The Ongoing History of New Music, episode 1082: The 50 biggest all-time alt-rock one-hit wonders (10-1)

Who doesn’t love a good list? Even before the internet was choked with listicles, my love of lists goes back to at least 1977, when I bought a paperback book called The Book of Lists, written by David Wallechinsky and David and Amy Wallace. It was a huge bestseller, spawning The Book of Lists 2, The Book of Lists 3, and The Book of Lists: Canadian Edition.

I still have all of them on the shelf of my home office. Let’s take a look. I’ll just open to a random page of the first of these volumes.

Page 315: “Six positions for sexual intercourse in order of preference.” Fifteen-year-old me must have loved that.

Page 75: “13 drops for the working hangman.” It goes on to list how much rope you need to hang people of various weights for a clean neck break. Turns out I’d need a drop of exactly eight feet, zero inches. Good to know, I guess.

Let’s go to chapter 9. It’s called “Arty Facts” and features lists about music, but it  lot of these don’t seem very relevant. “Rudy Vallee’s 10 best popular orchestras of all time.” “Fifteen recording artists with records that have sold one million copies or more.” Wow, that’s out of date.

How about this? “Dr. Demento’s worst song titles of all time.” Number one is “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream.” Probably outdated.

Funny, though. There doesn’t seem to be a list for the 10 greatest one-hit wonders. That seems like an obvious omission. And there certainly isn’t a list for the 10 biggest alt-rock one-hit wonders of all time.

Let’s fix that, shall we?

Song heard on this show. WAIT! Not yet. Let’s wait until the show runs. I don’t want to spoil the surprises.

The Ongoing History of New Music can be heard on these stations:

• 102.1 The Edge/Toronto – Sunday night at 7pm
• Q107/Toronto – Sunday night at 9pm
• Live 88-5/Ottawa – Saturdays at 9am and Sundays at 6pm
• 107.5 Dave-FM/Kitchener – Sunday nights at 11pm
• FM96/London – Sunday nights at 8pm
• Power 97/Winnipeg – Sunday nights at 10am and 10pm
• 107-3 The Edge/Calgary – Sundays at 10am and 10pm
• Sonic 102.9/Edmonton – Sunday at 8am and 8pm
• The Zone/Victoria – Sunday at 9am and 9pm
• The Fox/Vancouver – Sundays at 10am and 10pm
• The Goat Network/Interior BC
• Surge 105/Halifax – Sunday at 7pm
• WAPS/WKTL The Summit/Arkon, Canton, Cleveland, Youngstown – Mon-Fri at 9pm