I think Gary Numan's Are Friends Electric? is the best 80s song of the 70s, albeit only just (1979). I was also convinced Jake Bugg's Lightning Bolt was from the 1960s when I first heard it. Might it be possible to quantify the extent to which songs are from 'the wrong era' using embedding distances?
Yeah you could probably measure it. But I think I would have to scan audio files to find, like, what the most 60s song not from the 60s is. Let me know if you think there's a better way to get at it. It's a fun topic.
Also, Jake Bugg does sound like he's from the 60s. I think the only tell is the recordings have slightly more sheen than something the Stones would have done with a similar sound. I saw him in concert once years ago. Incredibly boring show
It would be great to do it with vectorised sound files - I suppose you'd do something like train a regression model to identify the year of a song, and then find the songs that it makes the biggest errors on. But I can imagine this being prohibitively challenging for all kinds of reasons.
It would be a lot easier to do it for song lyrics - but I feel like the conclusions would be much less interesting!
When I first heard "Metal" in 1979, I felt as though I saw the whole future of music laid out before me https://youtu.be/CQgLfMG92L4 .
I also ran across the house and woke up my sister in 1982 when I heard Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science" on the radio for the first time https://youtu.be/V83JR2IoI8k .
How about Norah Jones' "Don't Know Why"? It was released in 2002, but I thought it might've been a song from the '60s I'd missed. Similarly Amy Winehouse's "Back To Black" from 2006, which sounds like a "Wall of Sound" production.
Outcast's "Hey Ya" came out in 2003, but it would not have been out of place at a high school or college party in the early 1980s. That made me think that it and "Happy" by Pharell Williams (2013!) both sound as though they've been part of the furniture for 40-plus years.
Not quite the same thing, but back in the day, our oldies radio station would play Los Lobos's 1987 version of Ritchie Valens's "La Bamba," rather than the original. I think theirs is now considered the canonical version.
“In a Big Country” is such a fantastic, epic, even grandiose power pop song. It’s like “Chariots of Fire” or “Man In Motion/St. Elmo’s Fire” by John Parr.
I don't remember Prince's critical rep in the 80s - I think it was high, but with an acknowledgment that he was far from perfect (see: Under the Cherry Moon).
But, man, a lot of critics absolutely HATED The Cure back in the 80s. Their current critical status is kind of astonishing when you see what people thought back then.
Great post! I always find it fascinating what others think of as common knowledge in music, especially given how familiar most of these songs feel for me. I'm curious if you looked into any other metrics for calculating underratedness beyond just dividing quality by popularity. It seems this biases far too heavily in favor of top-ranked quality songs. The difference between the #1 and #10 songs might be bigger than the difference between the #100 and #110 most popular songs but I don't think it's 10 times. Intuitively, if the #10 song was 800th most popular that feels much more underrated than if the #1 song were 100th most popular. Maybe the solution is taking the difference and then adding some sort of weight for the highest quality songs? Would love to hear your thoughts!
This is a fantastic point. I toyed with this a bit, but then I couldn't find an approach that I thought made sense. Being biased towards top-rated songs didn't feel that wrong to me, especially if those top-rated songs aren't that popular. But I did run some other calculations that listed "Purple Rain" as underrated. That felt obviously wrong. At least with what came up here, I could say they weren't huge hits. But I know exactly what you are getting at.
If you have a concrete approach, I'm happy to run it. All the data is just sitting in an excel workbook waiting to be sorted
Thanks for the response! That definitely makes sense and it might be my biases showing because I probably listen to the Smiths a lot more than the average person. Three approaches I'd be curious the results of:
1] Straight Difference: (popularity minus quality). Simple but probably overweights very unpopular songs that are mediocre
The next two approaches I came up with after some back-and-forth with ChatGPT:
2] Weighted Rank Difference: Underratedness = (Popularity - Quality) * (1 / log(Quality + c)) where c is a constant that determines the weight of being higher quality. Start with c = 2.5 and can adjust based on the results
3] Linear regression residuals: “Underrated” means a song is less popular than expected given its quality. Steps in Excel:
Use raw popularity numbers (Spotify streams) rather than ranks.
Add two new columns: ln(Popularity) and Quality Score = 1 / Quality Rank.
Use LINEST(LNPopularity_range, QualityScore_range, TRUE, TRUE) to fit a simple linear model.
Compute LNPredicted Popularity = intercept + (slope * Quality Score) for every song.
Calculate Residual = LN(Popularity) – LNPredicted Popularity. The most negative residuals are the most underrated.
Let me know if any of these approaches are unclear or if you end up running any of them. And if you're willing to share the raw data / Excel, I'd love to play around with it myself. Thanks again for facilitating such a fun discussion!
Interesting data as always. I'm surprised by "How Soon is Now?" as the best song of the decade. It's a tune I've heard but could never identify by name....and I was in my 20s during the 80s!
My senior year of high school in 1983, a few of us "musical kids" put together sort of a "senior follies" review, and I performed "New York, New York" to thunderous applause. I'd bet 90% of people hadn't heard it, but it was truly an "instant classic" that sounded as though it'd been around for fourty years. We had our 40th class reunion recently, and I didn't make myself very popular by pointing out that our graduation was closer to the end of WWII than to our reunion ;-)
I'm 60, and grew up right during that magical time when Philadelphia FM radio could play Led Zeppelin, followed by Blondie, followed by Prince with a straight face. I was also in college as "New Music" seeped out of the prep schools more into the mainstream; I have a theory that rich kids have always brought more exotic musical fare back home over Thanksgiving, either from school or travel abroad. Punk/New Wave definitely had snob appeal attached to it; listening to The Cure on WLIR was infinitely cooler than listening to Journey on WPLJ. I've been a huge Smiths fan since the start, but it took quite a whole for a lot of my public school classmates to discover them, as they didn't get a lot of mainstream FM airplay. Some never did. I was seconded to San Francisco in 2015, and after browsing around a Whole Foods for half an hour listening to the "classic rock" soundtrack, I walked out wondering if I'd time-warped back to 1979 music-wise.
A few other things jumped out at me from your rankings. I suspect that many of those Spotify/RIAA "evergreens" were songs given extended life by use as sports arena play and/or modern-day advertising or viral video use.
There is also perhaps a "cream rises to the top" aspect to all of this. Think of some of the musicians from the '60s and early '70s that were derided at the time but are now recognized and even fetishized by hipsters today, and not just out of winking irony; The Carpenters, Dolly Parton, ABBA, Burt Bacharach, The Bee Bees, etc. People forget that even Queen weren't always universally liked the way they are today.
In A Big Country being a big song in the jamband community, covered not just by moe., but alot of other jambands is one of those weird little head scratchers.
I think "good" is just too subjective. The ranking of how good a song is seems very biased (as you noted) to a particular type of artist. It's more alternative/punk, new wave, and pop. Not much rock and roll, and not much rock. I like 80's music. A lot. The Spotify playlist I have for the 70's and 80's has so much on it (13+ hours of music) that weird things have started to happen like Spotify spontaneously moving songs around when I try and reorder it. And the only songs on it that are "good" by the definition here are "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "Take On Me". I don't even recognize half of those "good" songs. I'm not saying any of those songs are bad. I know for some people they're great. But they are (for the most part) not my cup of tea.
All that said, there is one on the underrated list that did surprise me. "I Melt with You" only 784 on the popularity chart? I would not have expected that. I really, really like that one, even though it's not the kind of song I usually listen to, because it brings back memories of dancing with this one girl in the summer of 1987. I guess that's part of what I mean by subjective. Some songs are very much connected with specific memories in my mind, and that radically skews how "good" or not I think they are. It's impossible for me to rate them in a purely objective way, and I'm fairly confident that that's true for everybody.
Yes, my jaw dropped to find out that "New York, New York" was released in 1980. And you're right, it has to be the true winner here.
Clearly the best Billy Joel song is the one when he sings about my life and how he's going be carrying on however he jolly well likes. I don't need data to know that but thanks for your thought provoking piece!
That's a big question. I was 8 years old in 1980, so here were some of my favorite songs during the 80s at the time they were released. Just some of the songs that pop into mind. Cars (Gary Numan), The Stroke, Jessie's Girl, No One Like You (Scorpions), The Tide is High, Too Much Time on my Hands, Welcome to the Jungle, 18 and Life, Tom Sawyer, Crazy Train, In the Air Tonight, Pour Some Sugar on Me.
Gonna need a future post about "New York New York effect" songs from other decades
I honestly can’t even fathom another example
I think Gary Numan's Are Friends Electric? is the best 80s song of the 70s, albeit only just (1979). I was also convinced Jake Bugg's Lightning Bolt was from the 1960s when I first heard it. Might it be possible to quantify the extent to which songs are from 'the wrong era' using embedding distances?
Yeah you could probably measure it. But I think I would have to scan audio files to find, like, what the most 60s song not from the 60s is. Let me know if you think there's a better way to get at it. It's a fun topic.
Also, Jake Bugg does sound like he's from the 60s. I think the only tell is the recordings have slightly more sheen than something the Stones would have done with a similar sound. I saw him in concert once years ago. Incredibly boring show
It would be great to do it with vectorised sound files - I suppose you'd do something like train a regression model to identify the year of a song, and then find the songs that it makes the biggest errors on. But I can imagine this being prohibitively challenging for all kinds of reasons.
It would be a lot easier to do it for song lyrics - but I feel like the conclusions would be much less interesting!
When I first heard "Metal" in 1979, I felt as though I saw the whole future of music laid out before me https://youtu.be/CQgLfMG92L4 .
I also ran across the house and woke up my sister in 1982 when I heard Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science" on the radio for the first time https://youtu.be/V83JR2IoI8k .
If we’re talking “songs people think are from other eras”, I think a lot of people assume Blister in the Sun came out 10-15 years after it did
Funny enough was kind of high up on the underrated list. But agreed.
How about Norah Jones' "Don't Know Why"? It was released in 2002, but I thought it might've been a song from the '60s I'd missed. Similarly Amy Winehouse's "Back To Black" from 2006, which sounds like a "Wall of Sound" production.
Outcast's "Hey Ya" came out in 2003, but it would not have been out of place at a high school or college party in the early 1980s. That made me think that it and "Happy" by Pharell Williams (2013!) both sound as though they've been part of the furniture for 40-plus years.
Not quite the same thing, but back in the day, our oldies radio station would play Los Lobos's 1987 version of Ritchie Valens's "La Bamba," rather than the original. I think theirs is now considered the canonical version.
“In a Big Country” is such a fantastic, epic, even grandiose power pop song. It’s like “Chariots of Fire” or “Man In Motion/St. Elmo’s Fire” by John Parr.
Funny enough I’ve never liked man in motion. But yes I do agree in a big country is fantastic
I love that Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance" showed up. Perhaps that song is the most underrated one-hit wonder.
"Prince and The Cure are critically beloved."
I don't remember Prince's critical rep in the 80s - I think it was high, but with an acknowledgment that he was far from perfect (see: Under the Cherry Moon).
But, man, a lot of critics absolutely HATED The Cure back in the 80s. Their current critical status is kind of astonishing when you see what people thought back then.
That’s fascinating. I’m really not familiar with the arc of the cure
Great post! I always find it fascinating what others think of as common knowledge in music, especially given how familiar most of these songs feel for me. I'm curious if you looked into any other metrics for calculating underratedness beyond just dividing quality by popularity. It seems this biases far too heavily in favor of top-ranked quality songs. The difference between the #1 and #10 songs might be bigger than the difference between the #100 and #110 most popular songs but I don't think it's 10 times. Intuitively, if the #10 song was 800th most popular that feels much more underrated than if the #1 song were 100th most popular. Maybe the solution is taking the difference and then adding some sort of weight for the highest quality songs? Would love to hear your thoughts!
This is a fantastic point. I toyed with this a bit, but then I couldn't find an approach that I thought made sense. Being biased towards top-rated songs didn't feel that wrong to me, especially if those top-rated songs aren't that popular. But I did run some other calculations that listed "Purple Rain" as underrated. That felt obviously wrong. At least with what came up here, I could say they weren't huge hits. But I know exactly what you are getting at.
If you have a concrete approach, I'm happy to run it. All the data is just sitting in an excel workbook waiting to be sorted
Thanks for the response! That definitely makes sense and it might be my biases showing because I probably listen to the Smiths a lot more than the average person. Three approaches I'd be curious the results of:
1] Straight Difference: (popularity minus quality). Simple but probably overweights very unpopular songs that are mediocre
The next two approaches I came up with after some back-and-forth with ChatGPT:
2] Weighted Rank Difference: Underratedness = (Popularity - Quality) * (1 / log(Quality + c)) where c is a constant that determines the weight of being higher quality. Start with c = 2.5 and can adjust based on the results
3] Linear regression residuals: “Underrated” means a song is less popular than expected given its quality. Steps in Excel:
Use raw popularity numbers (Spotify streams) rather than ranks.
Add two new columns: ln(Popularity) and Quality Score = 1 / Quality Rank.
Use LINEST(LNPopularity_range, QualityScore_range, TRUE, TRUE) to fit a simple linear model.
Compute LNPredicted Popularity = intercept + (slope * Quality Score) for every song.
Calculate Residual = LN(Popularity) – LNPredicted Popularity. The most negative residuals are the most underrated.
Let me know if any of these approaches are unclear or if you end up running any of them. And if you're willing to share the raw data / Excel, I'd love to play around with it myself. Thanks again for facilitating such a fun discussion!
The most detailed and helpful comment I've ever received! Email me at cdallarivamusic @ gmail and I'll send you the data to poke around
Interesting data as always. I'm surprised by "How Soon is Now?" as the best song of the decade. It's a tune I've heard but could never identify by name....and I was in my 20s during the 80s!
My familiarity was about the same but literally every listed I pulled had it in the top 10
My senior year of high school in 1983, a few of us "musical kids" put together sort of a "senior follies" review, and I performed "New York, New York" to thunderous applause. I'd bet 90% of people hadn't heard it, but it was truly an "instant classic" that sounded as though it'd been around for fourty years. We had our 40th class reunion recently, and I didn't make myself very popular by pointing out that our graduation was closer to the end of WWII than to our reunion ;-)
I'm 60, and grew up right during that magical time when Philadelphia FM radio could play Led Zeppelin, followed by Blondie, followed by Prince with a straight face. I was also in college as "New Music" seeped out of the prep schools more into the mainstream; I have a theory that rich kids have always brought more exotic musical fare back home over Thanksgiving, either from school or travel abroad. Punk/New Wave definitely had snob appeal attached to it; listening to The Cure on WLIR was infinitely cooler than listening to Journey on WPLJ. I've been a huge Smiths fan since the start, but it took quite a whole for a lot of my public school classmates to discover them, as they didn't get a lot of mainstream FM airplay. Some never did. I was seconded to San Francisco in 2015, and after browsing around a Whole Foods for half an hour listening to the "classic rock" soundtrack, I walked out wondering if I'd time-warped back to 1979 music-wise.
A few other things jumped out at me from your rankings. I suspect that many of those Spotify/RIAA "evergreens" were songs given extended life by use as sports arena play and/or modern-day advertising or viral video use.
There is also perhaps a "cream rises to the top" aspect to all of this. Think of some of the musicians from the '60s and early '70s that were derided at the time but are now recognized and even fetishized by hipsters today, and not just out of winking irony; The Carpenters, Dolly Parton, ABBA, Burt Bacharach, The Bee Bees, etc. People forget that even Queen weren't always universally liked the way they are today.
In A Big Country being a big song in the jamband community, covered not just by moe., but alot of other jambands is one of those weird little head scratchers.
That’s so odd
I think "good" is just too subjective. The ranking of how good a song is seems very biased (as you noted) to a particular type of artist. It's more alternative/punk, new wave, and pop. Not much rock and roll, and not much rock. I like 80's music. A lot. The Spotify playlist I have for the 70's and 80's has so much on it (13+ hours of music) that weird things have started to happen like Spotify spontaneously moving songs around when I try and reorder it. And the only songs on it that are "good" by the definition here are "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "Take On Me". I don't even recognize half of those "good" songs. I'm not saying any of those songs are bad. I know for some people they're great. But they are (for the most part) not my cup of tea.
All that said, there is one on the underrated list that did surprise me. "I Melt with You" only 784 on the popularity chart? I would not have expected that. I really, really like that one, even though it's not the kind of song I usually listen to, because it brings back memories of dancing with this one girl in the summer of 1987. I guess that's part of what I mean by subjective. Some songs are very much connected with specific memories in my mind, and that radically skews how "good" or not I think they are. It's impossible for me to rate them in a purely objective way, and I'm fairly confident that that's true for everybody.
Yes, my jaw dropped to find out that "New York, New York" was released in 1980. And you're right, it has to be the true winner here.
Somebody’s Baby
~Jackson Browne
Clearly the best Billy Joel song is the one when he sings about my life and how he's going be carrying on however he jolly well likes. I don't need data to know that but thanks for your thought provoking piece!
Alex Chilton - Replacements. I know you agree.
Masterpiece. By Tim, Westerberg could have been a pop songwriter if he so chose
"Kiss" was the best song of the 80s?
I actually love “Kiss” … but you’ll have to talk to the folks at rolling stone for their rationale lol
Oh yeah, I knew that wasn't your assessment. It's a fine song. But of all the songs from the 80s, it's hard to imagine that being the best one.
True. What are your favs?
That's a big question. I was 8 years old in 1980, so here were some of my favorite songs during the 80s at the time they were released. Just some of the songs that pop into mind. Cars (Gary Numan), The Stroke, Jessie's Girl, No One Like You (Scorpions), The Tide is High, Too Much Time on my Hands, Welcome to the Jungle, 18 and Life, Tom Sawyer, Crazy Train, In the Air Tonight, Pour Some Sugar on Me.
All great! I actually feel like "In the Air Tonight" is another song I didn't realize was from the 80s.
I think you're like 20 years younger than me. So that's like me trying to remember if Unchained Melody is from the 50s or 60s.
And to bring it back to Prince, I just remembered I loved Little Red Corvette