Huh. I don’t recognize this song at all, either. And I’ve actually owned a couple Billy Joel albums in my time.
Now you have got me clicking… it seems the fans have it covered, though I do not see an e-book version (could it be rights issues preventing that, if Amazon is now publishing a different translation?) The only surprising thing is that a book that popular remained untranslated for decades, professionally or otherwise.
ETA Wikipedia says the whole series is going to be published in English by MacLehose press, in 12 volumes. So you might be waiting a while for that omnibus official ebook.
Anyway, sorry for the digression…
Looking through his list of Top 25 hits, it looks like I know most of them, but there are a couple I have no recollection of. “Modern Woman” (which peaked at #10 on the charts) is the highest-ranked one. “Keeping the Faith” looks like it only made it to #18 on the Top 40, so I must have just missed it the first time around, and it doesn’t seem like stations around here play it. “This is the Time” is the other one I never heard, or at least have no recollection of. All the other ones I’m very familiar with (up to the point that I could play several of them on the piano.)
Actually, it is surprising to me that I didn’t know that there was a Chinese version of Produce 101 until just now. My wife is from China, and we watch a lot of Chinese and Korean TV, and listen to KPop and Mandopop. We watched the first two seasons of the original Korean version of Produce 101 and are familiar with the groups that came out of that - I.O.I. and Wanna One (we know of, but didn’t watch, Produce 48). We also have heard music from Rocket Girls 101, and I even wondered why they had that “101” tacked onto the end of their name. It should have at least been on my radar but I never made the connection.
For some reason I made it through the 80s till recently without hearing Yazoo’s ”Situation”. Love that song. Then I found out it was sung by a woman and that blew my mind further.
I never heard of it by that name, but I’ve seen the Penguin edition of it under its other name, The Story of the Stone many times. I still haven’t read it, though.
as for bits of Pop Culture I managed to avoid for a long time, I somehow never encountered Billy Joel’s Scenes from an Italian Restaurant until only a few years ago. I have no idea how I missed it, especially since I 've found that I really like it.
That’s a long one (clocking in at over seven minutes), so I don’t think it gets anywhere near the radio play his 3-minute pop ditties do. That said, it’s always heralding as being among his greatest work, if not his greatest, so it does get some play out there every once in awhile. But I’m not surprised someone could have avoided it for the longest time. [heh]
If you know Rocket Girls 101, you and your wife owe it to yourselves to what Produce 101 China. Especially for the amazing rise of Chao Yue, who is a true successor to So Hye’s legacy.
BTW, I (and many others) couldn’t believe Chao Yue was really that loveable/huggable/honest person she is on the show and now. Here’s her first audition that eventually lead her to the show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmlapPOlkaA and she also did a number of Tik Tok videos https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chao+yue+tik+tok in cosplay.
I think it was on these boards with a “Worst Xmas songs ever” thread that everyone kept mentioning The Christmas Shoes and how they hear it all the time and can’t escape it.
I had to look it up on Youtube to hear it and had never before heard that song. And I listen to plenty of “Holiday music 24-7” stations every December. I still never hear that song being played.
I hadn’t heard that one either; I think it was most popular a while back specifically in Christian Contemporary Christmas playlists. If you were listening to “normal” or “traditional” or even “religious” Christmas, you wouldn’t probably hear it. There’s apparently a whole pile of Christmas CCM songs that are super familiar to folks raised in the CCM scene that I’ve never heard. “Christmas Shoes” managed to escape that orbit with its pure glurgey awfulness.
That reminds me that I don’t remember every hearing the Christmas song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” until this past year’s kerfuffle about its lyrics promoting date rape. I don’t even remember hearing the song’s title til this year. The news reports always describe the song as “Christmas classic”; I’m just thinking to myself if it’s such a classic how come I’ve never heard of it? Was it really that big Christmas song? (For record, I am 43 years old.)
It’s big enough that I’m pretty sure you win the thread so far. It’s a wildly ubiquitous song and has been for a long time, although it did get a big bump in popularity after the move “Elf” came out and Zooey Deschanel’s version got put into holiday rotations. And this is at least the third or fourth year where its “date rape” vibe has been a talking point.
I’m exactly the same age as you, but I do remember the song as being a winter/Christmastime standard. And this year isn’t the first year the lyrical content has been discussed (we even had a thread here on the Dope two years ago debating it.)
That said, “Christmas Shoes” I’m only very tangentially aware of, only through Straight Dope Threads and lists of “Worst Christmas Songs Ever.” Listening to it now, I don’t think I’d be able to identify it from just a snippet. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard this one in the wild, but it’s also one of those bland sounding songs that would just melt into the background if I had ever heard it, or I would change the radio station because of the, I dunno, 80s Christian Adult Contemporary sound of it (wow…Wiki says this came out in 1999/2000?).
Oh, which reminds me, “Alice’s Restaurant.” I don’t think I became aware of that song (and it being a Thanksgiving staple for some) until an SDMB thread, probably around ten years ago. That one I have heard in the wild a couple times since.
I’ll check it out. I’ll also ask my in-laws if they have seen it. They also live with us and watch a lot of singing competition shows.
Never heard of Pulp Fiction until recently. Had to Wikipedia it.
Worth seeing. It’s my sweet little almost-a-nun wife’s favorite.
[Really, hon?]
Yep, turns out she loves good writing, to the extent that she’ll put up with a lot of violence for it.
The closest thing I can think of is I had heard of the song “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers, and I had heard the song “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers, but until 2 or so years ago I didn’t know they were the same song, even though the lyrics were right there in the chorus! I guess they were mumbled just enough to be ununderstandable to me.
Similarly, last month I heard “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell for the first time, and I’m pretty sure I hadn’t heard it in the background somewhere along the line, because while I recognized the lyrics of the chorus from having read them, the melody of the chorus seemed completely new to me. But Big Yellow Taxi was a bit before the years in which I would have been expected to have heard it constantly, and it may not have had the staying power to stay on the radio until I could hear it.
I had never heard of the short story The Little Match Girl before I saw a reference to it in an anime a couple of years ago. It was a bit odd learning about a fairly famous Christmas story by a Dutch author in a Japanese work. Then, a couple of weeks later, I saw the story referenced in a completely different anime. Later on, I realized that a third anime that I had seen previously had also made an oblique reference to it that I didn’t catch at the time. I guess the story made an impression on Japanese culture for whatever reason.