And I mean OBSCURE, people, I'm not talkin' "It was hot a while ago but could stand some revival." I'm thinking of songs which leave you wondering "How was this missed?"
If we're honest, we know our knowledge of music can be sketchy. The ending credits theme for the movie "GoodFellas" is so good I thought it might be some Beatles instrumental, so imagine my surprise to learn it was "merely" "Layla (Piano Exit)" by Derek and the Dominoes. The following three make me wonder at how easily we let some tunes go.
1. "Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon." This song should not have been obscure at all, as we get to hear it very early on in the hit movie "The French Connection," actually getting performed as Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle wanders into a club trailing a Mob hood. The song is by Jimmy Webb and is the most exuberant endorsement of humanity's future in space I've ever heard. Space songs tend to be either downers ("Space Oddity," "Rocket Man") or poetic fluff ("Fly Me to the Moon"), but Webb actually writes "Everybody gets to go in a weird white suit" and inserts a spoken verse about getting to "populate" the Moon. I find it notable that a few years later, as Apollo wore down, Webb wrote "The Moon's a Harsh Mistress" (yes, a little nod to Heinlein there), a song so magnificently fucking sad I watched some Youtube of it and bawled for two days. (Would that a song could inspire me to ball for two days, but that's a whole other tall order.) If "2001" remains the go-to movie for the look and feel of space, then this is my go-to anthem for space tourism.
2. "It's a Late Night World of Love." True, it had its big moment first turning up for the fourth anniversary of the original Letterman show, but I think it got reused precious little and it seems like it's been something like at least twenty years since it last played. Best Youtube for this is probably "Late Night Anthem," with Paul Shaffer singing and a chorus of serious little kids, though that unaccountably cuts off the opening verse complete with "clear blue skies, grandma's eyes." I love a dead-on parody, and this may be the best I had heard since the soundtrack of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." It reminds me a little of the movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," because I sit there thinking "You know, the quality of this is good -- these silly fuckers could actually make a SERIOUS Holy Grail adventure with all the energy they're pouring into this." It's a beautiful thing when parody can aim so high.
3. "Tonight is What It Means to Be Young." The Youtube link for this back in my You Know You're Old When thread seems dead, which is a damn shame, because that simply had the end of the movie "Streets of Fire," complete with the classic goodbye between Michael Pare and Diane Lane before moving on to the song, and that's still the best way to show it. "Streets" is a lot of superficial silliness to actually have to sit through, and the only song matching the quality of "Tonight" is "I Can Dream About You," sung by "the Sorels" and oddly enough the most successful song from this soundtrack, as well as the last song just before "Tonight." "Tonight" itself is a bit of a frantic Taylor Dayne mess, going on about enchantment and jewels and a forest and a lake and a boy dancing like a cat on the stairs in some castle, then chucking all that aside to say "But it's only a dream and tonight is for real." It's a marvel of energy, seeming to give up only to wind itself back up to a whole new level. It's also a flatly impossible song, the wisdom of some sage poured into some mere kid: "It's gonna be over/ Before you know it's begun." What kid would actually write that? And yet the song exists.
Anyhow, those are my opening candidates. Others?