If Pearl Jam had it their way, there’s a good chance that they wouldn’t have become as famous as they did. They were the epitome of a rock and roll band that was supposed to go on and earn their stripes the hard way, and when they became huge overnight, it was almost like they were betraying where they had come from. They weren’t ready for that kind of transition, and Vitalogy was the first time you could actually feel those birthing pains in real time as they tried to grow a new version of themselves.
Make no mistake, when the record is, you know, being a record, it’s actually pretty good, but there are more than a few times when things get a little too off the rails. ‘Pry To’ and ‘Aye Davanita’ are neat little interludes, but ‘Bugs’ is what happens when Eddie Vedder gets an accordion and a really bad idea, using the whole time to start talking about the bugs in his room and getting more agitated about them and his own state of mind.
There are plenty of times where grunge could sound whiny and annoying as a deliberate part of the sound, but this is one of the few times where you have to wonder what Vedder is even going for. No one coming to the band for songs like ‘Jeremy’ was going to like this, but even if he was being weird for the hell of it, it’s almost like he was actively trying to make sure all the fairweather fans were gone by the time the tune was over.
‘Nookie’ – Limp Bizkit
It is too harsh to say that nu metal was a mistake in a lot of ways? That’s not technically fair, given the many great bands that were under that label, like Korn, Deftones, and maybe even pieces of Slipknot, but when you look at the carnage caused at Woodstock 1999, even progenitors of the genre, like Tom Morello, were hanging their heads in shame, wondering how it got this low. Everyone has their own answers to where the genre went downhill, but the short answer usually comes back to Limp Bizkit.
Out of all the great frontmen of the past decades of rock and roll, Fred Durst tended to look more like a middle school bully than an actual rock star. So when he started making songs that were deliberately confrontational and talking about giving into his macho instincts, it was either going to come off as annoying, predatory, or a combination of the two, depending on how much tolerance you had for someone whining the word ‘YEAH’ into your ears.
And while ‘Nookie’ is just a small sample of the kind of songs that they had unleashed upon the Earth, it does get a few points for actually being a tune that can stick in someone’s head. Some of their tunes aren’t even worth taking up that much mental real estate, so you’re better off cutting your losses after hearing this song once and then moving on to something else. They might have sold a lot of records back in the day, but then everyone collectively turned 18 and realised what they were doing.
‘Bollywood’ – Liz Phair
The entire career trajectory of Liz Phair has been one of the strangest in music history. On one hand, she has made one of the greatest indie albums of all time and should be celebrated as one of the reigning queens of alternative music off the strength of Exile in Guyville. If you were to have heard of her in the 2000s, though, you’d have to have wondered what those people were talking about when she released her self-titled record, sounding like a slightly mature version of Avril Lavigne. And while that record does have its fans, ‘Bollywood’ was the first time that we truly saw how strange she could get.
A lot of the accompanying album Funstyle is a pretty by-the-numbers Liz Phair, but there are a few songs on the album that are recorded “funstyle”, to use her own language. There’s no real definition for what that is, but if ‘Bollywood’ is any indication, it’s music that’s being made to be as annoying as possible. It would have been a bad decision for her to rap on principle, but her decision to both rap over a Bollywood-style beat is against all matters of good taste that anyone could have done.
Never mind the fact that she could have faced real cancellation if she released this today, this song is one of the only ones on this list that makes you almost concerned for the artist’s well-being. Phair is more than capable of making great music after Exile’s success, but there had to be some form of delusion going on if she legitimately thought that a song like this had the potential to be innovative.
‘Emo Girl’ – Machine Gun Kelly
It’s almost cheating to call Machine Gun Kelly a rock musician in the truest sense of the word. Hell, there are some people who have problems calling him a “musician” in general, but there’s no denying that he at least had some chops in hip-hop before he got bodyslammed by Eminem when he started talking trash about Slim Shady. But even if he got slapped so hard he had to switch genres, seeing him trying on his best emo threads wasn’t the kind of thing that anyone would have been asking for.
While it’s hard to think that Willow Smith is carrying most of the weight on this song, ‘Emo Girl’ tends to feel like a cheap knockoff of everything it’s emulating. Pop-punk revivals were alive and well around the time that MGK broke out again, but even with the help of Travis Barker, his lack of chops can’t really be hidden that much, especially with his half-an-octave vocal range and a terminal case of smoker’s cough when he tries to go for anything remotely resembling a high note.
Smith does indeed have some great songs to her name, but anyone working beside Kelly was always asking for a little bit of backlash. And now that he’s moved on to collaborating with people like Jelly Roll, it’s important to understand who this guy is at this point. This is a culture vulture the same way Drake was before he was outed by Kendrick Lamar, and no matter how many genres he claims to love, there’s no denying that he’s trying to sell you something rather than put in the legwork.
‘About a Girl’ – Puddle of Mudd
Anyone trying to cover one of the greatest artists of all time needs to come prepared with a really good idea. Not every band is easy to cover, and even if you are working with a song that seems fairly easy, it can be nearly impossible to match the passion that the original artist put into the song when you take a swing at it. You need steady hands to touch a masterpiece, but Wes Scantlin approached Nirvana’s ‘About A Girl’ the same way that a chimp discovered a weapon in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
At first, the song is played decently, but as soon as Scantlin opens his mouth, we are treated to what I can only describe as somewhere between a man throwing his back out, several dying cats, and the devastating final moments of a walrus’s life on every single line. While Scantlin has covered the song well in the past, he’s clearly past his prime if he thinks that these notes are acceptable, especially when he gets into the higher register and starts sounding like he’s on the verge of getting a hernia.
Admittedly, Kurt Cobain wasn’t exactly right on the money with all of his high notes, but he at least knew how to roll with the punches whenever he played his tune live. If Scantlin intentionally made it sound this shitty, fair enough for pulling off one of the greatest trolls in music history, but even if it is a gag, why the hell would your fans want to listen to you desecrate one of the greatest grunge bands of all time?
‘Ebony and Ivory’ – Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder
Yep, not even The Beatles are safe from a list like this. Granted, it’s not like Paul McCartney didn’t have more than a few low lights even in the Fab Four. John Lennon said numerous times that he had hated his bandmate’s ‘granny shit’ songs, and yet there was always room for Macca to make songs that were too schmaltzy for the average listener. But even by his standards for sugary melodies, adding Stevie Wonder to a song like ‘Ebony and Ivory’ was one step further than most people were willing to go.
There’s nothing wrong with a message about bringing different people together in racial harmony, and the pedigree on display here is to die for, but the actual melody is one of the all-time worst in McCartney’s catalogue. Most people didn’t have the stomach for ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’, but putting it next to this tune makes the jaunty White Album track sound like you’re listening to a masterpiece, especially when the duet with Wonder has that many synth flourishes to it.
This period of McCartney’s career is usually hit or miss with most fans who preferred his 1970s stuff, but getting him to make something this trite was a little disheartening coming after an album as interesting as McCartney II. The door was open for him to make something more ambitious, but he was far happier to keep writing those silly love songs for the rest of his life, even if it meant getting a stinker like this.
‘Wango Tango’ – Ted Nugent
There’s always been a certain stench coming off of Ted Nugent’s music before you even listen to it. Even if we’re ignoring all of the strange political crusades that he has gone on throughout his career, his ability to speak his mind and do whatever the hell he wants has been more than a little bit slimy when looking at songs like ‘Jailbait’, especially knowing that he legally adopted one of his groupies back in the day. But despite proudly saying that he never did drugs throughout his career, that makes listening to a song like ‘Wango Tango’ even more inexcusable in his catalogue.
Nugent was never known to be the most clever wordsmith that anyone had ever heard or anything, but ‘Cat Scratch Fever’ seemed to be one of the most literate songs he ever wrote if this was his standard. Half of the song just consists of the title being said a million times, and while ‘tango’ at least implies some sort of dance, the fact that he missed the opportunity to actually make a dance craze out of it just seems like a worse version of the word gibberish that Marc Bolan used to do.
But whereas Bolan had style, all ‘Uncle Ted’ has to offer is the kind of delivery that makes him sound like the kind of uncle that you forgot to stop inviting to the family reunions every single year because of how crazy he is. Many of Nugent’s best songs are better when he shreds on guitar, but there’s no point in making a song that actively feels like it’s killing brain cells as you listen to it.
‘Kokomo’ – The Beach Boys
The story of The Beach Boys is one of the most romantic and tragic stories in rock and roll history. So many people have fond memories of the first time they heard a record like Pet Sounds, and half of the greatest productions of the 1960s came from Brian Wilson trying something different when he entered the studio. But when Wilson got lost along the way, all we had left was Mike Love, and he started making the kind of tunes that sounded like the epitome of middle-aged rock.
When coming up with tunes for the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail, Love’s ode to a made-up destination is still one of the most polarising songs in the band’s catalogue. Granted, if you first heard this song when you were six, you’re always going to have fond memories of it, but when you start to reach anywhere past the age of 21, you start to realise that this is a bunch of nonsense, especially knowing that this is the same band that made songs like ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘God Only Knows’.
And given the fact that Cocktail also gave us the song ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ by Bobby McFerrin, it’s safe to say that most people would want to take a hatchet to anyone who had put together the soundtrack. This might have some of the original members, but this version of The Beach Boys and the version that made ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ are very different entities, and the only silver lining is that Wilson wasn’t in the picture to see what they were doing to the band that he started.
‘Purify’ – Metallica
It’s hard to really fault a band that was working during their absolute worst emotional point. Metallica had been the kings of metal for decades by the time they landed on St Anger, but once they had to deal with Jason Newsted leaving, working with a therapist, and James Hetfield storming out midway through production, not many people were looking for them to come back with the best album of their careers or anything. But even with the massive curve that most people grade this record on, ‘Purify’ was the kind of song that seemed dead on arrival from the first time it came on.
Compared to the other Metallica songs that crammed in hook after hook over eight minutes, this is the first time where you could describe their music as pure cacophony. Lars Ulrich wasn’t the greatest drummer by this point, but even for the band’s track record, this is a rhythmic train wreck throughout most of the verses, only to be saved by the choruses, which have one of the most insidious earworms that Hetfield has ever come up with as he screams ‘CAN’T YOU HELP ME?’.
From the sound of their interviews, the band seemed to be enjoying making a more raw album than what they did before, but ‘Purify’ is the purest example of everything wrong with this approach to recording. They had many records throughout their early years that didn’t exactly sound great, but this sounds like they were shooting for garage rock and ended up somewhere between nu-metal’s sloppy seconds and avant-garde chaos. Lulu wasn’t designed to sound catchy, but they were way off the mark if they thought fans would eat this up happily.
‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ – The Bee Gees
If it’s hard enough trying to cover a classic rock band, covering The Beatles is probably ten times harder than that. This is the band that people herald as the greatest musicians to ever walk the Earth, so if you’re going to do justice to one of their songs, it has to either be a unique rendition of what they had done or played in such a way that every single piece of the tune is absolutely perfect. The Bee Gees chose neither option, and when working on the soundtrack to the Sgt Peppers movie, it’s disgusting to see how much they butchered one of the first proper metal songs.
‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ is one of the dirtiest songs that the Fab Four ever made, and when they give the song the Saturday Night Fever treatment, it just doesn’t work. The rest of the album benefits from having bands like Aerosmith and Earth, Wind and Fire put their own spin on some songs, but if there was ever a pure reasoning behind the phrase ‘disco sucks’, it most likely came from people listening to this album exclusively.
The Gibb Brothers don’t sing the song terribly, and the harmonies are impressively layered, but whereas other songs on this list seemed to have a real point, their version of the Beatles classic earns the title for not only being the most annoying song of the 1970s, but also the one that was never supposed to exist. Everyone could have easily erased this song from their memory the first time they heard it, but given the dismal reception of the movie, the executives owe George Martin an apology for having him involved with this cultural stain.