My coworker forced me to endure the Schumacher/Webber *Phantom of the Opera *the other day. I’m still recovering. In describing the experience to a friend, I found myself repeatedly describing it as “the worst music in the world.”
Then of course we get to talking about what’s really the worst music in the world. Of course this will be about the most subjective thing ever, so apologies to any of you who named your children after the characters in this dreadful movie. But anyway.
So. Kenny Rogers? Lionel Ritchie? Anne Murray? Celine Dion? Don Ho? Seriously. What’s the closest we can come to a consensus on this?
And I don’t think, like, the Shaggs count. Cuz yeah, no skillz. But hella entertaining, right? and not so soulless and empty as, like, the empty soulless music of Michael Bolton. Right?
But I like to say more, anyway, so, I dislike jazz also.
I will qualify it by saying any band or singer the girls in the audience emit high pitched screams for-sure sign its bad.
Very soon, I have a feeling, every single genre is going to get mentioned…
I’ll still nominate something: a song I just heard an hour ago, when I went out to eat lunch. It was so profoundly bad I had to look it up when I came back home. I’d like to hear from anyone who actually appreciates it, and not in a so-bad-it’s-good sort of way.
But seriously folks. I think any indie garage band where people can’t actually hit the notes - tuneless grunting meandering overbearing caterwauling is just unbearable.
I have my clock-radio set on a Christian rock station. It has to be that or country & western, otherwise I will lie in bed and listen to it and not get up.
But if there was an all-Yoko all the time station, that would be my best bet. I’d turn that sucker off before it even had a chance to pollute my brain.
North Cameroonian griot music is pretty terrible. It involves a really oddly dressed guy (think court jester, but in Africa) blowing a bagpipe or playing a tiny guitar right in your ear while singing a song that usually translates to “Hello white lady…” You have to pay them to go away. People will take a different route when they see a griot. When someone wants to raise money, sometimes they get a griot to go from house to house in the village to collect money to go away. Griot is an inherited position and children of griots can only marry into other griot families.
I wish I had a sound clip. It really does sound like a parody of the worst music you can think of.
The band that lived in the apartment below me used to warm up with a 20 - 30 minute version of a number that I called “Tuning While Stoned”. It was their signature piece, and they used it between every other number. Strangely, it was the only thing they played that was consistently recognizable…
I also remember a guy who played on the street who had bought a glockenspiel at a pawn shop and was bashing away at it with a pair of hammers.
There was also a busker on the trains in NYC who had an alto sax that had been run over by a car. His schtick involved shaking a coffee cup with some change in it under one’s nose and saying “If you don’t give me something, I might have to actually play this thing”. Never did hear him play…
Norteño, if that’s the right term for all that shit with the grating accordions and piercing trumpets and caterwauling vocals. Inevitably played at high enough volume to share with all the neighbors. God, I’d rather listen to anything else in this thread than that horrible garbage.
And you kneejerk Yoko-bashers don’t know what you’re talking about. Yoko has made some great records. “Mind Train” rocks.
