Hip-hop producer Devo Springsteen was once asked why he had sampled Nina Simone’s 1965 recording of the song “Strange Fruit” instead of Billie Holiday’s 1939 rendition. “Because of the rawness of her voice,” he said. “There is something really black about her voice. And when you are trying to make black music, there’s not a much blacker voice than Nina Simone.”

Twenty-two-year-old critic Richard Goldstein savaged the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in a New York Times review when the album was released in 1967, calling it “busy, hip, and cluttered.” He later admitted the stereo he’d heard it on had a busted left speaker, but he remained unapologetic: “What can I say? If you’re not embarrassed by your youth, what good are you?”

In 2009 a twenty-four-year-old policewoman in Long Branch, New Jersey, responded to complaints about an “eccentric-looking old man” peering into a house. She asked the man his name. “I’m Bob Dylan,” he said. “I’m on tour.” Taking him for a liar, she put him in the back of her car and drove him to his hotel, where others confirmed he really was the musician. “I think he named a couple of songs,” she later recalled. “But I wouldn’t have known any of the songs.”

Hoping to encourage hostages held by FARC during Colombia’s civil war, state negotiators commissioned a local producer in 2010 to create a pop song embedded with a Morse-code message and had it broadcast repeatedly on the radio in rebel-controlled areas. After the lyrics “Listen to this message, brother,” the code sounded as a synth interlude: “Nineteen people rescued. You are next. Don’t lose hope.”