I’ve recently fallen in love with Black Kids, the lead singer of which sounds like he’s totally channeling Robert Smith. A lot of their stuff sounds really '80s with (IMHO) a bit of a modern touch that you kinda have to pay close attention to hear. Their first single was I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You, but I think I like the second, Hurricane Jane, even more. Maybe. I don’t know. They’re both incredibly catchy, though Hurricane Jane has more of the '80s sound that I was talking about.
Anywho, what songs do you thing would have done better 10 or 20 or 30 years before or after they were made?
'80s style electro-pop is extremely popular at the minute. Check out MGMT, Ladytron, and innumerable others. I think it would have been funny if Black Kids had called themselves The Black Cure.
A song from the '90s by Space called The Female Of The Species should have come out in the '60s maybe even the '50s. The Coral’s Dreaming of You is another '60s throwback.
Thanks for the tip. This stuff is hard to find because I don’t know what genre it would fall under and haven’t found any web sites or other people who are really into it. Over the last year or so, though, I’ve been really into that type of music (well, the '80s stuff), so pretty good timing on it getting popular again, I suppose.
Up until I started paying attention to the Killers about a year and a half ago, I was convinced that their song Somebody Told Me was something from the '80s, and couldn’t figure out why I kept hearing it on stations that otherwise played new music.
Oddly, I was perfectly aware that Mr. Brightside was an '00s song, though they have a similar ‘80s sound and are by the same freakin’ band.
That was the first one I thought of when I read the thread title. James Hunter and Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings both do '60s soul/R&B pretty well, and Richard Hawley does a nice mix of '50s/'60s pop (all are current acts).
I just thought of another one: Ain’t No Other Man, by Christina Aguilera. The video hops around in different eras, though the music sounds pure '70s to me.
I know next to nothing about music and eras, but **Gnarls Barkley’s ***Crazy *is a great song that sounds very out of place amidst today’s radio selections.
The Scissor Sisters willfully sound like they are from the '70s. I’m at work, so can’t dig up a suitable YouTube reference - but look for “Take Your Mama”.
I Believe in a Thing Called Love by The Darkness. You can practically see Freddie Mercury walking toward the camera with shirt billowing against a backdrop of flames.
I’m totally loving that the current neo-soul revival… singers like Amy Winehouse, Duffy and Jully Blackall sound like they’d be perfectly at home in the golden era of Motown.
And speaking of 80’s electro, most tracks by Justice sound like they’d be perfect for the soundtrack for one of the Back To The Future movies.
I like a lot of the modern synthpop that is coming out and much of that stuff sounds straight out of the 80’s. Examples are Standing Still in Time by Neuropa and Messing with Love by Echo Image. There are tons of others if you want names.
Queen’s ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ sounds way younger than '74. All the more amazing is that Mercury wrote the song years earlier. Pure Thrash /Speed metal.
Couldn’t believe how modern The Doors’ ‘Ghost Song’ sounded, considering that Morrison died in '71. Very modern-sounding, groovy, killer bass line. Only later did I learn that the band (and a session bassist) recorded the song in '78, using late Jimbo’s recordings from years past as the vocal track.
Another that would have fit in the '50s or early '60s would be The Georgia Satellites 80s tune “Keep Your Hands to Yourself”.
I also think much of Brian Setzer’s work, both with the Stray Cats (early 80s) and with his swing orchestra (90s to present), would have been received well in the 1940s & 50s.
Ronnie Milsap’s 1985 hit “Lost In the Fifties Tonight” is notable for kind of drifting in and out of time, musically – much of the song is placeable in the 80s, but there are intereludes throughout where the late 50s are accurately channeled.
