Throwback Thursday: Five Songs That Found Their Real Audience Somewhere Other Than Where, or When, Anyone Expected

What Throwback Thursday Is

Every Thursday, Song Reviews looks backward – one short, ungraded tribute per major genre, deliberately jumping across different decades and eras to trace where a sound or a story actually came from.

This Week’s Run

Five songs, five genres, and in every case the record’s real commercial or cultural peak happened somewhere other than when, or how, anyone involved in making it expected:

• (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay (1968, soul) – Otis Redding finished recording it three days before he died in a plane crash. Released posthumously, it became his only Hot 100 No. 1 – still the only posthumous single ever to top the chart.
• Apache (1973, funk) – Never released as a single, barely noticed on arrival. A drum break two minutes in became, via DJ Kool Herc’s Bronx block parties, the most sampled breakbeat in hip-hop history.
• Dreams (1977, rock) – Fleetwood Mac’s only Hot 100 No. 1 spent 43 years as a classic-rock staple before a skateboarder’s cranberry-juice TikTok sent it back into the chart’s top 10 in 2020.
• Africa (1982, yacht rock) – Already a No. 1 hit once. A teenager’s year-long Twitter campaign and Weezer’s 2018 cover gave Toto’s original a second life that roughly doubled its streaming numbers.
• Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) (1985, art pop) – Peaked at No. 30 in the U.S. on release. Thirty-seven years later, one season of Stranger Things made it Kate Bush’s biggest American hit by a wide margin.

What Connects Them

None of these five songs failed on arrival – that’s worth being precise about, because it would be a tidier story if they had. Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” was already headed for success; Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was already a No. 1; Toto’s “Africa” was already a hit; Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” was already a real, if modest, chart entry. Only “Apache” was a true commercial non-event at release. What actually connects them is that the audience, the format, or the meaning each record is now remembered for arrived on a completely different schedule than the one its makers were working on – sometimes decades later, sometimes through a mechanism (a drum break looped at a block party, a lip-synced commute, a Twitter dare, a Netflix sync) that nobody involved in the original recording could have planned for or anticipated.

That gap is where the actual story in each case lives. Redding never got to hear “Dock of the Bay” top the chart; the posthumous release that made it a No. 1 was assembled by a producer finishing a song its author hadn’t completed. The Incredible Bongo Band had no concept of sampling as a creative practice when they recorded “Apache” – the idea that a drum break could be isolated and looped as the actual point of a recording didn’t meaningfully exist yet as a mainstream technique. Nathan Apodaca wasn’t trying to revive Fleetwood Mac’s catalog when he filmed himself longboarding to work; a fourteen-year-old’s Twitter campaign demanding a Weezer cover of “Africa” wasn’t a marketing plan; the Stranger Things writers’ room wasn’t thinking about UK chart history when it picked “Running Up That Hill” for a pivotal scene. In every case, the moment that mattered most to the song’s legacy belonged to somebody with no stake in, and often no real knowledge of, the song’s original context. That’s the quiet argument underneath all five of these records: a song’s meaning is never fully settled at release, no matter how big or small that release is, because the audience that eventually decides what a record actually means hasn’t necessarily been born yet.

Hero image: Kate Bush, 1985 EMI publicity photo, by Guido Harari. Public domain in the United States.