The Songs That Go Away

Something that's always been vaguely interesting to me is the question of which songs survive in the public consciousness. As awash as we are in musical throwbacks, it's curious to see which songs have become iconic tracks while others from that same time that were damn near inescapable on the radio have simply vanished. It's not even that people play them once in a while and say, "Oh yeah, that," and get back to the safety of their ironic Safety Dancing. It's that they're just...gone from the memory. Not reissued. Not used for hipster-friendly montage sequences. Left off bargain-priced compilation discs shelved prominently near the front of the consumer electronics section at Target. You get the idea. "Oh, Sheri" and "I Can't Wait" and "Only In My Dreams" stalk the sound systems of malls and Olive Gardens everywhere, but not the songs they once jostled for chart placement.

For some of them, the reason they disappear is pretty easy to point out: they were terrible songs. Nobody, and I include Dennis DeYoung's immediate family, ever needs to hear "Desert Moon" again. Then again, as terrible a song as it was, it wasn't quantifiably worse than, say, "The Search is Over", by Survivor, and that still gets trotted out at semi-regular intervals. But others were fine songs, fun songs, songs that just, for whatever reason, didn't quite maintain their grip on folks' aural real estate. They're the anti-earworms.

And so, thinking about that, here are a few that I...well, "miss" may be the wrong word, but that I hadn't heard in ages, and hadn't realized I hadn't heard until I forced myself to think about it. 

XTC, "The Mayor of Simpleton" - One suspects Mike Myers watched this video a lot.
Ric Ocasek, "Emotion in Motion" - Nice that they found something to do with the sets from Legend, at least.
Sly Fox, "Let's Go All The Way" - I didn't realize this one had a P-Funk pedigree until years later.
Squeeze, "Hourglass" - Lots of Squeeze songs still get play. Not this one. (Also, Vyvyan from The Young Ones directed the video. Bonus!)
Honeymoon Suite, "Feel It Again" - Perfectly serviceable hair metalilish stuff. Honeymoon Suite never came across as douchebags, which may explain why they faded and millions of people still know who Bret Michaels and Nikki Sixx are.
Robert Tepper, "No Easy Way Out" - Songs from Stallone movies tend to fade. Anyone heard "Meet Me Halfway" lately? Still, you've got to love the fact that Tepper seems to be rocking the back end of Connor McLeod's closet from Highlander 2.
GTR, "The Hunter"/The Firm, "Radioactive" - Near as I can tell, these two were the same band.

What are yours?