What's the worst song ever?

Perle_Rare

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The Love Shack followed closely with that Barbie Doll song, whatever it's called. I'll throw YMCA up there too, while I'm at it...

I'd rather listen to an hour of someone learning to play the violin rather than listen to any one of those songs. *shudder*
 

moderan

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Yummy Yummy by the 1910 Fruitgum Company
close second-How Do You Do? by Mouth and MacNeal
third...anything on top 40 radio today
 

Priene

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There's so much musical mediocrity in the world - mumbly, angsty indie, faux-sincere torch ballads, tuneless simpering crooners, dead-eyed Cowell-clone warblers - that it's a tricky choice. But I think a truly bad song should be about passion. It should instill in you the baleful desire to inflict a savage beating on every single individual who ever bought it. And what does that better than Crazy Frog?
 
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nerds

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I'm looking at Billboard for some of these songs, egads. People bought these records like hotcakes.



Seasons in the Sun, #2 in 1974.

Love Will Keep Us Together, by Captain and Tennille, which wasn't mentioned but is a pretty awful song, #ONE in 1975. It also got the Grammy for Record of the Year. To think I lived through the '70s. Don't know how we managed, all things considered. Suckalacious decade all around, bad clothes, bad hair, ugly cars, bad economy, bad everything.

Silly Love Songs, by Wings. omg. #1, 1976

Lovin' You, Minnie Riperton, #1 for weeks on end, 1975

Inagaddadavida, Iron Butterfly, sold 4 million copies and stayed in the Top Ten for a YEAR. 1969.

DISCO DUCK :D - sold 6 million. 1977.
 

Vandal

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More 70s dreck:


Rocky by Rickey Dee

Run, Joey, Run by David Geddes

Let Her In by John Travolta
 

Robert Toy

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Thank God and greyhound you're gone

Jesus drop kicked me through the goal post of life
 

alleycat

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Can I just throw in the entire Barry Manilow song catalog?
 

Priene

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C'mon, with lyrics like "I moved liked Harlow in Monte Carlo and showed 'em what I've got," do you blame me for horking? ;)

"I've been to Nice and the Isle of Greece" is my favourite. Just how much effort on the songwriter's part would it have taken to discover that Greece actually isn't an island?
 

Pagey's_Girl

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"Girl I Want to Sex You Up" by Color Me Bad. (I'd color then awful, but that's just me.) It's just - so bad on so many levels I can't even begin to articulate them....
 

Roger J Carlson

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Disco Duck

"It's a Sunshine Day" --The Brady Bunch

I double-dog dare ya to click the link while someone else is in the room with you. ;)

Tiptoe Through The Tulips
and
My DingALing

I agree with all of these, but I'd like to add Timothy by The Buoys as just plain -- sick.

Wow. you could drink in 1986? LEGALLY?

Zoinks, Rob. You're just so....old.

:D
That's not old! I could drink in '76. Of course I was only 19, that being in the short period when the drinking age was lowered to 18.
 

ChunkyC

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Wow. you could drink in 1986? LEGALLY?

Zoinks, Rob. You're just so....old.

:D
I was drinking legally in 1973. Illegally for a number of years before that, natch. Segue to my years on the road in a band and how we had to learn disco songs if we wanted to eat ...

Get down ... boogie oogie oogie *shudder*

I'll never truly be able to explain how I managed to make it through that without doing a Pete Townsend on my guitar. I can't really come up with a single disco tune that should be in the running for worst song of all time, so I'll just nominate the whole era.
 

nerds

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I was legal to drink in 1975. However, the '70s were driving me to drink well before that.
 

MsK

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Don't think I've seen anyone mention this one:
Afternoon Delight- Starland Vocal Band

Gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tight
Gonna grab some afternoon delight
My motto's always been; when it's right, it's right
Why wait until the middle of a cold dark night
When everything's a little clearer in the light of day
And we know the night is always gonna be there any way

Thinkin' of you's workin' up my appetite
Looking forward to a little afternoon delight
Rubbin' sticks and stones together makes the sparks ingite
and the thought of rubbin' you is getting so exciting

Sky rockets in flight
Afternoon delight
Afternoon delight

Started out this morning feeling so polite
I always thought a fish could not be caught who wouldn't bite
But you've got some bait a waitin' and I think
I might like having a little afternoon delight

Sky rockets in flight
Afternoon delight
Afternoon delight

Please' be waiting for me baby when I come around
We could make a lot of lovin' 'for the sun goes down

Thinkin' of you's workin' up an appetite
Looking forward to a little afternoon delight
Rubbin' sticks and stones together makes the sparks ingite
And the thought of rubbin' you is getting so exciting

Sky rockets in flight
Afternoon delight...

 

TerzaRima

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You know, that was my favorite song as a little kid and naturally I had no clue what it was about. I used to bellow it at top volume, and now I wonder what my parents thought of having a second grader running around the house singing about nooners.

Worst song? All I Want to Do Is Make Love To You, by Heart. Hands down. It's like a courtly love ballad, except with more hairspray.

What are the poetic elements that makes this a wonderfully bad song, class? Let's count the ways. She picks up a hitchhiker! She takes him to a motel! It was a place "she knew well"! So she's a harlot who habitually takes strange men to this motel!

Moving onto the depiction of their sex. He brought the woman out of her, so many times, easily! They walked in the garden and planted a seed! She sees him years later and he recognizes his own love child! How can you beat that for the worst song ever?
 

Bubastes

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OMG, and then she tells him that she's in love with someone else, but that someone else couldn't give her what this guy did (a kid or the big O, I don't know which).

What a waste. How far they fell after Barracuda (still my favorite Heart song).
 

Chameleon

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There's so much musical mediocrity in the world - mumbly, angsty indie, faux-sincere torch ballads, tuneless simpering crooners, dead-eyed Cowell-clone warblers - that it's a tricky choice. But I think a truly bad song should be about passion. It should instill in you the baleful desire to inflict a savage beating on every single individual who ever bought it. And what does that better than Crazy Frog?

lol@CF. I like CF.
 

ChunkyC

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You know, that was my favorite song as a little kid and naturally I had no clue what it was about. I used to bellow it at top volume, and now I wonder what my parents thought of having a second grader running around the house singing about nooners.

Worst song? All I Want to Do Is Make Love To You, by Heart. Hands down. It's like a courtly love ballad, except with more hairspray.

What are the poetic elements that makes this a wonderfully bad song, class? Let's count the ways. She picks up a hitchhiker! She takes him to a motel! It was a place "she knew well"! So she's a harlot who habitually takes strange men to this motel!

Moving onto the depiction of their sex. He brought the woman out of her, so many times, easily! They walked in the garden and planted a seed! She sees him years later and he recognizes his own love child! How can you beat that for the worst song ever?
It strikes me that there's a huge dichotomy between censorship in movies/tv and in popular music. Just look at some of the lyrics in these songs we're posting about, and they get played over and over on mainstream radio where anyone of any age can hear it. Right now the main line of the chorus of a big hit by a female artist is, "I kissed a girl and I liked it." Even group names are out there. The Scissor Sisters, for example, is a lesbian sexual position and every top forty drive time dj blithely rattles their name off without a second thought.

Yet in movies and on TV, you can't show a nekkid tit for fear that society is going to collapse in a paroxysm of sexual abandon if someone sees a nipple, at least not without labelling it for the dangerous goods it supposedly is.

Gawd, our cultures are screwed up. :)
 
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