(Credits: Far Out / Bernard Gotfryd / MK Feeney / Alamy)
Any musician’s goal is to make a record that sounds timeless. Regardless of how much blood, sweat and tears go into the final product, all that matters is that you made something that will last on this Earth for much longer than you will. Although artists like The Beatles have given fans their share of iconic songs that will go down in music history, every band does have those few songs that should be put away in vaults forever.
That’s not to say that every one of the tunes is bad from top to bottom. There may have been a time and a place for this kind of tune at one point, but the more that people start listening to the lyrics, the more they come off as incredibly dated or more than a little bit creepy by standards, whether that’s talking about sex, drugs, and rock and roll or the darkest sides of the human psyche.
No band is safe from a lousy performance, either, though, and while most records get deleted from people’s memories because of what the lyrics were, there are equally as many that are guilty of being downright difficult to listen to due to the band members either turning in one of their worst vocal takes or guitars that are blatantly out of tune or produced like a piece of trash.
Then again, the fact that every one of these artists made foul-ups like this does give audiences a certain sense of hope as well. For as flawless as their track record was, this was at least proof that even they could cough up a few duds every now and again. It’s not the legacy that anyone wants, but chances are fans of each band are going to at least 50 different other songs before they think about touching any of these.
10 songs that should never be heard again:
10. ‘Christine Sixteen’ – Kiss
We’re already skirting the line here a little bit in terms of great artists. While Kiss has been known as one of the greatest bands to ever walk the Earth, much of that comes down to their gimmick rather than them being absolute virtuosos on their respective instruments. Most of the band will tell you that they aren’t the greatest players in the world, but if they are judged on the strength of their songs, Gene Simmons already has a wealth of tunes to choose from as his absolute worst.
However, if ‘Goin’ Blind’ was already a dirty song about a 93-year-old man lusting over a teenage girl, ‘Christine Sixteen’ is one of the most ill-advised songs that the band would ever release. Although it’s all about playing up the ‘Demon’ persona that Simmons always talks about watching this literal child as she walks out of school and talking about how she is “young and clean”.
If you’re not already repulsed by that last sentence I had to write, feel free to avoid this tune like the plague. Tone Loc already got the best five seconds out of the song when he used the central riff for ‘Funky Cold Medina’, so there’s no shame in tapping out on this one and putting on the rap classic instead.
9. ‘He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)’ – The Crystals
We were already starting off in dangerous territory when talking about the dangers of lurking paedophiles around a school. Then again, putting something mildly offensive into a hard rock song was almost expected around that time to get some parents upset. But when songwriters started putting actual physical abuse into songs, you have to wonder what the point behind The Crystals’ ‘He Hit Me’ even was.
While it might have been progressive to get a song about domestic abuse on the charts, it doesn’t exactly play as well today. Compared to other artists that talk about confronting this nameless piece of shit for hitting a woman, hearing the iconic girl group sing along about being kept in a Stockholm Syndrome situation is one of the most unintentionally heartbreaking lines in a genre that’s meant to be lighthearted.
But surely breaking free from this man is what the song is building towards, right? Nope. By the end of the tune, all the audience is left with is a chorus about how this woman feels all the more happy that she is getting hurt. While there’s more than a 100% chance that a man wrote the lyrics to this tune, it feels like the wrong moral thing to do to actively seek out a track like this.
8. ‘One in a Million’ – Guns N’ Roses
It’s hard to argue with Guns N’ Roses regarding their most offensive material. This band borrowed from Sex Pistols regarding raw aggression, and no amount of political correctness would get in the way of Axl Rose saying whatever was on his mind. There was still a line that shouldn’t have been crossed somewhere, and the singer went a few years across that line when making ‘One in a Million’.
While any EP like GNR Lies should be a placeholder between major releases, Rose doubled down by making some of the most offensive lyrics he could. While it’s easy to just get wrapped up in his character as a scumbag on the streets, it’s hard to think that a sane man would write songs with various racial slurs and homophobic language in it without having some sort of axe to grind that most people don’t like to talk about.
All great rock songs might exist to exercise free speech, but for every PMRC policeman judging what should and shouldn’t be on records, this was their absolute worst nightmare. That may have been the whole point, but it’s really hard to listen to this song in confidence today and not feel more than a little bit grossed out. I mean, if you have a half-black singer in the band and are still trying to make your case to say the N-word, it’s hard to really ignore.
7. Every interlude on Unplugged – Lauryn Hill
Most people can only hope to accomplish what Lauryn Hill managed to do on her debut album. The Fugees would never stay together for very long, but in just one record, Hill got all of the warmth of R&B, the soulful vocals left over from The Score, and still had one of the most impressive flows imaginable. Whereas most people can say their piece within the span of a song, the last morsel we ever got of new music from the rap legend only made us scratch our heads when listening to the interludes.
Then again, Unplugged 2.0 almost doesn’t count as a mainline entry in her catalogue. While most people would ignore this kind of live record, the original compositions heard here are clearly unfinished, especially when trying to measure them against her mainline tracks like ‘Doo Wop (That Thing)’. But singing is not just what she came to do. She had some things on her mind, and every single interlude felt like listening to someone trauma-dump on you for a few minutes.
Although not everything she says in these breaks is bad by any metric, it tends to feel gross trying to relate to someone who is clearly not in a good spot and is desperately trying to make music for the masses. It’s a shame we only have one album out of Ms. Hill at the moment, but if Unplugged 2.0 was a preview of where things were going, people probably had to get themselves ready for more than a few TED talks if they wanted a proper album.
6. ‘Love Song’ – Alice in Chains
Any band can usually benefit from switching things up once in a while. It can get to be a slog if everyone knows what to expect out of each other, so grabbing different instruments can normally turn a jam into a different animal in just a few seconds. But when there are musicians who clearly aren’t equipped to handle another instrument, you get a rhythmic clusterfuck like what Alice in Chains gave us here.
At the same time, it’s easy to forgive ‘Love Song’, in theory. Most of the EP Sap was made as a way for the band to decompress after playing heavy music, but since the entire album was meant to be this wild comedown, hearing them pick up the intensity for what sounds like a death metal trying and failing to get a tune off the ground kills all the momentum that the project has at the very end.
While they eventually carried over that habit on Jar of Flies with ‘Swing on This’, at least that tune is a little bit of levity in between the morbid subjects on ‘Nutshell’. Here we were all having a great time until someone decided to get a little too drunk and unleashed this piece of musical vomit all over the studio floor.
5. ‘Circle of Power’ – Soundgarden
Most bands are still figuring themselves out by the time they start working on their first album. No one has all the bugs worked out the minute they get into the studio, so that means that everything will have to be a little bit rough around the edges. Soundgarden at least had some decent buildup before releasing Ultramega OK, but giving Hiro Yamamoto the microphone turned out to be a huge mistake.
Although the album itself is a grab bag of pretty much everything that makes them tick, ‘Circle of Power’ feels like a tune lifted out of some strange fever dream. Soundgarden can do many different things, but pulling off a Dead Kennedys-style punk song without Cornell at the front would always be a stretch, especially when Yamamoto starts singing like some homeless man that one would rather not come across on the subway.
Even though Soundgarden may have wanted to show their punk credentials to everyone labelling them as a metal band, a tune like this isn’t exactly helping their case. In some respects, it sounds closer to musicians who listened to Black Flag once and then just decided to make their version of it.
4. ‘We Built This City’ – Starship
Rock and roll has never been safe from being a little bit cheesy. Every act tends to have at least one soppy ballad in their arsenal, and even for all The Beatles’ iconic tracks, no one can deny that Paul McCartney’s granny music didn’t help their case as the hippest band in the world. But whereas most bands at least tried to change with the times, nothing has sounded so of its time and immediately middle-aged as Starship’s time in the spotlight.
It’s hard to really call this the ashes of Jefferson Airplane, though, considering that Grace Slick’s signature vocals had already been purged. But there was more to the band than just their star frontwoman, and when everyone got together again for the MTV generation on ‘We Built This City’, we got a song that felt like it was thrown together by a committee of moms rather than anyone who has genuinely heard a rock song before.
Ignoring the Casio keyboards that are running throughout the piece, everything that rock and roll stood for seems to be thrown out the window in favour of corporate rock on this tune. Congratulations to everyone for finding the exact middle of the road for the genre, but just remember that every time someone non-ironically listens to this song, John Lennon rolls over once in his grave, and Iggy Pop cries one solemn tear.
3. ‘Nightlife’ – Green Day
Any artist needs some sense of quality control when making a record. There will always be times when some songs don’t work well, and even if you think that the tune has potential, it takes a good producer to whip a band into shape and say that something is not good enough for them to work with. The Beatles had George Martin, and Oasis had Owen Morris or Alan McGee, but in the case of Green Day‘s trilogy, all of Rob Cavallo’s signature touches were thrown out the window when making ‘Nightlife’.
First of all, I get what the band are trying to do. The second part of their trilogy of albums, Dos!, was meant to be a party album reminiscent of Foxboro Hot Tubs, and ‘Nightlife’ was serving as the end of the night when Billie Joe Armstrong is walking the city streets. It’s easy to see what they’re going for, but all of the swagger the tune had going for it is over right after Armstrong opens his mouth.
As easy as it is to blame all of this on guest vocalist Lady Cobra, her verse would at least fit in a better song, whereas Armstrong sounds completely strung out and about to fall asleep by the end of the tune. Green Day are equipped to work with a mellow groove when they want to, but for all of the diverse pieces of their catalogue, someone should tell Armstrong to cut it out, trying to sound like a snotty version of Alex Turner.
2. ‘Purify’ – Metallica
Metallica is no stranger to rough patches in their personal lives. They had the death of Cliff Burton on the road after Master of Puppets and came out even stronger, and even when they made experiments that people didn’t love, like Load, they at least still seemed to be on the right track. Once they started to actually talk about their feelings, though, the riffs went out the window, and all we were left with was ear-piercing tunes like ‘Purify’.
But speaking as one of the dozens of people who can differentiate between the songs on St Anger, not every piece of the album was a bad idea. ‘Frantic’ had the germs of a good Metallica song, and ‘The Unnamed Feeling’ is a darker version of their traditional ballad style, but the album as a whole is lacking in ideas, and ‘Purify’ feels like they took every bad one they had and just threw them together to make a stew.
Even when a good riff does emerge towards the end of the tune, it’s hard to really get swept up in it when we had to go through Lars Ulrich’s falling-down-the-stairs drumming, the cruddy guitar tone on the rest of the song, and James Hetfield sounding like he’s about to pull a hernia every time he says the title of the song. Metal already has a reputation for sounding slightly ugly, but it’s normally not the kind of dirtiness that makes someone pull their headphones out like this.
1. ‘Revolution 9’ – The Beatles
No artist can claim to have a spotless track record. People love to talk about their favourite artists like they are the Second Coming of David Bowie or Bob Dylan, but even if there are some good songs in their discography, chances are they can cough it up at some point as well. It’s all a part of being human, but while The White Album showed The Beatles’ human side in more ways than one, ‘Revolution 9’ is one of the single strangest things ever created by Fab hands.
Since the entire album was about every member expressing themselves in whichever way they knew, hearing John Lennon turn an extended version of ‘Revolution’ into a musique concrete piece about the sound of a revolution is a bit too much on the ears. Even though Lennon was used to making this kind of experimental music with Yoko Ono, this experiment should have stayed on Two Virgins rather than be given a prime spot on the final album.
And the sad fact is that it just doesn’t in the track listing, especially when the mayhem wraps up and we are lulled back down to sleep by Ringo Starr on the sentimental ‘Good Night’. Then again, we almost need that musical equivalent of a warm hug after going through the hellish landscape on the last track.
Related Topics
