[264/365] first favorite song

I really love this.

I’ve long been fascinated by people’s first favorite songs. Not songs made for children, or the kinds of songs we self-consciously broadcast our allegiance to after we’ve developed the filters of taste, personal identity and critical perspective. I’m talking about those early formative encounters with the vast world of popular culture — the initial, primeval jolt that this song is somehow more special than the rest.

While I spent my teenage years being mortified of my terminally-uncool first favorite song, I find it as defensible now as I did when I was three years old. So I don't have much to say about it, and what I do have is about the song, it's much more fun if it's about the listener, as this is because they're sheepish about the song, which they describe in many wonderful ways ("notorious, wildly mystifying 1989 U.S.-history-lesson-on-Adderall") but my favorite is

More than anything, though, I am amazed that all the way back in 1989 Joel somehow managed to predict the precise, decontextualized mania that I feel when I’ve spent too long on the internet.

My first favorite song was "Born in the U.S.A." I could pick out the record before I could read any of the words on it, and carefully put it on the turntable without touching the grooves, as my dad had taught me. I recorded it onto a more accessible cassette tape by putting the microphone of my Fisher-Price recorder up next to the speakers of the Radio Shack Clarinette stereo in the living room and keeping very quiet, like it was a religious experience.

Like I say I spent my teenage years (the time of "Streets of Philadelphia" and that song from Jerry Maguire) in shame at ever having liked Bruce Springsteen, but I snapped out of it by the time of Ghost of Tom Joad. But what fun is it having a respectable song when I could have something that inspires the kind of introspection that "We Didn't Start the Fire" does in this person?

Do you have a similar "first favorite" song you liked as a small kid?