The Most Unlikely Hits

Every once in a while a song will become a huge hit, and I'll be sortof surprised as to how it became a hit. Sometimes it's a shitty song, and other times it's surprising simply because the song is so extreme in its sound compared to what radio normally plays.

Some songs that were radio hits, to my surprise, because I never imagined radio would play them:

NIN -- "Closer" [blink] We've got a huge hit, on the radio, whose chorus is "I wanna fuck you like an animal"...?

Marilyn Manson --- "The Beautiful People" The idea of Manson covering the Eurythmics was brilliant, and his version of "Sweet Dreams" was a great song, but "The Beautiful People" was such a heavy, creepy, anti-religion song, compared to what radio normally plays, that I was surprised at how popular it got.

Also, there are tons of songs that were hits in the 60s that would be impossible to get on the radio as a new song today. What would a radio station think if a band from today released a seventeen minute single called "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"?

What songs surprised you when they became hits?

like a bunch of bowie singles.

i kept thinking,"this stuff is too weird to get popular".

the most fucking bizarre hit of all-time has to be: "Death Disco" by Public Image Limited.. which at one point was in the top 10.

good topic.

i agree with bowie.

i would also add nirvana to the list.
"rape me" is just not something you would expect to hear coming at you from the radio.

my brain isn't working very well right now-- i'll have to think about this.

I loved when the Butthole Surfers scored a hit with "Pepper". It was funny to hear how the DJ's dealt with their name: I remember one DJ said the name as many times as he possibly could, obviously overjoyed at the fact he was getting to say "butthole" on the radio.

Anything by Limp Bizkit.

Anything by pre-2001 Static-X.

Anything by Linkin Park.

All bands any logical human wouldn't expect to hear on air, yet all bands that have made thousands of pink shirt wearing, peach body spash spraying, "like" saying 10th graders presume that they are actually nu-metal/hardcore/wtf-kinda-music-izit fans, respectively. Reason being, the song is on the radio twice every hour, so they listen to nu-metal/hardcore/wtf-kinda-music-izit "all day."

Did that go off-topic? I can never tell.

I totally agree with the NIN "Closer" unlikeliness, but for a different reason. That song is amazingly complex. Not really an "easy" song. I mean, the album was multi-platinum too, and that really blows my mind. That album is so dark, textural, and violent, that I can't believe it was a hit with 15 yr. olds, like me at the time. We must have been smart, but it still weirds me out.

along the lines of NIN's "Closer" is Rage Against The Machine's "I won't do what you tell me" I'm not sure if that's the actual name of the song.....but hearing "Fuck you I won't do what you tell me" over and over on the radio is something I never expected.

I'm not sure why U2's "Lemon" was a minor hit...because that song sucked ass. And I'm a big U2 fan.

It was before my time, but the fact that Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" ever got into Billboard's top twenty singles chart is amazing to me .

Remember that Squirrel Nut Zipper's song "Hot"? If you'd told before that that a ragtime song would have ever become a hit in the mid-1990's, I'd probably would have just laughed.

That the Gorillaz ever charted in the USA is pretty strange, too...

That Jay-Z song w/the sample from Annie was an oddity for the fact it even existed, much less that it was #1 for Five weeks.

...and does anybody really understand why Areosmith has had even one hit single in the last 12 years?

I was really surprised when Sonic Youth's "Little Trouble Girl" was a hit, even if it was only a minor one.

Bohemian Rhapsody
amazing...but kinda weird that it was a hit

"I'm Not In Love" by 10CC... far too ethereal and trancey for pop culture consumption... but somehow it was i think a number 2 hit in 1975... definitely one of the very few "Lite FM" songs with any artistic merit!

B]nullgolden brown by the stranglers.....to me this is why this band kicks ass. after experimenting with all different types of music and generally not giving a fuck about what people think, they end up having the biggest hit of their career with a song thats in waltz time!?

Biz Markie - Say He's Just A Friend. Most unlikely hit, ever.