Between ordering bespoke stickers on Etsy and watching a 6-hour recap of Game of Thrones on YouTube, I haven’t had too much time to come up with big smart intricate theories, so this is just a thing that I noticed that I like:
I like it when a song that was popular in its time takes off again decades after it came out.
The most current and obvious example is Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” which was super well-received when it dropped in 1988 and never really fell out of fashion, even getting a moment in the series finale of Girls. Then country singer Luke Combs lent his gravelly voice to a cover, which took off, and he and Chapman performed together at the Grammys, and it made so many people cry that it was news. Chapman’s original hit #1 again and it’s fair to say America’s got a case of “Fast Car” mania…and there ain’t no cure!
This is actually a pretty typical, if not downright conventional way to re-introduce listeners to a song. Combs was an established country star and the Grammys is perhaps the most staid and conventional music event of the year. But it’s far from the only way to get people excited about an older hit. “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey was used in the final moment of The Sopranos and the final moment of the pilot of Glee and soundtracked the White Sox’s 2005 World Series run. What was once a hit of the 80s became a song literally everyone in America knows.
Something similar happened with Laura Brannigan’s “Gloria,” even if you don’t know all the words. It appeared in not one but two montages involving Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street yacht rescue sequence and training in I, Tonya), and was the “win song” for the St. Louis hockey team The Blues.
Fans liked it so much that they kept clamoring for Brannigan to sing it live, and had to be reminded that she sadly died in 2004.
The most fun pop song comebacks, though, are the ones where the online kiddos just take a tune and run with it. Early pandemic brain made a celebrity out of The Guy Who Drank Ocean Spray And Skateboarded To “Dreams” By Fleetwood Mac (REMEMBER THAT?), introducing Gen Z to the song a few years before they likely would have discovered it on their own. Then when Stranger Things used Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” as a plot device, they made it the song of summer 2022.
Currently, British singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor is Having Her Moment — she’s been on The Tonight Show and attended the BAFTAs — thanks to her 2001 song “Murder on the Dance Floor” being used in the final moments of Saltburn, a scene that sticks out because…IYKYK, no spoilers.
My personal favorite comeback is that of Aqua, the Danish pop group whose song “Barbie Girl” got them sued by Mattel when it was released, and has since been given the seal of approval by the brand when it made its way (as a sample) onto the Barbie movie soundtrack. The band is over the moon to find out they still have so many American fans, and I can only hope that some of them realize that their entire 1997 album Aquarium is really really good. I listened to it a lot as a youth and it came in at number 11 in my ranking of all the CDs in my car.
Then there are the comebacks that have seemingly no genesis. Middle schoolers have, apparently, gotten really into John Denver’s “Country Roads” out of nowhere.
Fantastic work, Gen Alpha. Keep it up.
Lizzie