“It is genuinely delightful when old songs bubble up in unexpected ways,” cbattan writes. And yet there’s something a little disconcerting about Kate Bush’s decontextualized resurgence.
Hot 100 chart is an imperfect bellwether of trends in American pop music, but it can often provide useful signals. Last week’s Top Ten was largely predictable. It included multiple entries from the British soft-pop sensation Harry Styles—a guy so popular that he recently sold out his forthcoming fifteen-night run at Madison Square Garden—a swaggering single from the ever-present white rapper du jour, and Lizzo’s latest empowerment anthem.
Plenty of diffuse, mysterious factors contribute to any given song’s popularity, but the reason for the newfound ubiquity of “Running Up That Hill” is clear-cut. The song recently appeared during a pivotal, intensely melodramatic scene in the fourth season of “.” Netflix’s vibey teen sci-fi show struck a nerve with its highly stylized form of nineteen-eighties nostalgia when it first aired in 2016, and now it has become such a cultural force that its new season broke Netflix-viewership records.
The scene that features “Running Up That Hill” represents an emotional milestone in “Stranger Things,” and it’s been screen-capped and memed and reposted to oblivion. As a result, Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” has achieved an unprecedented level of belated exposure, and its appearance on “Stranger Things” has produced a cascade of attention that even the cleverest of viral-marketing professionals could not have hoped to engineer.
It’s tempting to see this phenomenon as a refreshing exception to social media’s dogged recency bias—a serendipitous detour through memory lane that creates a mini-avalanche of attention for an old song. It is genuinely delightful when old songs bubble up in unexpected ways. And yet there’s something a little disconcerting about a once-in-a-generation artist like Bush being removed from the larger backdrop of her strange and singular vision, and accidentally refashioned as a viral event.
This constant repurposing of the past also means that the music supervisors who select songs for popular shows are vastly influential as tastemakers and gatekeepers. Along with social-media influencers, they’re bestowed with the mystical power to breathe new life into an old song, particularly if a show is as big as “Stranger Things.” And yet this type of fresh exposure often does little to shore up an artist’s legacy in our shrinking memories.
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