30 Day Song Challenge, Day 16: A Song You Used To Love But Now Hate

This was hard. There are plenty of songs I used to like but now don’t like as much, or feel generally indifferent toward…but HATE? Actually, the first 45 single I ever owned all to myself, so probably the first song I really loved, I now HATE that song. It was:

Greatest American Hero Theme Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4JCehDOy54

So, I must have been four or five when I got this record. Well, when my parents got me this record. I played it on my Fisher Price turntable (which still sits on my shelf in my home office, below some papers). Greatest American Hero was a TV show that aired originally the early 1980s. It was about a schoolteacher who was given a superpower-granting suit (which I now know has a phi on the front, probably bc he’s a teacher, so the phi represents knowledge or wisdom or, you know, the love of wisdom or something); the catch was, he lost the instructions for the suit and its powers. So it was a comedy about a bumbly teacher-superhero. And I LOVED it. (I was really, really into superheroes when I was young. There was an animated Spiderman series on when I was around that age, and I was seriously seriously into Spidey.) My fandom of the show is probably why my parents bought me the 45 (at…Sears? or Gold Circle? or Van Lunens?). I remember putting the record player on the couch and dancing around the living room to this song.
The song is totally typical of the lite pop/rock of its era: there’s some country influence in there (the guitar after the bridge, for example), there’s a lot of strings, it’s standard VCVCBCC-y in structure. When I listen to it now it just feels…mediocre and dated. Also, you know, since I’ve listened to  A LOT of music in the last…32 years, my tastes have evolved and I’ve started to be choosier about what I like and don’t like. I would guess that back as a kid, this song was just what was around all the time, so it was what was familiar, so it was what I liked.

Runners Up: Monty Phython, “Philosopher’s Song” (in high school this was funny; as a professional philosopher, this is ugh too much like work/all the eyeroll in the world); Course of Empire, “Infested” (Darwin Goodwin Remix) (this was part of that 90s swing-rock revival).