So what say ye? What hit songs from "back in the day" were actually really terrible songs? For the purposes of this thread, I'm defining a "hit" as a song that reached the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 or other national or regional chart, so a terrible song that flopped everywhere wouldn't count, as I'm sure this thread would become a never-ending game of songs nobody's heard of in that case.
Here are some of my picks:
- Starland Vocal Band - Afternoon Delight (released 1976; chart #1, 1976). I don't like sex songs in general, and this one is particularly unsexy and bland to begin with. I knew from the first time I heard this one that I didn't like it.
- Rupert Holmes - Escape (released 1979; chart #1, 1980). This is the song that goes "if you like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain..." and goes on for four and a half minutes with a morally corrupt story in which the male narrator is bored of his relationship, so he's reading the classified ads section of the newspaper one night, comes across one he likes, meets the person the next day, and discovers it's his own girlfriend. And instead of any confrontation or shock or anything, it's as though nothing happened as the chorus repeats with the guitar track in the background, which sounds like a music bit rejected from the game Wii Sports Resort anyway.
- REO Speedwagon - Can't Fight This Feeling (released 1984; chart #1, 1985). Overly sappy ballad that takes three minutes to go anywhere, in which the narrator comes across seeming like a user anyway. The song should reasonably be two minutes or so given its two-verse, two-chorus structure, but it comes out to almost five, and there were already plenty of other really bad sappy ballads on the charts in the 80s too.
