Complex Numbers

Just Once

Speaking of numbers (the musical definition this time)...

A Stanford Psychologist Says He’s Cracked the Code of One-Hit Wonders  
What separates Blind Melon from Shania Twain?

"What separates Blind Melon from Shania Twain?" The US-Canadian border.

In September 1992, the band Blind Melon released their self-titled debut album. The record was mostly ignored until a music video for the song “No Rain,” featuring a girl in glasses dressed as a bumblebee, went berserk on MTV. The song rocketed up the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

You know, I'm obviously not opposed to the concept of music videos. Some of them can be quite clever. When that was all MTV did, it was pretty awesome—though I could only watch it at other peoples' houses because I always refused to get cable.

What I have a problem with is a song becoming popular because of the video. It should stand on its own. To be fair, "No Rain" did. Literally. But one thing I've learned is that other people don't appreciate music so much as they love dancing, spectacle, and a performer's brand.

I blame MTV for killing Cyndi Lauper's career, for example. Amazing musician. Really unconventional looks. What they used to call a "face for radio."

Two decades later, Rolling Stone named “No Rain” one of the biggest one-hit wonders of all time.

It never even occurred to me that the band didn't have other hits. I wasn't that into it. But at least I'd heard the song, as opposed to...

Soon after Blind Melon topped the charts, another artist had a breakout moment. Shania Twain released her second album, The Woman in Me, which included the No. 1 hit “Any Man of Mine.”

It's not that I dislike Shania Twain. I just never listened to her music. Wasn't on my radar; still isn't. It's not like her fellow Canadian, Celine Dion, whose music I actively despise.

Whatever the polar opposite of a one-hit wonder is, that’s what Shania Twain turned out to be. She became one of the most consistent hitmakers of her era, and the only female artist ever with three straight albums certified Diamond, meaning more than 10 million copies sold.

Gotta admit, that's impressive. But when it comes to country-adjacent music, give me BrandiCarlile any day.

For decades, psychologists have puzzled over the ingredients of creative popularity by studying music, because the medium offers literally millions of data points.

Snort. Be attractive and know how to dance. That's it. Musical talent is underappreciated. Hell, if you can put on a spectacle, these days, they'll even autotune your crappy voice.

Is the thing that separates one-hit wonders from consistent hitmakers luck, or talent, or some complex combination of factors? I did my best to summarize their work in my book, Hit Makers.

Oh hey, another ad for a book. Well, that's okay.

This month, the Stanford psychologist Justin Berg published a new paper on the topic and argued that the secret to creative success just happens to hinge on the difference between “No Rain” and Shania Twain.

"This month" apparently being this past April, based on the date of the article.

He used an algorithm developed by the company EchoNest to measure the songs’ sonic features, including key, tempo, and danceability.

Ugggghhhh. "Danceablity" is bullshit.

This allowed him to quantify how similar a given hit is to the contemporary popular-music landscape (which he calls “novelty”), and the musical diversity of an artist’s body of work (“variety”).

Probably using applied mathematics.

Blind Melon’s “No Rain” rated extremely low on novelty in Berg’s research. Dreamy, guitar-driven soft rock wasn’t exactly innovative in 1992.

It hasn't been innovative since the Beatles, but at least it's got the potential for showcasing talent.

By contrast, Twain’s breakout hit rated high on novelty in Berg’s research.

I'm betting "novelty" has to be assessed based on historical context. Hoping, anyway.

Berg’s research also found that musical variety (as opposed to novelty) was useful for artists before they broke out. But down the line, variety wasn’t very useful, possibly because audience expectations are set by initial hits. “After the first hit, the research showed that it was good for artists to focus on what I call relatedness, or similarity of music,” he said. Nobody wants Bruce Springsteen to make a rap album.

Okay, if you're going to bring up Springsteen...

Bruce's first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, had variety in spades. Slow, fast, upbeat, depressing... it's all there, and all with his signature rhyming poetic lyrical style. Far as I can recall, it produced no hits... but Manfred Mann climbed the charts with their overproduced cover of "Blinded by the Light."

Bruce's second album, The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, was an artistic miracle and a commercial flop.

His third album was Born to Run, and thus history was made.

As for "nobody" wants him to make a rap album, I wouldn't be so sure about that. Last I checked, he was the most prolific songwriter in the business, and has done just about every other genre in existence. I'd buy it.

This second finding about the benefits of early variety is similar to a model of creativity known as explore-exploit. The Northwestern University economist Dashun Wang has found that artists and scientists tend to have “hot streaks,” or tight clusters of highly successful work.

In the case of Einstein, this was absolutely true. 1905 was all Al, baby.

Berg’s and Wang’s research suggests three rules of thumb that may come in handy for creative work.

This is, of course, how the article is relevant here, where most of us are doing creative work of some sort. It's the last paragraph in the article, though, and to avoid lawyers, I'll suggest you go ahead and click through to find these "rules" if you're interested.

Instead, I'll leave you today with what I consider to be the greatest one-hit wonder of all time—from a band that went on to record some truly great, but completely obscure, songs. As a bonus, the lead singer, Paul Roberts, is also an accomplished graphic artist, and as far as I know, he painted all his own album covers.

Pick up your feet
You've got to move to the trick of the beat
There is no elite
Just take your place in the driver's seat