Atlantic Coast Entertainment
Professional Disc Jockeys
50 Worst Songs
Atlantic Coast EntertainmentProfessional Disc Jockeys50 Worst Songs
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Run for your Life! It's the 50 Worst Songs Ever!An Article from Blender.com By John Aizlewood, Clark Collis, Steve Kandell, Ben Mitchell, Tony Power, James Slaughter, Rob Tannenbaum, Mim Udovitch, Rene Vienet and Jonah Weiner 50. CÉLINE DION “My Heart Will Go On” 1998 And on and on and on… Worst Moment The third chorus, where she goes from soft to
eye-bleedingly loud. 49. RIGHT SAID FRED “I’m Too Sexy” 1992 The answer to Spinal Tap’s question “What’s wrong
with being sexy?” Right Said Fred were horrible, bald novelty Brits whose one
claim to fame was a song that announced that they were “too sexy” for most
things, from “New York” to “my cat.” Alas, singer Richard Fairbrass
resembled Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett, and was therefore “too sexy” for
precisely nothing. The song spawned a welter of grating catchphrases starting
with “I’m too sexy” repeated endlessly by annoying people: “I’m too
sexy for my tractor,” etc. Disturbingly, the Freds, as nobody calls them, are
still going. Worst Moment The so-called chorus, in which, instead of
mumbling, Fairbrass tries to sing. Stop it. Stop it now! 48.THE BEATLES “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” 1968 You can practically hear them gritting their teeth The Beatles proved conclusively that there were two things
they could not do: play reggae and feign enjoyment. “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” was
a ska track recorded at a point during the White Album sessions when the Beatles
would happily have beaten one another to death if only they had had some clubs
on hand. As a result, this sounds less like reggae than the desperately chirpy
songs Cockneys used to sing to keep their spirits up while the Luftwaffe rained
death on them during the Blitz. Worst Moment The woefully unconvincing laughter in the
final line: “If you want some fun — heh-heh-heh-heh! — take ob-la-di-bla-da!" 47. BRYAN ADAMS “The Only Thing That Looks Good on Me Is You” 1996 It’s Great-Uncle Disgusting — from Canada! When Adams chose to do sexy after 15 years of chaste,
aw-shucks rockin’, even his fans were stunned — as if they’d just seen a
stag film starring Richie Cunningham. “I don’t look good in no Armani
suits,” he leered in the song’s only believable moment, before suggesting
he’d rather “wear” the song’s female protagonist over a blues riff like
someone explaining ZZ Top to an accountant. This wasn’t the creepiest track
off his album 18 Til I Die; that accolade goes to a song called “(I Wanna Be)
Your Underwear.” Worst Moment “…There’s only one thing that fits me
like it should.” Ick. 46. NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK “Hangin’ Tough” 1989 Boy-band blueprint! It sucked the Swing out of New Jack, bleached the Blues out
of Rhythm &, and featured white boys calling themselves “funky” despite
some very unfunky denim vests. This Boston quintet triggered a hormonal rush
among 13-year-old girls and intense confusion among their boyfriends, and paved
the way for megaselling boy bands who ran low on talent and high on dumb hats.
This 1988 hit was all crossed arms and scowls, but the tuff-guy routine didn’t
gel: These nancy boys make the Sharks and Jets look like G-Unit. Worst Moment The boys warn: “Don’t cross our path or
you’re gonna get stomped!” Scary! 45. JA RULE FEAT. ASHANTI “Mesmerize” 2002 The most hated man in hip-hop — for good reason! Many rappers sing poorly, but none as irritatingly as
Jeffrey Atkins. In 2001, he went from a raise-da-roof club grunter who treated
women like car doors to a tone-deaf warbler who swore he worshiped them — and
cried in his videos to prove it. On this 2002 duet with the reliably transparent
Ashanti, he can’t contain his horny side, repeating a cracked-voiced mantra
about “Your lips/Your smile/Your hips/Those thighs” and admitting his
“fetish for &$#%ing you with your skirt on.” Gains points for honesty;
loses many more for coming off like an ogling doofus. Worst Moment The two-note chorus, which is a laundry list
of female body parts. 44. MEAT LOAF “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” 1993 Bitch-titted balladeer seeks dictionary Forget that this song comes from Bat Out of Hell II: Back
Into Hell and that pop albums can’t really have sequels. Forget that it’s 12
minutes — and crammed with pianos, choirs and every over-the-top adornment
that producer Jim Steinman could get his hands on, it feels twice that length.
No, this epic chunk of histrionics’ worst offense is that it doesn’t make
any sense. You wouldn’t do what, exactly? It’s OK for rock songs to be dumb.
But not stupid. Worst Moment Shamelessly aping “Paradise by the Dashboard
Light,” the boy-girl duet kicks in at around the nine-minute mark. 43. UNCLE KRACKER “Follow Me” 2000 Sleaze-rap DJ goes solo, blows like Hootie Breaking out on his own, the leading light of Kid Rock’s
“Detroit playas” reneges on his boss’s promise to “cause chaos” and
“rock like Amadeus.” He does, however, cause nausea and rock like Muzak with
his nobody-saw-it-coming lite-FM stylings, hummin’, strummin’ and
practically promisin’ to tuck you in at night. The unexpected bonus? It gives
hope to everyone awaiting the Terminator X collection of Air Supply covers. Worst Moment Knowing every rhyme before it happens — the
first time you hear the song. 42. SIMON & GARFUNKEL “The Sounds of Silence” 1965 If Frasier Crane were a song, he would sound like this From the terrible opening line, in which darkness is
addressed as “my old friend,” the lyrics of “The Sounds of Silence”
sound like a vicious parody of a pompous and pretentious mid-’60s folk singer.
But it’s no joke: While a rock band twangs aimlessly in the middle distance,
Simon & Garfunkel thunder away in voices that suggest they’re scowling and
wagging their fingers as they sing. The overall experience is like being
lectured on the meaning of life by a jumped-up freshman. Worst Moment “Hear my words that I might teach you”:
Officially the most self-important line in rock history! 41. BILLY JOEL “We Didn’t Start the Fire” 1989 Can you fit a cultural history of the twentieth century
into four minutes? Uh, no Despite its bombastic production, “We Didn’t Start the
Fire” resembles a term paper scribbled the night before it’s due. As the
song progresses, Joel audibly realizes he can’t cram it all in: The ’70s get
four bellowed words amid the widdly-woo guitars and meet-thy-maker drums. The
chorus denies responsibility for any events mentioned, clearing up the common
misconception that Billy Joel developed the H-bomb. Worst Moment “China’s under martial law, rock &
roller cola wars!”: No way does conflating Tiananmen Square with Michael
Jackson selling Pepsi trivialize a massacre. 40. COLOR ME BADD “I Wanna Sex You Up” 1991 Small-penis alert! These Oklahoma R&B smoothies looked like rejects from a
Benetton ad and sounded like flunkies from the Keith Sweat School of Horny Jamz.
This is one long string of fake falsetto moans — there’s more heat in an
Herbal Essences commercial — and the imagery ranges from perplexing (“We can
do it till we both wake up”) to downright unpleasant (“Makin’ love until
we drown”). Not recommended for the bedroom, unless your bedroom also features
leopard-print picture frames, mirrored ceilings and a five-gallon tub of
Astroglide from Costco. Worst Moment Toward the end, la-la-la’s creep in under
whispered phrases like “Lay back and enjoy the ride.” 39. RICKY MARTIN “She Bangs” 2000 La vida proves not to be so loca after all The arrangers of Ricky Martin’s follow-up to “La Vida
Loca” worked with the fevered desperation of men who had been driven to the
desert and made to dig their own graves at gunpoint: first with the hooting
180-piece horn section, then the percussion played by a crateful of
ADD-afflicted chimpanzees, and — finally, in a last-ditch effort at the fade
— a male chorus as numerous and frenzied as the Red Army Choir let loose in a
Cuban whorehouse. The ingredients of its epic predecessor are all here — but
it’s all wrong, and worse still, unintentionally hilarious. Worst Moment “She looks like a flower but she stings like
a bee/Like every girl in his-to-ry!” 38. REDNEX “Cotton Eye Joe” 1995 Just what the world needed: a Swedish techno-bluegrass
crossover Novelty European techno is not a genre noted for its
multitude of artistic high points, but “Cotton Eye Joe” may well be its
nadir. A Country & Western record made by people who evidently hate C&W
music with every fiber of their being, it layers a thumping beat with every
hillbilly cliché known to man — twanging Jew’s harp, people shouting “yee-haw!”,
bluegrass banjo, horses neighing — and then tops it off with a vocalist
singing in what may be the most risible American accent ever committed to tape. Worst Moment Rednex have spent more weeks at number 1 in
Germany than any other artist of the last 25 years. 37. GERARDO “Rico Suave” 1991 He was Vanilla Ice for the Telemundo set Long before Ricky Martin lived la vida loca, another
fleet-footed, sexually ambiguous Latino star crossed over to pop-chart glory by
turning an otherwise forgettable dance-pop tune into a ubiquitous and dreaded
catchphrase. In the verses, this Don Juan in a bandanna boasted about his
insatiable libido over a cheesy Casiotone beat, but it’s the chorus that
really sticks in our cabeza: Reeeeeeeco. Suuaaaaaave. No es bueno. Worst Moment Nothing brings a dance floor to a screeching
halt like the line “I’m used to good ol’-fashioned homestyle Spanish
cooking/If I try that, I’ll be puking.” 36. MASTER P FEAT. SILKK, FIEND, MIA-X AND MYSTIKAL “Make Em Say Uhh!” 1998 Cristal meets constipation! A lot of ideas occur to people in the shower, but the hook
for this Dirty South smash sounds as though someone thought it up on the toilet
during a strenuous bowel movement: Master P and a small army of cronies groan
“Unnngghhh” no fewer than 25 (!) times here. Rapping, P mumbles, falls
behind an already wooden beat and is generally trounced by the phenomenally
speedy Mystikal, who tries to pump some crunk back into the sinking ship with an
eleventh-hour guest verse. Worst Moment Each hook, which sounds like the “before”
section of an Ex-Lax ad. 35. R.E.M. “Shiny Happy People” 1991 What were they thinking? It’s difficult to imagine the circumstances that led
R.E.M. — intelligent, literate, subtle even when rocking out — to record
this. Not only is “Shiny Happy People” an annoying song, but you also get
the distinct sense that it’s going out of its way to annoy you. What other
explanation is there for its riff — which sounds like a cellphone ring tone
chosen by a sociopath — or its lyrics, which resemble something you would
force children to learn as a punishment, or the backing vocals of B-52 Kate
Pierson, which defy rational description? Worst Moment “Throw your love around, take it into town,
put it in the ground, where the flowers grow.” 34. DAN FOGELBERG “Longer” 1979 Dear Mr. Fogelberg: Why not consider a stage name? Having trouble placing this song? Imagine you’re in a
dentist’s chair with a 10-inch steel drill about to bore into your molars when
this Muzak classic pipes in through the office speakers. The singer sounds like
he could be your patchouli-scented sixth-grade history teacher, whispering
politely about being in love with you longer than there have been fish in the
ocean, higher than any bird ever flew. Then the violins kick in. Then you pray
for the sweet, sweet relief of the drill. Worst Moment Any musician who uses the phrase forest
primeval with a straight face must be stopped. 33. AQUA “Barbie Girl” 1997 Scandi-wegian pedo-pop alert! Erk! Brilliant idea: Take a child’s toy, turn it into a
twisted sexual fantasy (“Kiss me here, touch me there”), set it to
teeth-rotting synth-pop like a robot pony kicking children to death and hawk it
like Happy Meals to the under-13s. Perhaps the gambit sounded acceptable in
helium-huffing singer Lene Nystrøm’s native Norwegian, but in English it’s
just plain wrong. Barbie manufacturer Mattel sued, but that didn’t stop
“Barbie Girl” from casting a blight on 1997. One question sprang to mind if
you were unlucky enough to catch the video: Weren’t they a little old to be
doing this? Worst Moment “Rapper” René Dif’s basso profundo
“Come on, Barbie, let’s go party.” 32. WILL SMITH On New Year’s Eve, the Fresh Prince
drops the ball In 1999, the incoming millennium sent most rappers into
doomsday mode, but not Will Smith. He was writing a celebration jam so wildly
dorky it makes your local bar mitzvah DJ look like a member of the Strokes.
Having jumped from ’hood to Hollywood, Smith can’t make the return trip: His
overearnest, G-rated rhymes about fun bob along to an unlikely “Rock the
Casbah” sample — you can practically see Joe Strummer wondering if he came
to the right party and inching toward the exit. Worst Moment In the running for the Worst Pun Ever award, Smith raps, “The new millennium — excuse me, Will-ennium.” 31. CRASH TEST DUMMIES “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” 1994 The worst hum in music ever You know that jerk at your office who can burp the
alphabet? That’s the way Brad Roberts sings. On this 1994 single, his voice is
a ludicrously bassy croak as he narrates supposed “slice-of-life” stories
that land with a dull thud: A car hits one kid and turns his hair white;
another’s covered in birthmarks; the last has genuflecting, churchgoing
parents. Sure, white hair’s weird and evangelicals are weirder, but why are
you telling us this? Moreover, why do you insist on humming the chorus? You
sound like E.T. crossed with Barry White, dude! Worst Moment Any time Roberts sings a vowel. 30. WHITNEY HOUSTON “Greatest Love Of All” 1986 “Sexual chocolate!” Immortalized by Eddie Murphy’s lascivious funk band in
Coming to America, this heartrending über-ballad is still best known as Whitney
Houston’s career zenith, before the marriage and the drugs took hold. Backed
by a piano and what may or may not be a high-school symphony, Whit is at her
proto-Mariah overexuding best, belting out platitudes about the joys of loving
oneself above all others. Truly an anthem for the ’80s. Worst Moment Picture a whacked-out Whitney and Bobby
staggering through Israel in his-n’-hers prayer robes, then listen to the
climactic line, “They can’t take away my dignity.” 29. DEEP BLUE SOMETHING “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” 1995 So bland, you can actually forget you’re listening to
music while it’s playing Less a song than an experiment to see how mundane college
rock can become before it ceases to exist altogether. Texas’s Deep Blue
Something matched frantic acoustic guitars to a perky melody and a lyric that
re-creates the experience of being cornered at a party by a stranger who insists
on telling you his romantic problems in excruciating detail: “So I said.…She
said.…And I said.…” Worst Moment Has there ever been a more boring line in a
song than “And as I recall, I think we both kinda liked it?” 28. JOHN MAYER “Your Body is a Wonderland” 2001 Get this man a cold shower “Ohhh,” the women of the world sigh, “why can’t I
just find a nice guy — you know, someone who’ll compare my breasts to a
theme park?” Yearn no more, ladies! Drool never sounded as sweet as it does on
this slow-stirred ode to daytime sex — but even from the otherwise charming
Mayer, it’s still drool. What’s more, sunny acoustic guitars belie some
creepy undertones: When Mayer rasps “Discover me discovering you” and
“I’ll use my hands,” it sounds as though he’s sitting in a dark room,
playing pocket pool to a camera he planted in the women’s lavatory. Worst Moment Mayer describes the “deep sea of blankets” on his bed. Ewww! 27. EUROPE “The Final Countdown” 1987 The worst thing to come from both the band and the
continent itself Eschewing such traditional hair-metal concerns as
girl-chasing and “steel horse”–riding, this Rocky 4 theme from the poodle-permed
Swedes found frontman Joey Tempest announcing that he was off to Venus, “
’cause maybe they’ve seen us!” — proof that English lyrics are best
written by people with a working knowledge of the language. Tempest’s
nonsensical caterwauling was backed by music that somehow managed to be fascist
in its bombast yet also coma-inducingly dull. Worst Moment The synth trills remind us that before they
were a crappy metal band, Europe were a crappy prog-rock band. 26. THE DOORS “The End” 1967 The most pretentious rock star’s most pretentious song Bombastic? Lugubrious? Sounds like it was recorded in a
large metal shipping container and mixed by drunks? It must be a Doors song!
Painful in so many ways, “The End,” for starters, has none. (OK, it’s 11
minutes and 45 seconds long.) Over anemic jazz noodling, Jim Morrison intones
lyrics that would make the kid wearing the pentagram T-shirt in the back row of
homeroom blush with shame. For example: “Father…I want to kill
you/Mother…I want to unh-grblgrauauauauaugh!” Worst Moment According to online lyrics guides, that last
vocal eruption actually contains the words that constitute the most appropriate
response to the song: &$#% you. 25. PUFF DADDY FEAT. FAITH EVANS AND 112 “I’ll Be Missing You” 1997 …and your platinum-selling albums. Sob! A little over three months after the tragic shooting of his
best friend, the Notorious B.I.G., a distraught Puffy Combs channeled his grief
into “I’ll Be Missing You,” a nauseating brew of gloopy sentimentality and
strategic-marketing mawkishness. Opportunistic? Perhaps. But how very
therapeutic it must have been for Puffy to have this memorial to his departed
chum spend 11 weeks at number 1. Worst Moment The mumbling insincerity of the spoken-word intro: “I saw your son today.…He looked just like you.” 24. FIVE FOR FIGHTING “Superman” 2000 Musical kryptonite In the chaotic days following 9/11, people were grasping at
whatever they could find for comfort. But perhaps nothing shows how out of sorts
America was than the ascendance of this turgid ballad by once-and-future-unknown
John Ondrasik as this grieving nation’s unofficial anthem. Maybe it was the
sensitive-guy lyrics (“Even heroes have the right to bleed”) delivered over
Billy Joel–lite piano noodling that soothed America’s frazzled nerves. But
if this man is allowed to continue recording, then surely the terrorists have
won. Worst Moment Those falsetto notes in the chorus are enough to bring Osama bin Laden and Lex Luthor to their knees. 23. COREY HART “Sunglasses At Night” 1984 If you look up one-hit wonder in the dictionary, this is
what you’ll find Over a keyboard riff that sounds more than a little like
that of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” the brooding Quebecois Hart
mugged worse than Derek Zoolander as he extolled the virtues of going incognito.
With its lack of anything resembling a human being playing an instrument, this
is disposable synth-pop at its most bubblegum. Worst Moment The chorus, in which Hart warns, “Don’t
switch a blade on the guy in shades, oh, no,” was an attempt at tough-guy
posing, but it made him sound like the musical equivalent of Judd Nelson in The
Breakfast Club. That is, not very tough at all. 22. TOBY KEITH “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” 2002 Oklahoma redneck runs for office on Hate ticket Outraged by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Toby Keith enlisted
in the Air Force — no, sorry, he wrote a fight anthem so vengeful, it makes
“The Star-Spangled Banner” sound like “Give Peace a Chance.” Though
right-wing radio hosts and politicians called him a hero, Keith (who hadn’t
had a hit in years) moaned, “It sucks ass that I have to defend myself for
being patriotic.” Wrong. You have to defend yourself for celebrating violence
and bloodlust. Worst Moment“We’ll put a boot in your ass; it’s the
American way,” Keith sings, mistaking revenge for ideals of liberty. 21. SPIN DOCTORS “Two Princes” 1992 This is what happens when jam bands go pop It’s obviously unfair to dislike a song because of the
appearance of the band that recorded it. Yet the very sound of “Two Princes”
evokes the way the Spin Doctors looked. With its riff repeated long past
endurance, dopey lyrics and abominable vocal scatting, it could only have been
the work of scrabbly beared, questionably hatted, red-eyed stoners staggering
out of the rehearsal room convinced they have discovered the missing link
between grunge, the Grateful Dead and Jamiroquai — blissfully unaware that no
one in his right mind was looking for that in the first place. Worst Moment “Dit-dit-dit!
Dit-dit-dit-a-dobba-dobba-dobba dobba!” 20. LIONEL RICHIE “Dancing On The Ceiling” 1986 The world’s least convincing party song Sounding suspiciously as if it was written in order to fit
a video treatment rather than the other way around, this dispiritingly unfunky
celebration appears literally to be about dancing on a ceiling — “People
starting to climb the walls.…The only thing we want to do tonight is go round
and round and turn upside down.” Even more troubling is the thought that in
the ’80s, this rancidly thin stew of AOR dynamics and curiously Rick Wakeman–ish
keyboards was Motown’s idea of a hot party record. Worst Moment The fake party ambience, clearly the work of
bored studio employees forced to whoop and cheer. 19. MR. MISTER “Broken Wings” 1985 The thoroughly nasty sound of yuppie angst “Broken Wings” is primarily annoying not for its
anodyne mid-’80s production, nor for its lyrics, which make its central
protagonist sound like someone you would seek a restraining order against
(“You’re half of the flesh, and blood makes me whole,” he sings, reaching
for the duct tape and the nail gun). It’s primarily annoying because it’s a
four-minute intro with no song attached. When the booming drums finally kick in,
they announce the arrival not of a fantastic chorus or an epic finale, but the
greatest anticlimax in pop, featuring what can only be described as a synth bass
solo. Worst Moment The synth bass solo. 18. CHICAGO “You’re the Inspiration” 1984 And you thought the Cubs were the biggest losers in this
town? Wrong! It’s hard to believe, but at one point Chicago were a
fairly well-respected rock band. Then Peter Cetera joined, and they jettisoned
any remaining street cred in favor of soft-rock ballads your grandmother would
deem harmless. In this, their most egregious offense, Cetera’s gratingly
affected and overmodulated vocals float over 1984 standard-issue electric piano,
and a nation of greasy, awkward seventh graders slow-danced for the very first
time. Worst Moment That power-rock drum fill before the second
verse, apparently designed to mollify hatas who thought the band had lost its
edge. 17. HAMMER “Pumps and a Bump” 1994 Next stop: bankruptcy court! It takes a special kind of awful to destroy a career. This
song is that kind of awful. Four years after winning our hearts with his Rick
James samples, deft footwork and baggy pants, Hammer (né MC Hammer) took an
ill-advised stab at gangsta rap. Over third-rate Dre beats and high-pitched
synth samples, the former Saturday-morning cartoon star freestyled about his
love of women with gigantic asses. Soon after it nosedived off the charts,
Hammer gave up chubby-chasing and devoted his life to Jesus. Worst Moment The line “You wiggity-wiggity wack if you
ain’t got biggity back” must have been found on Sir Mix-a-Lot’s
cutting-room floor. 16. 4 NON BLONDES “What’s Up?” 1993 To grunge what “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”
was to the Woodstock Generation Whenever a new genre comes along, one thing is
guaranteed: Sooner or later someone will reduce its values to platitudes, then
set them to music so trite you could use it to sell soft drinks. “What’s
Up?” stapled grunge angst to the AOR that grunge was supposed to stamp out,
then added the remarkable vocals of Linda Perry, a woman so tormented by what
she referred to as her “lahf” — which she had apparently spent trying to
climb that “heeyuhl of howp” — that she had invented her own accent. Worst Moment The first chorus, in which Perry unleashes the
one thing ’90s rock had lacked to that point: yodeling. 15. THE REMBRANDTS “I’ll Be There For You” 1995 With friends like these… Like a support group crammed into a pop ditty, this theme
song–turned–radio hit is crushingly sunny, cheaply “empathetic” and
unsparingly upbeat. The Beatles-adoring duo harmonize about romantic travails,
dead-end jobs and the overwhelming power of — you guessed it — friendship.
The only way it could be more irritating is if they repeated “Turn that frown
upside down” for three minutes and 10 seconds. It is a powerfully appropriate
theme, as it’s impossible to hear a note and not think of Rachel’s haircut,
Chandler’s grin, Ross’s whimper. Worst Moment Four handclaps punctuate the song’s first
line, all mimed peppiness and overprescribed Prozac. 14. BETTE MIDLER “From a Distance” 1990 Satanic ballad depicts the Lord as neglectful oaf Ignoring an entire century of existentialism and science
that declared God dead, bawdy bathhouse babe Bette Midler keeps a straight face
throughout liberal homilies, stiff rhymes and more sound F/X than a Mel Gibson
movie. Sure, war and famine suck, but Midler assures us that “God is watching
us, from a distance.” In other words, the Almighty is some kind of heavenly
grandfather, loving and caring, but too doddering and distracted to really get
involved. Thanks, God! Worst Moment The drum machine. If God exists, He probably
hates drum machines. 13. GENESIS “Illegal Alien” 1983 Did nobody ever suggest that this song might be considered
a teensy bit…offensive? The ’80s was the decade when rock superstars like Genesis
discovered their social conscience. What better way to draw attention to the
plight of illegal Hispanic immigrant workers than by adopting a Speedy Gonzales
accent and singing a jaunty AOR track depicting Mexicans as freeloading
degenerates? Perhaps fearing that the song’s subtle ethnic humor might be
missed by some listeners, Phil Collins sported a Zapata mustache and a sombrero
in the video. Worst Moment The middle eight, featuring hilariously
accented shouting of the arriba! and eh, greeengo! variety. 12. THE BEACH BOYS “Kokomo” 1988 They might as well have just pissed in Brian’s sandbox The Boys’ Cocktail soundtrack single was their first
number 1 since “Good Vibrations” 18 years earlier. But chart position is all
the songs have in common. “Good Vibrations” is a glorious slice of Brian
Wilson–penned pop perfection; “Kokomo” is a gloopy mess of faux-Carribean
musical stylings cowritten by Mike Love. It’s all anodyne harmonizing and
forced rhymes (“To Martinique, that Montserrat mystique!”) that would have
driven Brian totally nuts had he not been totally nuts already. Worst Moment The most diabolical rhyme is saved for, um,
first: “Aruba, Jamaica, ooh, I wanna take ya!” 11. CLAY AIKEN “Invisible” 2003 Bad haircut. Worse song! It’s not just the schmaltzy play for loser pity (“If I
was invisible — wait, I already am”). It’s not just the ridiculously
purple lyrics. And it’s not just the thought of Aiken’s eternally
asymmetrical porcupine ’do quivering as he soars into a high note. It’s the
whole
hey-girl-I-want-to-watch-you-while-you-think-you’re-alone-in-your-bedroom
thing that transforms this song from a merely mediocre ballad to a disturbing
voyeur fantasy, filling your head with images of Aiken downloading porn and
thinking bad things about that girl from homeroom. What lurks in the hearts of
lonely geeks? Clay Aiken knows, and it’s not pretty. Worst Moment “I wish you could touch me with the colors
of your life.” 10. PAUL McCARTNEY AND STEVIE WONDER “Ebony and Ivory” 1982 Racial-harmony dreck See, it’s a metaphor: “Side by side on my
piano/Keyboard/Oh, Lord/Why don’t we?” McCartney and Wonder want the races
to get along as peacefully as the white and black keys on a piano — which
seems unlikely, since the white keys didn’t enslave the black keys for
hundreds of years. The anguished idealism inspired a Saturday Night Live duet
between Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo: “I am dark and you are light/You are
blind as a bat and I have sight.” Worst Moment The repeated chorus at the end — where the
song gets even chirpier. 9. MADONNA “American Life” 2003 Desperately seeking…contemporary relevance On which Madonna updates the “Material Girl”–era
satire of commercialism and spiritual emptiness — but this time, she does it
with what is hands-down the most embarrassing rap ever recorded. Nervous and
choppy, she makes Debbie Harry sound as smooth as Jay-Z. The only thing worse
than shouting “soy latte”? Rhyming it with “double shot-ay.” The rhymes
don’t kick in for a full three minutes, but the song — propelled by a
constipated digital beat and some bungled musings on celebrity culture —
stinks the whole way through. Worst Moment After rapping, Madonna sings, “Nothing is
what it seeeems” in a manner drained of all profundity. 8. EDDIE MURPHY “Party All the Time” 1985 Beverly Hills Cop commits felony pop Now, it might seem like a cruel satire: Leather-suited
comedian teams up with Jheri-curled Superfreak to craft hit record. But no —
in 1985, Eddie Murphy and Rick James really did get to number 2 with this
catatonic checklist of funk clichés: the witlessly parping synthesizers,
electro-totalitarian drums that are practically ready to invade Poland on their
own, production mimicking karaoke night in an abandoned pet-food factory
and…falsetto singing! Worst Moment James oozes, “She-likes-to-paaarty — all
— the — tiiiime,” leaving us in no doubt about what kind of “party” he
has in mind. Relax, ladies: He was on crack. 7. BOBBY McFERRIN “Don’t Worry Be Happy” 1988 Oh, great — a bumper sticker set to music Just as there are few things more depressing than being
told to cheer up, it’s difficult to think of a song more likely to plunge you
into suicidal despondency than this. The finger-clicking rhythm, the Sesame
Street backing and McFerrin’s various accents — all different, all
patronizing — are an object lesson in trying too hard. The lyrics are
appalling, too: If your landlord is indeed threatening you with legal action,
you should not under any circumstances follow McFerrin’s advice, which seems
to involve chuckling at him and saying “Look at me, I’m ’appy” in a
comical Jamaican voice. Worst Moment The whole wretched thing. 6. HUEY LEWIS AND THE NEWS “The Heart Of Rock & Roll” 1984 A celebration of rock music …by a band seemingly intent
on destroying it Less a song than a craven attempt to curry favor from
drunken arena crowds trained to roar on cue when they hear their city’s name
mentioned. Coming off more like one of your dad’s golf buddies than a rock
star, Lewis rattles off a list of American cities in a monotone so bland that
subbing in “Bakersfield” for “San Antone” would drive the fans wild, and
hopefully distract them from the fact that the bar band–caliber music
suuuuucked. Worst Moment The second verse, when that cheeky Huey almost
uses the word ass. Ah, 1984 — such a simple time. 5. VANILLA ICE “Ice Ice Baby” 1990 When hip-hop stopped being the “black CNN” Making fellow early-’90s pop-rap pioneer MC Hammer look
cutting-edge by comparison, the chart-topping “Ice Ice Baby” was mindless
white rap for mindless white people, set to the plodding bass line from
Queen’s “Under Pressure” for easy move-busting. Lyrically, the Iceman
recounts a trip to Palm Beach, where he is forced to reach for his “nine” by
some moody dope fiends. It later emerged that this nice suburban boy fabricated
his tough past and would probably soil himself at the sight of a real gun. Worst Moment “To the extreme I rock a mic like a
vandal/Light up the stage and wax a chump like a candle.” None of this was
remotely true. 4. LIMP BIZKIT “Rollin’” 2000 In which nü-metal veers from disaffected rage to “Will
this do?” Sounding like a middle-aged man trying to fight his way out
of his son’s frat party using only random words of youth slang and an
unconvincingly gruff tone of voice, Fred Durst dictates a light aerobic workout
(“Hands up, now hands down.…Breathe in, now breathe out”) against a
background of histrionic metal noise. The song is meaningless and embarrassing
in equal measure. Worst Moment Being addressed as both “partner” and
“baby” in Durst’s drawling intro, shortly before being told, bafflingly,
“You know what time it is.” 3. WANG CHUNG “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” 1986 If this song was a party, you’d lock yourself in the
bathroom and cry Initially called Huang Chung, but in no way Chinese,
London-based funk tools Wang Chung changed their name to make it easier for
whitey to pronounce, thus patronizing Asia and Europe in one stroke. Musically
one of history’s least convivial party songs, “Everybody Have Fun Tonight”
was both lyrically preposterous (“On the edge of oblivion/All the world is
Babylon”) and sung by Jack Hues as though he would turn to sulphur at the very
thought of “fun.” Worst Moment That chorus: “Everybody have fun
tonight/Everybody Wang Chung tonight.” 2. BILLY RAY CYRUS “Achy Breaky Heart” 1992 At least the haircut never caught on. Oh, wait… Country, but not as we know it. Written by Vietnam vet Don
“Pickle Puss” Von Tress in the style of a brain-dead “Blue Suede Shoes,”
“Achy Breaky Heart” represented every prejudice non-believers have about
country: It was trite, it was inane, it was big in trailer parks and it was
thoroughly enjoyed by the obese. Strangely, it was covered by Bruce Springsteen,
with slightly less irony than you might imagine; still, this does not make it
good. Worst Moment An instrumental break that single-handedly
rejuvenated the line-dancing fad. 1. STARSHIP “We Built This City” 1985 The truly horrible sound of a band taking the corporate
dollar while sneering at those who take the corporate dollar The lyrics of “We Built This City” appear to restate
the importance of the band once known as Jefferson Airplane within San
Francisco’s ’60s rock scene. Not so, says former leader Grace Slick, who by
1985 had handed her band to singer Mickey Thomas and a shadowy team of outside
songwriters. “Everybody thought we were talking about San Francisco.
We weren’t,” Slick says. “It was written by an Englishman, Bernie Taupin,
about Los Angeles in the early ’70s. Nobody was telling the truth!” Certainly not Starship, who spend the song carrying on as
if they invented rock & roll rebellion, while churning out music that
encapsulates all that was wrong with rock in the ’80s: Sexless and corporate,
it sounds less like a song than something built in a lab by a team of
record-company executives. The result was so awful that years afterward, it seems to
bring on a personality disorder in the woman who sang it. “This is not me,”
Slick remarks when reminded of the 1985 chart-topper. “Now you’re an actor.
It’s the same as Meryl Streep playing Joan of Arc.” Worst Moment “Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names,” sneers Slick — whose band had changed its name three times.
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