Category: Bad Songs List Court

Discussing this artist’s output has become something of a minefield, at least among those who have a decent respect for the dead, due to his tragically young death a couple of years ago. And while, as a critic, I have to be honest and say I don’t think this track is completely successful or even really a “good song” in the conventional sense of the word, I do think it showed an enormous amount of potential that would be tragically snuffed out by this Rapper’s early passing.

After all, what this song reminds me of more than anything else is the singles from Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory album. And while those singles (particularly “Crawling”) haven’t really aged all that well, they did feature genuinely interesting sonic textures and a sincerity to their melodrama that made them hard to dismiss, and the very same qualities are apparent in this song.

And remember, Linkin Park would go on to make multiple masterpiece-level albums later in their career, and I could totally have seen Lil Peep undergoing the same kind of artistic progress had he lived. The music he made while he was alive may have been deeply flawed, but it had all the earmarks of the early-career teething errors of a future musical genius, and it’s heartbreaking that we’ll never know what this young man could have achieved in a better world.

Verdict: Not entirely successful, but legitimately interesting, and hinting at a potential that will now sadly always be one of popular music’s great unanswered questions.

This song, which inexplicably reached Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 and then even more inexplicably sat there long enough to set a new record, apparently started as a memetic joke, and became only slightly less of one after Billy Ray Cyrus recorded a remix of it that at least filled it out to full song length. (For the record, I am aware that this abomination has received several other remixes, some of them featuring more talented artists, but it was the Billy Ray rendition that took it to Number One.)

It has apparently become the center of some idiotic debate among the political correctness types about racism in Country music or some such nonsense, but even that is really more attention than it deserves. I suppose I have heard worse Rap-Country hybrids, but I can still count them on one hand. The chorus sounds like Country cliches distilled into their most basic form and then delivered by someone who doesn’t actually understand them in the slightest.

On the verses, we get to watch Billy Ray Cyrus equally fail to comprehend the workings of Hip-Hop, managing to find whole new ways of embarrassing himself (something I frankly wouldn’t have thought possible at this point). Granted, this song is still not as bad as Billy Ray’s previous Pop hit, the legendarily awful “Achy Breaky Heart”, but the fact that it gave that bozo a second Number One hit is reason enough to hate it all by itself.

Verdict: I’m not sure this even qualifies as a song, but if it does, it’s definitely a bad one.

Ladies and gentleman, the award for Single Most Annoying Falsetto in Pop Music History goes to…Tiny Tim! Seriously, this guy has to be the absolute worst Easy Listening musician of all time…even the Starland Vocal Band were more capable than this. Tiny Tim is regarded as little more than a joke these days, but that’s actually giving him too much credit. I have literally never heard a worse singing voice come out of someone who supposedly sings for a living. Granted, the song itself, a hopelessly hackneyed piece of fifth-rate Tin Pan Alley leftovers, doesn’t help, but if you give this idiot a good song, the results are actually even worse (listen to his horrific butchering of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” if you don’t believe me).

Verdict: Beyond horrific.

Of all the songs Weird Al has recorded, this seems to be the one he’s most openly ashamed of (it’s worth noting that he never wound up putting it on an album). Granted, it’s a mean-spirited attack on the original artist, something Yankovich is normally above doing, but so is “Achy Breaky Song”, and while Al seems somewhat embarrassed about that one too, his fans had a much more positive reaction to it.

Maybe I’m biased because I am an avowed Billy Joel fan and absolutely despise Billy Ray Cyrus’ music, but I am a fan of about two-thirds of the other artists Yankovich insults in “Achy Breaky Song” (and I’m certainly no great defender of “It’s Still Rock’n’Roll to Me” as an individual song).

The difference is that “Achy Breaky Song”, with its hyperbolic language and comedic exaggerations, actually came off as a joke. “It’s Still Billy Joel to Me”, on the other hand, doesn’t really tell any jokes…it’s just a string of fairly mundane cheap insults, and mostly just comes across as a jealous rant about Billy Joel’s level of commercial success and security (Weird Al’s own career hadn’t really started to take off at this point, and his envy and pettiness here don’t exactly reflect well on him).

Verdict: Bad.

While the album Slow Train Coming is generally the best-regarded of Bob Dylan’s three Christian Rock albums, this particular song is generally seen as emblematic of the problems associated with that stage of his career. This is partly because it was only really popular hit song to come out of his Christian phase, but there’s more to it than that.

For one thing, it’s a relatively simplistic piece of songwriting by Dylan’s usual standards, which is bound to come off as disappointing to fans of his usual work. For another, its simplicity means that Dylan’s smugness, a problem that is generally present to at least a subtle degree even on his classics, is much more direct and palpable here.

But perhaps the biggest problem with this song is one that most of the people who object to it don’t even realize…it is blatantly ripped off in both content and structure from “Righteous Rocker No. 1”, a song from Larry Norman’s seminal Christian Rock album Only Visiting This Planet. Both songs offer various descriptions of worldly success or failure before tying each statement back to a biblical reference. In Norman’s case, it’s that “you ain’t nothing without love”, a reference to Corintheans 13; in Dylan’s, that you’re “gonna have to serve somebody”, a reference to the ‘God or Mammon’ dichotemy from Matthew 6:24.

The songs are in fact virtually identical, except that Norman’s is actually a lot better, coming off as significantly less smug and more sincere. Dylan’s Christian albums actually produced several songs much better than this one but he ought to have been above this kind of borderline plagiarism, and it stands as one of the more disappointing moments of his illustrious career.

Verdict: Not terrible, exactly, but “Righteous Rocker No. 1” got there first and did it a lot better.

It will probably not come as a surprise to my readers to know that I am a devoted admirer of Taylor Swift. That said, up ’til now, I have not been very enthusiastic about the bubblegummy lead singles she’s tended to release during her current Pop phase…if you’ll recall, I panned “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, and was only lukewarm about “Shake It Off”. Of course, “Look What You Made Me Do” was an exception, but then, it was the polar opposite of those songs in terms of style and tone.

This song, on the other hand, is essentially the same upbeat Pop style, just done right this time. With its joyous marching band melody and sunny, unashamedly garish tone, this is simply a glorious, glowing smile in music. The lyrics do at times resemble a children’s song, but they do so just enough to tap into primal innocence without ever becoming infantile, much like the Flaming Lips or Owl City.

I’ve heard a few critics, both amateur and professional, turn their noses up at the song, but then, this is exactly the kind of song the music snobs naturally hate. For the rest of us, this is probably the best lead single of Swift’s career so far, and while it is notoriously hard to predict the sound or tone of a Swift album from the lead single alone, this still seems to suggest a happier, more upbeat album to contrast with the brooding darkness of Reputation.

Now, while the “backlash” against that earlier album that her detractors love to speak of was clearly an enormous exaggeration (“failed” albums don’t generally become year-end bestsellers), I still admire Swift for varying her artistic palette, something she has always done and will no doubt continue to do with her upcoming seventh album.

Verdict: A modern masterpiece. I honestly can’t imagine how anyone could bring themselves to dislike this song.

I didn’t really think we needed a Jonas Brothers reunion, and the quality of their new material seems to be bearing out that point of view, to the point where even most of the people who were initially excited by the idea are now cringing at the prospect of their new album.

Their first and more successful post-reunion single, “Sucker”, bore the same painful resemblance to the dreadful late-career work of Maroon 5 that Joe Jonas’ solo hit “Cake By the Ocean” did, but their followup single makes it look like a masterpiece by comparison. This is, quite simply, the single most laughably unconvincing boast track I have ever heard in my life.

People have compared it to a Train song, and it certainly has enough bizarre lyrical choices to be one, referencing everything from Game of Thrones to movie stars from two generations ago. That said, Train’s output was usually creative and quirky enough to at least have an amusing side to its awfulness. By contrast, hearing a superannuated boy-band whose idea of wit is “When I grow up, I wanna be just like me” confidently proclaim how “cool” they are isn’t funny at all…it’s just sad.

Verdict: Almost indescribably bad, and already a serious contender for Worst Song of 2019.

Elvis’ 1969 hit “In the Ghetto” gets included on a lot of amateur “Worst Songs of All Time” lists, and generally gets written off these days as a piece of lugubrious schmaltz. There’s no denying that the song is extraordinarily depressing, and it isn’t exactly subtle about the social message it’s trying to convey. That said, it’s an acknowledged truth that sometimes preachiness and didacticism in works of art are justified in the name of greater good in the real world, and it would be hard to find a situation in which that applies more than this one. Granted, worthy ideological aims don’t automatically transform a bad song into a good one, but the song can hardly be accused of bad craftsmanship. The lilting melody is far more effective for this purpose than the lugubrious sound Elvis usually used for these kinds of songs. As for the lyrics, they are surprisingly penetrating, making particularly haunting use of imagery and repeated, cyclical phrases and humanizing the subject by telling a poignant human story as an example of the suffering it depicts.

Also, you have to remember that just making this song was a sizable risk for Presley. However much of a radical he had been earlier in his career, Elvis still always had one foot in Nashville, and there were still plenty among his fanbase at the time who wouldn’t want to hear their idol sing a song like this. In fact, I venture to suggest that the reason this song gained a negative reputation in the first place is because it makes many people think and feel things they don’t want to think and feel, and declaring it to be just some piece of melodramatic tripe helps neutralize the discomfort it causes them.

However, as I said, worthy motives don’t automatically turn a bad song into a good one, and Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise” is a perfect illustration of that. This song deals with exactly the same subject matter as “In the Ghetto”, but that fails everywhere that song succeeded. The music is just dull, morose Adult Contemporary balladry with none of the distinctive qualities Collins’ work had been known for in earlier years, and the song has no real interest in drama, only in proselytizing. At least “In the Ghetto” actually told a story…this song is just a guilt-based harangue about what a bad person you supposedly are. I understand this song had good intentions, but it simply has nothing to offer artistically, and those intentions would have been far more successful if Collins had actually tried to make a good song and not just to send a message. It’s basically a solo “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, only instead of Christmas and Africa, it’s every day and the local homeless.

Verdict: Good for “In the Ghetto”, but “Another Day in Paradise”, however sincere its intentions may have been, is simply a bad song. Of course, neither of these songs even approach the gut-wrenching tragic beauty of the definitive song on the subject, Stevie Wonder’s “Village Ghetto Land”, but that just indicates that neither Mac Davis (who wrote “In the Ghetto”) nor Phil Collins were world-changing musical geniuses on the level of Wonder at his peak, which should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody. (Granted, Elvis was arguably that kind of genius, but then, he didn’t write the song).

For some reason, during his Nineties run of inexplicable hits on the Country charts, Billy Ray Cyrus wrote two highly political songs, but from wildly different platforms. The first, “Some Gave All”, was the title track of his debut album, and it was written from the perspective of jingoistic conservatives. Now, odes to the wartime dead are one of Country music’s trademark specialties and something the genre generally does well even in its lowest eras (even Luke Bryan managed to pull one off successfully in “Drink a Beer”), but unfortunately, Billy Ray Cyrus is a moron. As a result, the song’s writing is so over-the-top and melodramatic, and Cyrus’ performance so laughably overwrought, that the result is more unintentionally hilarious than stirring or inspirational.

As for “Trail of Tears”, made several years later on Cyrus’ fourth album of the same name, it represents the bleeding-heart liberal side of Cyrus’ political profile. Again, there’s nothing wrong with writing a Country song about the plight of the American Indian…Johnny Cash devoted a whole album to it, and that album, Bitter Tears, is one of his masterpieces. But this song, in addition to having no tune to speak of, is so shallow in its writing that it comes off as condescending…at times it sounds more like he’s taunting the Native Americans about their suffering than sympathizing with it.

Verdict: Both of these songs are utter garbage, but I suppose I can appreciate the fact that Cyrus was willing to make both Parties look bad by association.

This might well be the single worst piece of Contemporary Christian Music ever written, and that’s not a statement anyone would make lightly. This is one of the most depressing songs ever written, essentially positing an uncaring, unfeeling God who is so distant from humanity that he cannot see their suffering. For all intents and purposes, this is just as bad as no God, but with the additional implied insult that human beings are not even worth caring about.

If this were the intention, I could see the song working…indeed, there is a Tori Amos song, the eerie, haunting “Flavor”, that posits almost exactly the same premise, but is smart enough to realize how disturbing that sentiment is. But everything about this song’s presentation and marketing suggests that it was meant to be inspirational and uplifting, and that apparently the songwriter responsible for it, Julie Gold, was just too stupid to realize the implications of what she had written.

Given all the frankly superb work that Bette Midler has released over the years, it seems a real injustice that the two songs most personally associated with her in the general public’s mind are “Wind Beneath My Wings” and this abomination. It’s not like she wrote this atrocity…she wasn’t even the first talented artist to record it (Judy Collins had already done so), and Cliff Richards would have a hit version in England that very same year. I realize someone has to take the blame for this piece of garbage, but I don’t really see why that person has to be Bette Midler just because her version had the bad luck to make it into a hit.

Verdict: This might be the worst Easy Listening/Soft Rock song of any kind that I’ve ever reviewed, and keep in mind how much of that genre I’ve covered.