Get Back Music- weirder than your average mixtape

Alright, what do Wire, Raincoats, Undertones, Barbara Streisand, Peaches and Herb, Dead Kennedys, the Police and the Bee Gees have in common? Get Back Music plays them back-to-back on their music website for 1979.

Admittedly, I was pretty skeptical when I read a Reuters story about a "a social network targeted at people over age 35" (i.e. me) but I had to check it out, at least for laughs. And while their flashback stories only lead to YouTube links, I was intrigued by the weirdest online stations that I'd run into in a while. If you skip to 1981, you get Devo, Blasters, X (which is part of what I was listening to and loving then), followed by disco babes A Taste of Honey and U2. 1982 gives you the Fixx (yuck), the Violent Femmes (yeah!), Elvis Costello (ditto), Missing Persons (yuck again), Willie Nelson (yeah), McCartney's/Wonder's "Ebony & Ivory" (yuck) and Roxy Music (hells yeah).

So basically, they give you the indie/alt heroes alongside some hit dreck (and some combinations of the two). You'd think that it would be better if they stuck with one or the other but the fact of the matter is that's the way it was then (and now, for that matter) so it's a pretty accurate gauge of the time, like it or not. I like it and for anyone who can't stand the dreck, the GBM people are nice enough to let you skip ahead to greener musical pastures.

As they admit, Get Back is still in its Beta format so maybe the vintage headlines will improve and maybe they'll have more of their own content to add but for now, I hope that they keep the year-by-year stations as bizarre as they are right now. At the very least, they're doing much better than the Filter, a hip-music tracking aggregator that's also in beta and looks like it's running at least a couple of years behind the times.