Worst songs according to Blender

[Nano]

Hi there. Blender magazine made one of those lists: "The Worst 50 Songs Ever!" Surprisingly, disco tracks were not featured (phew!) but there's a lot of dance material, selected and copypasted down here.

As always, the real fun is not in the songs themselves but in the blurbs written for them. Enjoy.
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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!


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.”


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.”


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.


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.


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!”


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.


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.


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.”


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.

[osses]

hahah good list,i agree with number one in 100%!!!Hate this song so much!

And there is now disco here ,hehe

[Disco Funk]

I just checked out Illegal Alien on youtube - what a terrible song! And Genesis isn't even American. How could they put together a song so prejudiced? I barely remembered it back in the day. I was probably too young to realize the song was so nasty.

Disco Funk

[paul]

Boy, do I agree with this list. I think we had a thread on crappy '80s Lionel Ritchie songs
Everybody wang chung tonight