Songs that are ahead of their time

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Know of any old songs or artists that sound unusually current?

This song by Pigmeat Markham has the flow and drumbeat of your classic rap track -- except it was recorded in 1968:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvMBxlu62c0[/youtube]

"Vitamin C" by CAN sounds like a Thom Yorke-inspired bit of 21st century indie rock. It's the signature track off of their 1972 album, Ege Bamyasi:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a1NhRbNJ_Y[/youtube]

A lot of Radiohead songs sound like Can. Check out 'Sing Swan Song' for example. It sounds like a template for several Radiohead records. They also covered the marvelous 'The Thief'.

Not a song really, but a person and her technology. Delia Derbyshire Demonstrates beatmatching from the 60's

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDX_CS3NsTk[/youtube]

This is my little joke. I might think of some proper ones later.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNM2K8cmU8[/youtube]

This one sounds like it fell out of a time warp.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UGrFr7wAUc[/youtube]

I feel like Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick was ahead of its time. Or timeless.

Interesting selections.

I do shows about "rap music from before the era of rap music" on my public access radio show from time to time. I forgot about that Pigmeat Markham song. It is indeed a rap song from long before the era of rap music.

The most of ahead of its time song ever was "Beans and Cornbread" by Louis Jordan in 1947.

The lyrics were ahead of their time: it was a plea for peace and tolerence twenty years before Dylan wrote "Blowin in the Wind", and Lennon wrote "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine".

It was one of the first Rythmn and Blues songs, and it was one of the first RocknRoll songs- almost a decade before Elvis put rocknroll on the map.

And it had elements of rap in it more the thirty years before the Sugar Hill Gang put Rap on the map with the hit "Rapper's Delight".

If you want to talk about music that is ahead of its time, at some point you have to mention Louis and Bebe Barron, who were pioneers of electronic music. In 1957 they produced their best known work-- the score to the sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet. While the theremin was a staple of sci-fi/horror movies of the time, the Barrons instead created similar ethereal effects using electronic circuits of their own design. Theirs was the first entirely electronic film score, and it was orchestrated several years before the Moog synthesizer was developed.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIuc1_Qg4A8[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XfeWp2y1Lk[/youtube]

Stockhausen's music from the 50's. He was one of the first composers to experiment with qualities of music such as timbre and texture, and also one of the first composers to incorporate electronic elements in his music.

The Forbidden Plane soundtrack is amazing.

Blue Monday by New Order. Released in 1983. It doesn't just sound current. IMHO it still sounds like its from the future.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwupfdyXGfY[/youtube]

Good choice! It does.

Here's another record from '83. Clear by Cybotron.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGqiBFqWCTU[/youtube]

As far as electronic music is concerned, I cannot think of many seminal tracks that do not appear on ishkur's online guide (which I would recommend to anyone who has not visited it already!) - http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

Are there any musicologists in the house who can explain to us what the real musical innovations of recent times were?

To me, the theme to Dr Who (from 1963) would be an obvious choice for a piece that was ahead of its time. (I see Delia Derbyshire has already been mentioned!). That is on the ishkur site already.

Here's a track that is not on ishkur's site: Club Cannibal by Ashra from 1978. I don't know if it is really any different from what Kraftwerk or Giorgio Moroder were doing, but to me it sounds like something Orbital or LFO might have made in the 90s.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgebQlG963I[/youtube]

Yikes, I haven't seen that site in a LONG time, but I have seen it before. Honestly I never really agreed with the opinionated viewpoint he expresses on a lot of this, how the different genres/sub-genres fit together or really if the songs he uses as examples of each style really fit with that style. Its like he is professing himself to be an authority on all this when a) I've no idea what his credentials supposedly are and b) I think he's trying to give a definitive guide to something that is much too subjective for there to exist a definitive, no-questions-asked, this-is-how-it-is guide.

An example - Robert Miles' "Children" is Dream Trance, but BT's Flaming June is Prog Trance? Or that somehow Prog trance derives from classic trance and then Anthem trance derives from Prog? Really?

I agree, I would take it with a pinch of salt. It is still pretty cool, even if bits of it are vague or plain wrong.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SHJ6CcML80[/youtube]

Raymond Scott was the guy who composed the crazy jazz music used in cartoons like Tom & Jerry, but he was also creating electronic music using instruments he invented himself. I think this stuff sounds very futuristic even now. I find it amazing that this is from 1959.

Kinda chiptune-ish that one. Yeah, it sounds like a 2010 throwback to '80s video gaming. Made in 1959 you say? Very amusing.

I like his Soothing Sounds for Babies records, very pretty.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHnKuK6V0o0&feature=related[/youtube]

To me sounds like it precedes Eno's work by a decade or two.

I was totally gonna post up Vitamin C

Nevermind

So I'll put up Jennifer instead

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grvr4nK4AZA[/youtube]

Speaking of timeless, here's Aerial Boundaries by Michael Hedges, recorded in 1984. It's remarkable not just for the technique (everything you're hearing comes from one six-string acoustic guitar -- live with no overdubs) and composition but also the way it was recorded -- thanks in part to his engineer Steve Miller who brought in that lush and thunderous reverb. Listen to this with your headphones on:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X30AroojjFk[/youtube]

Or another by Hedges that sounds somewhat futuristic. All the sounds were created with acoustic guitar. Although it could easily be done digitally with audio editing software today, back in 1984, Hedges had to painstakingly cut and paste together pieces of analog audio tape to create it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3RvhLt9x0c[/youtube]