High School Hits From The '70s That Make Us Cringe Now

The 1970s were a time when pop music exploded into numerous subgenres: Soft rock, arena rock, punk, new wave, bubblegum, disco, reggae, and more competed for ears and record store dollars. Though a wide range of ages determined what got on the radio and moved units, high school-age kids have always dictated what's hip, and they especially did in the 1970s. And with the whole decade now about 50 years in the rearview, it's safe to say that the decade gave us a lot of music that didn't age well.

As always, some songs that were considered totally groovy at the time just don't hold up. They were hits among the youth, but now they're just laughable, whether because they're cheesy, embarrassing, or just plain offensive. These are the songs that were played at school dances (both fast and slow ones), made a lot of headway on the radio, or appeared on the many TV variety and performance shows of the era geared toward a younger audience. Here are five such high school hits — ones that kids of the '70s loved that they'd probably be embarrassed to listen to today.

Culturally appropriating, if not downright casually racist, "Kung Fu Fighting" would never get airplay if it were released anytime after 1974, when it went to No. 1 on the pop chart. "Kung Fu Fighting" appealed to kids and teens because it wasn't just a bouncy, danceable disco bop — it was light and comical, too. The plot: A man talks of his martial arts exploits with plenty of ad libs and overexaggerated vocal expressions. But there's also a familiar, if dangerous, motif used in "Kung Fu Fighting" — what's become stereotypical and offensive "Asian" music. It sends shivers down one's spine to think about how it was apparently just fine to use that in a pop song as recently as the 1970s, particularly one that appealed to impressionable young people.

"Kung Fu Fighting" wasn't performed by an Asian musician, either. Carl Douglas was merely a non-Asian individual who hopped on the decade's Western fascination with martial arts pop culture. He often appeared on TV and in print wearing martial arts clothing as he kicked, jumped, and used the martial arts terminology that powered this song into a hit at dance clubs and school dances alike.

For a while in the late 1970s, the young people went wild for Leif Garrett (who also had a tragic real-life story). One of the notable teen idols of the time, he had many television appearances and five albums of pop-rock and dance music about subjects like love and romance. His music was more commodity than it was art, churned out to strike while the proverbial iron was hot. And in addition to overzealous and bombastic covers of well-known '60s hits "The Wanderer," "Runaround Sue," and "Surfin' USA," Garrett hit Billboard's Top 10 once with a brand new tune, "I Was Made for Dancin.'"

Today's adults who swooned over Garrett around 45 years ago will cringe at the mere idea of getting all hot and bothered over a song sung by a thin-voiced performer with very little enthusiasm. A mishmash of soft rock and disco without getting too mature, "I Was Made for Dancin'" is lyrically light, custom-built for the teeny-bopper market. Garrett rattles off barely coherent phrases like "You're such a crazy love, you tear me in two" and "turnin' round and round, nowhere to go / I've got to find out if you're feeling it, too." And then there's the chorus, which makes a whopping five appearances, with multiple choppy line deliveries stolen from the disco-era Bee Gees.

Unabashedly a work of manufactured dissent, "School's Out" was cynically devised to freak out the squares of 1972. Or more specifically, rile up their already bristling children and teens who didn't know any better and were just aching to get on the rebellion train that started in the late 1960s. "School's Out" is presented as a menacing rejection and repudiation of formal education — as if that's a bad thing. Its message is little more than "school sucks, right kids?" and it's delivered by singer Alice Cooper, a leather pants-wearing man in his mid-20s, way past school age. If that wasn't awkward enough, Cooper incorporates the old and annoying end-of-school schoolyard chant, "No more pencils / No more books / No more teachers' dirty looks," as sung by a children's choir so braying and off-key it hurts the ears. It's not nefarious — it's ridiculous.

Perhaps because it's buried under a shuffling groove of a drumbeat and some loud guitars that reside somewhere between light heavy metal and proto-punk, "School's Out" became an anthem of nonconformity even though it's anything but. Indeed, it was instantly accepted by polite society as a Billboard Top 10 hit. Even today, it still earns plenty of airtime on classic rock radio — a boring cliché played by DJs when school gets out for the summer each and every year.

This twangy, hooky, Southern rock stomper from a bunch of fully grown Michiganders hit No. 3 on the pop chart in 1973, and at the time, it must have sounded so irresistibly mischievous. "Smokin' in the Boys Room" by Brownsville Station is about a bunch of guys who can't be told what to do, so they all ditch class to break one of their school's most hallowed rules: No smoking. They gather in the place where they're afforded a modicum of privacy, the men's bathroom, and therein do they smoke (exactly what is left unsaid) with their good pals Sixx, Mick, and Tom.

In retrospect, "Smokin' in the Boys Room" is less a call to action against oppressive adults and more of a cigarette commercial. Attitudes about smoking, especially among the '70s youth generation, have changed. At best, it's a woefully mundane activity. At worst, it'll kill you. It's wild that in the early 1970s, there was a song about how smoking was a cool thing to do with friends and look tough. Such sentiments are likely to make former fans of this song roll their eyes at themselves. Besides, hanging around in a place full of well-used toilets isn't fun or rowdy — it's disgusting.

Disco was never high art. Musicians just wanted to make funky, catchy songs that were good for dancing. Thus the lyrics suffered, because nobody really cared about the words if the beat and melody were on point. In fact, disco tracks tended to be burdened with forgettable, silly, and downright dumb lyrics, often concerning disco or how dancing was a thing that felt good. There's no better example of that than "Boogie Oogie Oogie" by A Taste of Honey, which got the young people dancing in the late 1970s.

A '70s Grammy winner that fell victim to the best new artist curse, A Taste of Honey just didn't have what it took to make it in the long run. That's evident by the youthful and exuberant "Boogie Oogie Oogie," which spent three weeks at No. 1 in the fall of 1978. Listeners must not have paid attention to the words, or they didn't care, because they were clearly written in haste and with little care. That title rhymes "boogie," another word for dance, with the nonsense "oogie" not once but twice. That's the centerpiece of the chorus, which encourages dancers to dance. The verses in this instantly dated disco jam aren't much better, loaded with more entreaties to dance. Then for about the last third of the song, it's just the words "get down, boogie oogie oogie" repeated over and over. Clearly, A Taste of Honey just gave up at some point in the songwriting process.