morriscroy

Hey Hey Rise Up.




It is basically Pink Floyd doing a cover of a 400 year old Ukrainian Cossack war hymn.

morriscroy

Hayden - String Quartet No. 62 in C major, Op. 76, No. 3, Hob. III:77 "Emperor"



The music was originally written by Joseph Haydn in the late 1790s and published in 1799. Lyrics were later added to the music in 1841 by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, which the third verse today is now the national anthem of Germany.

(only third verse)


(with all verses)

morriscroy

Hatikvah first appeared sometime in the late part of the 19th century in eastern europe and Ottoman ruled Palestine. Eventually it became the unofficial national anthem of Israel in 1948, and made official in 2004.

- sung by inmates at Bergen-Belsen after liberation by British troops in 1945



- sung by survivors at Auschwitz 70th liberation ceremony in 2015



- instrumental from Munich movie soundtrack

morriscroy

Nikolai Volkoff making the Soviet Union national anthem very popular in the west.

Fist of Doom Jr

Pixies "Where Is My Mind?"

I doubt most people ever heard the song before Fight Club came out over a decade later.

rocket1312

I'll submit The Killers' Mr. Brightside. It was a decent hit when first released (I remember Somebody Told Me being the far bigger hit from that album, but apparently that's not true), but in the 20 years since it has become one of the top songs of the 2000's and a millennial anthem. I have a friend who used to dj weddings and he told a few years back that it was by far the most requested and most popular song he played. I was kind of taken aback by that since I didn't recall the song being that big of a deal, but once he said that I started noticing it everywhere. The most startling moment was when I was watching an NBA game on tv and they came back from commercial and the broadcast picked up the sound of 20,000 people singing along to the song during a timeout.

Kdogg

In that vein Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes is played in football (soccer) stadium across the globe.

Josh-da-man

Songs that got popularized by appearing in movies is a whole subset of this topic.

Can anyone hear "Stuck in the Middle with You" without remembering Mr. Blonde taking a straight razor to Marvin Nash?

morriscroy

Speaking of movie soundtracks, the current national anthem of The People's Republic of China was originally the theme song from a 1935 movie "Children of Troubled Times".



(exerpt from original 1935 film with english subtitles)

PhantomStranger

It was a pretty big hit even upon debut. I do find it strange how some big hits "stick" and stay relevant while many other deserving hits disappear into the ether.

MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This was a monster hit upon debut, maybe the biggest hit of the early 1990s in terms of cultural and commercial impact. Then by the end of the 1990s, it went missing in action and disappeared almost completely. I wonder if a 15-year-old today has even heard the song.

morriscroy

Likely the same reasons why many Germans born after 1989 would not recognize the national anthem of East Germany "Auferstanden aus Ruinen" ("risen from the ruins").




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auferstanden_aus_Ruinen

Paff

Sports fans of Boston have made sure Neil Diamond never needs to work again.

Kdogg

English Football fans contribute to that fund too although I still don’t understand why.

Nick Danger

Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses. That song was very obscure when it came out in 1981. I had to special order a compilation album of post-punk Christmas songs to get it. Today it gets played so often that some people are sick of it.

Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. It was released in 1984 by a niche artist and only listened to by his fans. But in the 2000s, it became huge, and I don't know why.

Paff

I'm gonna have to disagree with you there.

It was indeed a little hard to find at first, but that doesn't mean it wasn't popular. I remember the year it came out, the DJs would say on the air "Please stop calling the station, we'll get to that Christmas song by the Waitresses this hour". People fell in love with it immediately. Then, I made it a goal of mine to get it on vinyl my freshman year of college a few years later (I should have been studying for finals, but that's another story). I finally found the "I Could Rule the World if I Only Find the Parts" EP that it also appeared on, and was playing it in my dorm room. People would come running to my room when I played it, with a blank tape asking me to make a copy.

I didn't hear it once this past X-mas, and had to pull out that same EP that I still have on Christmas Eve to finally hear it.

Paff

Just thought of one that was the opposite of "popular later due to appearing in a movie": "Theme from New York, New York"

That movie was an utter flop, but a few years later the song became hugely popular. It's like the New York NY anthem. I bet that's what people think when it's called the "Theme from...", and not that it's because of a movie.

(the same could also be possibly said for John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band's "On the Dark Side", from the flop film Eddie and the Cruisers, but in that case the movie and song became popular a year or so later when it started airing on cable TV frequently. Even leading to a sequel. But the New York New York movie never became popular)

William Fuld

It became huge because of the tragic death of Jeff Buckley.

Kdogg

We probably could have a thread about misunderstood songs. That songs starts with adultery and murder.

milo bloom

I never heard Christmas Wrapping until the mid to late 90s or so and it was still hard to find till it suddenly became possible to get music on the computer. It’s still one of my favorites.


And I can’t believe you all are forgetting that Hallelujah was used in Shrek and that had to have made a difference in its popularity.

PhantomStranger

Buckley's 1994? cover was a minor hit and then one of those television singing contests in the early 2000s started using his cover of Hallelujah as a tune for many of their contestants. His cover then became a smash global hit. I still don't think many have ever heard Cohen's original, John Cale also had some success covering the song.

It's funny because most long-time Leonard Cohen fans wouldn't have even considered it one of his ten best songs before the 2000s and it never really got much more run than a deep catalog selection for nearly 20 years, until its popularity from the Buckley cover blew it up.

rocket1312

Malcolm Gladwell did an episode on his podcast about Hallelujah and it's interesting path to becoming a classic. Basically Cohen labored over the song for years, changing the music and writing dozens of verses. He continued to tinker with it in concert even after the original version was released. That's when John Cale heard it and asked Cohen for the lyrics so he could do his own version. Cale then completely reworked Cohen's reworked version and it was Cale's version that Buckley eventually heard and turned into the song everyone knows today.

Mr. Brightside was a hit, but in the US the track only topped out at #10 on the billboard charts. Other songs from the album were bigger hits in the UK. Now it's considered one of the very best songs of its decade and even of the 21st century. Rolling Stone has it somewhere in the 300's on their most recent top 500 songs of all-time. I think it's been on the British charts cumulatively something like 7 or 8 years. If I'm not mistaken it's the longest charting song in UK history. That's some crazy staying power.

sportsfan64

Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" after some guy decided to skateboard to it while drinking cranberry juice.

John Galt

I’ll add You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling after Top Gun. I wasn’t around for when it was first released, and it looks like it was a pretty big hit then. But the movie really gave it a resurgence of
popularity for a new generation.

fujishig

Yeah, that's what I was going to say, I first heard Hallelujah in Shrek (2001).

Christmas Wrapping has certainly been in a fair number of movies/shows (I think it's in the GotG christmas special) but it was almost inexplicably popular when it first came out. I recently watched a condensed story about the Waitresses and this particular song here:

Paff

Thank you, I started wondering if I was in an alternate universe when people here were saying they didn't know about it till the 90s.

That said, Christmas songs are an anomaly in general, because no matter how popular or unpopular they are, they're only getting airplay for a few weeks at the most. By that nature, it takes at least 2-3 years for them to become "standards" of the season. The only exceptions might be the more novelty songs, like say, "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer". That was huge when it first came out, but after a couple of years people didn't really dig it and it eventually died the death it should have from the beginning.