in this country, both from the late 1960s: "In the Year 2525" by Zager and Evans (who?), and "MacArthur Park" by actor Richard Harris (ohhh nooooooooooooooo).

Our top 10 is not in any particular order of awfulness, just chronological, and we have refrained from providing editorial comment on them.

Grab yourself an airsick bag, and peruse our top 10 (or non-top 10, as the case may be):

• "Seasons In the Sun," Terry Jacks
• "The Night Chicago Died," Paper Lace
• "Lovin' You," Minnie Riperton
• "The Hustle," Van McCoy
• "Afternoon Delight," Starland Vocal Band
• "You Light Up My Life," Debby Boone
• "Ring My Bell," Anita Ward
• "Pop Muzik," M
• "Funkytown," Lipps Inc.
• "Mickey," Toni Basil

If they are done hurling, we invite readers to submit their choices for the most rotten pieces of junk in the comments section below.