Throwback Thursday: Six Songs That Became the Whole Career
Nat King Cole, Billy Joel, the Bee Gees, MC Lyte, Nickelback and BTS -- six records, 1951 to 2020, each one the single song that ended up defining everything its artist did afterward, for better or worse.
By Song Reviews · October 8, 2026
What Throwback Thursday Is
Every Thursday, Song Reviews looks backward: one short retrospective per major genre, deliberately jumping between decades instead of camping in one. These entries are not graded. The artists we cover on a Thursday are settled business, so the Review Score box carries the Song.Reviews mark and the words Greatest of All Time! rather than a number, on every Thursday entry, every week. The writing still has to earn its place – “this is great” is not a piece of criticism.
Today’s Run
This week also closes a loop. Three weeks ago this column ran six of the eight Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Performer inductees for 2026, and two weeks ago it finished the Performer class plus four of the five Early Influence honorees, naming the fifth, MC Lyte, as the one record held back. She’s here today, paired with five records from outside the Hall’s 2026 class, spanning six decades.
| Genre | Year | Record | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Pop | 1951 | Unforgettable – Nat King Cole | The vocal everyone now hears duetted with a 1991 overdub he never sang on. |
| Singer-Songwriter | 1973 | Piano Man – Billy Joel | Reported, not invented – he lived the lounge gig the lyric describes. |
| Disco | 1977 | Stayin’ Alive – Bee Gees | Written for a film script the band hadn’t read, over a drum loop built from a different song. |
| Hip-Hop | 1993 | Ruffneck – MC Lyte | First Gold single by a solo female rapper; 2026 Rock Hall Early Influence honoree. |
| Post-Grunge | 2001 | How You Remind Me – Nickelback | Billboard’s most-played US rock song of the entire 2000s. |
| K-Pop | 2020 | Dynamite – BTS | The group’s only all-English, no-rap single – and its first Hot 100 No. 1. |
What Connects Them
Every artist on this list made other music, in some cases a great deal of it, and every one of them is still introduced, first, by the song on this list. That’s a different kind of staying power than the one this column usually measures, and the six records get there by three different routes. Nat King Cole, Billy Joel and the Bee Gees chose it: “Unforgettable” is a ballad singer at the peak of his control choosing restraint, “Piano Man” is a songwriter turning a day job into reportage, and “Stayin’ Alive” is three brothers pivoting an entire sound on purpose, mid-career, for a film they hadn’t seen. The song became the identity because the artist built the identity into the song first.
Ruffneck and Dynamite are closer to a door kicked open. MC Lyte had already spent six years setting precedents before “Ruffneck” made one of them commercially undeniable – it isn’t the song that made her an innovator, it’s the song that made the industry certify what was already true. BTS had seven years of Korean-language hits before “Dynamite” proved a crossover the group’s own prior singles, for all their numbers, hadn’t managed; the song didn’t start the career, it unlocked the one chart the career had been locked out of.
How You Remind Me is the cautionary version of the same pattern. Nickelback wrote a song that worked so completely – a riff, a cadence, a production formula specific enough to repeat – that repeating it became both the band’s commercial strategy and the reason an entire genre spent a decade using their name as shorthand for creative stagnation. The same specificity that makes a song impossible to forget is, in the wrong hands, also a formula impossible to stop running. Six very different careers, one shared fact: for every artist here, there was a before, and then there was this song, and after that there was mostly an echo of it.
Hero image: Bee Gees with a Billboard No. 1 award, 1977, NBC Television. Public domain.