Stranger Things' Season 5 Soundtrack Brings This Iconic '70s Cover Back To Life

If you ever missed the chance to hear a pint-sized Michael Jackson sing "Tweedily-deedily-dee, tweedily-deedily-dee" in a song about a dancing bird, "Stranger Things" has got you covered. Building on Season 4's use of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and Metallica's "Master of Puppets," Season 5 has a whole gamut of notable tunes scooped from our bottomless, self-referential, nostalgia-glutted rabbit hole. This time we're talking about a 1958 song covered in 1972 and featured in a show set in the '80s that folks are watching in 2025. Whoa, whoa, whoa. 

The song in question, of course, is "Rockin' Robin," a 1958 Bobby Day song released way back when Elvis was at his peak. It spent a whopping 13 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached No. 2 under Tommy Edward's much less-remembered "It's All in the Game." We're not sure why a 13-year-old, post-Jackson Five Michael Jackson covered it on his 1972 debut album, "Got to Be There," though it does have some suitably kiddie, onomatopoeic animal sounds in it and an admittedly bangin' chorus. The instrumentation in Jackson's version features the same classic blues progression as the original, but it is revamped a bit for the '70s. 

Now, thanks to the magic of our collective pop cultural memory and the handiwork of "Stranger Things'" creators, the Duffer Brothers, we viewers get to have our generational heartstrings tugged again. We can't talk about spoilers, but we can tell you that Jackson's "Rockin' Robbin" makes an auditory appearance in Season 5, Episode 1 of "Stranger Things" alongside "Pretty in Pink" by The Psychedelic Furs, the aptly titled "Upside Down" by Diana Ross, and, you guessed it, "Running Up That Hill" yet again.  

Okay, we can tell you a bit about when and how Michael Jackson's 1972 cover of "Rockin' Robin" gets used in "Stranger Things" because it's a part of the show's official Netflix promotional material. We remember the character Robin, right? She's the ice cream gal who showed up in Season 3, played by Maya Hawke, daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. 

As we see in an official, three-minute YouTube clip, Robin plays the "Tweedily-deedily-dee, Tweedily-deedily-dee" opening from "Rockin' Robin" at the start of her radio show, which is a new thing for Season 5. Because her name is Robin. And she's rockin'. Get it? That's all you'll get from us, people. Just go ahead and watch the show before even more of the cast who are supposed to be playing teenagers reach their 30s. If you do, you'll get to hear lots more classic tunes from all decades, like "Mr. Sandman" by The Chordettes, "Fernando" by ABBA, and, in case you somehow missed it, "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush. Again.

And you know who also reached his 30s and made music across multiple decades? Michael Jackson. He hit 30 in 1988, the year after he released "Bad," also known for its Weird Al parody, "Fat" (we've had to rope Weird Al into this, somehow). No matter that the events of "Stranger Things" don't really synchronize perfectly with the '80s, and a song like "Bad" would've been way closer to what the characters listened to, we're going to give the show a pass to use a '70s Jackson track. It has the right to turn certain things upside down, after all.