Five songs that make more sense today than when they were released
Pop music is full of songs that age badly.
Which makes sense. Music is arguably the most immediate art form there is. It’s all about defining the here and now, or at least trying to, which is an admirable intention on the surface. However, anytime you define the here and now, one must only wait a day before that piece of art is outdated. It is a relic of its time that will almost certainly age like milk, reminding us all of a less refined time. Y’all remember Klaxons? Exactly.
Most of the time, the best you can hope for is for history to look upon the period of time your song was written for fondly. Everyone loves the synth-heavy chart pop of the 1980s, so those Stock, Aitken & Waterman classics are hailed as classics despite the fact that they couldn’t sound more dated if they came with free shoulder pads. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you can sound ‘timeless’. A song so good that it doesn’t matter when it appeared, just that it sounds great.
However, on vanishingly few occasions, you get songs that might age, but age well. It may be rarer than rocking horse shit, but it still happens from time to time. When an artist has their ear so close to the ground that they take a gamble on the next big style of music and correctly predict the future, Nostradamus-style.
Sometimes these songs are celebrated when they come out, sometimes they’re not, but one way or another, history vindicates them with aplomb.
Five songs that make more sense today:
‘Fast Car’ – Tracy Chapman
Hold on, now. In no way am I suggesting that people didn’t love this masterpiece of a song when it came out, quite the opposite, in fact. There are few live performance videos quite as absurdly moving as Tracy Chapman silencing a packed-out Wembley Stadium armed only with an acoustic guitar and a sad story of a life unfulfilled. This was a gigantic hit at the time and marked Chapman out as one of the most beloved singers of her generation. However, one can’t deny that it was an outlier at the time, because just about the only style of music the 1980s weren’t good for were singer-songwriters.
Everyone had to be bigger, louder, and more produced than everyone else, so Chapman’s stark storytelling and hushed vocals stood out like a sore thumb. Granted, that may have also made her stand out at the time. However, it’s pretty undeniable that ‘Fast Car’ makes more sense in the last decade or so, when hushed, sensitive singer-songwriters like Adele, Taylor Swift and Noah Kahan are having a genuine renaissance. I mean, Luke Combs having a gigantic hit with ‘Fast Car’ in 2024 says it all.
‘Bombs Over Baghdad’ – Outkast
Everyone likes novelty, don’t they? If someone’s doing something new, we naturally want to take a closer look. This goes double when it comes to music. How else do you explain inexplicable phenomena like the late 1990s’ swing revival in the USA? Outkast, Andre 3000 and Big Boi’s epoch-defining hip-hop duo were one of those acts that were so bizarre and out-there that they could have easily descended into being a novelty act. However, the songs were just so spectacular that people didn’t just take notice, they took influence.
One has to believe that a young Tyler, the Creator was taking notes on the likes of ‘Hey Ya!’ when making Flower Boy. However, in terms of defining the ballistic missile edge of modern alternative hip-hop, it’s got to be their 2000 masterpiece ‘Bombs Over Baghdad’. An ear-splitting, mile-a-minute explosion of daring creativity. One that may have got people’s attention at the time for being weird and out there, but in an alternative hip-hop scene defined by the likes of JPEGMAFIA, Danny Brown, Doechii and Run The Jewels, it gets people’s attention today by being influential.
’21st Century Schizoid Man’ – King Crimson
Imagine hearing this song in the year of our lord 1969. Unless you were a devotee of the Birmingham blues scene, Black Sabbath probably haven’t thundered their way into your life yet. Led Zeppelin were huge but still operating on the tougher end of psychedelic rock at the time. There were a few proto-punk acts to those really in the know, like The Stooges and MC5, but no one was taking their energy and fusing it with the technical chops of the progressive rock bands springing up around Pink Floyd. Then the Kings arrived, and holy shit.
To hear this on the radio must have been like hearing a demonic monster trying to claw its way into your reality via your radio set. Doubly so if you’d happened to see the subtly horrifying cover art of the album it came from. At the time, it must have been an unnerving, barely understandable migraine of a song built around heavier sounds than anyone was creating at the time. Six decades later, it’s still all of those things, but now we have a word for it. Heavy. Goddamn. Metal.
‘Good Vibrations’ – The Beach Boys
Let this be a lesson to all the budding pop musicians perusing the pages of this fair website. When you make pop songs, by all means, listen to them on top-of-the-range, professional-grade speakers first. Then, for the sake of everyone else, find the person in your team with the worst, most blown-out headphones and listen to it on them as well. Because while a song will sound great on speakers that cost more than a small flat, they won’t be what people listen to them on. Back in the day, the same test was done on car stereos.
One has to wonder whether a song as life-affirming as ‘Good Vibrations‘ got such a shrug upon initial release because the vast, vast majority of the technology people were listening to it on just wasn’t built for it. This is a song where you’re meant to hear every scrape of those cellos. Every beep of those keys that Brian Wilson’s dazzling falsetto waltzes in on. Every note of this symphony is as important as the last, and today, your average laptop or phone speaker can do it justice. Not so much in the early 1960s.
‘Vroom Vroom’ – Charli XCX
The career of Charli XCX has been a frustrating affair, mainly for famed electro-pop singer-songwriter Charli XCX. For nearly ten years, her songs fluctuated between having pop hits that she seemingly hated, followed up with more esoteric, challenging efforts that went under the radar. This, in turn, was followed up with Charli having a public temper tantrum about it and resolving to make more digestible fodder for an audience she seemed to resent. While 2024’s Brat seemed to get the balance right, those in the know knew that she’d taken that sound and aesthetic for a test drive (if you’ll pardon the pun) in 2016.
The Vroom Vroom EP was Charli’s first foray into full-on hyper-pop. Made in part with members of the PC Music collective and in particular, produced by the dearly missed Sophie, who would go on to become one of Charli’s closest friends and collaborators. A pop scene expecting ‘Boom Clap’ round two were baffled, as were most of the record-buying public.
It turned out that not even ten years later, her Beadales-girl-gone-gansta-rap shtick would fit the zeitgeist like a glove, and a call of “let’s ride” at her concerts gets some of the biggest reactions of the night everywhere she goes. Not bad for a flop era, right?
