Heh, that song has been an earworm for me every other day for about 2 weeks. I have no idea why.
Funny this thread should come up. My husband and I got into a stupid discussion/argument about a song that featured while we were watching “Mr. Bean’s Holiday” last week. In the film, a cover of “Crash” by The Primitives came on, and I started singing along. He said, “Oh, that’s the kind of late 90s punk that pissed me off for blah blah blah, and ruined pop festivals” :rolleyes: and I said that the song was from the 80s. He refused to believe me till I looked it up, and still used it to bolster the non-argument. Such is life.
Another one, just for fun. We were playing “Thriller” and “Beat It” and “Smooth Criminal” for my 14 y.o. son, who was not enjoying it as I had hoped…anyway…but I pointed out that, timewise, this was EXACTLY like our parents raving to us about the Beatles having their firstmajortourin the US. Whoa.
“Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again” by the Fortunes has NO business being from the seventies!! Seems it’s from 1971, but sounds middle to later sixties, more like 1965-1967. And singer Rod Allen’s voice is a dead ringer for Frankie Valli during parts of that song. Seems they had another song called “Here It Comes Again”. Combine the titles of their two songs and you get the Eurthmics’ “Here Comes The Rain Again”, LOL!
According to this article, the Fortunes’ manager was murdered in 1966.
I was shocked to discover that “Superman” – you know, that R.E.M. song – was actually a cover of a 1969 song by the Clique (the B-side to “Sugar on Sunday”)… and not only that, but the Clique’s version sounds a lot like the R.E.M. version.
Hehehe, given Suzuki’s lyrics, it’d be hard to prove you right or wrong. I’m on board with this interpretation.
But like I said, everything by them is far before it’s time. Turtles Have Short Legs from '71 sounds pretty damn contemporary. I’ve spent a week or so using that song to play “guess what year this was released” with people I know who are music fans, but almost certainly aren’t familiar with Can. With a sample size of about ten, the closest guess has been 20 years off.
Even the long jam sessions from the 60’s with Mooney on vocals sound like they’re based in some space-rock culture that already knew about no-wave and noise rock, then discovered Americana and soul. You Doo Right is the masterpiece of that era. 20 minutes of almost perfect jam that moves like an orchestrated piece by Glenn Branca, gleaned from a six hour jam.
I’d also like to add Les Paul’s Lover. I wasn’t particularly surprised by the year of release when I first heard it, but I was tripping on quite a bit of acid (1990 was a vague concept at the moment), and it was put on just to blow my mind. The second half certainly did. Hell, I know the release date now, and how it was done; but it still makes my eyeballs feel like they’re going to roll out of my head and makes my stomach drop like I’m on a roller coaster. It’s totally dizzying and breathtaking. I played it for my brother last night, who’s pretty well versed in music, knows Les Paul and Mary Ford ok, but had never heard that particular track. His comments were along the lines of “Damn, that sounds pretty avant-garde!”, and “It sounds like you just became invincible in a video game”.
I thought about it for a second, and yeah, until analog synths became common, nobody tried that level of manipulation besides Les Paul. You honestly cannot play that stuff live. That’s Les Paul playing (several) fairly complex parts as fast as he can, then speeding them up an octave or so, then laying parts below without speeding them up. The guys who wrote for the video games were probably the next people after Wendy Carlos who wrote popular music that only the machine could really play.
Oh, I thought of another one. That “Shut Up and Dance With Me” song that has been everywhere the past few months or year I could have sworn was an 80s hit that I just somehow missed.
I have heard of Boney M, like their song “Gotta Go Home”. Most of their stuff was pretty strange, and many of the songs were sung by Frank Farian, their manager who later formed Milli Vanilli.
Sad thing is the members of Boney M made little money from royalties. Reason why I disliked Farian.
Indeed. I always found “Hallelujah” by the Mondays as showing clear evidence of influence from Can, especially the likes of “Halleluhwah”. See where I’m going with that?
One that is rarely mentioned is a Pink Floyd track. It comes from what I think is their second most experimental album - and definitely their most musically varied - but somehow overlooked: “More”. “Main Theme” sounds like some sort of proto techno, yet it came out in 1969.
The answer to this thread, of course, is 96 Tears by ? and the Mysterians. It could have been late '70s or early '80s, easily. It was played on WLIR, the New Wave/Modern Rock station on Long Island.
Not really. I come from a country where Boney M was huge. In the US, in the 80s (when I got here), any time you’d walk into a record store and ask for Boney M, you’d get a blank stare.
Such is life.