Pop songs that mention Superman

[Kat]

I’ll add Don Williams I Believe in You to the list, although it’s not exactly “pop”:

I don’t believe virginity,
Is as common as it used to be.
In working days and sleeping nights,
That black is black and white is white.
That Superman and Robin Hood,
Are still alive in Hollywood.
That gasoline’s in short supply,
The rising cost of getting by.

[Ellis_Aponte_Jr]

Dung Beetle, the disco one you mention is “Superman” by Celi Bee & the Buzzy Bunch (1977).

[jayjay]

@Voyager

Julie Brown had a song “I like them Strong and Stupid” with a line

The kind of guy who’s right for me
Superman with a lobotomy

(not sure of the first line, but am of the second. )

“I Like Them BIG and Stupid”, actually.

What kind of guy does a lot for me?
A Superman with a lobotomy
My fathers outa Harvard
My brothers outa Yale
But the guy I took home last night
Just got outa jail.

[Sublight]

The Kinks: (Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman

David Bowie: The Superman (although this Superman is more Nietzsche/Shaw than Siegel)

[Dung_Beetle]

@Ellis Aponte Jr.

Dung Beetle, the disco one you mention is “Superman” by Celi Bee & the Buzzy Bunch (1977).

Thank you! I was really hoping someone would come along and confirm that I didn’t imagine that.

[gredbioz]

Take off the blazer, loosen up the tie
Step inside the booth, Superman is alive

• Jay-Z, from “Kingdom Come” the title track from his new album.

The song and album are named for a Superman comic.

[Shoeless]

@Lochdale

What about Genisis’ the Carpet Crawlers? Doesn’t it mention kryptonite?

“Mild mannered supermen
Are held in kryptonite
And the wise and foolish virgins giggle
With their bodies glowing bright”

[Asylum]

Not mentioned so far, or on the website Atomic Dog linked to. Maybe that’s because Superman’s not mentioned by name in the song, but check out the third line. That’s definitely a reference to Superman.

Matchbox 20, Real World
I wonder what its like to be a super hero
I wonder where I’d go if I could fly around downtown
From some other planet, I get this funky high from a yellow sun
Boy I bet my friends will all be stunned, they’re stunned

[Sam_Stone]

Eminem, Superman:

*You know you want me baby
You know I want you too
They call me Superman
I’m here to rescue you
I wanna save you girl
Come be in shady’s world… *

It goes very downhill from there.

[Thudlow_Boink]

Tangentially related: “Brainiac’s Daughter” by the Dukes of Stratosphear

[Rilchiam]

@mobo85

There’s an old legend that says if you play the end of Sergeant Pepper’s backwards, you can hear the Beatles saying “We’ll fuck you like Superman,”

Not quite.

And the famous “Inner Groove” - the snippet of pointless conversation that sticks in the album’s run-out groove and that was not included in the original American version of “Sgt. Pepper” - has an equally zany genesis. Around the time of Sgt. Pepper’s release, McCartney explains, “a lot of record players didn’t have auto-change. You would play an album and it would go, ‘Tick, tick, tick,’ in the run-out groove - it would just stay there endlessly. We were whacked out so much of the time in the Sixties - just quite harmlessly, as we thought, it was quite innocent - but you would be at friends’ houses, twelve at night, and nobody would be going to get up to change that record player. So we’d be getting into the little ‘tick, tick, tick,’: ‘It’s quite good, you know? There’s a rhythm there.’ We were into Cage and Stockhausen, those kind of people. Obviously, once you allow yourself that kind of freedom . . . well, Cage is appreciating silence, isn’t he? We were appreciating the run-out groove! We said, ‘What if we put something, so that every time it did that, it said something?’ So we put a little loop of conversation on.”

I’ve heard it on Rarities. Doesn’t sound like anything except party noise, IMO, but I have heard people give the “Superman” translation.

[Monstera_deliciosa]

@Jackknifed Juggernaut

The first rap song I ever liked when I was just a kid featured Superman:

Jam On It by Newcleus

<snip>
We rocked this bet with a 12 inch cut called Disco Kryptonite

That would be “We rocked his butt with a 12 inch cut…”

I wasn’t a kid, but I loved that jam too.

[Kat]

Kenny Rogers has a new song out titled “The Last Ten Years (Superman)”:

@Kenny Rogers

We lost Charlie Brown, Ray Charles an’ Johnny Cash
We even lost Superman, mhm.

[mobo85]

@Rilchiam

Not quite.

Well, I’m not saying that’s what it really is. I think I read in an old Rolling Stone interview that one of the Beatles (Paul, perhaps?) listened to it after hearing the rumor and was surprised that it did sound like that!

[Rilchiam]

Okay, but you still don’t have to play it backwards, is all.

[Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew]

@Rilchiam

Okay, but you still don’t have to play it backwards, is all.

You do if you want to hear what supposedly sounds like “We’ll fuck you like supermen.” (I heard this done on a radio special once, and it requires about the same amount of wishful thinking as hearing “Number nine” backwards as “Turn me on dead man.”) Forwards it sounds like “I never do see any other way.”

[JThunder]

Used to Be by Stevie Wonder and Charlene. It contained the line, “Superman was killed in Dallas,” which was a reference to JFK.

[Horatio_Hellpop]

I wanted to find info about the theme song to Scrubs, but apparently there are at least a dozen songs (mostly rap) with the lyric “I’m not Superman.”

Oh, also: “Sunshine Superman” by Donovan.

[Kat]

According to IMDB, the main theme for Scrubs is titled Superman and was written and performed by Lazlo Bane.

[Chance_the_Gardener]

In Der Fuhrer’s Face by Spike Jones and his City Slickers, a choir of brownshirts sings:

Are ve not der supermen?
Aryan pure supermen?
Ja, ve ist der supermen!
Super-duper-supermen!

It’s not really a reference to Superman but rather to Hitler’s “master race” nonsense, but wasn’t it Nietzche who first wrote about the superman in the first place? And wasn’t that the same source material for Nazism and the name of the superhero? Or am I off track here?