Older Than They Think / Music

"Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did use the word "grunge" (to describe our style of music) back in the early days. I don't know if anybody picked up on it. I wonder."

— Kim Salmon of The Scientists, Long Way to the Top: Stories of Australian Rock & Roll

See Covered Up and Sampled Up for when songs from previous eras get covered or sampled, and are known to a new generation for the first time. (For example, after Nirvana played "The Man Who Sold The World" on MTV from MTV Unplugged in New York, and David Bowie complained about the young people who came up to him and said "It's so cool you're covering a Nirvana song".) This is especially striking for songs which have been covered multiple times over the years.

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• Rock & Roll: Although music fans and purists vehemently debate the origins of the music form, most tend to date the start as occurring sometime between 1951 and 1956 (with a few even setting the start date as early as the 1930s and as late as the the 1960s). In truth, elements of rock and roll can be found in musical forms dating back to the late 19th century, and on record from at least the early 1930s, with many recordings qualifying as rock and roll in all but name.
• "Mmm Whatcha Say" (as featured by Jason Derulo, The O.C., and SNL) is from Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek".
• Anna Kendrick's ''Cups'' was actually written by Lulu and the Lampshades back in 2009. The original version of the song was written by A.P. Carter in 1931 and was later recorded by the Carter Family in the 1950s (Carter also wrote a second, completely separate tune called "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?" which is sometimes confused for this one). The beat itself is also not original, watch it here on Full House.
• If you hear the song "Blaise Bailey Finnegan III" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, you might be compelled to think the "poem" recited by the eccentric vox pop interviewee in the song was written by himself...if you've also heard "Virus" by Iron Maiden, however, you'll know this "poem" merely plagiarized the lyrics of that song. Even Godspeed themselves seemed unaware of this at the time.
• El Chombo's 2018 hit "Dame tu Cosita" is actually an extended mix of a 1997 song originally called "Introducción B" that he released in the album Cuentos De La Cripta 2.
• "Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?" derives from the Catchphrase of To Tell the Truth, an American gameshow, "Will the real ____ please stand up?" Most non-American fans assume Eminem coined the phrase, as do a good portion of the American fanbase as well, due to a lot of them not having been born yet when the show was popular.
  • The Internet is full of Eminem fans who praise The Dark Knight for including the line "will the real Batman please stand up".
  • I'm Spartacus!!
  • The line "two trailer park girls go 'round the outside" from "Without Me" is a spin on "two Buffalo girls go 'round the outside" from "Buffalo Girls" by Malcolm McLaren, former manager of The Sex Pistols. This escaped some people, as the latter song came out almost 20 years earlier.
• Nowadays, most people associate using the term "ice" when referring to diamond jewelry with modern rap artists. However, back in 1953, Marilyn Monroe used the term in "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend. (Around the 2:25 mark.)
• The Nokia ringtone is an interpolation of a hook from a guitar piece (Gran Vals) by Francisco Tárrega, written in 1902.
• Since Michael Jackson's death, numerous comments have been made on the YouTube copies of "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Eat It" and "Fat" music videos decrying how "disrespectful" it is to be making fun of Jackson so soon after he died, regardless of the posted dates of the official videos to YouTube (2007-03-17), the ostensible copyright (1984 and 1988 respectively), or the fact that Jackson was a fan of Yankovic and allowed him to studio-record all but one ("Snack All Night", a "Black or White" parody that he is allowed to perform in concert) of his Jackson parodies.
• The song "Die Young" by Kesha suffered a similar fate following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Radio stations all across the nation pulled the song from their playlists, causing it to drop by nearly 5,000 spins in the span of a week. The song came out in September of 2012, nearly 3 months before the shooting. Like the Yankovic parodies, the song wasn't unknown prior to the shooting, but it nearly derailed her career. Additionally, "Die Young" is not the first time a song plummeted down the radio charts due to real-life events. The Dixie Chicks' music was blackballed by radio stations after a controversial remark against then-President George W. Bush shortly after the beginning of the Iraq War. And even before that, Billy Joe Royal's "Burned Like a Rocket" disappeared from the country music charts after the Challenger disaster in 1986.
• It can be as true of bands as of songs; some examples include Pulp, who started in 1978 but had most of their mainstream success in The '90s, Karl Hyde and Rick Smith of Underworld, who had hits in the 90s and are still touring but started working together in 1980 and started Underworld in 1987, and The Flaming Lips (who formed in 1983 and solidified themselves as a mainstream force in 1998 with The Soft Bulletin). Consequently they're probably Older Than They Look for many people.
• The rickroll was not the first time that Rick Astley's '80s hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" was used in a humorous context; it has featured in comedy routines by Joel and the bots and Peter Kay, among others.
• Nobody knows how old the Londonderry Air (the tune for "Danny Boy") is, to the extent that Julian May decided to assign authorship to the Tanu in the Saga of the Exiles series. Recent music scholars are pretty well satisfied that it was first transcribed in 1792, from a performance at the Belfast Harp Festival by harpist Denis O'Hampsey (Denis Hempson), who was about 97 years old at the time. O'Hampsey's repertoire contained melodies that he asserted dated back to the 17th century, but it's unknown whether this melody was one of them. The earliest known words were published in 1814.
• The song best known as Greensleeves. It's quite possible that the famous lyrics were written by Henry VIII, but the tune itself — the Dargason, as it's called — goes back way further.
• The Jazz/Blues standard "St. James Infirmary" first gained fame via a 1928 Louis Armstrong recording, so it's easy to assume a 20th century New Orleans origin for it, but its history is muddled and mysterious and might date back several hundred years. A common theory is that it's a modern adaptation of an old English folk song variously called "The Unfortunate Lad" or "The Unfortunate Rake", about a man dying of syphilis, which was first transcribed in the late 1700s. A sticking point on the song's origin is the very specific use of "St. James" as the name of a hospital, which has led to searches for various London facilities with that name. One possible candidate, an infirmary that treated leprosy, was seized and shut down by Henry VIII in 1531, which could push the creation of "The Unfortunate Rake" back into the English Renaissance. But, all the versions of "The Unfortunate Rake" that mention St. James Hospital were collected in 20th century America, not England. Also, the similarities between "The Unfortunate Rake" and "St. James Infirmary" aren't strong enough to establish a direct connection. Other musicologists feel the situation is more a case of "The Unfortunate Rake" being a distant influence on "St. James Infirmary" (and possibly other songs like "The Streets of Laredo", "House of the Rising Sun", and "Minnie the Moocher"—verses only; Cab Calloway added the "Hi-De-Ho" chorus). There have been entire books that have tried to untangle the origins of "St. James Infirmary", but the various early releases crediting the song to contemporary composers were clearly mistaken.
• "The Anacreontick Song" or "To Anacreon in Heaven", written by one John Stafford Smith as the official song of the Anacreontic Society, a gentlemen's club of amateur musicians in 18th century London. With different lyrics adapted from a poem by Francis Scott Key, it's better known as "The Star-Spangled Banner", the United States national anthem. Oh, and in an interesting crossover with Newer Than They Think, "The Star-Spangled Banner" was not adopted as the national anthem of the United States until 1931.
• "Froggy Went a-Courtin'", generally thought to be a 19th-century American folk song, actually dates back much further, to 16th-century Scotland.
• Stone Temple Pilots were often derided as cheap Pearl Jam/Alice in Chains/Nirvana ripoffs, despite having actually been formed before any of them. STP was formed in 1986. Pearl Jam was formed in 1990. Nirvana and Alice in Chains were both formed in 1987. That said, STP did have some Early-Installment Weirdness - their first demo featured songs that would be re-recorded for their first proper album without much change, but also included funk influences, which they abandoned by 1992; it's possible the success of bands like Nirvana impacted which material they opted to focus on.
• The mainstream success of Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam often overshadows the many similar American bands we now call 'alternative' that were around in the eighties such as Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., The Pixies, Meat Puppets (who were actually covered on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York), and Minutemen, who are relegated to Mainstream Obscurity at best; not to mention that, aside from R.E.M., The Cure and especially U2, the 80s alternative artists who were more closely derived from post-punk/new wave tend to get even less attention (at least in America). Music critic Michael Azerrad was compelled to write the 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life, a now essential tome on 1980s alternative rock, after watching a documentary on the history of rock & roll that skipped from Talking Heads straight to Nirvana, ignoring all of those bands.
• Everyone on the SongMeanings page for Babyshambles song "There She Goes (A Little Heartache)" agreed it was written about Kate Moss, supermodel girlfriend of Pete Doherty, until someone pointed out the song was around since before the two of them even met.
• The music now best known as the German national anthem (since 1922) originated in 1797 as an anthem in honour of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (from 1804 also Emperor Francis I of the Austria). The music was written by none other than Joseph Haydn, who incorporated it into one of his string quartets. The German anthem's lyrics come from a 1841 poem. This also serves to explain the dissonance between the lyrics (a call for unity, democracy and liberty) and the very slow, solemn music (the original lyrics for the Austro-Hungarian anthem were in praise of their emperor, their "God Save the King").
• A few songs that sometimes appear on "Best of the '80s" compilations and get played at radio stations' and dance clubs' "80s nights" were recorded in the late 1970s, including the The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star", M's "Pop Muzik" (both 1979; the Buggles' song was released as a single in 1979, but its parent album was released in 1980, and it was the first video played on MTV in 1981), Plastic Bertrand's "Ça Plane Pour Moi" (1977), the Cars' "Just What I Needed" (1978), the The B-52s "Rock Lobster" (1979), "I Got You" by Split Enz (recorded 1979, released January 1980), and Gary Numan's "Cars" (1979). Yes, some songs were so "1980's" in their sound that they made it to the party before the actual decade did.
• Similarly, the song "Ain't We Got Fun" became popular during The Great Depression, but it was first published in 1921.
• Massive Attack recorded "Teardrop" before House got hold of it. How anyone manages to miss this when the credits say "Theme song by Massive Attack" is a mystery.
• There are a lot of people who think Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" from A Night at the Opera (1975) was first released in 1992 with Wayne's World (Freddie Mercury died the year before).
• On the subject of Marilyn Manson:
  • "He has a woman's name and wears makeup. How original." — Alice Cooper. As comedian/talk-show host Dennis Miller once said, "I love Marilyn Manson's music! In fact, I've been a fan of Marilyn Manson ever since the days when he called himself Alice Cooper!"
  • There was another singer who adopted a similar style in the time between Cooper and Manson: Roger Painter, known by the stage name of Rozz Williams, who was one of the pioneers of the American '80s deathrock scene.
  • And one before: Screaming Lord Sutch, especially "Jack the Ripper" from 1963. David Bowie noticed this, noting in the book Moonage Daydream (a retrospective of his Glam Rock period) that "Alice Cooper had been over to the UK earlier that year [1972] but what I saw was something terribly reminiscent of British act Screaming Lord Sutch and his funny but extremely silly 'blood and guts' pantomime." (He liked Cooper's songs, though.) Sutch's "Jack the Ripper" itself counts for this trope, as he Covered Up the obscure original version by American Rockabilly singer Clarence Stacy from 1960.
  • Also in the UK, Arthur Brown (best known as a One-Hit Wonder for his 1968 single "Fire") and his early-'Seventies band Kingdom Come were ploughing a similar Shock Rock furrow to Cooper at about the same time.
  • When Manson covered "Tainted Love", eye-rolling teenagers would chastise fans for being unfamiliar with the "original" Soft Cell version, oblivious to the fact that it was originally recorded as a northern soul song by Gloria Jones in 1964. It was written by Ed Cobb, formerly of the The Four Preps. One of his bandmates was future TV superproducer Glenn Larson.
  • The chorus of their song "(m)OBSCENE" has been called a ripoff of Faith No More's "Be Aggressive" - both songs were actually parodying a common cheerleader routine. You could still argue that Marilyn Manson borrowed the general idea of incorporating the chant into a subversive rock song from Faith No More though.
• Many fans of modern Goth music are unaware that the scene has its origins in the late 1970's, beginning with bands like Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Joy Division far before the genre's popularity surge in the mid-1990's.
• Press any kid growing up in the 90's or 00's when they think ska started and most will say that it was started in the United States in the 90's with bands like Reel Big Fish, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and No Doubt, and that it's "punk with horns". In fact, ska is a Jamaican music genre that's only slightly younger than Rock & Roll. Reggae spun off from ska (Bob Marley and the Wailers started out as a ska band). If you want to go further, some American rock and R&B songs from The '50s that picked up followings in Jamaica basically use a ska rhythm, like Barbie Gaye's 1956 original version of "My Boy Lollipop" and Fats Domino's 1959 hit "Be My Guest".
  • By 1964, ska had attracted enough attention outside Jamaica that The Beatles threw a ska-rhythm guitar solo into "I Call Your Name", and Annette Funicello recorded a Dance Sensation song called "Jamaica Ska".
  • Furthermore, the fusing of ska and punk itself is older than the early 90's and dates to the late 1970's English "2 Tone" scene, and artists like Fishbone, The Specials and Madness.
  • Interestingly, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and No Doubt also qualify. They're two of the first bands that would come to mind when one thinks of mid-90s ska, and both enjoyed massive popularity then. But both bands formed and performed in the 80s; The Bosstones started in 1983, No Doubt in 1986.
• '90s kids might believe Green Day was the founder of PopPunk (i.e., punk rock with a pop sensibility. But the roots of pop punk can be traced to the 1970s with bands like the Ramones and the Buzzcocks.
• Bob Marley is often called "the first international reggae superstar". Jimmy Cliff was the first reggae musician to score worldwide hits and he did it as early as 1969, three years before Catch a Fire (1972) broke in the West.
  • Reggae's popularity in the U.S. goes all the way back to the ska version of "My Boy Lollipop" as recorded by Millie Small.^note This has one of the most complex origins of any pop song of that era. Prince Buster's "Ten Commandments" was a Top 20 hit on the R&B charts in 1967 (four years after it was recorded). Desmond Dekker's "Israelites" hit the charts in 1969 and rose to #9 on Billboard — despite the fact that few people could understand a word Dekker was saying. Believe it or not, Marley never had a song go higher than #51.
  • Johnny Nash hit the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic with his reggae hits as early as 1968. Nash qualifies for "Older Than They Think" in another way: he'd been making records since 1958. So a lot of his late sixties fans probably would have found his old 45s in their older brothers' and sisters' collections - with neither being aware that it was the same guy, since his style had changed completely in the interim.
• Most people (in the United States anyway) are very surprised the first time they learn that music videos existed before MTV started in 1981. Although when you think about it, the alternative makes no sense... if videos didn't already exist, how would MTV have had anything to show? Many people today don't even realize MTV dates back to '81 (or that it used to show music videos!).
  • If you're looking for an Older Than Television Ur-Example, music videos are about as old as sound film itself if you consider cartoons such as Silly Symphonies and Cab Calloway's appearances in Betty Boop cartoons to be music videos.
  • Another Older Than Television Ur-Example is the Jimmie Rodgers (not the 50s-60s pop singer, but the late 20s-early 30s country singer) 1930 short film "The Singing Brakeman" produced by Columbia Pictures where Jimmie performed on a movie set looking like a railroad dressed in a railroad suit performing "Waiting For a Train", "Daddy and Home" and "Blue Yodel No. 1 (T For Texas)".
  • Soundies (a combination jukebox and film projector) were around in the 1940's.
  • Another early video is Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues", made in 1965 as a lead-in to the documentary Don't Look Back.
  • Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975) is often claimed to be the first "true" music video, despite the fact that many '60s groups, such as The Beatles and The Monkees, were doing them ten years earlier. The Beatles' clips were even made for the same reason the Queen clip was — to stand in for live TV appearances on various shows (Top of the Pops in Queen's case). The idea of having a group shoot a video to promote a single on TV spots and send out as many copies of it as required, rather than have them jetting from studio to studio to appear (often miming) was sensible. Pink Floyd, Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and The Rolling Stones also appeared in films during the 1960s and '70s. Most were intended for release as theatrical features, for internal music industry promotion, or were just the group messing about. Some had limited releases at the time, and most of the others remained hidden for years before the general public saw them (David Bowie's featurette Love You Till Tuesday was made in 1969 but not screened until 1984, for instance).
  • Ricky Nelson was also a pioneer in music video, judging from this promo of him singing "Travelin' Man" in 1961, filmed as part of an episode for his sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. And Nelson predated The Monkees as America's first TV-promoted rock and roll Teen Idol by a decade.
  • Humble beginnings: The Dickson experimental film, made in late 1894 or early 1895 at Edison's Black Maria film studio on West Orange, New Jersey. It is the first known film with live recorded sound, a kinetoscope film accompanied by a phonograph cylinder. The 17-second film features a man playing the violin, while two men dance to the music nearby, and a fourth man walks by near the end. The music played was "Song of the Cabin Boy", from Robert Planquette's Les Cloches de Corneville. The cylinder containing the live sound recording was lost for decades, eventually being found in The '60s, broken in two. It was repaired in 1998, and finally film and sound were reunited after more than a century of being recorded. You can watch it here.
• Michael Jackson gets a lot of hype from his estate and fans as the originator of the story-driven Concept Video, a point also argued in this article: "Jackson turned the low-budget, promotional clips record companies would make to promote a hit single into high art, a whole new genre that combined every form of 20th century mass media: the music video." But concept videos existed in the late 1970s and early '80s, while Jackson's Thriller videos didn't arrive until 1983. The Jacksons (including Michael) did have a Concept Video in 1980's "Can You Feel It", but even then they're predated by the work of such artists as George Harrison (1976's comic "This Song" and "True Love" clips) and David Bowie ("Look Back in Anger" and "D.J." in 1979). Often forgotten is the fact that the first winners of the MTV Video Vanguard Award in 1984 were The Beatles and Richard Lester, due to the influence of the films they made in The '60s, and Bowie. Jackson didn't win until 1988, but the award was renamed after him in 1991, which only aids misperceptions about his influence.
  • Devo thrived on the use of multi-media in this regard, having creating the short film The Truth About De-evolution in 1976 which could be described as an early concept video (featuring two songs and a dialogue between their mascot characters, Booji Boy and General Boy). They also created concert interstitials set in their fictional Spudland universe such as Roll the Barrel, and several pre-MTV promotional videos that in some way or another tied in with de-evolution. The home video compilations The Men Who Make the Music (1978) and We're All Devo (1984) expanded on this universe with further scenes from the band, General Boy, Rod Rooter, and so forth.
  • Several of the segments of the 1940 movie Fantasia, which in effect is a two-hour music video, are story-driven. The last-but-one, illustrating Modest Mussorgsky's "Night On Bald Mountain", has some heavy satanic imagery — over fifty years before Doom.
  • In terms of pairing a song with images that tell a story, way back in the 1890s songwriter Charles K. Harris ("After the Ball") produced slide shows with painted photographs that were supposed to accompany performances of his songs.
• When They Might Be Giants came out with "Why Does The Sun Shine?" in 1993, most people didn't know that it was a cover. The original version was written for Space Songs, a 1959 educational album for children performed by folk singer Tom Glazer. "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" has a similar lineage. It was written in 1953, and first recorded that year by the singing group The Four Lads.
• "Wham, bam, thank you, Ma'am!" is nearly always a reference to David Bowie's "Suffragette City"; the phrase had been around since well before World War II.
• Even though the term was coined during the Turn of the Millennium, this song from 1984 sounds remarkably similar to a modern denpa song, complete with off-key synths and chanting. Denpa is an umbrella term and can be applied retroactively to it as well. The 80's band Zin-Say (especially "Kyofu Kamereon Ningen"), Sukisukisu Fumie Hosokawa, and Computer Obaachan by Ryuichi Sakamoto are also retroactively labelled denpa. Jun Togawa was also hugely influential in early denpa.
  • Denpa being Older Than They Think doesn't even just apply to unintentional examples like the above. Otaku-oriented doujin music with strange lyrics and intentionally off-key vocals and instruments that resemble denpa song in all but name date back to the early 90s, like so.
  • A lot of people think that ARM from IOSYS and Camellia are responsible for creating denpa that incorporates more mainstream EDM elements. While they certainly popularized it, they were not the first. If you were to tell someone this early denpa song from 2002 was made by IOSYS, they'd probably believe you.
• Many people think that the saxophones are rather new instruments. While they became ubiquitous in The Roaring '20s, the instrument was invented by the Belgian Adolphe Sax in the 1840s. Of 19th-century musical works requiring a saxophone, the most commonly performed is Bizet's L'Arlésienne suite for orchestra, No. 1 (1872). By the standards of classical music, the saxophone is quite new (and also unusual in that it was purposefully invented). The next-newest instrument in common use is the clarinet, which was developed in the early 1700s from an older instrument called the chalumeau. It gets even older than that — the oboe and harp can trace their lineage to ancient Greece.
• "Avantcore", a song by Busdriver, includes a sample of the song "Turtles Have Short Legs" by Can. One of Parappa The Rapper's songs sampled it before then. People on YouTube were wondering why Busdriver would sample Parappa.
  • Can themselves pioneered a number of musical techniques that are now common today. Looped break-beats, for example. Most people would associate with Rap and Hip-Hop, though Can first used the technique (in combination with live drums) on the 1971 epic "Halleluhwah" from "Tago Mago".
• Manufactured pop music is a funny example in that just about every generation tends to think they birthed it. In fact, pop music manufactured to appeal to teenage girls has been around since The '50s. And it was every bit as derided then by critics and music snobs as it is now (albeit perhaps not as vocally, since the internet didn't exist until much later). To give a good example of this, lots of people think that the Backstreet Boys and **NSYNC were the first mainstream pop boy bands. In fact, The Monkees were manufactured in 1966 as a knock-off of the Beatles. Menudo is a long-running Puerto Rican boy band famous for its rotating roster of singers, who are replaced as they age (Ricky Martin was once a member, well before he was famous as a solo artist). Kids Incorporated had a TV series running nine seasons on the air in the '80s, with a rotating roster (including Stacy Ferguson 20 years before she started flaunting her lovely lady lumps). Musical Youth is another early boy band, formed in 1980 and known for their "Pass the Dutchie" single; a few years later New Kids on the Block were one of the hottest acts of the late 80s. See the page image for a satirical take on this idea.
  • Many Americans aren't aware that not only have British & Irish boy bands existed long before One Direction and The Wanted, but that some of them tried to go for U.S. success. Take That, Westlife, Boyzone, Five, BBMak, A1, and JLS all tried to become popular in the States, but became commercial failures over there. The Wanted would soon follow suit, but One Direction would go on to become more successful in the USA than all of the others combined. Most people are aware of the Beatles and know they're British, but don't exactly associate them with the term "boy band".
  • Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers of "Why Do Fools Fall In Love" were arguably a precursor to the "boy band" back in The '50s!
• The earliest synthesizer album was not Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos — Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon was released a year earlier, Perrey and Kingsley's Kaleidoscopic Vibrations in the same year as Subotnick's, and Perrey and Kingsley's The In Sound From Way Out! (which almost certainly was the first synth album) in 1966. In fact, synthesizer music is older than L.P.s themselves. The first public performance of music on a synthesizer took place in Russia in 1920. According to The Other Wiki, the first synthesiser was invented in 1876(!).
• There has been an edit war on the Wikipedia page for Isao Tomita's "Snowflakes Are Dancing", with one editor trying to claim that there is somehow something "remarkable" about the fact that Tomita used multitrack layering to record this album. All previous synth albums also used this technique, because if you're using a monophonic instrument (as all synths were at the time) but also want complex melody lines, there is no alternative. Indeed, The Beatles used multitrack layering in 1964, and it was an old technique then.
• Many people think that the song "Hurt" was originally recorded by Johnny Cash, not Nine Inch Nails. The Youtube 'debate' on this is cringe inducing.
• A video from 1973 circulating on YouTube features Dolly Parton singing her own composition, "I Will Always Love You". Not only did she write it, but she recorded two different hit versions before Whitney Houston covered it. This doesn't stop people from gasping at Parton's gall for daring to "sing that Whitney Houston song".
• A large number of Beyoncé fans are upset that Lady Gaga's robot suit in "Paparazzi" got more attention than the similar one Beyoncé wore in "Sweet Dreams". However, Brigitte Helm did it first, she did it best, and she did it 80 years before either of them did. While it's understandable that these fans aren't familiar with the original silent film, they've also forgotten that similar costumes have been used in popular music videos and live performances for at least two decades, some of which came out only a couple years ago.
• If you were to ask anyone where the line "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end" is from, if they knew, chances are they'd say it's a line from "Closing Time" by Semisonic. But it's actually a direct quote from the Roman Philosopher Seneca the Younger, making it Older Than Feudalism. The song's other famous line, "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here", was a long-established cliche for bar and restaurant owners to say to customers as they closed for the night. A 1944 Boston Herald article quotes the line verbatim, but calls it a line from "the old days", suggesting it was probably a few centuries old by the time Semisonic used it.
• After Ace Ventura was first released, some moviegoers believed the Mission: Impossible theme (which is used in the movie) originated from it.
• Pachelbel Rant anyone?
• How about a four-chord song?
• One YouTube video of a certain elder statesman of Rock doing a version of "All Along The Watchtower" drew several indignant comments about this "old geezer" covering Jimi Hendrix. The "geezer" in question? Bob Dylan, who wrote the song on John Wesley Harding before Hendrix covered it on Electric Ladyland.
• Folk music icon Dave Van Ronk tells a tremendous story about "House of the Rising Sun". The song itself is a traditional — it dates back at least a hundred years and was first recorded by Alan Lomax in 1933. Somewhere around 1960, Van Ronk did his own arrangement of the song (many others had been done previously) that originated some of the now-common melodic features of the tune. At the time, Van Ronk's friend and protege was none other than a very young Bob Dylan. When Dylan was signed by Columbia Records in 1961, he recorded (without asking) Van Ronk's arrangement. When the record came out in 1962, Van Ronk had to stop playing the song because people started accusing him of stealing it from Dylan. The two of them stayed friends, but Van Ronk would get a measure of revenge two years later — when the song became a huge hit for The Animals, and Dylan had to stop playing it when people accused him of stealing it from Eric Burdon.
• Speaking of Hendrix, before he unleashed his slowed down cover of "Hey Joe", Tim Rose made a version that had a similar tempo. Hendrix himself would say that this Rose's rendition was the one that inspired the Experience to record it.
• The 2008 Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles rendition of "Samson and Delilah" is generally cited as being a cover of the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name, recorded in 2006. Believe it or not, Springsteen did NOT create the song, nor did The Grateful Dead who recorded a memorable version in 1977; gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson did, and back then it was called "If I Had My Way, I'd Burn This Whole Building Down".
• "In My Time of Dying" is not a Led Zeppelin original; it's a cover of Blind Willie Johnson's "Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed". There are number of versions of that song, that predate the Led Zeppelin version.
• The Britpop band Space is best known for the song "Female of the Species" (1996), with the lyric "The female of the species is more deadly than the male." Rudyard Kipling, who may have originated the sentiment, wrote The Female of the Species almost one hundred years earlier. It's not even the first song to use the phrase. The Walker Brothers recorded the remarkably similar "Deadlier Than the Male" in 1966.
• That scene-transition theme from SpongeBob SquarePants? Sure, I know that. "What do you do with a drunken sailor"? Never heard of it! And of course, it's the same tune as a couple of other songs.
  • The song at the beginning of the episode "Sailor Mouth", called "Sailing over the Dogger Bank"? That's a real sea shanty.
• "Stand and Deliver" may sound like an anti-grunge song at first. Then you realize it's from the early 80's.
• Go to YouTube and look up "Twilight" by Vanessa Carlton. Now look at the comments for the video. I guarantee you that you'll encounter in the first page someone who thinks it's connected to the Twilight series, or more likely, someone complaining that there's no connection and the earlier poster is an idiot for thinking there is. The song was written in 2002, before the first Twilight book even came out, let alone when the series truly become a cultural phenomenon upon the release of the film.
• Pay close attention to any TV commercial that advertises a band's "brand new single". The single might be new insofar as the band hasn't performed it before, but it's surprising how often it's a cover or remix of an older song. Though not universally true, Pop music seems to be especially prone to this.
• Some Kate Bush fans are adamant in claiming that she was the first quirky keyboard-playing female singer-songwriter, and that every female musician with a penchant for weirdness to come after ripped her off. What they don't know is that Nico predated Kate by 12 years. Bizarre chords and melodies, expert piano playing and unorthodox vocalizing are also the province of one Joni Mitchell.
• Some people seem to think that the refrain from Kesha's song "Take It Off" is original, this is not true the melody is from a song called "The Streets of Cairo" which dates back to the late 1800's. You might also know it as that Standard Snippet that's associated with snake charmers and belly-dancing, or as that schoolyard chant about a place in France where the naked ladies dance. Given the subject matter of the song and the fact that both mention "a hole in the wall", the Ke$ha song was probably alluding to the latter.
• Play the Westminster Quarters on THE Ohio State University's campus, and the students will look towards Orton Hall. Play it in a Columbus bar, and Ohio State football fans will be ready to sing the school's alma mater, "Carmen Ohio". The same holds true at Indiana University, the University of Illinois and many other schools. The bell chimes actually didn't even originate at the Palace of Westminster; they were written for the new bells at St. Mary the Great Church in Cambridge (England) in 1793.
• Ditto for "Le Regiment de Sambre et Meuse". “Why is the French army doing Script Ohio?”
• "Up On The Housetop" sounds like something that might have been written around the same time as other novelty holiday songs like "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" or "Frosty The Snowman": late 1940s-early 1950s. It was actually written before the end of the Civil War (1864, most likely). It was the first song to have Santa Claus in a flying sleigh landing on rooftops and coming down chimneys. "Jolly Old St. Nicholas" also unexpectedly dates to this era, with its first publication in 1874, with lyrics that are a slightly rewritten version of an 1865 poem.
• What about people who think "I'm A Believer" was written by/for "Shrek"? Or even if they think they know better, believe the song was written by The Monkees. (It was written for them by Neil Diamond.)
• Many people, when asked about the history of the Concept Album, will date it to mid-to-late 60s rock bands, possibly naming Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as the first of the genre. These people are wrong. Serious historians of music generally mark Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours, released in 1955, as the first true concept album (with the thoughts of lovelorn men in the wee small hours of the morning being the concept). Even way older than that is Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (1940), with songs about the poverty and drought in the American Midwest during The Great Depression.
  • A possible ancestor of the concept album is the song cycle, dating to the early 19th century, as That Other Wiki defines it as having "Unification achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs."
  • An inversion was when Richard Harris (yes, he of subsequent Dumbledore fame) announced circa 1969 that he was to record a concept album; the announcement made it clear that he believed that he had invented the idea and that nobody had done one before, despite this being two years after Sgt. Pepper.
  • When people think of the term "album" in general, they'll think of an LP record. The concept existed earlier as 78 rpm records packaged together in a book like a photo album. RCA Records even marketed albums of 45 rpm records when they were engaged in a format war with Columbia Records' LP, but eventually dropped these to market 45s as a format for singles to teenagers once it became clear that the LP was here to stay.
• Don McLean didn't write "Babylon". It's generally credited to 18th-century American composer William Billings.
• Inverted with the Lady Gaga hatedom who love to point out that some female musician (usually Madonna) 'did it first'. And then played straight as most of the haters of the Madonna loving variety seem to forget that Madonna faced very similar criticism in her early career. Even Madonna wasn't the first female pop singer to play out her sexiness. Tina Turner already danced and pranced around in very short dresses in the 1960s. And Madonna was criticized in the 1980s for blatantly copying styles from other pop singers and Hollywood actresses way before her, the most obvious being Marilyn Monroe.
• Golden Earring, of "Radar Love" fame (1973), formed in 1961. Fleetwood Mac formed in 1967 and Rush formed in 1968 along with Yes. Journey formed in 1973.
• The iconic title song from 1994's Pulp Fiction is a song from the early 1960s, Dick Dale's "Misirlou" from Surfers Choice. Dale didn't write the song (though he is the first to adapt it to Surf Rock, where it has since become a standard)—it's a folk song from either Greece or Turkey, dating back at least to the 1930s. It was recorded, in its original slower tempo, many times before Dale. And then there are people who know the song solely from The Black Eyed Peas's "Pump It"... In fact, many people recognize the tune from both Pulp Fiction and "Pump It", but can't identify it as "Misirlou".
• A lot of romantic music of the 19th century were re-adaptations of earlier works and medieval music. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was quite fond of delivering this, most notably in his symphonies drawing themes from Russian or Ukrainian traditional music. Perhaps the best example is the final coda of his ballet "Sleeping Beauty", featured in Disney's film of the same name, which is a direct rearrangement of the national anthem of the Kingdom France, "Marche d' Henry IV" (prior to the French Revolution).
• Most musical concepts in general fit this trope
  • Musical tablature notation is Older Than Feudalism, existing in China in the Warring States Period (475 BCE - 256 BCE), though it was a little different◊ than the modern guitar tabs you see.
  • Western notation dates back to around the 12th century.
  • Sampling is Older Than Print in Western music. Motets are generally mashups of various sacred and secular songs dating back to the 13th century.
    • Recorded samples for musical effect in the modern sense is generally attributed to Pierre Schaffer in the late 1940s (called "Musique Concrête"). Oddly, the first time this concept was used in pop music was The Singing Dogs, the novelty music project from The '50s that used differently-pitched dog barks to simulate a melody (most famously "Jingle Bells").
  • Composers as far back as Johann Sebastian Bach have been caught using tone rows.
• Leave it to Cracked to take this one on.
  • Industrial music — invented in the early '80s, or in 1969? (Cromagnon - "Caledonia")
  • Radiohead's "groundbreaking" electronica-rock album Kid A sounds surprisingly similar to the album Love Without Sound by the '60s psychedelia band White Noise.
  • Daft Punk in 1970. Or, better yet, in 1958.
    • Even more impressive is that some of those sounds existed as early as 1919, as seen in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
  • What if Billy Corgan was around in 1964, and was a French chick named Françoise Hardy?
  • New Wave Music... in 1968!
    • You could even say that Joe Meek did it nine years earlier with his 1959 album I Hear a New World.
• What was the first rap record, the The Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" in 1979? Gil Scott-Heron's beat poetry on The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1974)? Or the ouevre of the Last Poets, who formed in 1968 and released their debut in 1970? Or this track by comedian Pigmeat Markham from '68? Or the Jubalaires back in 1937? In a sense, scatting from the 1920s is a precursor to rapping.
• KISS invented grunge rock. No, seriously. At least, they can make a case for it. Their 1974 sophomore album, Hotter Than Hell (which reportedly sold better in Japan than in the United States) included, in addition to what is arguably history's first thrash-metal song ("Parasite", which you may know better from the Anthrax cover version), "Goin' Blind" and "Got to Choose", both of which have a surprisingly modern, '90s alternative sound evocative of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, etc. True, Gene Simmons's vocal on "Goin' Blind" is a good deal more basso than any of Eddie Vedder's, but the singing style is almost exactly the same.
• Barney's "I Love You" song is most often misattributed to the creator of Barney, Sheryl Leach, and is often thought to have been created in the 90s with the TV show. As it turns out, the song was actually written by Lee Bernstein in 1983 for a children's book.
  • Which is based on an even older traditional children's rhyme, This Old Man.
• Elvis Presley is often (mis)attributed as the writer of Love Me Tender (he didn't even write the song, he just performed it), which debuted in 1956. But in actual fact, the tune itself was lifted from an old Civil War ballet called Aura Lee, written over a hundred years prior in 1861, by George R. Poulton.
  • Similarly, the melody for "It's Now or Never" comes from "O Sole Mio", composed by Eduardo di Capua in 1898.
    • "It's Now or Never" wasn't even the first hit English version of "O Sole Mio". "There's No Tomorrow" reached #2 on the Billboard' chart for Tony Martin in 1950. Elvis wanted to cover the song but his publishers told him it would be less of a hassle to just write new words instead of trying to make a deal with the publishers of the older version, so a new set of writers penned some Suspiciously Similar lyrics.
  • ...same with its Spiritual Successor "Surrender", same tune as the Italian "Torna a Surriento" or "Come Back to Sorrento".
  • "Wooden Heart" is adapted from the German song "Muss i denn" written by Friedrich Silcher in 1827.
  • "Can't Help Falling in Love" is derived from the 1784 French song "Plaisir d'amour", tune by Jean Paul Égide Martini.
  • Speaking of Elvis, Elvis impersonators have been a thing not only since before he died, but also since his peak popularity during the 1950s. The Other Wiki gives some examples of this.
• Most new listeners are surprised to learn that Yellow Magic Orchestra released their first album in 1978, which had the same Synth-Pop sound that would come to dominate the 1980s. Or that synthpop itself dates back to 1966 at the latest, with Perrey & Kingsley's first album.
  • Same can be said for Kraftwerk.
• Two Dropkick Murphys songs, "I'm Shipping Up to Boston" and "Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight" are actually covers of two previously unrecorded sets of Woody Guthrie lyrics (with new music written by the band).
  • Meanwhile, "Tessie", their famed 2006 Red Sox World Series song, is actually Newer Than They Think - parts of the chorus are adapted from the original Royal Rooters chant from the turn of the 20th century, but the verses are original to the Murphys' version, and tell the story of the Rooters themselves.
• Many younger people think that the idea of a graduation song dates back to Vitamin C in 2000 (or Green Day two years before — that was not even about graduation to begin with). The Four Freshmen did it in 1954.
• Lady Gaga's infamous meat dress? The Undertones' 1983 compilation album All Wrapped Up did it first.◊
  • And the indie musician Brittany Brazil donned a meat bra a few years before Gaga did in her video "Piece of Meat" (which is probably best known for having a cameo by The Angry Video Game Nerd).
  • And before them all was The Beatles' infamous "Butcher Shop" cover◊, way back in 1966.
  • Ross Noble mentioned in a stand up show that he'd done a bit in 2004 about gluing meat to himself "to ward off amorous vegans" and that Lady Gaga had copied him.
• Metallica's For Whom the Bell Tolls from Ride the Lightning is a quote from John Donne's Meditation 17, via a 1940 novel by Ernest Hemingway. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;It tolls for thee.
• John Williams's film music abounds with homages. For instance, some sections of the more "jazzy" battle music sections in "Star Wars" are straight out of Igor Stravinsky. The Bearded One is honest and cool about these borrowings but younger fanboys can get a bit hot under the collar when this is pointed out. (Also, the famous "Jaws" cue sounds a lot like the theme of the Doomsday Machine in the original Star Trek.) Then there's the title music for Jurassic Park — or, as Baroque fans prefer to call it, "Fugue no 2 from Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier".
• Listen to this piece of music. Now listen to this one. Even to this day, people are still confused as to who ripped off whose music. (If only they checked out the dates: Leviathan came out in 1989, whereas the first Recordof Lodoss War OVA came out in 1990.) And to even ask if the veteran composer like Jerry Goldsmith ripped off music from an obscure (at that time anyways) anime series is kinda unthinkable.
• "Hello Kitty" wasn't the first song Avril Lavigne used Gratuitous Japanese in the lyrics. Before that, Avril released versions of her song "Girlfriend" with its chorus sang in various languages, including Japanese.
• "Norwegian Wood" wasn't the first Indian classical music influenced song by a pop-group. That's probably See My Friends by The Kinks, recorded a few months earlier. The first pop song to feature a sitar was the Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren novelty record Goodness Gracious Me, from 1960.
  • Bizarrely enough, the James Bond theme from 1962's Dr. No is also based on a pastiche-Indian melody, "Good Sign Bad Sign" by Monty Norman.
• The "Flying V" and "Explorer" type electric guitars. They're usually associated with late 70's/early 80's heavy metal acts and Japanese guitar companies creating modern "shredder" guitars. They were actually limited production models from Gibson released in 1958 (although selling for less than a year due to low popularity). The Flying V was first reissued in 1967, and one well known user was Jimi Hendrix.
• The lyrics to "Turn! Turn! Turn!" by The Byrds are taken nearly word-for-word from The Bible — ironically, from the same book where we get the saying, "There's nothing new under the sun." Also, the Byrds didn't write that. It was written by Pete Seeger in about 1952.
• Lots of people know Eric Prydz's hit "Call On Me". However, years earlier, a house track of the same name was made by Thomas Bangalter (of Daft Punk) and DJ Falcon. However, they decided not to release the track, as they felt it sounded basic and uninspired. Similarly, the Freeloaders' "So Much Love To Give" is based on another track by Bangalter and Falcon (under the name Together), which also has the same name.
• Look to most YouTube clips of Skillet's "Monster" and Three Days Grace's "Animal I Have Become" will have fans of the opposing band claiming that one ripped off the other. "Monster" was released in 2009, "Animal I Have Become" in 2006.
• Some Gaga YouTube viewers Christina Aguilera have commented on how she is "ripping off Lady Gaga" especially on "Dirrty" - a song released in 2002, while Gaga didn't become active until 2005.
• Justin Bieber? Well he is a teen pop star and teen Idol, we had them in the 90s, Aaron Carter, and the 80s, Tiffany Darwish, and the 70s, Donny Osmond, in the late 60s/early 70s, Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy, and the early 50s, Frankie Avalon, and even the mid 30s to early 40s, Frank Sinatra.
  • A Canadian pop star singing Silly Love Songs that appeals mostly to teens? Surely you must mean Avril Lavigne.
  • Bubblegum pop from Canada? Let me take you back to The '70s and introduce you to the DeFranco Family.
  • Or Paul Anka who had his heyday in the 1950s. A Canadian teenage boy? Check. Cute and baby-faced? Check. A teen heartthrob with many obsessive teenage girl fans? Check. Sings romantic pop songs with questionable artistic merit? Check.
  • Oh my god! A Canadian act despised by the internet? Where have we seen that before?
• Many fans of Drake think that he coined the term "yolo" with his song, "The Motto". He popularized it, but Deathcore band Suicide Silence had a song the predates it by a few months, and The Strokes had song of the same name in 2006. The term "you only live once" goes back to 1937, with a Henry Fonda film titled You Only Live Once.
• Here's a little drinking game for you: find any Youtube video for the band Overkill that includes an image of their mascot Chalie (a skull with bat wings) on it, then look through the comments section and take a shot each time someone insists that the idea was stolen from Avenged Sevenfold. Take an extra shot if they stick to their guns even after being informed that Overkill has been using the character since the early '80s, well over a decade before A7X existed.
• People who only know Carly Rae Jepsen from "Call Me Maybe" would be very surprised to learn that her first album (Tug of War) was released in 2008.
• Psy's work before "Gangnam Style" (and to a lesser extent, "Gentleman") predates to 2001. However, his earlier songs were Darker and Edgier, which resulted in controversies and he's unable to get out of his Audience-Alienating Era until later.
• It might come as a surprise to fans of Lil Wayne and Jay-Z that Lil Wayne started in 1992 and Jay-Z Started in 1989.
• Disney's Teen Idols are nothing new. They've been marketing young singers since Walt himself was alive. Closer to today, people like Hilary Duff come to mind years before Miley Cyrus and The Jonas Brothers popped up.
• Whitney Houston's powerful melismatic style of singing has been around for awhile in the Soul/Gospel community (especially gospel). It just fell out of prominence when the over produced eighties arrived.
• Quite a few misinformed people think the rapper Drake (including Drake himself apparently) is the first to infuse R&B stylings into his rap delivery, over looking the fact that Slimkid of The Pharcyde, and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony did it first.
• People thinking Jimi Hendrix was the first black rock artist, which is so untrue it's not even funny. Then there are those who think Living Colour was the first black rock band. But bands like Sound Barrier, Bad Brains, The Black Muerda (started in the early sixties), The Isley Brothers, and The Chambers Brothers predate them.
  • These is even weirder when you consider that rock draws much of its background and inspiration from blues, which was originally predominantly performed by black artists for black audiences.
  • Hendrix wasn't the first black Psychedelic Rock musician either. Love, fronted by African-American Arthur Lee, released its debut album a year before Are You Experienced?
  • He was also not the first Native American rock musician. That would be Willie Mitchell and the Northern Lights (Algonquin-Mohawk). The one you're more likely to have heard of is Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree), more of a folk artist.
  • Actually, the first Native American rock musician was probably Link Wray (Shawnee from North Carolina). His instrumental "Rumble" was a top 20 hit in 1958 (and is also sometimes cited as the first heavy metal song).
• Common trope with many artists or bands who experience a career revival, a change in lead singers or a genre shift. Gary Numan experienced this same trope when he released the goth and industrial influenced "Exile", a sharp diversion from his former, softer proto-electronica sound. in 1998. Some fans thought that Exile was his first album. Mind you, Gary Numan at that time had been active in the music business for 20 years. Cher experienced the same trope with younger listeners when 1999's "Believe" hit the top 10 and revived her career.
• Also a common trope when artists in a formerly underground genre gain crossover appeal. Often the people who predated the artists (sometimes by decades!) are accused of by younger fans of ripping off the pop artists' sound.
• There are documents dating back to before the Civil War that call the fiddling tune 'Cotton-eyed Joe' "an old favorite". The (in)famous late 1990s dance mix by Rednex was only one of many, many covers the song has had in its long history.
• David Guetta has been active since 1984, but released his first album in 2002 and didn't become a global household name until the turn of the new decade.
• The title of the 2000 Shaggy song "It Wasn't Me", which some have dubbed the "Shaggy defense", as well as its subject matter, is taken directly from the 1987 Eddie Murphy comedy special "Raw".
• No, Emo is not some weird subculture that appeared in the early 00s. The term and a related style of music^note that sounds absolutely nothing like what's thought of as "emo" in the mainstream.has been around since the mid-80s.
  • No, Screamo is not some stupid word created in the same decade to describe angsty bands with screaming vocals. The word's first recorded usage dates back to 1997, and it was used to describe a style of Hardcore Punk music that's even older. Records of what later became known as screamo were released while the Soviet Union still existed.
• Many Cannibal Corpse fans don't know that their second vocalist George Fisher (aka "Corpsegrinder") was active in the music scene well before joining the band, most notably as the former vocalist for Monstrosity, a much, much more obscure band in death metal.
• Allmusic hypes up Da Yoopers' "When One Love Dies" (from their 1992 album Yoopy Do Wah) as the first "serious" song from the usually comedic band. However, their first album (1986's Yoopanese) also had two unarguably serious songs: "My Shoes" and "Critics Tune".
• Keith Urban has been active since 1991. He released an album in Australia that year, then had dozens of credits on other people's albums ranging from INXS to Garth Brooks, and fronted a short-lived band called The Ranch (which did two low-charting singles and an album for Capitol Records in 1997) before putting out his "real" country music debut in 1999.
  • Also, "Somebody Like You" (2002) was not his first hit on the country charts — it was the first single from his second country album. His first country album had three of its four singles land in the country Top 10, including the now-forgotten #1 hit "But for the Grace of God". Most of the output from his first American album is likely forgotten now due to Early-Installment Weirdness that puts it out of sync with his current body of work. He wasn't even the first Australian to have a #1 country hit — Jamie O'Neal's "There Is No Arizona" reached the top of the charts literally one week before "But for the Grace of God".
  • And of course, the idea of an Australian country singer having success in the U.S. dates all the way back to Olivia Newton-John in The '70s, before she genre-shifted to Pop in The '80s. (She never had a #1 hit at country, though.)
• Dennis DeYoung of Styx mentioned in an interview that his band, which did not get major mainstream success until 1977, was often accused of being a rip-off of Queen in their use of operatic, high-pitched harmonies and grandiose prog-rock/arena-rock instrumentation, in spite of the fact that the band, formed in Chicago in The '60s, claims they experimented with the sound long before Queen were well-known.
• Fans of Joy Division who dislike their later work as New Order frequently cite how the band's later incarnation ditched their old "rock" sound in favor of electronic music. However, Joy Division were already heavily influenced by Kraftwerk, and it showed. In particular, the B-side "As You Said" is a direct pastiche of Kraftwerk, featuring little to no identifiable rock elements.
• Death Metal band Kataklysm did not become popular until the release of their acclaimed 2006 album In the Arms of Devastation. Even to this day people are a little surprised to find out that they've been a band since 1991. Also, many of their younger fans don't know that Maurizio Iacono isn't their original singer; Sylvain Houde was, although Maurizio was always in the band, just as bassist for a while.
• Those who know "A Simple Game" usually think of it as a classic Motown song by The Four Tops; but it was actually written by Mike Pinder of The Moody Blues, and the Moodies recorded it first. The two versions even had the same producer — Tony Clarke.
• The slapping bass sound popularized by bands like Korn in the late '90s, was actually pioneered by Elvis Presley's original bass player Bill Black. The method was retired after the band found a drummer.
• The swing rhythm of jazz did not actually originate in the 20th century. Rather, swing rhythm was used as far back as the Baroque era as "notes inégales", a performance practice where notes with the same time value are played with unequal durations. J.S. Bach famously wrote in a swing rhythm in several parts of the Art of Fugue.
  • Some jazz musicians have revered Bach as "the first jazz composer". There is even an Alec Templeton composition called "Bach Goes to Town" (famously performed by the Benny Goodman group) which although a jazz/swing number, is also fugal in structure.
• Most people seem to believe the East vs. West Coast Hip-Hop feud started with Tupac & Biggie. But the fact of the matter is it started long before them thanks to a east coast rapper by the name of Tim Dog firing disses at a lot of California emcees, even Snoop Dogg. Long before Tupac, and especially before Biggie was even on the scene.
• Bass wobble (aka "wubs") was certainly popularized by Dubstep, but the technique existed well before dubstep itself did. The other wiki posits 1998 as the origin of dubstep. The techno duo Orbital used wobble bass on their 1996 EP, The Box. Drum-n-bass DJ Alex Reece used it on his 1995 track "Pulp Fiction". And the Italo disco duo Amin Peck dropped some mad wubs in 1984, on their remix of "Running Straight".
• A group of teenagers with questionable musical talent release a song via an obscure music label. Because of its So Bad, It's Good and earworm qualities, the song goes viral and almost overnight becomes a sensation and iconic One-Hit Wonder...nearly six decades before Rebecca Black and "Friday", Don Howard created a very similar stir with his song "Oh Happy Day".
• Twerking existed long before Miley Cyrus's infamous VMA performance in 2013; the word "twerk" can be found in hip-hop lyrics written as far back as the 1990s and the early 2000s (for example: it's used in Lil' Jon's "Get Low", which was released in 2003), and various forms of "booty shaking" are even older than that.
• When somebody mentions the jukebox, most will think of The '50s and the early rock & roll era. They'll think of a Malt Shop with 1950s teens listening to Nothing but Hits. Actually, jukeboxes are much older than that! They were quite popular in the 1940s too, playing swing music and even classical music along with opera. And they're still older than that. While the jukebox we know of today originated around 1928, coin operated music players date back at least to the 1890s.
• CDs and dynamic range compression took the practice of mastering music at high volume levels for a perceived advantage in the market to a whole new level, but the practice itself dates back to the 1920s when records were made loud to take advantage of gramophones that didn't have volume dials. The phrase "put a sock in it" comes from the trick of doing exactly that in order to reduce the volume.
• Many believe Bruce Springsteen was the first to have an album released on CD. While that's true in the United States, overseas, The Visitors from ABBA was released in 1981, three years before Born In The USA, the Springsteen album. Sony and Phillips were working the technology since 1974.
• The Moonwalk Dance, linked to Michael Jackson, was used in 1932 by Cab Calloway, 49 years before Jackson used it in his Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever performance of "Billie Jean". Further, Jackson's "Billie Jean" moves and costume bear a detailed resemblance to famous choreographer Bob Fosse's performance of "A Snake in the Grass" in the 1974 film adaptation of The Little Prince—notoriously Jackson's favourite film.
• Many younger Millennials thought "All Through The Night" by Cyndi Lauper sampled "Sugar Rush" by Swedish band A-Teens due to the similar beat. Lauper's "All Through The Night" was released in October 1983, while "Sugar Rush" was released in February 2001. Even further, Lauper's version isn't the original; it was originally performed by folksy singer-songwriter Jules Shear, whose version was released roughly five months before Lauper's.
• Three songs tend to get lumped in with the wave of patriotic or inspirational Country Music songs that gained popularity after 9/11: Diamond Rio's "One More Day", Tammy Cochran's "Angels in Waiting", and Brooks & Dunn's "Only in America". However, they were respectively released in October 2000, March 2001, and June 2001; in fact, "One More Day" had already been off the country music charts for several months (although it did peak on the AC charts in late September). What is particularly grating is that "One More Day" was written about a lover and Diamond Rio are actually not too fond of the mixes found of that song with 9/11 news reels playing.
• On a similar note, many country music fans would tell you that Dixie Chicks were the first "major" left-wing country act. They forget that Dwight Yoakam doesn't talk about his views as often as he used to for the same reason. Billy Ray Cyrus, even with all of the "Some Gave All" flag-waving of 1992, was the son of a prominent Kentucky Democratic Party senator (and Kentucky Colonel), Ron Cyrus, and he and his family are clearly politically liberal/left wing, if one knows where to look. Billy Ray's daughter is best friends with the Obama family, and endorsed him on Twitter in the 2008 elections.
  • Steve Earle, who holds some decidedly left-of-center views (anti-war, anti-death penalty, pro-union), has been around since the mid-80's.
  • Willie Nelson, whose pro-marijuana stance made him controversial for decades in Nashville.
  • And assuming you conflate country music with folk music (as many people do), you can take this back to Woody Guthrie in the 1930s.
  • Neil Young is considered a country-rocker by many people, given his proclivity for wandering between genres.
• While Anamanaguchi are definitely pioneers of Chiptune rock, they were not the first to do it. If you think they are, then Ratatat, Horse the Band and The Protomen would like to have a word with you. Machinae Supremacy were doing it as far back as 2000.
• Imagine Dragons started performing music four years before "It's Time" and "Radioactive" became mainstream hits. Indeed, "It's Time" originally came from one of the EPs the band recorded independently prior to signing on with Interscope.
• Ask your average listener to pinpoint the first use of the infamous "double bass" percussion technique that's become commonplace in Heavy Metal and similar genres, and they'll probably mention the first two tracks on Metallica's 1984 album Ride the Lightning. Double bass was actually used by Judas Priest several years earlier, as far back as their Sad Wings of Destiny album.
  • The double bass drum setup was pioneered by jazz drummer Louie Bellson when he was 15, all the way back in 1939-40. The constant "thunder roll" wasn't a feature to the degree it is in metal, but snippets show up frequently.
  • Similarly, while the name "blast beat" does seem to have originated with Napalm Death, they were far from the first to have played rapid rhythms on bass/snare/cymbal, such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer displaying a sort of proto-blast beat on their 1970 single The Barbarian
• Old-school Hip-Hop fans like to lament "Bling rap" taking the popular stage in the wake of Gangsta Rap's fall. What they might not know is that the style and many of its tropes go back to the mid-1980s when the genre first became mainstream. One such act was the now critically-renowned Run–D.M.C..
• The hit song "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia is actually a cover of a song by an obscure band called Ednaswap from 1995. Imbruglia's version of the song was produced by Phil Thornalley, who co-wrote the song and produced the original Ednaswap version.
• "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" actually originated from a Christmas picture book written in 1939, ten years before the song came out.
• Robin Thicke, who was supposedly one of the biggest "new artists" of 2013 with his incredibly risqué chart-topper "Blurred Lines", actually released his first album in 2002. In fact, the album of the same name was actually his sixth album. In fact, "Blurred Lines" wasn't even his first Top 40 hit (that would've been "Lost Without U" in 2007), but he was unknown to mainstream audiences at the time.
• A lot of people have known that El chombos 'Dame tu cosita' single came out in 2018 along with the alien dancing video accompanying it. The song was originally part of an album called Cuentos de la Cripta II way back in 1997, and was originally under the title 'Introducction B (El cosita mix)'; 2018 was actually the year when the song was remastered and remixed. The alien itself is also a remake of an old CGI animation from 2001.
• Ask someone in 2014 who John Legend is, and they'll answer "you mean that hot new R&B singer who sang "All of Me"?" He's actually been a star on R&B radio since 2005, had two minor Top 40 hits, and even won the Best New Artist Grammy, even though he never had a crossover pop hit until nine years later.
• Pharrell Williams has been on the scene a long time before he recorded 2013's "Happy". He was best known as a producer and featured artist on a number of other musicians' hits (and even had a top 5 hit with "Frontin'" in 2003). Still, it doesn't stop the perception that he was a new artist.
• Several Soul groups such as The Chi-lites, The O’jays, and The Spinners, who are synonymous with the 70s, had actually been together since the late 50s/ early 60s. Some of them were quite popular among R&B audiences before finally crossing over in the 70s.
• Big Machine Records, an independent Country Music record label, is best known for being the label to which Taylor Swift was signed for many years. Not only is it easy to forget that Swift isn't the label's only success story, but also that it existed a full year before she even released her first single, and even had a #1 hit (Jack Ingram's "Wherever You Are") by that point.
• Scotty Emerick is known for his role as a backing musician for Toby Keith and co-writer of some of Keith's biggest hits, such as "Beer for My Horses" and "I Love This Bar". However, before he started working with Keith, Emerick had a couple hits for Sawyer Brown in the late 1990s: "I Don't Believe in Goodbye" and "'Round Here".
• Dubstep, that newfangled electronic dance craze of The New '10s that Skrillex invented? Actually, dubstep originated in London nightclubs from the late nineties.
  • The much-sought-after bass drop has been around since the 1980s, where it was often heard in Eurodance music.
• Pop rap is often considered The Scrappy of the hip-hop world for 'dumbing-down' hip-hop for the masses and ruining the genre in general. Actually, the first pop rap song is the first rap song, period. "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang was the song that kickstarted genre, yet it was heavily pop-centric with its beats, tone, and lyrics all being extremely radio-friendly. Today, "Rapper's Delight" would seem like a song aimed for kids preformed by Moral Substitutes.
• Macklemore, one of the biggest "new artists" of 2013 who burst onto the scene with his album The Heist and songs like "Thrift Shop" and "Can't Hold Us"? Actually, Macklemore released his first album, The Language of My World, in 2005. Back then, he was an extremely obscure underground rapper that only Seattleites into the underground scene knew about (the album only sold about 15,000 copies). But, believe it or not, his career actually dates even further than that. He released his first EP "Open Your Eyes" in the year 2000.
• Although Shania Twain broke through in 1995 with her smash album The Woman in Me, it was her second. Her first, which was self-titled, was released in 1993.
• Reba McEntire is largely thought of as an 80s and 90s artist, but she charted her first single in 1976.
• The diss track is associated with Hiphop, though as early as the 1960s reggae musician Lee Scratch Perry already recorded a musical attack at his former record boss called "People Funny Boy (1968)".
• Elvis Presley is associated with sexually suggestive pelvis movements while dancing on stage, but Muddy Waters did this almost a decade earlier.
• Openly singing about sex seems to be something that is very modern. But early 1920s and 1930s blues recordings prove that musicians back then weren't shy about the subject either. The Other Wiki has an entire article about it. And even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart once composed a piece called "Lick My Arse, Quick!" We are NOT making this up! But this has probably been done for ages before Mozart. The English ayre It fell on a summer´s day from about 1600 goes into detail on the subject of fingering. Other madrigals from all over Europe tend to be very explicit on this subject as well.
• Michael Jackson is often credited being the first black musical superstar who gained an international audience among all races. Never mind the fact that before him we had Louis Armstrong in the 1920s.
• The phenomenon of musical superstars in itself seems to be something from when Rock & Roll was created. Yet classical composer Franz Liszt was so popular in the mid 19th century that crowds of people flocked together to hear his works be performed, coining the term "Lisztomania". Yeah, you thought Ken Russell made that up, didn't you? And even before Liszt troubadours were well beloved by people, even so that people in the Middle Ages regarded music as "the tool of the devil", which also sounds familiar, doesn't it?
  • You don't even have to go back that far. You only have to look back about a decade, and you'll find Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was a band singer with Tommy Dorsey, and when he went solo, he drew enormous crowds of teenage girls, known as bobbysoxers, who would scream and pass out at his concerts, to the point where it became the go-to stock Sinatra parody in the mid-20th century.
• Björk, in the '90s became widely known for her wide variety of music and well, being weird. So, when did she debut? Obviously 1993, since her album is clearly named Debut. That must be it, right? Wrong. Her debut album was Björk, which was released in 1977. Granted, she was only 12-years-old at the time and it was only released in Iceland, being sung entirely in Icelandic. It has since been disowned by Björk, hence the name of her second album.
• Lots of people think the song "Mad World" was written and sung by Gary Jules in 2001, but it was actually sung (in a more upbeat fashion) by the group Tears for Fears in 1982.
• The only thing most Americans know about Mark Ronson is that he is the actual lead artist on "Uptown Funk!", a song primarily associated with Bruno Mars. He's actually been churning out hits in the UK since 2003.
• The idea that Iggy Azalea is the first white female rapper is so off it isn't even funny. Before her there were white female artists such as Kreayshawn and Amanda Blank, before them there were plenty of white female rappers from Europe such as Lady Sovereign. But if you really want to go back, Debbie Harry of Blondie made one of the first Hip-Hop hits ever with "Rapture" in 1981, which was the first #1 hit to feature rapping period. Speaking of Iggy Azalea, "Fancy" wasn't her debut single and she's had a following long before it and had a few hits in the UK and Australia.
• More than a few Americans were introduced to the Arctic Monkeys through their 2013 album AM, thinking of them as one of the biggest "new rock bands" on the market. They've been rockstars in the UK since 2006, when their first two singles went straight to #1 and their debut album became one of the fastest selling albums in British history. Even in America, they were still fairly popular: Each one of their five albums debuted in the Top 30 of the American album chart, but they didn't get their first Gold record there until AM.
• The spiked hair and torn clothing that started being associated with Punk Rock around 1977 were first worn by early punk musician Richard Hell a few years earlier. But where things get interesting is that Hell claimed his hairstyle was influenced by 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The most famous portrait of Rimbaud◊ did depict him with deliberately tousled Messy Hair.
• Toni Basil, a textbook example of an '80s One-Hit Wonder, was 38 when she released her 1982 #1 single "Mickey". The first song she released was "Breakaway" (and its B-Side "I'm 28"^note A Non-Indicative Name since she was 23 at the time of release) in 1966, working mainly as an actress and choreographer in the meantime.
  • Also, "Mickey" is actually a cover. The original version, "Kitty", was originally performed by Racey, a British Power Pop band, back in 1979.
• Rachel Platten is thought to be one of the biggest "new artists" of 2015, particularly on the Pop scene for "Fight Song". She released her first album in 2003, and her second album in 2011 and charted a minor hit in 2011 on adult radio with "1000 Ships".
• While "Shut Up and Dance" was Walk The Moon's first big hit on pop radio, it wasn't their breakthrough on their home alternative format — that would be 2012's "Anna Sun".
• Andy Grammer's been active long before "Honey, I'm Good" became a hit in 2015. He had a pair of AC hits in 2011 with "Keep Your Head Up" and "Fine By Me".
• Canadian duo Tegan and Sara are thought of as one of biggest new indie acts of the The New '10s with their 2013 Breakthrough Hit album Heartthrob. Their first album was released in 1999, and the aforementioned Heartthrob is actually their seventh album.
• Some people are under the impression that Sam Smith is the first gay musician to gain commercial success in the mainstream. Never mind that before them there was Elton John in The '80s.
• Before Brooks & Dunn exploded onto the scene in 1991, both Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn had several solo releases (Kix even had a full album and had co-written three #1 hits for other artists). One of Kix's pre-fame singles, "Sacred Ground", was Covered Up by McBride & the Ride in 1992.
• Dixie Chicks were a bluegrass band fronted by Laura Lynch and Robin Lynn Macy for most of The '90s. It wasn't until 1997 that they, with Natalie Maines as sole lead singer, rose swiftly to fame.
• A lot of Melanie Martinez fans don't realize the chorus to "Pity Party" uses lyrics from the popular 1960s song by Lesley Gore "It's My Party".
• If you go anywhere on the internet where people discuss music you will see many people complain that modern mainstream music is nothing but sex, partying, and drugs and how music was cleaner in the past. These same people ironically probably love Marvin Gaye. It's not too hard to find really dirty songs from the early 20th century, such as "Makin' Whoopee" from the 1928 musical Whoopee!. Even prior to recording music, music always had a lot of Intercourse with You music.
• Most people only know Trap Music as the kind that was combined with EDM in the '10s. They may not know that it's been around since the mid-'90s, originating in the Deep South as a hardcore variation of Hip-Hop. What most people know as trap has little in common with the original.
• Sia seemingly came out of nowhere in the early 2010s as a featured artist on hits like "Wild Ones" and "Titanium" before skyrocketing to fame with her own material in 2014-2016. However, Sia released her first album in the 1990s.
• Marmozets are seen as a fast-rising 'new' band after getting signed to Roadrunner in 2013. However, they've been around since 2007. Granted, they were still in their mid-teens at the time but they've been touring and the lineup has been exactly the same since formation.
• The Weeknd became one of the biggest acts in the world in 2015 after the success of "Earned It" from Fifty Shades of Grey, his two #1 follow ups "Can't Feel My Face" and "The Hills", and parent album Beauty Behind the Madness, but some might be surprised to learn that he had been making music since 2011. Despite having a large following on the internet, and all of his albums charting in the Top 5, this did not stop the perception of him being a "hot new artist" by the general public due to how gargantuan and inescapable he became, compared to before where his audience was mostly limited to internet circles.
• Music duo Twenty One Pilots rose to fame in 2015/16 with their album Blurryface going #1 on the albums chart and "Stressed Out" being one of the biggest indie crossovers of the decade and "Ride" becoming almost as big. It may come as a surprise to some that they were formed as a trio in 2009, the same year they released their first album. Tyler Joseph is the only original member left, as the other two left and had been replaced by Josh Dun, and became the duo we know today. While predecessor Vessel was a hit, scoring two minor alternative hits with "Holding on to You" and "House of Gold". But ask the general public what their first hit single was, and they'll almost invariably say "Stressed Out" (and if not that, most likely its predecessor "Tear in my Heart")
• Puddle of Mudd formed in 1991, but it wasn't until 2002 (after Fred Durst discovered them) that the band broke through with "Control", and subsequently scored a top 10 Hot 100 hit with "Blurry", which also topped both rock charts.
• Halestorm is one of the biggest rock bands today, and certainly one of the most popular female-fronted ones. They actually formed in 1997, when Lzzy Hale was only 14-years-old, but didn't actually release their debut album until 2009.
• There are two versions of "Sky's Still Blue" by Andrew Belle. The more popular version was made for a commercial. Many people mistake the original for a Darker and Edgier version when in fact the song was lightened up for the commercial, not the other way around.
• Country Music label Broken Bow Records is best known as the home of Jason Aldean (who has been signed to it since 2005), along with several other hit makers such as Dustin Lynch, Randy Houser, Chase Bryant, Parmalee, Thompson Square, and Joe Nichols. The label had actually been around since 2000, and its first artists to hit the country Top 40 were Craig Morgan (his 2003 hit "Almost Home", and more notably, the late 2004-early 2005 "That's What I Love About Sunday", which Billboard named the biggest country hit of 2005 on the Year-End charts) and Sherrié Austin. After Craig Morgan's gradual slide and Aldean's gradual rise, it also took them quite a while to get a hit out of anyone else.
• Shane McAnally is one of the hottest songwriter-producers in Country Music in The New '10s, and is known for his work with Kacey Musgraves, Jake Owen, and Old Dominion among others. He actually began his career in 1999 with an album for Curb Records that had the minor chart single "Are Your Eyes Still Blue", and after a nearly eight-year absence, had his first hit as a songwriter in 2008 with Lee Ann Womack's "Last Call".
• Another label example: Disney-owned Lyric Street Records was the label for Rascal Flatts from their 2000 debut until the label's closure in 2010, and they were hands-down the label's biggest money maker. However, Lyric Street had been around a good three years prior to that, and had its first successes with Lari White (whose 1998 hit "Stepping Stone" was the label's first chart entry), Aaron Tippin, and SHeDAISY, all of whom had previously been on RCA Records.
• Deftones released their debut album Adrenaline in 1995, but actually formed in 1988. While the Deftones are often thought of as being second only to Korn in terms of influence to Nu Metal, they've actually been around five years longer than them. However, Korn released their self-titled debut in 1994, just a year before the Deftones hit the scene.
• Stone Sour is a highly successful rock/metal band but is commonly thought of as Corey Taylor's side project separate from the much more iconic Slipknot. In reality, Stone Sour is Corey's original band. Furthermore, Stone Sour was formed in 1992 or rather, three years before Slipknot. To be fair though, the confusion comes from the fact that Stone Sour broke up in 1997 before they released any material, while Slipknot became one of the biggest metal bands on the planet not long after. Stone Sour wouldn't reform until 2000, and it wasn't until 2002 where they released their first official single while Slipknot had never looked back on their dominance in the metal world.
• Many assume Lindsey Stirling was the first musician to mix Classical Violin with Electronic music but in truth that genre already existed in the late 1990s by British Violinist Vanessa Mae.
• A Country Music artist singing the Christmas song "Mary, Did You Know?" That had to be Kenny Rogers in duet with Wynonna Judd, right? Kathy Mattea was actually the first country singer to record it, doing so nearly three years before the Rogers/Judd version.
• Tim McGraw's first big hit was "Indian Outlaw", which was actually the lead single to his second album. He had a Self-Titled Album in 1992 that produced no major hits. This is itself an example, as it was long believed that "Welcome to the Club" was that album's first single; instead, it was "What Room Was the Holiday In", which was forgotten because it did not chart. (It also remains to date his only solo single not to be produced or co-produced by Byron Gallimore.)
• Due to the single's massive success in the 80s, some believe that Taco wrote "Puttin' On The Ritz". Not so- the song was written by Irving Berlin in 1927 and eventually performed by Harry Richman in Berlin's film "Puttin' On The Ritz" in 1930, with a version recorded shortly after by Fred Astaire. In fact, the song even appeared in "Young Frankenstein" in 1974, many years prior to Taco's version.
• More 80s examples- Bananarama did not write "Venus", they merely covered the Shocking Blue song from 1969. And Kim Wilde's "You Keep Me Hanging On"? Originally by The Supremes, then followed by a Rod Stewart version and the slow, psychedelic Vanilla Fudge version.
• The song "God Bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood achieved great mainstream popularity during the 1991 Persian Gulf War (and again following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and again following the killing of Osama Bin Laden), but many people don't know that it was originally recorded in 1984. Greenwood was inspired to write and record it following the Korean Airlines Flight 007 tragedy, in which a civilian airliner was shot down after it accidentally entered Soviet airspace.
• Alessia Cara's song "Here" (2015) on first glance sounds like a straight up sampling of Portishead's "Glory Box" (1994) or Tricky's "Hell is Round the Corner" (1995) when in reality all these songs took inspiration from Isaac Hayes' song "Ike's Rap II" (1971). Also, the video for "Here" includes Cara walking through a party where every person (aside from herself) appearing like statues. The video predates "The Mannequin Challenge" a trend in 2016 that had similar elements, involving people appearing frozen while a song is playing in the background (the theme to that was "Black Beatles" by Rae Sremmurd).
• Many people believe that Sinead O'Connor's hit "Nothing Compares 2 U" was an original hit by the singer, when in fact, Prince had written the song around 1984, and gave it to a side project, The Family, which they used on their debut album of the same name (1985). However, since that album flopped, the song wasn't very-well known until O'Connor covered the single, which became an international hit in 1990.
• The Lyric Video is typically associated with the streaming video era. The format definitely became more widespread because of the internet, since it was an easy way for fans to make their own videos, or for labels to quickly have something official on their YouTube channel as an alternative (or in addition to) a more expensive and time-intensive conventional video... But a few such videos were made well before the internet age: the other wiki cites R.E.M.'s "Fall On Me" (1986), Prince's "Sign o' the Times" (1987), Talking Heads' "(Nothing but) Flowers" (1988), and George Michael's "Praying For Time" (1990) as early examples. If you discount the couple of scenes where he's on-screen lip syncing, Bob Dylan's "Jokerman" (1983) may be the Ur-Example. Or for an even earlier Dylan example, a proto-music video sequence for "Subterranean Homesick Blues", shot in 1965 and featured as the opening sequence of 1967's Don't Look Back, focused on him holding up cue cards with handwritten lyrics.
• Big & Rich are a double example. First, most people know them for "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)", but that was actually their second single. Their first was "Wild West Show", which was quickly forgotten. Also, both members had been in Nashville several years prior: John Rich was Lonestar's bassist on their first two albums, and both of them had solo albums and songwriting credits dating back to the late 1990s.
• Country Music with hip hop influences:
  • First, the concept of mixing country and rap has gone back way further than the "bro country" trend of The New '10s. The Bellamy Brothers released "Country Rap" in 1987; Neal McCoy did a rap version of the theme to The Beverly Hillbillies in The '90s; Toby Keith did it twice with "Getcha Some" (1998) and "I Wanna Talk About Me" (2001) (granted, most of these were Played for Laughs examples); and Big & Rich frequently did it early in their career, often collaborating with Cowboy Troy in the process. There are also Southern rappers who sometimes take country influences, such as Bubba Sparxxx. Some people even insist that much older country songs with rapid-fire spoken verses, such as "Convoy" (1975) or "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" (1979) are prototypical examples of country-rap. One of the first significant collaborations of a country artist and a rap artist was "Over and Over" by Nelly and Tim McGraw in 2005. Even the more contemporary Colt Ford predates the "Bro-county" moniker by several years (Ford's first album came out in 2008, and the term "bro-country" was coined in 2013).
  • A country duo who uses hip-hop beats, egregious Auto-Tune, and street slang in their songs — while that describes Florida Georgia Line to a tee, it also describes Fast Ryde, who were doing the same thing several years prior. While Fast Ryde never broke through, one of the members is Jody Stevens, son of Luke Bryan's Record Producer Jeff Stevens, who has begun assisting his father in production duties for Luke.
  • The use of drum machines and heavy synthesizers in country music had to be a product of the increasing pop and EDM influences of The New '10s, right? Buck Owens prominently featured a Moog in 1970's "The Great White Horse" (a duet with Susan Raye). Mark McGuinn was using drum loops as early as 2001 (they were also present in Lonestar's 2002 hit "Unusually Unusual", which he wrote), and Crystal Gayle's "Straight to the Heart" used them in 1986. Also, Ronnie Milsap's 1987 hit "Button Off My Shirt" was done entirely on synthesizers, and Ray Stevens (of all people) used a vocoder on "Bionie and the Robotics" in 1986 (and had previously used a synth for the recurring musical hook in "Shriner's Convention" in 1980).
• Country Music singer Billy Dean's "Only Here for a Little While" remains among his most popular songs, and was long thought to be his debut single. His first single release was actually "Lowdown Lonely", but this fact was quickly forgotten due to that song not making the charts.
• Deacon Blue were such prolific songwriters early on that in addition to managing to release more outtakes as b-sides during 1986-1987's "Raintown" period than were tracks on the actual album (some of which were even carried over to their second album "When The World Knows Your Name"'s b-sides), they had already written the songs "Cover From The Sky" and "James Joyce Soles" that would not appear till their third album, "Fellow Hoodlums" in 1990.
• Thanks to Memetic Mutation, Smash Mouth's song "All Star" is mostly associated with Shrek now. But it was originally made for the film Mystery Men, with clips of the movie even appearing in the music video.
  • "All Star" was also used in the Sabrina the Teenage Witch episode "Super Hero", which aired a year before the release of Shrek.
• Portugal. The Man had been around long before "Feel It Still" became a hit, having charted several minor hits on alternative radio for six years beforehand, but none of their songs before "Still" have ever appeared on any other chart.
• These Greek children songs about colors are often thought to have been released in 1998, but they were actually released as part of a vinyl in 1986. 1998 was actually the year the songs first came on CD and audio cassette, and were thus Vindicated by History.
• VERY few people had heard of Jamie Lawson before his 2015 hit "Wasn't Expecting That". His first album, "Last Night Stars" was released in 2006, but he'd had radio airtime (albeit college radio) in 2001.
• Lots of Moral Guardians and Media Watchdogs complain about how vulgar music has gotten in the past 20 years or so, but the truth is, vulgar music has probably been around as long as music has. Mozart, for example, wrote a song called "Leck Mich im Arsche" ("Lick My Ass").
• Davido's "Fall" became a hit in America and several other countries in 2019. The song came out in 2017.
• The phrase "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" is frequently credited to John Lennon due to its use in the lyrics of the 1980 song "Beautiful Boy". While the song popularised the phrase, as this page demonstrates the phrase actually predates the song by several decades.
• Ray J scored a Top 40 hit in early 1997 with his song “Let It Go”, only a few years after his sister Brandy began her successful R&B career. However, as that song is all but forgotten today and its parent album sold poorly, most people naturally assume his career began with either his 2006 hit “One Wish” or his infamous sex tape with his then-girlfriend Kim Kardashian.
• Chely Wright gained notability in 2010 when she announced publicly that she was a lesbian. While out Country Music performers are still a rarity, Wright wasn't the first: k.d. lang had already preceded her, and it's since come to light that Wilma Burgess, who had a few Country hits in The '60s (most notably the original version of "Misty Blue"), was out in her personal life at the peak of her career, and the Nashville music community was aware of her orientation. While she didn't publicly identify as lesbian, Burgess also didn't go out of her way to present herself as straight either. She generally recorded love songs that were gender-neutral and not specifically about relationships with men, and whenever her producer Owen Bradley made her record a heterosexually-oriented song, he made it up to her by letting her choose a song that she was more comfortable with, even if he hated it.
• People are usually surprised to discover that Art of Noise's classic downtempo/new age track "Moments in Love" dates from 1983, not some time in the 90s or later.
• Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun", in all its awkward, shambling glory, is often thought of as a 90s alternative rock classic, when it originally appeared on the band's debut album in 1983. The song's popularity with 90s college students and the inclusion of it in the soundtrack to 1997's Grosse Pointe Blank have helped fuel this belief.
• Those unfamiliar with The Velvet Underground often assume that "After Hours" is by some twee 2010s indie band upon viewing its music video, made 45 years after the song's release. Much of the band's output may surprise people with its age, given how vastly influential they were on practically all independent music to follow.
• Heavyweight vinyl records of 180 grams or higher, colored vinyl, and those suitcase-style record players: all modern gimmicks to hook costumers of the 21st century Vinyl Revival? Absolutely not.
  • Vinyl debuted as a medium for phonograph records when Columbia Records launched the LP format in 1948. Columbia's early LPs weighed 220 grams, which was lighter than the shellac used in 78 rpm records up to that point, but still much heavier than what would become standard in the heyday of the LP (the lighter weight vinyl was a cost-cutting measure).
  • Meanwhile, phonograph records done-up in non-black colors predate the invention of vinyl records! The Vocalion label started pressing their shellac records in a maroonish red color around 1917, to help them stand out among the competition. When RCA Records launched the 45 rpm record in 1949, they used a Color-Coded for Your Convenience system of different colors of vinyl for different genres.^ExplanationThe system was: standard black=regular pop music, dark red=Classical Music, green=Country Music, yellow=children's music, midnight blue=show tunes, "cerise" (bright red)=Rhythm and Blues, sky blue=World Music. After the 45s underperformed in their initial launch, RCA decided to retool the format into a more budget-minded alternative to LPs and 78s and scrapped the colors.
  • Portable wind-up turntables housed in a suitcase-style case with handles were sold in The Roaring '20s. Battery-operated portable turntables launched in The '50s and became popular among younger listeners for being cheap and compact from then up until The '70s, when cassettes became the preferred portable audio format. The suitcase players were then supplanted by boomboxes. There was also the very expensive "portable jukebox", which could hold 40 singles; John Lennon owned one and took it with him on the Beatles' later tours.
• Contrary to popular belief, Progressive Rock bands were not the first artists to mix rock and classical influences. The early part of The '60s saw novelty Instrumental hits like "Asia Minor" (based on Edvard Grieg's "Piano Concerto in A Minor") and "Nut Rocker" (based on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "March" from The Nutcracker), and a few other songs based on classical melodies. The first Rock group to release a serious song with a classical influence was The Move at the tail end of 1966. The riff of their first hit, "Night of Fear", was based on Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. This was right before before Sgt. Pepper or "A Whiter Shade of Pale", so the Move could probably be considered the Ur-Example for prog.
• People who heard "WAP" by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion might believe that raunchy female rappers rapping X-rated lyrics is a new development. Wrong! Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown were doing the same thing back in the 1990s. Millie Jackson could be considered the Ur-Example of a female dirty rapper in the 1970s.
  • And even before rap, earlier all the way back in the 1930s, we had artists like Lucille Bogan who were known for incredibly explicit lyrics (NSFW) even for today.
• Ludwig van Beethoven, for all his musical accomplishments and monumental legacy, was not the one who introduced the trombone and piccolo into the symphonic repertoire as many discussions on his Fifth Symphony would have you believe. In 1807, the year before the première of Beethoven's Fifth, Swedish composer Joachim Nicolas Eggert wrote his Third Symphony which used trombones, and symphonies with piccolo parts go as far back as Michael Haydn's (younger brother of Joseph Haydn) Eighteenth Symphony, composed in 1773. Beethoven receives the credit because he was and continues to be recognized as one of the greatest composers of all time, while M. Haydn is obscure and Eggert has been almost entirely forgotten.
• Booklets containing lyrics, artwork and other information were most identified with the Compact Disc format, but they were also previously used for some LPs, such as The Who's Tommy and Lou Reed's Berlin. These booklets were obviously sized for the 12-inch LP release, but they were fairly easy to adapt when it came time to reissue them on CD, as it was essentially only a matter of shrinking the booklet down to CD size.
• Christian Rock might have not had as many fans and haters until recently, but its origins go back to the counterculture movement of the 60’s and 70’s when it was created by self-proclaimed “Jesus Freaks” as “Jesus Music”. Larry Norman's 1969 Capitol Records album Upon This Rock is often considered the Ur-Example. However, it was difficult to gain acceptance in churches. Not until the Hillsong Church in Australia started recording music in The '90s was it able to take off in mainstream churches.
• Not very many people realize that Nickelback had not one, but two top 10 hits on the Mainstream Rock charts before "How You Remind Me". "Leader of Men" and "Breathe" hit #8 and #10 respectively, but they’re all but forgotten these days.
• Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" was the Trope Maker for Electronic Dance Music, built around Giorgio Moroder's audacious mix of synthesizer sounds and constant drum machine rhythms. But it wasn't the first Top 40 hit single in America with those ingredients. Eight years earlier in 1969, veteran Jazz keyboardist Dick Hyman got to #38 with "The Minotaur", an uptempo Instrumental featuring the then-novel Moog synthesizer.
• Miracle Musical: Some of the songs on Hawaii: Part II (December 2012) are confused for being brand-new originals, while they actually date to earlier in Tally Hall's history.
  • "The Mind Electric" was originally a Tally Hall demo called "Inside the Mind of Simon" written for Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum in 2005. It required too many instruments and was too expensive, so they had to cut it. The lyrics are mostly the same, but notable changes include "resident minor" and "father, your honor" originally being "Resident Simon" and "Resident Marvin". "Inside the Mind of Simon" also has the line "please mend my mind and let me go free", which changed to "condemn him to the infirmary" in "The Mind Electric".
  • "Time Machine" dates back to May 2006 (or earlier), when Tally Hall played it in a live performance at The Blind Pig. The tone of the song is different, but the lyrics are all the same.
• A celebrated "songwriting team" who actually wrote songs by themselves and collaborated by giving each other feedback before they finalized the material. Long before John Lennon and Paul McCartney worked in this fashion, the classic Broadway and Hollywood team of Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin (best known for Meet Me in St. Louis) used a similar working partnership. "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" was basically a Martin song, while Blane was the main writer of "The Trolley Song".
• "The Alphabet Song" (the "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" version) predates Sesame Street by well over a century, having been first published in 1835.
• Aborted was formed in 1995 and released their first album in 1999, but it's extremely easy to mistake them for a much newer band. This is due quite a few factors. Firstly, until their 2012 record Global Flatline (which was also around the time they finally had a fairly stable lineup), they were a third-tier band at best and received very little attention outside of the brutal death metal scene back then. Second, their sound is consistently updated with elements of modern sounds for the time period. Third, they frequently collaborate with other artists on their albums, many of which are from the current era at the time of release.
• "Video Killed the Radio Star" is cemented in pop culture history thanks to its video being the first ever shown on MTV at its launch in 1981. However, though The Buggles' version is the most iconic, it was not the first to be released. The song's co-writer, Bruce Woolley, left the Buggles during recording of their first album to form his own band, Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club (which notably included a young Thomas Dolby on keyboards), and "Video" was one of two songs he had co-written with Geoff Downes and Trevor Horn (along with "Clean, Clean") to appear on both the Camera Club's English Garden (released in November 1979) and the Buggles' The Age of Plastic (released in January 1980). The Camera Club's single version of "Video Killed the Radio Star" was released in June 1979, three months before the Buggles' version, and although both the single and album drew rave reviews from critics, they were never as popular as those of Woolley's former band.^note Neither version can be called a "cover" since Woolley shared co-writer credit with Downes and Horn, so both bands were recording their own material.
• "Oh No" by Capone, a rap song which uses a sample from "Remember (Walking In The Sand)" by The Shangri-La's. A TikTok invention? No, the song is from 2005.^note And the version of the song you hear is just the instrumental, the song's original version contains actual lyrics
• Technical Death Metal band Capharnaum is most famous for featuring Matt Heafy as a member on their album Fractured, and is often referred to among Trivium fans as his side project. In actuality, however, this isn't the case at all. Not only did Matt join the band extremely early in Trivium's career,^note To drive the point home, he was brought in between Ember to Inferno and Ascendancy, well before they became popular, and recorded his parts before the former was even released. but Fractured isn't even their only album. Their debut Reality Only Fantasized doesn't feature Matt and was released all the way back in 1997, two years before Trivium was established, and in fact a big reason why Matt became part of the group was because he was a fan of their older music and Trivium's producer at the time, Jason Suecof, was one of their core members.

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