My Top 100, No. 37: "After All" by Cher and Peter Cetera

I apologize for the shocking thematic shift from The Roots to this.

As I've said before, there are songs on this list that I'm positive are objectively great, while others probably aren't that great, but I like them anyway. This is in the second camp.

"After All" is the first song I remember liking. It was on B101 in Philadelphia constantly when I was about three or four years old, and I mean constantly. I came to expect to hear it whenever I went anywhere in the car.
Then I forgot about it for about 20 years, until I decided to listen to it again on a whim, and you know what? It's not an awesome song. It's cheesy and synthified, and sung with complete earnestness, and it's a little hard to take solo Peter Cetera seriously in general.
The thing is, I don't know that in general terms, "After All" is any more cheesy than any of a billion other classic 1980s duets: "Up Where We Belong" or "Somewhere Out There" or "Total Eclipse of the Heart." And all of those are universally beloved, at least on an ironic level, so maybe I shouldn't feel weird about liking this song this much. There's nothing quite like a good slow dance song, and "After All" is as slow-dancey as it gets.