Why does BioShock Infinite have 1980s pop songs in 1912?

Columbia, the floating city of BioShock Infinite, hangs in the sky in 1912. Its music does not. Stroll the boardwalks and you will hear a barbershop quartet harmonising the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" (1966), a parlour arrangement of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (1985), and period covers of "Tainted Love", Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun", and R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People" (1991).

The game explains itself. Columbia is pocked with dimensional tears, rips between worlds and times, and its resident music man, Albert Fink, can hear music through them. The songs he "composes" for the city are other decades' hits, overheard and passed off as his own work, a theft the game documents in its voxophone recordings.

On the production side, several of the anachronistic arrangements came from Scott Bradlee, later famous for Postmodern Jukebox, who sang one of them in what he called his best 1912 voice. The recordings were then run through period-style crackle, so the future arrives sounding like it was always there.