Category: Bad Songs List Court

I don’t entirely agree with those who say Greta Van Fleet is just a warmed-over imitation of Led Zeppelin. Granted, they are definitely recycling influences from Classic Rock (they’ve never really pretended otherwise), and their vocalist is certainly doing an uncanny Robert Plant impersonation, but their instrumentation has always given me more of a Lynyrd Skynyrd or Creedence Clearwater Revival vibe…more Swamp-Rock or Southern Rock than the harsher sounds of Zeppelin’s early Heavy Metal style. The resulting mix of styles does give them at least some semblance of their own distinct sound, and this particular song, which is more a piece of Folk balladry than their usual Rock sound, certainly shows they aren’t entirely indebted to the Led Zeppelin influences.

That said, I’m not entirely sure why they’re getting as much attention within their field as they are, or why they’re being touted as the ‘leaders’ of the Classic Rock Revival. After all, Halestorm and the Pretty Reckless are both better bands in the same Retro-Rock style that were around quite a while before Greta Van Fleet, and both are still together and recording…Halestorm released a new album just last year, in fact.

While it may demonstrate some small degree of versatility, even this song, while well-played and well-sung, isn’t really all that interesting as a composition, especially compared to songs by the aforementioned other bands in this subgenre.

Verdict: A decent enough slice of retro-Folk Rock, but I just don’t see why it justifies all the attention.

I’ve said some harsh things about this artist in the past, mostly because I disliked his featured appearance on Migos’ “Bad and Boujee” so strongly, but when he was (at least purportedly) supposed to be retiring from the music scene last year, I felt the need to explore his body of work a little more deeply. I was actually surprised to find how much more effective and interesting he is on his own albums.

My primary objection to his appearance on “Bad and Boujee” was his bizarre vocal quality, which on that song sounded unintentionally comic. However, on his solo albums and mixtapes, his work has a uniquely quirky sensibility that manages to turn his odd vocal sound into an asset rather than a liability.

Lil Uzi Vert is a significantly more interesting lyricist than most of the other big-name Hook-Rappers, and this song in particular is a morbid, twisted ode to emotional numbness and death-embracing fatalism that goes far beyond the dimensions of your average “Emo-Rap” song like Juiceworld’s “Lucid Dreams”.

I was pretty much entirely wrong about this guy and his work, and ironically enough, I, who until recently was one of this Rapper’s biggest detractors, now find myself genuinely relieved that his threat of retirement appears to have been merely a publicity stunt for his next album.

Verdict: Far more fascinating and evocative than I would have ever expected.

Despite inviting a level of personal and moral controversy that makes XXXTentacion look like Donny Osmond by comparison, this particular Trap-Rapper acquired a surprising level of Pop success before the whole ‘going to jail for years’ thing disrupted his Rap career. Now, I’m not concerned here with the crimes this artist has committed…I’m not saying those things aren’t important, but that’s the courts’ business, not mine, and as mentioned above, they seem to be taking care of it. The question I’m trying to settle is whether this guy actually had any artistic validity to justify his popularity in the face of controversy.

His primary selling point seemed to be the intensity and authenticity of his vocal delivery: he actually sounded like a hardcore thug, and when he rapped about murdering you, it sounded like he might actually do it. Leaving aside any speculation on why that was the case, the primary problem is that we already had a more interesting Rapper with exactly the same qualifications and stylistic approach a couple of years before this guy showed up…his name was 21 Savage.

And apart from offering a warmed-over version of 21 Savage’s shtick, 6ix9ine wasn’t particularly good at…well, much of anything: his lyrics were moronic shock value, so he couldn’t function as an old-school lyrical rapper in the J. Cole—Kendrick Lamar vein, and his vocal melodies weren’t nearly interesting enough to hold his own with the other Hook-Rappers. From a purely artistic perspective, I’ve heard worse Rap, but I doubt this guy has contributed anything that will make history remember him positively once his time in the spotlight is over.

Verdict: This guy is kind of like the frontman from LostProphets…the question of the importance of artistic ability vs. morality is one that has raged from time immemorial, but nothing this guy has done in his actual music is interesting enough to raise it in his case.

This song is not particularly distinguished, but I’m having something of a hard time understanding why it’s received such an extreme level of vitriol from the internet critics. It’s a pleasant enough piece of radio filler, mellow and euphonious, and it’s certainly the best thing Florida Georgia Line have released since their first album (not that that constitutes any great distinction given the dismal quality of their work during that interim, but it’s worth remembering the duo have done much worse than this).

It’s a bit on the bland side, but it pulls off the relaxing vibe FGL are attempting without descending into the blatantly noxious worthlessness of, say, “Sun Daze”. It’s not remotely close to any kind of authentic Country, but neither is anything else FGL has ever released, so I don’t really understand the passionate anger some people seem to feel over this particular song being labelled “Country” by the perennially clueless Billboard charts.

At any rate, this song is nowhere near as bad as the biggest “Country” hits on the Billboard charts in the previous two years (Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road” in 2017 and FGL’s own “H.O.L.Y.” in 2016), and it’s certainly superior to this year’s preeminent Pop-Country hit, the grotesque Country-Rap hybrid “Old Town Road”. So while there is infinitely better Country music being made that the charts and Country radio are ignoring, and that’s certainly a thing worth getting mad over, I don’t really understand why this specific song has become such a focal point for hatred.

Verdict: Not great by any means, but harmless enough, and certainly nothing to get upset over.

This song is seen by most of the amateur “critics” who infest the internet as a piece of trite soundtrack filler that is supposedly unworthy of Pink’s talent. This is partly because it comes from an unnecessary sequel to an already disappointing movie…the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland movie wasn’t quite the abomination some make it out to be, but it didn’t really merit a second outing. Still, good and even great songs have come from the soundtracks of worse movies (look how many classic songs have wound up attached to the Twilight franchise, for example), so this doesn’t cut it as a justification for dismissing the song.

The other reason this song is poorly thought of is that most of the internet critics have entirely missed the point of its dramatic content, misinterpreting it as a “self-esteem” anthem in the vein of Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” or Pink’s own earlier single “Raise Your Glass”. What the song is actually meant to be is a Wanting Song, a song model that is a staple element in Musical Theater.

Interestingly, this Wanting Song is not about the standard topic of love, or even about success per se, but about power. It’s a furiously defiant promise to tear down the established order, to “light the world up for just one day”, as the song puts it. Granted, the Rap bridge toward the end is actually kind of embarrassing, but the rest of the song has an intensity and hypnotic, almost mystical quality that ranks with the most inspired work Pink has ever done. It strikes a dark, almost villainous note that makes it resonate perfectly with the part of our psyches that would actually like to burn the world up for our own glory, making it a potently evocative anthem of enraged pride.

Verdict: This is a fantastic song, one of Pink’s all-time classics, and its unanimous dismissal by the internet peanut gallery does nothing to change that.

Oasis were possibly the greatest of all the Nineties Britpop bands, but their third album, Be Here Now, while well-received at the time of its release, has somehow acquired a reputation as a massive disaster in the intervening years. This song, one of two UK Number One hits from the album, receives a particularly strong level of antipathy these days, due to being the most severe exemplar of the two not-entirely-unjustified complaints leveled at the album as a whole: excessive repetition (it is the longest track on the album, and basically spends its last six minutes repeating its chorus ad infinitum), and headache-inducing levels of overproduction.

That said, the song itself is easily the best thing on the album from a purely compositional perspective…it was written around the time of their far superior first album, Definitely Maybe (indeed, it was reportedly the first thing the band’s primary songwriter wrote after their formation), and underneath those layers of bloated production excess, the actual song itself is a superb pastiche of Sixties Psychedelia that sounds fully comparable to an actual Beatles composition. Some have complained that the band’s punkish vocals make the song’s sentiments sound sarcastic, but if you actually listen to the verses (which include phrases like “You’re lost at sea/well, I hope that you drown” and “The lies you make me say/are getting deeper every day”), it becomes obvious that this was the intent all along.

There exists a demo recording of the material from Be Here Now that was included on a deluxe rerelease of the album and that mostly avoids the production problems that plagued the album proper, and while pretty much all the tracks sound better there than on the actual album, the demo version of this song is a revelation. Trimmed down from nine-plus minutes in length to merely six, and freed from its insane levels of overproduction, the demo version gives us a glimpse of what the song might have sounded like had they just included it on Definitely Maybe, and it becomes clear that it would easily have been a major highlight of that already superb album.

Verdict: Not entirely successful in the actual album version, to say the least, but it’s well worth tracking down the demo version to see what might have been.

If all you’ve ever heard is the single edit of this song, it sounds like a classic: one of the earliest pioneers of Heavy Metal, with one of the great Rock guitar riffs of the Sixties, and a lyric that, say what you will about it, is just enigmatic enough in its stupidity to provide some amusement. The reason many people hate this song doesn’t really become clear until you listen to the full-length, seventeen-minute album version of the song.

Now, it’s entirely possible to make seventeen consecutive minutes of music consistently engaging (I’ve seen plenty of Classical composers and Jazz musicians sustain the listeners’ interest for almost twice that long), but the members of Iron Butterfly are far too self-indulgent and sloppy to pull it off. The full-length track goes well enough for the first few minutes, but then they proceed to repeat the aforementioned great riff over and over until you never want to hear it again, let their drummer indulge himself with almost three minutes of uninspired drum solo, and make a bunch of unpleasant noises that make it seem like they discovered Industrial Music twenty years early, but hadn’t figured out how to actually make it listenable yet.

Some might try to make comparisons between this and the Grateful Dead, but the Dead’s extended jam sessions (at least on a good day) were far more sophisticated and varied than this. Remember, the Dead had a Jazz man (Phil Lesh) as their bassist, and their jams owed as much to Miles Davis as they did to earlier Psychedelic Rock. These guys, on the other hand, sound like they wrote and recorded a great three minute single and then just amused themselves in the studio for fifteen more minutes, and no-one had the good sense to tell them to leave that part off the album.

Verdict: Good for the single version, but pretty bad on the whole for the album version.

Well, Ted Nugent is saying shockingly offensive and stupid things in public again, though I’m not sure why anyone is acting surprised anymore at this point…the fact that he’s an insane idiot is pretty well established by now. But with his image having become almost entirely dominated by his increasingly asinine public pronouncements, I thought it would be interesting to shine a light on the actual musical career that made him famous in the first place. Not that there’s really much to talk about…the man was always an embarrassing walking cliche, and even his “good” songs like “Stranglehold” weren’t really all that interesting. Even his guitar chops…his only real claim to fame…aren’t really anything to write home about in the big scheme of things.

Most of his music sounded more or less like this song…a filthy, juvenile double-entendre chorus over generic Blues-Rock music that can be termed passable at best even without the stupid lyrics. This song became the ultimate shorthand for the stupid, burned-out rocker stereotype for a reason (though it is a bit ironic given Nugent’s very public stance about that demographic’s drug of choice these days).  You could at least argue this song was influential…it probably helped set the tone for all those double-entendre Rock anthems from the Hair Metal era…but most of them weren’t any better than this, so that’s a dubious accomplishment at best (and even then, you could argue he was only ripping off Led Zeppelin’s “The Lemon Song” and the dozens of raunchy Blues songs that inspired it).

There’s a reason this guy is nothing but a punchline today, and it’s not only because of his impressive propensity for making an ass of himself. I mean, Kanye West is a lunatic, too, but at least West makes sufficiently interesting music that people care about him for more than his outrageous behavior. The truth is that, if Nugent hadn’t turned out to be such a reprehensible nutcase, his music would probably have simply been forgotten decades ago.

Verdict: Not even bad enough to be interesting.

The Beatles’ Let It Be album is generally considered to be the weakest of their “real” albums (the original Yellow Submarine soundtrack hardly counts, given that it only really contained six songs, two of which were already available on other Beatles albums, and a set of instrumental film score tracks that most Beatles fans have never really cared about). And while Let It Be, like all the band’s albums, does contain at least a handful of classic Beatles gems, its negative reputation isn’t entirely undeserved…it has more outright clinkers than any other album in their discography, and “Dig a Pony” is one of the most severe.

Part of the reason this song feels so disjointed is that it was actually two different unfinished song fragments by two different songwriters within the band that were combined to make a barely-passable facsimile of a finished composition. However, this fact cannot entirely explain or excuse the song’s problems, since John Lennon’s verses would make absolutely no sense even without McCartney’s “All I want is you” chorus.

Now, there are certainly no shortage of all-time classic Beatles songs that don’t make any more sense than this one, but those songs were generally full of memorable and evocative imagery and language. This song, on the other hand, is essentially just random drivel that means nothing whatsoever even on an abstract level, wedded to a cliche chorus that doesn’t fit with the rest of the song in the slightest. It may not be the worst Beatles song of all time, but it is without a doubt the most pointless.

Verdict: Bad.

The Darkness, who had one hugely successful album in England in the early 2000s, were essentially attempting a more over-the-top version of Tenacious D’s schtick…a parody of the ridiculous flamboyance of 80s Hair Metal. The difference is that while Jack Black was hardly a credible Metal vocalist (indeed, that is meant to be a major part of the joke), he was still actually a listenable singer. This band, on the other hand, featured a lead singer whose agonizingly out-of-control falsetto ruins any comic value their attempted parody might have had. Intentional awfulness for the sake of humor is all well and good, but being intended as a parody is not a blank check to be unlistenable, and making your audience’s ear bleed is pretty much never a pleasurable experience for them. There might have been some potential in the band’s style of parody…they certainly had better instrumental chops than Tenacious D, and they did seem to have a knack for making over-the-top music videos that might have served them well if they had come out a decade or so later. But while stupidity can be played off as comedic, visceral annoyance is much harder to make enjoyable, no matter how much irony you wrap it in. It’s probably not a coincidence that this band was a success at the height of the hipster era, and I have to wonder how many of their listeners actually enjoyed their music.

Verdict: This singer’s voice is pure punishment, so I don’t think any other factor really matters. If you really need an ironic throwback Metal band that has more legit musical credentials than Tenacious D, I’d recommend checking out The Sword instead.