The first the world saw of Robert Smith’s hair, and still one of the best songs he ever wrote. The Clash would soon move beyond the narrow confines of this song’s stylistic strictures, their musical horizons expanding to encompass all sorts of sounds and influences, but they never sounded quite this dynamic and angry again. It’s remarkable just how well this has held up 25 years later, it’s still as colorful and fresh as ever.Ī song that sounds like a brick being thrown through your window. It’s still remarkable to think this was such a massive hit - it’s as dark and somber a lyric as you’re ever gonna hear in the charts, discussing the persistence of poverty and the difficulty of social mobility in a society that just keeps pushing you back down.Ĭherry had done a couple of guest appearances with The Wild Bunch and The The before this song was released, but this was her solo debut, and it remains one of the most exuberant and idiosyncratic moments of the late ’80s. Also memorable: that video, with Bush’s iconic red dress and her equally iconic interpretive dance moves. One of the most idiosyncratic debut singles the world has ever heard, and one of the most memorable - there just aren’t that many Brontë-inspired oddball singer/songwriters around, sadly. It’s since become something of an Australian classic, despite the fact that Howard himself had long since grown tired of it. The first the world heard from Nick Cave and the band who would become The Birthday Party, although this song was written by guitarist Rowland S. If you weren’t listening to this on Halloween, you were doing it all wrong. Also, as a measure of its ubiquity, I heard it being played last year on a flight between Kuala Lumpur and Bahrain - they censored all the “fucks,” but clearly didn’t realize “cunt” was also a curse word. Sure, her career since has been an ongoing exercise in being let down, but this is still a killer single. The experience of listening is not unlike having your head put into a blender. Into the course of precisely 86 seconds, Bad Brains managed to cram two verses that delivered a strongly worded critique of consumer society, a brief instrumental break, and coda that manages to strike some note of hope (“A peace together/ A piece apart/ A piece of wisdom from our hearts”). (One caveat: we’ve generally avoided one-hit wonders, who are a category of their own, although a couple did sneak in.) Of course, this discussion inevitably led to list-making, and here’s the result: our picks for the 50 best debut singles the world of music has to offer.
The list is nearly endless, but once you start to think about it, picking out the best isn’t quite as easy as you might think - “Alison” wasn’t Elvis Costello’s first single, for instance, nor was “Take Me Out” Franz Ferdinand’s debut or “Unfinished Sympathy” Massive Attack’s. Apropos of not a great deal, the music nerd contingent at Flavorwire central recently got a-talking about our favorite debut single.
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