[Music] Songs or albums that somehow predicted things in the future?

[exKT17]

For me it's Diamond Dogs (1974) describing boom-time Shanghai (Post 2000)...not just the music - the sleeve art also evokes the overarching high-tech, bonkers wealth and warped sleaze of the city and it's amazing, ambiguous energy...

 

[The Antikythera Mechanism]

[YT]GkNumV2ZyQ4[/YT]

 

[Gwylan]

There's a flipside to this: I was disappointed that Jimi Hendrix didn't turn into a merman in 1983

 

[Tyrone Biggums]

Video Killed the Radio Star.

Released years before MTV began and predicted the decline of Radio in popularity and the rise of Music on TV.

 

[Tyrone Biggums]

There's a flipside to this: I was disappointed that Jimi Hendrix didn't turn into a merman in 1983

He did predict his own death in The Ballad Of Jimi.

 

[hart's shirt]

Video Killed the Radio Star.

Released years before MTV began and predicted the decline of Radio in popularity and the rise of Music on TV.

A good shout. The decline of radio for sure, but interestingly enough, apparently not the rise of music videos.

According to the BBC:

"...the promo for the 1979 Buggles hit was the first video shown on MTV when it launched in 1981. As a consequence, it's become lodged in the mind as predicting the rise of the music video in the 1980s as the primary means for making music stars. But that's not what the song is about. As Buggles man Trevor Horn told the Guardian in 2004, Video Killed the Radio Star "came from a [J. G.] Ballard story called Sound Sweep in which a boy goes around old buildings with a vacuum cleaner that sucks up sound".

The opening lyrics look back, not forward - "I heard you on the wireless back in 52 / Lying awake intent at tuning in on you" - suggesting the song concerns the birth of TV in 1950s threatening radio, rather than music videos in the late-70s, although of course Horn would have been acutely aware of the parallels."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/cf0754b3-71ca-4fd0-bb2f-b2d95cd2338f

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/nov/05/1

 

[Baldseagull]

John Denver- Leaving on a Jet Plane. However, it was a single rear propeller, but I guess that didn't fit in the song so well.

 

[bhafc99]

Good Technology by Red Guitars.

A list of all the ways technology is transforming life, with the twist at the end that, ultimately, all it means is we'll just sit around watching TV instead of doing anything.

36 years old now, this song, but still prescient. If they'd predicted Facebook instead of TV, they'd've been even more on the money...


We've got photographs of men on the moon
We've got water that is good for us
We've got coffee that's instantaneous
We've got buildings that are very tall
We've got cigarettes that are low in tar
We've got policemen who can tell us who we are
We can reproduce a work of art
We've got missiles can tear the world apart
Good, good, good, good, good, good technology

We've got trains that run underground
Aeroplanes that fly very fast
We've got music that is popular
We've got machines that sound like orchestras
We've got ability to transplant a heart
We've got freezers full of body parts
We've got computers that can find us friends
We know roughly when the world will end
Good, good, good, good, good, good technology

We've got animals with transistors in
We've got pills that can make you slim
We've got factories turning frozen chickens out
We've got ovens that cook in seconds flat
We've got plastics that are indestructible
We've got deodorants that make us smell of flowers
We've got detergents to clean up the sea
We've got sounds that can tear us inside out

Sometimes I wonder what it is all about
There's lots of leisure time to sit and work it out
There's a TV show I've got to see
Good, good, good, good, good, good technology
Good technology

 

[El Presidente]

“Only last night I found myself lost
By the station called King's Cross
Dead and wounded on either side
You know it's only a matter of time”

King’s Cross by Pet Shop Boys from the album Actually, released 7th September, 1987.

On 18 November 1987 a fire took place at King’s Cross station killing 31 innocent people.

 

[golddene]

Well..... I can't wait until 2525 to see if we're still alive?

 

[Nitram]

Beatles Hello Goodbye. Britain joining the Common Market and then predicting Brexit. Uncanny.

 

[Taybha]

3 Lions

 

[Gabbafella]

Party music by Coup.
Designed in June 2001 and meant to be released early September 2001. Album was delayed until November and obviously the artwork was changed as a result.

 

[neilbard]

1978 Parallel Lines

"Picture this, my telephone number
One and one is what I’m telling you
Get a pocket computer
Try to do what you used to do, yeah"

 

[Is it PotG?]

 

[Saunders]

1978 Parallel Lines

"Picture this, my telephone number
One and one is what I’m telling you
Get a pocket computer
Try to do what you used to do, yeah"

We had pocket computers then programable and digital calculators. That is what she is singing about.

 

[Saunders]

Ghost Town - Specials

It all kicked off while the song was in the charts.
"can't go on no more. People getting angry"

 

[neilbard]

We had pocket computers then programable and digital calculators. That is what she is singing about.

But there is a big difference, a calculator doesn't have the features of a computer.

 

[studio150]

Lifehouse - Pete Townshend

The internet

 

[studio150]

1978 Parallel Lines

"Picture this, my telephone number
One and one is what I’m telling you
Get a pocket computer
Try to do what you used to do, yeah"

I just hope that they aren't too good at predicting the future given the closing track on their debut album (The Attack of the Giant Ants)