What happens when you assume a shared cultural experience, only to discover it doesn’t exist?
In 2020, one man’s frustration that his wife did not remember a 90s pop hit triggered one of the most acclaimed podcast episodes ever.
The team at Reply All were eventually able to track down the missing song for Tyler Gillett: Evan Olson’s vanished 1998 single ‘So Much Better’.
The song had essentially disappeared from the internet.
While the search was in progress, it had briefly seemed like Tyler’s grip on reality might be a little tenuous. Was he remembering a song that never even existed?
But even after ‘So Much Better’ was unearthed, Tyler wasn’t entirely vindicated.
When his wife confessed her initial ignorance of Olson’s song, he had been incredulous: “You don’t know this song? This was like a huge thing in the nineties! I can’t believe you don’t know this song!”
In the end, it wasn’t truly a missing hit. It had only been a huge song for Tyler.
A smash in an alternate timeline
I’ve encountered a similar issue several times: that gulf between personal and public consciousness.
Headcanon hits are songs you discover are only popular in your brain
The problem wasn’t that the songs I remembered were disappearing off the face of the Earth.
Instead I assumed, for a period of time, that certain songs were much bigger hits than they actually were.
Like Tyler, I was fully expecting to verify a shared experience where none existed.
Maybe you’ve encountered the same phenomena: songs you discover are only popular in your own alternate timeline. Headcanon hits that your brain was unconsciously nurturing over the years.
You don’t have to like these songs particularly. They just need to get enough mental airplay that they’re stored away as a falsified entry in the pop-cultural canon.
For me, three songs in particular stand out. Two tunes recorded by pop legends (Prince and Kylie Minogue) and one by a more obscure duo (Little T and One Track Mike).
Here are my three headcanon hits, in chronological order:
1989: ‘Trust’ by Prince
I was eight years old when Batman was released in cinemas. For my age cohort, it was clearly the most significant event since the moon landings two decades earlier. The fall of the Berlin Wall would register as a footnote by comparison.
I wasn’t familiar with Prince’s back catalogue, but I knew that his involvement in the soundtrack was a Big Deal.
Hearing ‘Trust’, I thought ‘Well here’s an Important Prince Song that Everyone Knows!’
During the climax of the movie, the Joker (Jack Nicholson) glides into Gotham City on a bicentennial float, with ‘Trust’ pumping out of the sound system. He dances to the song while his goons dispense fistfuls of bank notes to the crowd.
Most of Prince’s songs in the movie are used as diegetic sound. For ‘Partyman’ and ‘Trust’ in particular, this creates the aura of an established hit being played. These songs already existed in Gotham as real music.
Every time I watched the movie as a preteen, and that familiar six-note sequence became audible, I thought Well here’s an Important Prince Song that Everyone Knows.
In my defence, it sort of sounds familiar and famous, and there’s a persuasive explanation for that.
Director Tim Burton used existing Prince songs as temporary tracks in the rough cut of the movie. The song that ‘Trust’ replaced was ‘Baby I’m A Star’ from Purple Rain, a similarly uptempo number from one of the best-selling albums of all time.
Prince’s Batman went multi-platinum and spawned five commercial singles, but ‘Trust’ saw release only as a promotional single, and in just one territory: Hong Kong.
More than three decades later, ‘Batdance’ has held its curio value as a kitsch cross-promotional smash. ‘Partyman’ even enjoyed renewed exposure in 2020 after being featured in The Last Dance.
But my standout track has been forgotten.
It endures only in my headcanon, as one of Prince’s most iconic hits: ‘When Doves Cry,’ ‘Sign o’ the Times,’ ‘Raspberry Beret’… and ‘Trust’.
2001: ‘Shaniqua’ by Little T and One Track Mike
I’d only recently arrived in the United States when I heard this earworm for the first and only time. It was September 2001.
I assumed ‘Shaniqua’ was a late-90s hit that hadn’t crossed the Atlantic. A popular telephonic novelty song, in the proud tradition of ‘8675309/Jenny’ or ‘Hello! Ma Baby’.
My roommate joked about a friend calling him and using the catchphrase from the chorus. So that reinforced the impression that Little T and One Track Mike had minted a new American meme.
But far from being a pop-cultural staple, this track enjoys a status closer to the missing Evan Olson track that prompted the Reply All episode.
Here’s a sample of comments from below the YouTube video:
“I feel like I’m the only person in the world who remembers this”
“I randomly sing this and no one knows what I’m talking about?”
“I’m glad to know this song really does exist and I’m not as crazy as I thought”
A glance over the historical ledger clarifies the matter. I arrived in the States a couple of weeks before the song made its solitary appearance in the Top 10 of MTV’s Total Request Live.
Five days after that, 9/11 happened. The tenor of American pop culture underwent a radical shift.
Maybe in a less horrific timeline, ‘Shaniqua’ had a shot at becoming a signature Noughties song.
But in this one? Hell, no.
2010: ‘Better Than Today’ by Kylie Minogue
I went on with my life for two decades with the false impression that ‘Shaniqua’ was a hit. I thought the same thing about ‘Better Than Today’ for less than a week.
I encountered the song in Barcelona during a romantic city break.
‘Better than Today’ actually underperformed. Critics didn’t think it should have been a single
For some reason, ‘Better Than Today’ seemed to be on heavy rotation on one of the music channels in our boutique hotel room. The song and the video struck a sweet spot.
I was pretty loved-up at this point, so the relentlessly ebullient chorus jibed with my mood. The squelchy synth riffs and the Pac Man keytar players sealed the deal for me.
To me, it sounded like yet another peak in Kylie’s 21st century renaissance. The next ‘Spinning Around’ or ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’.
This was the early 2010s, so the urge to go online and verify my hunch on social media wasn’t as strong. But I was very, very wrong.
I returned to the UK to discover that the song had been released four months earlier and had failed to make a ripple.
‘Better Than Today’ had actually registered as something of a flop. It was an underperforming tune that should have never been a single, released during a period when Kylie’s commercial staying power began to look shaky.
Why the song was on heavy rotation on Spanish TV is a mystery. Perhaps it coincided with the song’s brief revival in the US, where it had recently topped the Dance chart.
Either way, I discovered that my Barcelona hotel room had acted as a kind of filter bubble. For that brief weekend, ignorance was bliss.
As with ‘Trust’ and ‘Shaniqua,’ the success of the song proved to be both illusory and temporary. Still, I enjoyed it while it lasted.
