So I was reading this article on Cracked about one-hit wonders, and one of them was the New Radicals, who apparently had a huge hit back in 1998 with “You Get What You Give.” Now, today I’m not exactly up on pop music, but in 1998 I was in my early 20s and was at least reasonably conversant with what was popular. Yet, somehow, I managed to remain ignorant of the very existence of this song until today. Maybe I’ve heard it in a commercial or something, but I have no memory of ever listening to it or being aware of the existence of the New Radicals until I read this article in Cracked today.
That made me wonder what other very popular songs, or books, or movies have seemingly been everywhere in the culture, yet went unnoticed by other people until much later. I’m not thinking of things that you were well aware of but just didn’t bother to immediately investigate. If you know who Han Solo and Darth Vader are but have never bothered to see Star Wars, that doesn’t count. Or if you know about Harry Potter but just aren’t into young adult fantasy novels. I’m thinking of things whose existence went entirely unnoticed by you until years after they were initially popular.
For example, if you went to the movie theater this weekend, noticed that Titanic 3D was playing, and said, “Huh, someone made a movie about the Titanic. Interesting.” Then you find out it originally came out back in the '90s, made $600 million, and won a bunch of Oscars.
It’s on my DVR but haven’t seen any of it yet. A year or so ago I was at my neighbor’s house, and he and his friend were talking about it. When I revealed to them that I hadn’t seen it yet, their jaws dropped. :rolleyes:
There are lots of popular things I haven’t seen yet (Pulp Fiction, anyone?) but I think the OP is asking for things we didn’t even know existed, because we dropped through a hole in the space time continuum (or got busy with work and/or kids…same thing, really).
For me, it was that Friday song that got everyone’s panties in a bunch a few months - years? - ago. That girl whose parents bought her a song? Obviously I’m still hazy on the details. But I didn’t learn about the whole thing until after the outrage had died down for some time. Just completely missed that whole thing.
Which I think is perhaps not entirely a bad thing…
I seem to have missed that the new Titanic film is the old Titanic film. It’s a double-hit post-wise, because I never saw the original either. No chip on my shoulder about it or protest; I just never got around to seeing it.
If it is any comfort, I had never heard of that Michael Penn song that was listed on page 1 of the article. I was vaguely aware that he did music (and some crappy movies I think). I’m thinking that it may be a stretch to call him a one hit wonder though. It may be even more of a stretch to claim that he should deserve my respect.
Don’t feel too badly about not being aware of “You Get What You Give” when it came out in 1998 because it really wasn’t as big a hit as the Cracked article says it was. For about a month or two it did get a fair amount of airplay on alternative radio stations but not much beyond that. On MTV, I only remember seeing the video for song aired during “120 Minutes”. If you didn’t listen to alternative rock radio stations or watch MTV late Sunday night in 1998, it would’ve been very easy for even a twenty-something to miss “You Get What You Give”.
For popular songs/movies/whatever that we weren’t even aware of when they came out. So people’s comments about not getting around to seeing Titanic and Avatar are not really what the OP is looking for, unless they really and truly never heard of James Cameron’s Titanic until now.
I’m not sure I phrased my initial question very well. I was just interested in whether other people had had the experience of stumbling across something years after it first came out, and then discovering that it had been very popular without you noticing. Not things that you knew were very popular, but just never got around to.
Harry Potter movies. I was aware of the books, but it seemed to juvenile to bother with. When the movies came out , I was already jaded about seeing them. I finally tried to watch a marathon on tv,but I couldn’t tell the difference between the movies and gave up after a couple of tries.
These two may be too recent – in other words, you might say I’m late to the party, instead of having completely missed them – but this season on SNL there were two bands I was completely unfamiliar with before they performed – Karmin and Gotye. Apparently they both had hundreds of millions of YouTube hits, but I was completely unaware of them existing before SNL. And, I suspect, had I not seen the SNL episodes, I’d still be clueless.
I can’t really think of anything that I was contemporaneous with, if “being older than an infant” counts as contemporaneous. However there is quite a bit of music from the late 60s to mid 70s that I was totally unaware of even though it was only a couple years before my time (born in 1973.) Traffic and Iron Butterfly (at least innagaddadavita) come to mind, I didn’t even know they existed till the 90s.
The closest I come to fullfilling the category is completely missing I’m Not Okay, I Promise by My Chemical Romance until The Black Parade became popular, despite the fact that at the time I listened to online alternative radio and (occasionally) terrestrial modern rock radio. I guess the DJs weren’t fans. But that’s only a couple year lag.
But how is this related to the OP’s question on popular things that you were not aware of at the time they came out? It seems like you are saying you were fully aware of the movies, you just didn’t choose to see them.
I’m not sure how big of a deal this was, though Wikipedia says that Ke$ha’s song “Tik Tok” held the #1 spot for nine weeks, the longest for a female artist since “You Light Up My Life”. I’ve had some vague hints at her existence - I knew about a year ago that someone named Ke$ha existed and was reviled for her name and maybe her music. At another point I knew that Tik Tok was one of her songs. It was only today that I heard the song (or at least most of it), in a review.
I do have another ‘miss’ story, though I was aware of it. I knew that Madonna had recorded “American Pie”. I had heard people talking about it, I knew it was out there but didn’t seek it out. I figured I’d hear it at some point and could judge it then. But I’ve still never heard it at all. I have no idea what it sounds like.
