The Alternative Number Ones: Concrete Blonde’s “Joey”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

When your biggest hit doesn't sound anything like the rest of your music, how does that feel? This isn't a rhetorical question. I would really like to know. It's happened again and again throughout music history, and I'd imagine that the answer is different each time. Plenty of people are probably delighted to have any kind of hit at all, even if that hit is a stylistic and commercial fluke. Plenty of people probably came to hate their one hit very quickly. There must be some feeling of rejection involved -- the public loves this version of you but only this version. There must be pressure to recapture a success that refuses to be recaptured. It must be such a strange cauldron of excitement and disappointment and confusion.

Concrete Blonde aren't the most egregious example of that whole phenomenon, but the narrative definitely fits them. The group came out of the Los Angeles club scene in the moment after punk rock but before glam-metal, when the town hadn't really landed on a dominant sound. They were tough and scratchy and dark, and they didn't have an obvious lane. They weren't quite goth, but they weren't quite hard rock, either. They were respected, but they weren't super-popular, and they never really became a critical sensation. They were simply part of the landscape of modern rock radio when that landscape first took shape. And then "Joey" happened.