Are songs timeless?

I think you have to look at the idea of timelessness from two perspectives at once: time experienced and time awareness. I've only experienced 44 years, but as a classically trained musician I'm aware of music from hundreds of years before my birth.

Certain collections of musical concepts can be considered "Timeless" insofar as we human sorts are concerned because they correspond to set specific cause/effect reactions within the general populace. Consonant chords and progressions tend to make your average person feel a certain way. Dissonant tend to make you feel another way. Major and minor progressions tend to have pretty similar effects regardless of the society or time period involved. Both a mass written in D-minor and a minor key blues tune will make you feel differently than something written in a major key.

You also have to take into account the impact lyrics (especially since we're talking *songs* here) have on the average person. Certain lyrical concepts tend to have near-universal relevance to the listeners, again...regardless of who listens or when it's listened to. As such....someone from one age of man can likely understand and appreciate something from another when it speaks of a subject that is relevant to the listener.

So....having said all that, I think that songs can be timeless, but most are not simply because the vast majority of people are really only aware of relevance within the time they've lived. It takes a special combination of melody, chord progression, musical arrangement, lyric structure and content, voice and performance to bring a song out of the social milieu of the time period it was created in and still be considered relevant in a later period.

I suppose a minor corollary to that idea would be that a song becomes "timeless" when you bring it out of the original setting (your youth, say) and assign it an importance through the later ages of your life. But that's really more an individual judgement rather than a social or historical or cultural one.

Every Rose Has Its Thorn is a timeless classic. Bret Micheals said so himself, so it must be true.

Tone Loc's Funky Cold Medina is timeless for me so I think this thread and discusssion is over.

Mr. Shane McGowan and Ms. Kirsty MacColl disagree with you.

Listen to Springsteen's Seeger Sessions and I think the answer will be revealed to you.

Very true. That's one of the best Christmas songs of all time.