A one-hit wonder is a well-documented breed of musician: An entire career generally summed up in four minutes or less.
That's a sad commentary on what can be years and decades-spanning careers for some artists. Think Plain White T's, Eagle-Eye Cherry, Bobby McFerrin and Dexys Midnight Runners (right).
A line from one of my favorite films of the last decade, "I'm Not There," comes to mind: "Never create anything. It will be misinterpreted. It will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life."
In the context of the film it is one of Todd Haynes' six split-personalities for Bob Dylan that delivers the line, a statement about the Minnesota songwriters incalculable effect on our musical lexicon.
A different sort of chains shackle a lesser-known breed of sad musical commentary: The one-album wonder.
I postulate that these are artists which produced not one insanely memorable four-minute song that slithered into our consciousness and slid right back out, but ones that snaked their way into our hopes and expectations with a dazzling record and never managed to produce anything that even approached it as an equal.
There are different types of one-album wonders, too.
2012 threatens to be the year we finally receive new albums from The Avalanches and D'Angelo, both of which have left fans waiting a dozen years for follow ups to the amazing Since I Left You and Voodoo (left), respectively.
Should these new records fall flat, it's quite possible we will remember The Avalanches and D'Angelo as one-album wonders.
In their cases, it's not that any successive work didn't compare. It's that they haven't given us any other work.
Severe examples of this include Sex Pistols and Jeff Buckley, two artists who lived long enough to create a magnum opus and then died quickly thereafter.
Perhaps the saddest examples, though, have to live in the shadow of their monolithic achievement.
In April, Oakland's Fox Theater hosted two nights with Jeff Mangum, the mastermind behind Neutral Milk Hotel's celebrated 1998 slab, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
The "I'm Not There" curse proves true. Mangum's obituary will no doubt mention "In the Aeroplane," a classic indie rock record from the 1990s.
Another '90s example that comes to mind is Prodigy, the British breakbeat group that was everywhere in the late '90s with "Breathe," "Firestarter" and "Smack My B---- Up" from 1997's The Fat of the Land and then suddenly nowhere when Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned arrived in 2004.
Fat of the Land (right) is a surefire classic that holds up well, but for many, The Prodigy's legacy will be the playing of "Firestarter" during breaks at NBA games.
It's an unfortunate statement that an entire person's life's work amounts to a punch line for someone else, but, as Carol Burnett said, comedy is just tragedy plus time.
It's true, too, that the musical business can be a cruel and fickle beast. Ask Van Morrison, an unquestioned legend who claims to have never received a penny for "Brown Eyed Girl" because of a shady record deal in his youthful years.
The reason some artists are doomed and others rise to greatness is a question to which few, if any, among us has an answer.
But in the case of the one-hit and one-album wonders who capture us for four minutes or even the length of an entire album, at least, for their sake, they got our attention for that long.