Five classic songs that predicted life in 2026
A lot of folk musicians, such as Bob Dylan, Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell, write music which acts as a reflection of the world around them.
“I really still think every day about a quote by Nina Simone,” said Nash, when talking about why his art often talks about politics and the society in which we live, “Who said ‘Every artist, whether you’re a songwriter or a piano player or a sculptor or a painter, you have to reflect the times in which we live’.”
While that’s the ethos of a lot of artists, there are many who decide not to look around but instead look forward. They take pictures of what they believe the future will look like and condense what the image comes up with into a song. Sometimes, these predictions end up being pretty accurate, as bands end up writing songs which are a complete reflection of modern life, despite them originally being penned decades ago.
You’d be surprised just how many classic songs feel as though they could have been written yesterday with how well they depict the modern world.
Classic songs that predicted life in 2026:
Radiohead – ‘Paranoid Android’
The song ‘Paranoid Android’ was written by Thom Yorke after a bar crawl in Los Angeles left him feeling isolated, as people continued to walk up to him and ask for photos. “The people I saw that night were just like demons from another planet,” he said, “Everyone was trying to get something out of me. I felt like my own self was collapsing in the presence of it, but I also felt completely, utterly part of it, like it was all going to come crashing down any minute.”
While the song might have come from a completely personal experience, ‘Paranoid Android’, and the entirety of the band’s album OK Computer, manage to somewhat predict what life is like in 2026, as themes of social isolation brought on by technology and social media are explored, so despite being written during a bar crawl in the ‘90s, it was seemingly about 20 years ahead of its time.
Kraftwerk – ‘Computer Love’
Kraftwerk predicted the future on more than one occasion, not just in their sound, but also with the different subject matters that they wrote about, and one of their most poignant tracks comes in the form of ‘Computer Love’, which talks about someone attempting to find romance using their computer.
It’s a pretty damning prediction of what dating in 2026 is like, with people meeting in real life less and less, as the majority of couples meet one another using online dating apps, while a number of other people take it a step further and keep their relationships strictly on the internet. They opt not to meet in person at all, and in creating a jovial track with their song, Kraftwerk managed to predict what it’s like looking for love in 2026.
The Who – ‘Relay’
Pete Townshend loved creating dystopian worlds within his music, and so you don’t need to look too far to find a song by The Who which seems to oddly predict the future, but one of their tracks which really hits home, especially when it comes to discussing life in 2026, is ‘Relay’.
The song was written decades before the internet (and our subsequent reliance on it) was ever a thing, and yet, it feels as though that’s exactly what the song is about. It refers to an invisible network that rules over the entire world, with lyrics like “From tree to tree, from you to me, travelling twice as fast on any freeway”, where the words are almost an uncanny depiction of what life is like in the modern technological age.
The Velvet Underground – ‘The Murder Mystery’
The Velvet Underground were always praised for their unpredictability, where you never really knew what kind of music they might end up churning out, as each single and album was completely separate from their last. It was this unpredictability that made them so beloved, and one of their most experimental songs came in the form of ‘The Murder Mystery’, a nine-minute track where different members of the band read a selection of poems all at the same time, creating a haphazard mess of noise which is unlistenable at times.
The song feels like a reflection of how music is marketed and consumed in the modern age. Thanks to social media, short-form content and the barrage of marketing attempts by bands, sound is no longer cohesive, and it’s instead a blanket mess of noise which people need to wade their way through in order to dig up what they like.
Jimi Hendrix – ‘Up From the Skies’
Jimi Hendrix often incorporated elements of sci-fi into his music, and he believed in aliens, so much so that he thought they had actually landed in his back garden once when he was a kid. As a result, they would pop up in a few of his tracks, which is what happens in his song ‘Up From the Skies’, as an alien tourist makes observations of Earth.
What this alien sees isn’t just the Earth in all of its glory, though; it also sees the impending danger that lingers on the horizon, which includes the planet heating up and rising sea levels. Keep in mind, Hendrix penned this track towards the back end of the ‘60s, when the topic of climate change wasn’t on many people’s lips. In the modern age, this subject has become too big to ignore, leaving Jimi Hendrix to double up as a soothsayer with his assessment of the threat.
