The organ sound is horrible (the musical equivalent to fingernails running down a chalkboard… and then back up. Repeatedly). Jim Morrison’s voice lacks the ability to carry a tune. The lyrics make no sense whatsover, especially taken as a whole. It’s extremely overplayed, over-rated, and over-popular (as per the OP).
It is a bad song. It is iconic, especially of pretentious late-60s rock songs. Therefore, it gets my vote.
Wow, Ludovic, you’re a difficult man to please. Really, early Beatles, Unskinny Bop, and Rockefella Skank are the iconic bad songs of their decades?
Excellent choice.
For the 90s I’m going with that terrible "Sex and Candy’ song.
Actually, I can see this point of view. If you take this song out of context and listen to it today for the first time, you’d say that the melody is sing-songy, the lyrics are trite and the rhyming is contrived (“no time to wallow in the mire”? please :rolleyes:), the singing is bad, and the instrumental musicianship mediocre. It is perhaps the most popular Doors song but not necessarily their best work. It makes you wonder why Jim Morrison was the object of so much worship.
But you could do that kind of analysis with many of the #1 hits of the 60s and have no shortage of criticism. This song is hardly the worst song of the decade.
How about this as a contender for the '90’s,
No Limits - 2 unlimited - just about epitomises the worst of that decade.
for the '80’s this is the one
Clouds across the moon - The Rah band
…how about this for an absolutely cringmaking performance - the day rock N roll finally gave up and hid away in embarassment
OK… Loved this question, so I actually thought about my answers for each decade.
1960’s - It’s Now or Never - Elvis
1970’s - Rhinestone Cowboy - Glenn Campbell
1980’s - We Are The World
1990’s - When A Man Loves A Woman - Michael Bolton
2000’s - This is the Night - Clay Aiken
Well good call bringing American Idol into the conversation.
For the 80’s I think “Lady In Red” by Chris De Burgh deserves a mention. Horrible glurgy stuff. Just A Friend by Biz Markie also needs to be thrown out there.
00’s I gotta mention “Whatever You Like” by TI because of it’s badness. The best thing I can say about it is that it didn’t use the dreaded autotune, but sounds like it needed it.
If you’re going to talk about the worst of the '70’s, you have to talk about disco. My nomination: “Get Down Tonight” by KC and Sunshine Band.
And I have to say this for the umpteenth time in umpteen threads: If you going to say ‘X’ is a bad singer, you also have to provide us with a ‘Y’ whom you think is a good singer, to provide context and credibility.
I’m not getting this Jim Morrisson is a bad singer thing at all. So please provide your good singer examples.
:rolleyes:
Enrico Caruso
There. Satisfied?
Link for you and others who are demanding proof as to how one can consider a song/singer/drummer/guitarist/writer/President/ideology/etc. to be “bad” when others like it.
:rolleyes:
Oh yeah, that’s a pretty bad one.
I’d like to nominate Kid Rock’s stupidly-rhymed theft of intellectual property, All Summer Long. It starts our by directly stealing the opening music of Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London; I assume that if Zevon were still alive he’d have an acerbic remark or two to make about it. Then Kid Rock rhymes “man” and “Michcigan,” “bar” and “fire” (they might rhyme in the Deep South but not in Northern Michigan), and finally, for the pièce de résistance, “things” and “things.” At least that sounds less jarring, but you can’t really rhyme a word with itself – that’s not rhyming, it’s just repeating.
Then he segues into ripping off ANOTHER act’s work, Sweet Home Alabama from Lynyrd Skynyrd. The entirety of the song is dumb and predictable lyrics, horrible or trite rhymes, and a substantial misappropriation of the work of other, arguably more popular musicians.
Kid Rock has two songs for which he should be shot. This one (things and things? IDIOCY) and the execrable “Picture.”
Yep, I haven’t heard from you in three nights so I’m sleeping with this other person. OMIGOD I’M SO TORTURED OMIGOD THE PAAAAAAAAAAAIN.
I weep with joy finding that someone else hates that suckass “Lady in Red” song, but you will take my Biz Markie from my COLD DEAD HANDS!
It’s so fabulously bad that it’s great!
Yeah, I’m not getting that one at all. You can call him a bad poet and have a fair argument. But a bad singer? Nah. He has a good strong bass-to-baritone voice.
The song is boring but I don’t think it’s fair to accuse him of stealing anything. They’re samples and he credited them to Zevon and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Werewolves of London and Sweet Home Alabama are pretty much musically identical anyway; they have the same chord progression. So it’s dumb and uncreative but not stealing.
60s and 70s, I werent around enough to be able to nominate this. But Light my Fire and Smoke on the water are contenders, really? With a long progressive solo in one, and a monster hook in the other.
80s, I second Lady in Red.
Definitely not: Walkin on sunshine. A great and unusual example of a straight happy song.
90s.
Some of the synth dance crap. Barbie Girl maybe.
Not: Breakfast at Tiffanys is a good representative of that genre of rock, but it’s too catchy.
00s, I second My Humps. Also because the lyrics are so stupid.
10s, The Tik Tik song is a predeclared winner. Damn.
2000’s: first song I thought of was “Hey Ya” by Outkast. I swear I heard that every 15 minutes for 6 months.
Not mentioned yet and in no particular order:
Troglodyte - Jimmy Caster Bunch
Brand New Key - Melanie
Hot Pants - Gene Summers and the Platinum Fog
Muscrat Love - Captain and Tennille
Beth - Kiss
Not to be too much of a party-pooper, but an iconic song of a decade should be one that was fairly ubiquitous in that decade, no? Not something fairly obscure?
I have to think about 2000-2009 - I do listen to a lot of music from that era, but if it’s crap, I just delete it from my iTunes. I’ve heard “Anything You Like” once or twice, and it is unbelievably bad.