Over the decades and centuries, certain songs have become inextricably associated with certain events in history. Obviously, some of those songs were written specifically in response to those events: “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” for the attack on Pearl Harbor, or “The Men Behind the Wire” for the Troubles. But many songs bring back the memory of events for those of us who lived through them not because the song is about the event, but because it received so much airplay during that period that it became associated in our minds with those events.
Often it’s a song that happened to come out during that period, so it got a lot of airplay at that time. To this day, Diesel’s “Sausalito Summer Nights” brings back the summer of 1981: the food, the fashions, the stores where we hung out. To this day, I can close my eyes and see the house we were living in then. But there are also oldies that suddenly become topical as a result of events. Just a few years later, events in the Soviet Union would bring the Beatles’ “Back in the USSR” to the top of the charts, almost two decades after the White Album came out.
Nobody can say exactly how the Trammps’ “The Night the Lights Went Out in New York City” became the anthem of the Great Outbreak, especially considering it was a disco song from the previous century. Was it Tony Mahoney at WOWO who started playing it, or Mark Boone at WLS-FM in Chicago? Or was it one of the Internet-only stations? A lot of people point to Spencer Dawes, DJ of the Disco Ball at Shepardsport Pirate Radio, although by that time the Flannigan Administration was trying to block the Lunar Resistance’s primary media organ by interfering with the ability of DNS servers to resolve their domain names (which was why their DJ’s and news personnel always read out the IP octets as well as the regular domain names when doing station identifications).
But whoever started it, by the time we knew something major was going on, “The Night the Lights Went Out in New York City” was everywhere. The New York Philharmonic even played a symphonic arrangement to close their final concert, the night public gatherings were closed For The Duration.
—- Rachel Bailey, The Cultural Scene of the Great Outbreak. Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2033.