I disagree. I would say that it would be “Coming out of nowhere, scoring a hit, then never doing it again.” The “coming out of nowhere” is key. The Dead were around, everybody knew them for decades. So they were “one hit,” but hardly “wonders.”
And I’m certainly not going to fight you tooth and nail over this. The Knack had another song that charted in the top 40, but most people still consider them to be a one hit wonder, so it’s not like the definition is objective exactly.
We all know what we mean. 
The World is a Ghetto has several excellent cuts – the title song, “Four Cornered Room” and, of course “The Cisco Kid.” The album went to #1 and was named Album of the Year by Billboard and is one of Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums. The group had eight top-40 hits, and six gold albums. It released charting albums for over 15 years.
These are all signs of a very successful group, not one that had one hit and faded into obscurity.
Yea, but play any of that for your current students. Will they have your perniculated understanding and glory days of the band as a young one in the sixties, will they even care, or talk onerously of such a great band, my estimation is “No”. But they will know “Lowrider” because of Pop Culture.
Big fan - I had all their albums on vinyl, back in the dark ages when I still had vinyl. I’d be inclined to consider the two albums All Day Music and The World is a Ghetto as genuine masterpieces, well worth listing all the way through. Well, if you like extended jazz-funk instrumental jams and vocal harmonies.
Two songs, one long one from the first cited album which builds to a strong finish. And a much shorter one from the second, this rousing little march. I could go on 
.
I know someone who is generally regarded as a one hit wonder, though, technically, they’re a two hit wonder. They know they’re regarded as a one hit wonder, and absolutely regard themselves as being wildly privileged to be in the set of musicians who have had any number of hits above zero.
But no, they really didn’t realize it at the time.
She was/is too busy elsewhere.
Yeah, that’s always been my ambition - to create that one song that’ll set
me up for life.
I remember reading an interview with Ted Shackleford back when Knots Landing was on the air. He talked about how some actors on a hit series feel that they should use their fame as a springboard on to bigger things and can’t wait to leave their show. But Shackleford said he figured being one of the leads on Knots Landing was as high as his career was ever going to get and he was going to stay with it as long as he could. He did, in fact, remain on the series for all fourteen seasons.
Afroman, famous for his song “Because I Got High” has a song called One Hit Wonder.
Well, looking at it cynically, the effort/reward ratio is excellent.
From interviews I’ve seen, one-hit wonders all generally believed that “this is just the beginning”
It’s a funny thing, when you think about it. You have a group of musicians, generally technically proficient, the singer can sing well, and the songwriting had enough of the special sauce to be a hit. But then, everything else they try is either too similar to the original, or now lacks the special sauce. I can’t imagine how frustrating that must be.
It’s interesting how for many OHW their OH is completely different from all their other songs. Are there artists who completely changed their musical style once they figured out what everybody but their most loyal fans wanted?
Many artists have interest in more than one style. While recording a bunch of demos a song out of the usual vein might be played. If one of the Record Company minions (producer, A&R, etc.) thinks that song has potential things can quickly spin out of control as far as the artists are concerned.
A far from OHW example. Per the liner notes for Blondie’s compilation The Platinum Collection, the band had been overseas and on the cab ride from the airport back in NYC, the cab’s radio played their song Heart of Glass. Except it wasn’t. The record company had taken the original tapes and made it much more of a disco song then they intended. And it was a hit already. On the way to #1. They had no clue about any of this. But it branded them as a “disco group” despite their very wide range of song styles used.
Phil Spector was well known for playing all sorts of games with recordings to suit his purpose.
In the ‘60s that one hit early in an act’s music career was often a song composed by professionals from places like the Brill Buiding or their own producers… When the artists noticed that half the royalties were going to the songwriters they would start to insist that they only record their own compositions which were predictably in a different style and less marketable.
While this is quite possibly true, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein who wrote the it new exactly what it was from the get go. Their working title for it in it’s rough stage was ‘the disco song’. They weren’t really particularly anti-disco as an aesthetic and their early fascination with rap comports with that - they were pretty much into all the new club scene music.
Interesting. I’ve heard different members of the band interviewed and while they always mention that Heart of Glass started in a completely different style, it was their own in studio experimentation with drum machines and synthesizers that landed them on the disco sound.
“We were living in a loft in New York’s then-notorious Bowery area, rehearsing at night in rooms so cold we had to wear gloves,” Harry later told The Guardian in a separate interview in 2013. “’Heart of Glass’ was one of the first songs Blondie wrote, but it was years before we recorded it properly. We’d tried it as a ballad, as reggae, but it never quite worked. At that point, it had no title. We just called it ‘The Disco Song.'”
He [theproducer] continued: “One of the demos was a song called ‘Once I Had a Love.’ It had a reggae feel and I told them the title was too long and suggested they call it ‘Heart of Glass,’ which was one of the lines in the chorus. I thought the song was an obvious hit if the arrangement was right. We spent the first day of rehearsal rearranging it and I decided that it should have a bit of a Donna Summer vibe, which pleased Debbie. She loved Donna Summer.” It’s an undeniable comparison and is a compliment to Chris Stein’s bravery—traversing the punk picket line.
It may have been a song from the past but ‘Heart Of Glass’ with its signature disco sound could never have worked without a few more years experience with electronic music, Harry says “the advent of synthesizers came into play, and all the little gadgetry and rhythm machines.”
“Synchronising [the synthesizer and drum machine] was a big deal at the time,” Stein said in an interview with The Guardian. “It all had to be done manually, with every note and beat played in real time rather than looped over. And on old disco tracks, the bass drum was always recorded separately, so Clem had to pound away on a foot-pedal for three hours until they got a take they were happy with.” It all worked out as the song put synthesizers on the underground map.
I remember hearing a fun, hook-filled single called “I’m Really Gonna Blow Your Mind” (or something like that) by one Carly Hennessy back in 2001. It didn’t get me to buy the album (I’d been burned too many times on OHWs by then, and I’m looking at You, “Forest For The Trees” by “Forest For The Trees”), but the singer was cute, had a good voice, and it was a catchy track. Only heard it a few times on MuchMusic but not often enough for me to think it charted much.
A few years later, this gorgeous Irish singer with loads of tattoos and a bangin’ voice shows up on American Idol (there were two Irish singers that year, for some reason). Same singer, it turned out: her name was Carly Smithson now, and her sound was not at all like that original single. So I looked her up online and found that her original record company had high hopes for her: invested a couple of million dollars into her album, which then sold less than 400 copies and would go on to take up space in the remainder bins. Not to knock her, as she had a pretty good voice, and would ultimately make a living in the music business, but she seems like someone who, 22 years ago, was about to be a OHW but through the shrugging weirdness of radio didn’t even get a whiff of that.