Lipps Inc. were a Minneapolis studio project led by musician and producer Steven Greenberg, with the singer Cynthia Johnson out front, and together they made one of disco's last great chart-toppers. "Funkytown", released in 1980, with its synth bounce and vocoder hook, reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 and topped charts in dozens of countries.
Cynthia Johnson, a saxophonist and former pageant winner, gave the track its commanding lead vocal. It arrived just as disco's commercial moment was ending, and Lipps Inc. never found another hit on its scale. The project faded, but "Funkytown" endured, covered and sampled and replayed for decades.
On streaming, the hit sits near 523 million plays, while their next most-streamed track trails at around 31 million. That puts the ratio above 16, far past our 5.0 line.
By our measure Lipps Inc. are a certified one-hit wonder. As a studio creation built around a single irresistible groove, theirs is one of the purer examples of the form: one song so complete that it became, in effect, the whole project. Disco produced many such acts, but few of their hooks have proved this durable.