Stumbling across Orkestra Obsolete‘s hauntingly awesome (hauntsome?) cover of Blue Monday the other day led me into one of those internet rabbit holes.

You know the kind. You start off clicking off on a link about the recent extinction of bees and six hours later you come to and the lights have been turned off, the sun has descended, you smell funny, and your screen is covered in open tabs on everything from UFO conspiracy theories to the pollenation patterns of South Australian cacti.

TVTropes is lousy for this stuff, as I’ve mentioned before. But YouTube is pretty horrendous for it as well.

Anyway, it was Orkestra Obsolete‘s video yesterday (and Glenavailable’s comment) that put me in mind of the meta-retro soundtrack of BioShock Infinite, featuring such gems as Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, REM’s Shiny Happy People, and Tears for Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World (my personal favorite). These iconic tracks were re-recorded in the style of the early twentieth century, and they are brilliant, making an already excellent game that much more memorable.

So I was re-listening to some of those tracks and that’s when the bottom of the rabbit hole dropped out from under me, because that’s when I discovered PostModern Jukebox. (Turns out that the guy who does the piano on those BioShock tracks started this group.)

How have I been living my life and not knowing about this? They take the best (and worst) pop music of the last couple decades and fling it back in time to the era of lounge lizards and doo-wop girls and … well.

It’s awesome.

If you’re not familiar, you owe it to yourself to go check it out.

Here’s one of my all-time favorite songs, which is now even more all-time favoritey:

And if you were already familiar, you owe me a fargoing explanation for not cluing me in to this before now.

YOU’RE WELCOME.