If you think David Hasselhoff hasn’t added anything of worth to the world, aside from scarily ingrained images of him running along a beach in tiny red shorts in Baywatch, then it seems you could be wrong.
His late '80s hit Looking For Freedom has been named among the 10 most “world-changing” songs of all time.
The Hoff’s song, about a rich man's son who wants to make his own way in the world and which topped West Germany’s pop charts for eight weeks, has made it into the top 10 of Timeout magazine'sTop 100 Songs That Changed History.
The Timeout panel who voted for Hoff’s song, made up of 16 industry experts and Mercury nominee Katy B, explained the unlikely entry thus: “Looking for Freedom was at the top of the charts when West Berliners started chipping away at the wall.
“Hasselhoff was invited to perform to an audience in the hundreds of thousands from atop the partially-demolished Cold War icon on New Year’s Eve 1989, officially the most optimistic night in history.
“The mood must have had a permanent effect on The Hoff’s brain, as to this day he’s convinced he is largely responsible for the eastward spread of democracy. The only reason this song isn’t at number one on this list is a sneaking suspicion on our part that Hasselhoff may be mistaken.”
Public Enemy’s Fight the Power was chosen as the number one world-changing song, followed by Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?
Time Out’s Music Editor Eddy Lawrence said of the choice; “Subtlety and nuance are great qualities. Public Enemy's Chuck D had them in spades: he was a man so professor-like, he needed playful sprite Flavor Flav just to remind people to occasionally have fun.
“Subtlety and nuance don't change the world, however. Fight the Power was incendiary because it was brutally explicit and unequivocal. What makes this our number one, is that it transcended its locality and became a call to action around the world: in Ireland, in Serbia, along the fault lines of the crumbling Soviet bloc and beyond.”
WATCH the top ten songs' music videos in our slideshow below…