perfidy

Now! Newly updated and revised, 4/21!

Blender magazine's new issue contains the latest volley in an increasingly tiresome but still lively debate: the 50 worst songs ever. According to this USA Today coverage, the Blender top ten are

1. We Built This City Starship 1985
2. Achy Breaky Heart, Billy Ray Cyrus,1992
3. Everybody Have Fun Tonight, Wang Chung, 1986
4. Rollin', Limp Bizkit, 2000
5. Ice Ice Baby, Vanilla Ice, 1990
6. The Heart of Rock & Roll, Huey Lewis & The News, 1984
7. Don't Worry, Be Happy , Bobby McFerrin, 1988
8. Party All the Time, Eddie Murphy, 1985
9. American Life, Madonna, 2003
10. Ebony and Ivory, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, 1982

Man... I wish I could find absolute fault with this list, but that's hard to do given the eminent suckitude of each song in the top ten. "We Built This City" is indeed a worthy contender for the title of worst song ever. Nonetheless I personally have a hard time finding "City" worse than, say, Extreme's "More Than Words," Aqua's "Barbie Girl" (reportedly also on the list), or the entire recorded output of Supertramp.

I wonder what metric they used to put this list together? Well, I have some proposals! (Read on: there's a few dick jokes, some graphic revenge fantasies, and some deeply ridiculous angry conviction)

[wik] BTD Greg has his own list up, and no overlap with mine. Just shows to go ya how much bad music there is out there.

The USA-Today piece notes that novelty songs, or songs that aspire to nothing more than shlock, don't rate as "worst ever" because they don't aspire to anything more. I can agree with that. So, no "Who Let The Dogs Out" or "Macarena."

But how do we decide that Madonna's excrescent "American Life," released just last year, is worse than the Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" or Debbie Boone's "You Light Up My Life," which have more than half a century of sick-making between them? I argue that long-livedness should play a part. I seriously doubt that Madonna's "American Life" will ever surface again, but on any given night, at any bar in the more thinly populated areas of the USA, you stand an awfully good chance of enduring "Achy Breaky Heart."

Then, how do you decide what's worse between an established artist who makes a shitty single (e.g. Madonna's "American Life," Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire," Stevie Wonder/Macca "Ebony/Ivory"), otherwise innocuous artists who have an unlooked-for chart hit with a horrible song (Bobby McFerrin, "Don't Worry, Be Happy," Wang Chung, "Everybody Have Fun Tonight") and artists who seem to exist only to fester (Limp Bizkit ("Nookie" aside), Billy Ray Cyrus, Starship)? Madonna, Stevie and Paul all have towering achievements to their name, and in my opinion, one bad song from them-- no matter how shit-your-pants embarrassing it may be-- is still better than any song from shlockmeister supremes like Jefferson Airplane's third incarnation, Journey, or Debbie Boone. The flukes are the wild cards: competent bar bands like Huey Lewis who succeed beyond their talent, one-hit-wonders like Wang Chung, and arthouse mediocrities like Bobby McFerrin.

So. We can leave Madonna, Stevie Wonder, and Paul McCartney aside, no matter how I may personally feel about "Ob-la-di."

I would also axe the merely incompetent. So: goodbye Eddie Murphy. Ditto the merely innocuous who punch above their weight. Goodbye Huey Lewis.

Now that I have cleared the field of all but the most serious of contenders, here is my personal, highly idiosyncratic, and dyspeptically jaundiced list of the ten worst songs of all time.

1) Debbie Boone. "You Light Up My Life." Apart from lovesick thirteen-year-olds Christian girls crying into their heart shaped pillows at four-color Tiger Beat centerfolds of Leif Garrett (and the housewives they grew up to be) nobody can honestly claim this song is anything but an affront to all that is good, decent, and holy. More than anything else in the history of the world, this song's fanbase are an absolutely persuasive argument in favor of a rigorous program of enforced eugenics.

2) Billy Ray Cyrus. "Achy Breaky Heart." Made the mullet and dancing in formation fashionable once again. Hey Billy! Those were my people you did that to! My people, the good, honest upright briarhoppers, hillbillies, and piney-barrens homesteaders of the world who, if they only had a chance would groove to AC/DC and Steve Earle, but now wear big stupid hats and listen to your progeny. Cyrus is also to be blamed for collateral damage: the line-dancing craze, the meteoric rise of so-called "country" music machine-tooled for the minivan set, and making pasty drug-taking sons of bitches like Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and my main man George Jones into pop-culture footnotes for the entire decade of the 1990s.

3) REM. "Shiny Happy People." The same band that crafted such monuments of messy genius as "Radio Free Europe" and "Belong" stumbled bad. I can't find much to say about this song except that I hate it. The worst part (for me) is that it's still a staple of the Adult-Album-Alternative radio I tend to listen to, and therefore I am subjected to this overmedicated pap far more often than is healthy for the members of REM. Someday vengeance will be mine.

4) .38 Special. "Rockin' Into The Night." The Blender list wisely chose to cut out the "low-hanging fruit" of the awful music of the 70's, but some offenses are too egregious to bear. Three years after the punk revolution broke, .38 Special still felt fine about putting out a song whose chorus ran "Rocking into the night, rocking into the night." So... you gonna rock into the night or something? The single most boneheaded of all butt-rock songs, first among a thick field of worthy contenders.

5) Starlight Vocal Band. "Afternoon Delight." Although part of that terrible era Blender wisely ignored, this song's recent resurgence via an inexplicable retro-fondness for the worst parts of the 1970s and films like "PCU" and "Good Will Hunting" renders it eligible for the list. Of all the songs ever recorded about sweet love in the afternoon, this is the only one that makes me wish I could cut off my own penis in protest. Or maybe cut the penises off the Starlight Vocal Band's male members. That's a healthier way to think of this.

6) Marcy Playground. "Sex And Candy."
7) Live. "Lighting Crashes."

These two picks represent all the worst aspects of the Alternative movement of the 1990s. "Sex and Candy" is simply the very worst song I have personally ever heard, though it seems to be quite the popular item among millions and millions of my peers. A more rational mind would conclude that they are right and I am wrong, but that's what they said about Jesus before they nailed him to a tree, and look how far it got him! I hereby announce the establishment of a new religion: the Church of Fuck Marcy Playground.

As for Live, they make it on here because they took a great song with a lovely hook and sound and threw lyrics over top of it that include the line, "The placenta falls to the floor." Nice, guys. Next!

8) The Doors. "Hello, I Love You." Somehow Jim Morrison, in between drunkenly waving his dick around and acting all pretty, got himself rated a poet. A poet! "Hello, I love you/ won't you tell me your name. / Hello, I love you/ let me jump in your game." A poet! "Hello Mother. I want to fuck you." A poet! "There's a killer on the road/ his brain is squirming like a toad /Take a long holiday/ let your children play." A poet! "Hello, I Love You" is the sound of the most overrated band of all time pushing Four Roses and calling it Champagne. Makes me want to dig up Jim Morrison's corpse just so I can pee on it while singing "Riders on the Storm."

9) "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" Rod Stewart. The great, the inimitable Rod the Mod burned up an entire career's goodwill with this turd. Worse, this song represented a nadir from which Stewart would never recover, a huge loss to the world's sleazy rock well-being. Nothing more to say, except that the Revolting Cocks cover of the tune is priceless, with an extra verse about the nameless couple realizing they have to buy a rubber and some KY.

10) This space intentionally left blank in honor of all the thousands of songs I'd like to include but can't, ten being a conveniently round number and all. Pat Boone. Jazz guys trying rock. Jess Roden's godawful version of "On Broadway" (Doors trivia: Roden was on the band's short list to replace Jim Morrison when Jim took the dirt nap. Why the hell are the Doors so famous?). Alicia Bridges' "I Love the Nightlife," the song that proved that if disco wasn't dead, it was shooting dirty heroin in a Chelsea bathroom with a shotgun in its mouth. Candelbox's lone hit. There are so many, many, more, but I will leave you now with just three words: "Cold." "As." "Ice."

[alsø wik] Allison, commenting at Begging to Differ, notes that Lee Greenwood's "Proud To Be An American" just might be the worst song of all time. Fie on me for forgetting! She's right.

Number 11 with a bullet) Lee Greenwood. "God Bless the U.S.A." The anthem of knee-jerk patriotic Rotarians everywhere. No other song in the world has done so much to make me not only ashamed to be American for the three minutes it's playing, but to wish fervently for a Chomskyite hairshirt-wearing America-hating putsch JUST SO I never have to hear that trash again. Or, I could just go cut off Lee Greenwood's penis, for all the good it would do.