Forgotten 2010s Pop One-Hit Wonders
The 2010s pop landscape was a glorious, chaotic jukebox of fleeting fame, a decade where an algorithm's whim or a viral TikTok precursor could catapult an artist from obscurity to ubiquity and back into the ether before their vinyl pressing even arrived. We all remember the monolithic triumphs of Gotye's 'Somebody That I Used to Know' or Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe'—tracks so embedded in the cultural firmware they feel like eternal standards.But the true soul of the era's one-hit wonder phenomenon lies in the deeper cuts, the songs that burned with a brilliant, almost cruel intensity for a single season, soundtracking a specific summer or a singular heartbreak, only to vanish from the collective playlist as if digitally redacted. These aren't just forgotten songs; they are sonic time capsules, each a perfect, self-contained artifact of a specific moment in pop's relentless evolution.Let's drop the needle on a few. Remember 'We Are Young' by fun.? It was inescapable, a stadium-sized anthem of youthful invincibility that topped the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks and felt like the climax of every movie in 2012. Yet, for all its bombast, the band itself became a paradox—a group name that doomed them to search engine obscurity, their subsequent work, however critically acclaimed, forever overshadowed by that one colossal hit.Then there's the curious case of 'Royals' by Lorde. To call her a one-hit wonder feels blasphemous now, given her enduring artistic stature, but in the immediate aftermath of 2013, that was the pervasive narrative.The song was a minimalist, anti-pop revolution that dethroned the very bling-centric hip-pop it critiqued, earning her two Grammys and making a teenager from New Zealand the voice of a generation's disaffection. The pressure for a follow-up was immense, a testament to how the one-hit wonder label is often a provisional sentence, one that only a few, like Lorde, have the power to overturn.Shifting gears entirely, who could purge the deliriously nonsensical 'Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)' by Silentó from their memory? A 2015 phenomenon born from social media dance challenges, it was less a song and more a participatory cultural command. Its success was purely functional, a tool for viral virality, and once the dance craze subsided, the track had no infrastructure to support a lasting career, perfectly illustrating how the internet could manufacture and discard a star with terrifying efficiency.And finally, consider the synth-pop melancholy of 'Somebody' by Natalie La Rose, a 2015 hit built on a sample of Whitney Houston's 'I Wanna Dance with Somebody'. It was a clever, melancholic bop that showcased the decade's fascination with 80s nostalgia, yet La Rose struggled to escape the long shadow of both the sample and her featured artist, Jeremih.These artists and their singular hits form a secret history of 2010s pop, a B-side to the official narrative. Their stories are not merely of failure but of the bizarre alchemy of timing, trend, and taste—a reminder that in the streaming age, immortality is often just a fifteen-minute lease.
#featured
#one-hit wonders
#2010s
#pop music
#forgotten songs
#music nostalgia
#Vice article
