Up All Afternoon

with Kyle Anderson

Filtering by Category: Music

Filtering by Tag: Top 10

This Week's Top 10: Novelty Rap Songs From Movies

On the way to Disneyland last weekend, I was listening to the Back in the Day Replay on '90s on 9. I love those old countdown shows because they often resurrect songs that certainly had their moments at the time but have otherwise been forgotten by history. Such was the case on Sunday when Partners in Kryme's "Turtle Power" popped up somewhere in the 20s. That was the theme song to the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, which dominated the box office in the spring of 1990 (it was number one for four straight weeks and was the fifth biggest movie of that year). "Turtle Power" is a very silly song that very intricately describes the characters and action of the movie, a phenomenon that used to be pretty commonplace but is now mostly dead. 

But some of those songs, despite their novelty status, are great! And so I decided to dig deep in the archives and unearth the top 10 novelty rap songs attached to movies. 

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This Week's Top 10: One-Album Wonders

Fifteen years ago this week, Zwan released their debut album Mary Star of the Sea. The band, led by then-former Smashing Pumpkins cohorts Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin and fleshed out by a bunch of indie and post-grunge all-stars (Paz Lenchantin from A Perfect Circle, Dave Pajo from Slint, Matt Sweeney from Chavez), maintained the infectious melodies of the best Pumpkins tunes and pushed the production into a much glammier and prog-inflected direction. It felt like the first step of a promising second act for Corgan, but it ended up being the band's only release because Corgan remains an exceptionally difficult person with whom to work. 

Zwan's Mary Star of the Sea remains a great album, and it joins the pantheon of great one-album wonders—artists who made one exceptional album and one album only. Here are the 10 best of those.   

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