Is Gnarls Barkley A One-Hit Wonder?

Billboard just released its list of the top one-hit wonders of the decade. I enjoy one-hit wonders just as much as the next person: It’s always great when you can experience a song that piques the interest of a broad range of people for a short period of time. Where would I have been in sixth grade without Harvey Danger? It’s the kind of thing that bridges nostalgia for yesteryear and allows you to connect to other people in the present on the memory of a fleeting moment in time.

So I was a bit perplexed by what cropped up at No. 7 on Billboard’s list:

“Crazy” was such a gargantuan smash, it felt like Gnarls Barkley’s spell would never wear off. But after peaking at No. 2 in July 2006, Ceee-Lo and Dangermouse haven’t made it past No. 88 with their subsequent singles. Crazy, indeed.

I was always under the impression that a one-hit wonder was the kind of band or musician that only had one thing to speak of, that being a single song that was popular for a short while. True, “Crazy” was popular, but it exceeded the kind of popularity that defines a one-hit wonder to really burrow into the sub-conscience of our culture. Unlike, say Crazytown’s “Butterfly,” “Crazy” isn’t tied into one particular moment or date. “Butterfly” will always remind me of early high school. “Crazy” may have been a big hit in 2006, but you could play it right now without saying, “remember this song?”

That could be because “Crazy” was the rare kind of single that really breached the popular-time stamps for being another forgotten act like The Calling with only one song to their name, and really sticking in people’s heads. It’s a difficult task for a song to really cement itself in people’s heads, especially considering the fracturing state of popular music and pop music listenership, but Gnarls Barkley managed to do that in ways that few bands can compare to. In the aughts, there were really only two songs that breached the multicultural nature of American culture: Outkast’s (or should I say Andre 3000’s) “Hey Ya!” and Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” Sure, there were other great songs to come out this decade, but none had the all-enclosing effect that those two songs had. They cropped up and never really went away, unlike, say, “Blue (Da Ba Dee).”

What’s more, one-hit wonder implies that those acts are forgotten, and if anyone were to bring them up in a casual conversation, you could only recognize them for that one song. Yes, “Crazy” was a huge hit. But Gnarls Barkley has a lot more to its name than “Crazy.” The band’s debut, St. Elsewhere hit No. 4 on Billboard: Their 2008 follow up, The Odd Couple, hit No. 12. These statistics speak to a bit of a fallacy of Billboard’s argument, which stated that the acts on its one-hit wonder list never made it past the 25th spot on the singles chart. That’s a bit of a trick, as most artists tend to create entire albums instead of just singles, and clearly Gnarls Barkley have continued to succeed beyond the sweeping success of “Crazy.” And then there’s the whole fact that their two halves, Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo, have distinct and prolific careers in their own right. Oh, and the post-St. Elsewhere touring success and the beloved music video for “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul?”