Last Friday I watched a stand-up performance by comedian Ralphie May. At one point in his routine he started belting out Livin’ On A Prayer. That song is 25+ years old, and yet everyone in the audience, young and old, instantly recognized it and began singing along. Sure, it was a #1 hit back in the '80’s, but how many other chart-toppers from that era are known by such a wide-ranging audience, and how many have equally well-known lyrics?
And I started to wonder, what songs from the 1990’s and 2000’s will be comparably well-known 25 years later? When a stand-up comic performs in 2025, what song could he sing from 2000 that everyone in his audience would instantly recognize and know the lyrics to?
Are songs from the past 20 years or so really not that memorable, or am I just old (42) and out of touch? Or is there a built-in bias, in that no song from recent years will seem as golden until 25+ years have gone by?
“Or is there a built-in bias, in that no song from recent years will seem as golden until 25+ years have gone by?”
This. I felt the same way about songs from the Disco era on, and then when Rap hit, well, I couldn’t imagine any future audiences still wanting it. I was wrong. Today’s hits will still charm the hearts of those now in their teenage years when they too are middle-aged. Or old.
In the 1920’s older people were scandalized by jazz music, and couldn’t imagine it having a lasting effect. In the 1950’s older people were hoping and praying Rock & Roll would just go away.
Once I realized I was wrong, I started making a concerted effort to try and like music know matter what the generation. I still try. Sometimes I even make it.
For a more recent song, I am positive that “We are Never, Ever, Ever Getting Back Together” will be in heavy rotation on the oldies stations come 2038. Would damn near bet the farm on that, actually.
I’d expect your age and music tastes to be a factor, but there’s also the more recent splintering of the music scene to consider. There are still unavoidable crossover hits now and then (although I think I’m pretty good at avoiding them). Rolling in the Deep was a big hit, and so was Somebody That I Used to Know - and that’s just the last few years. If you go back to 1989 and the 1990s you’re still at the tail end of the era of big rock songs and then you get to the boy band/Britney Spears era. Much of that isn’t stuff I want to hear again, but there’s some widely known stuff.
And let’s note in passing that the afterlife of songs like Livin’ On a Prayer and Don’t Stop Believin’ and Shot Through the Heart is at least ironic. I don’t know if it’s entirely ironic but it might be- then again I loathe all of those songs.
The problem, now that I’m the oldster, is not that popular music listened to by the kids of the 1990s or 2000s makes me clutch my pearls or drop my monocle in my soup, but that … it doesn’t leave much of an impression at all. It isn’t shocking or scandalous or even particularly horrible. It just seems like more of the same old, same old, mostly manufactured by a major studeo somewhere.
Of course, that could be all on me (and other such oldsters). Of course, previous generations of music were probably just as “manufactured”. But it is, you must grant, a wholly different thing than oldsters being horrified, scandalized and shocked by Jazz or Rock.
Naw, it’s not you. There’s little difference between the music of today and the music of Gen-X, except there’s more of a hip-hop element to today’s songs. My 11yo daughter gets confused all the time whether or not she’s listening to a modern song or something “old” - the latest was Steve Miller’s “Rock 'n Me”. Madonna is another one - “Is this a new Gaga song?” When I was a teen back in the eighties, there was quite the difference between songs popular in 1952 and 1982… today, between songs popular in 1983 and 2013 - not so much.
And we’re having a bit of difficulty trying to get her to distinguish between “sampling” and “covering.”
There are also songs that will gain a certain immortality because they are on the soundtracks of popular films. Those Smash Mouth songs from the early 2000s are never going to go away.
I Want It That Way
Waterfalls
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Ice Ice Baby
Wonderwall
Genie In A Bottle
Peaches
One Week
I’m Too Sexy
Achy Breaky Heart
This is assuming by know, you mean a couple of lines to sing along because all I know of Living On A Prayer is “Who-oh, we’re halfway there. Who-oh, living on a prayer.”
I’m really not hearing a lot of music that is similar to early/mid '90s alternative right now. And hip hop was pretty big during the '90s even though it’s more pervasive now. And like I said earlier, boy bands were big during the '90s, but there’s a lot of dance music coming out now that doesn’t sound like anything I can recall from the '90s or early 2000s.
[QUOTE=JohnT]
My 11yo daughter gets confused all the time whether or not she’s listening to a modern song or something “old” - the latest was Steve Miller’s “Rock 'n Me”. Madonna is another one - “Is this a new Gaga song?”
[/QUOTE]
I’m not going to argue about Madonna vs. Lady Gaga because I agree there are major similarities and I’m a fan of neither. But do you think this might have less to do with music today and more to do with the fact that your daughter is 11? When I was 11 I couldn’t have told you what was new and what was old either. I had no frame of reference. The fact that she was thrown by Steve Miller and “Rockin’ Me” confirms that impression. I can’t think of anything new that sounds like that.
Yes, a lot of it sounds the same. That’s because the music industry feels jeopardized because of lower sales, and when something is successful, all the artists are “encouraged” to fit the mold (viz., P!nk’s “Don’t Let Me Get Me”).
The best, last hope of originality in music is the Internet: Gangnam Style may have been over-the-top and stayed around too long, but it certainly wasn’t anything we’d seen before. With the advent of a world of creative artists able to go viral, something truly wonderful is, I hope, bound to appear in the near future.
(Oh, and I really like Norah Jones and Adele, so…)
I grew to like Gangnam style, but that song sounded to me like a mash-up of the last ten or fifteen years of pop dance music (although it did have some more modern blips and bleeps in it). Same with Lady Gaga. I actually like her work a lot, but the first few times I heard it, I thought it was mid-to-late 90s Euro dance music.
As for the OP, “Hey Ya!,” although from 2003, would qualify, I think. “Sexy Back,” too. Just go to a wedding and you’ll get a sense of what 90s and 00s music is going to stick around for awhile.
I get what you’re saying, but I think it depends on the genre. My son listens mostly to rock: classic rock, hard rock and heavy metal. Coincidentally, that’s what I listen to as well, but more to the classic rock/metal side of things than recent. Sometimes I hear a song and I’m surprised it’s as recent as it is, because it sounds like stuff I listened to when I was his age.
Not knowing anything about you, did you listen to your parent’s music? I didn’t - my Dad liked Big Band music, Broadway shows, and his one nod to music that hit the top-40 when I was growing up was Neil Diamond.
