Five Retro Songs That Found a Second Life on the Internet

Readers may be familiar with how songs from the 1980s, both hits and lesser-known tracks, have found new audiences, thanks to Internet trends and exposure in current shows and movies. Take Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” for instance, which became the centerpiece of the rickrolling prank, in which an unsuspecting viewer is led to the music video through an apparently unrelated link. Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” meanwhile, enjoyed a resurgence in popularity after being featured in the TV series Stranger Things. 

But there’s a lot more, and indeed the Internet is a perfect place for rediscovering old gems that make people today exclaim “why didn’t I find that before?” In fact, such songs might become permanent fixtures in one’s playlist and could even reinforce the claim that “older songs are better!” Sometimes, it even helps the original artist revitalize their music career and release new material.   

Here are five songs that flew under the radar when they were first released but eventually found a much wider audience online, including among young listeners who weren’t even born when the songs came out.

A blog post about the song says “this kind of song is the reason the Internet exists.” It’s easy to see why: “Mechanical” is a delightful synthpop gem that might have remained obscure without the online communities that brought it to light.

“Mechanical” was created by the duo of Bowkett and Ansell under the name The Quarks in 1981, during a time when science fiction names and themes were all the rage. The album cover even pictured a robot hand playing a keyboard, an image that beautifully captured the spirit of the song. However, it failed to chart. Bowkett and Ansell created a second project titled President President and released two other songs. Again, no success, so they went their separate ways.   

Cut to the 2010s, the song gets shared in various Facebook and other social media groups about music and it gets talked about. It became popular enough that Ansell, who did the vocals for the song, started up a Bandcamp account where he offers both old and new music, which includes the original Quarks album and an acoustic version of “Mechanical.”   

For years, this song was one of the Internet’s greatest mysteries, earning the nickname “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet.” The story began in the early 1980s, when a German teenager named Darius S. recorded it from a radio broadcast onto a cassette tape. Unfortunately, he missed the DJ’s introduction, which might have identified the song and its artist, leaving him with a recording whose origins remained unknown. 

Years later, Darius and his older sister uploaded snippets of the song to various forums and websites, hoping someone could identify it. Numerous guesses, false leads, and even hoaxes followed, but the song’s identity remained elusive until 2024, when a Reddit user suggested that it was “Subways of Your Mind” by the German band Fex. Further investigation eventually confirmed this, finally solving a mystery that had captivated Internet users for years. 

Thanks to this rediscovery, Fex reunited to record some new materials for their new fans (and some old ones who rediscovered them). In fact, it made possible the release of their first album, Skyscraper, in 2025, decades after their now-famous song was recorded from radio onto a cassette tape by a teenager.  

This 80s city pop anthem was a moderate success in Takeuchi’s native Japan in 1984 and likely seldom heard by people outside of that country. The Wikipedia article says the lyrics “describe a woman who embraces a hollow, hedonistic lifestyle after being scorned by a lover.” Today, Filipinos would likely apply their own meaning of “plastic,” as in “fake,” to describe this kind of love that the woman went through.   

In 2010, a remix of the song was uploaded on YouTube. It received 55 million views by 2021 before its removal due to a copyright strike. In addition, the song got attached to other viral trends such as Vaporwave. “Plastic Love” would also spawn a cultural phenomenon wherein some users in western countries get into older Japanese pop, using the song as a gateway. One could say that it is a parallel phenomenon to anime fandom.   

This is a prime example of European disco styles during the 70s, paving the way for the sometimes enigmatic Eurodance movement of the 80s. Dschingis Khan (pronounced as “jing-gis can”) is a vocal group formed in 1979 for the purpose of competing in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest, with a song that shares the band’s name. “Dschingis Khan” though gained only fourth place (Israel’s entry Milk and Honey singing “Hallelujah” won the prize that year).   

Following Eurovision, the group stayed together and came out with more songs, the one going viral in the 2010s and 2020s being “Moskau.” Their performances are marked by choreographed movements while singing, frontlined by member Louis Hendrik Potgieter delivering an energetic and flashy dance number while dressed like Genghis Khan. Their style was so unique and entertaining that some netizens even described them as “Russian Power Rangers.”   

Sadly, Potgieter and another member, Steve Bender, have already passed, Potgeiter from AIDS in 1994 and Bender in 2006 from cancer. A new lineup of talents now tours under the group’s name.   

“Na Zare” (Russian for “At Dawn”) is a 1987 synthpop song by the Soviet band Alyans (alliance). It was a hit in the then-Soviet Union. But most of us in the western world (or western-influenced Philippine society) likely never knew of its existence, which we could attribute to the existence of the Iron Curtain, the metaphorical divide between the capitalist west and communist east at the time.   

In 2019, the song became known to the rest of the world when the band’s former keyboardist, Oleg Parastayev, posted several videos of it on his YouTube channel, the most popular of these being a recording of a performance on Soviet TV in 1987. The song has very haunting, ethereal synth sounds and frontman Igor Zhuravlev’s vocal performance demonstrates amazing range, from a low, dark tone at the start to blazingly high notes near the song’s end. Some have also expressed amazement that something so western in sound and style could come from the former leading communist country in the world.   

Sadly, Parastayev passed away in 2020 at the age of 61. His video postings of the song however remain up for the rest of the world to enjoy.   

That’s not all there is, of course. Keep your ears peeled and keep scouring the web for gems you might have missed during the “good old days.”   

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