Jeanette MacDonald rose to fame in the ruffle-laden, fantasy-ridden Hollywood musicals of the 1930s, her angel’s voice transporting audiences and establishing her as one of the highest-paid actresses of the day. MacDonald kept this pristine image until the day she died, even right up to her beautiful last words to her long-time husband.

Boomers often assume these references are universal—timeless, obvious, self-explanatory. Millennials hear them and nod politely, the same way you do when someone explains a dream that only mattered to them.

After pushing Crazy Horse out of his career, Neil Young spiraled into creative chaos. Their reunions reveal how this volatile partnership ultimately fueled some of his most powerful music.

Some of the biggest movie hits of the 80s made Gen Xers shrug and say "whatever."

Some songs feel like diary entries accidentally left on the radio. “In The Air Tonight” is one of those rare tracks that sounds less like a hit single and more like a private meltdown set to echoing synths and a famously delayed drum fill. By the time Phil Collins released it in 1981, he wasn’t trying to reinvent pop music—he was trying to survive the wreckage of his personal life. What came out instead was a haunting anthem that turned private heartbreak into public mythology and permanently fused Collins’ name to four minutes of restrained fury.

Country music has never been short on heartbreak, sin, or scandal—but for decades, it preferred those topics safely filtered through male voices. Then Loretta Lynn showed up and started singing about women’s lives the way women actually lived them. When she released “The Pill,” the genre wasn’t just uncomfortable—it panicked. The backlash was fierce, the bans were real, and the conversation she sparked never stopped echoing.