Since I work a lot producing my own music, I like to listen very intently to the backing beats to songs and try to pick out little sounds that I wouldn’t notice on my first pass over a song. This is sometimes really cool and sometimes very very annoying. For example, in the Bob Dyl…I mean, Steeler’s Wheel song “Stuck in the Middle With You”, there is hand clapping going on to the beat. Normally this isn’t a big deal, but, for some dumb reason, someone at the studio decided it would be a great idea to pan the sound of the clap pretty much all the way to just one ear. I dig the song, but the misbalance just throws my OCD for a loop. - YouTube
I don’t know how I listened to this song without noticing it, but now that it was pointed out, I can’t get it out of my head…the beat for “Run This Town” from Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Kanye West sounds like a duck quacking. No joke. Run This Town-Jay-Z Ft. Kanye West & Rihanna-Lyrics - YouTube
Bad by Wale has straight up bedsprings in the background. No joke. - YouTube
There have been a number of songs with a woman making orgasmic sounds laid in - “Hungry Like The Wolf” (Duran Duran Duran Duran - which sounds like an old truck that wont’ start) comes to mind. It gets old pretty fast.
If producers are going to do that, it needs to be more subtle - the original studio recording of “Pink” (Aerosmith) has one very well-placed “Oooh!” in a woman’s voice. (Of course, if you understand that the song’s about Steven Tyler’s dong, it makes sense…)
On that track, some songs have one small sound that makes the whole cut work. Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” is one of my favorites, with the pause in the middle that has one of the nicest pickups of the riff I can think of, followed by three short high notes on what sounds like a glockenspiel. I listen for them every time.
ETA: Aerosmith also tends to mess around with song balance a lot. A couple of their big songs start in one channel and then blow out into two. Never sure whether that’s cool or annoying.
Blanking on titles and acts right now, but any time there are car horns or police/emergency crew sirens in a piece it bothers me enough that no matter how much I like them I can’t put them in any shuffle I use in a vehicle. If the traffic is heavy enough and full of idiot drivers I can’t have bogus signals in to distract me from the idiots trying to dice traffic at some ungodly speed that is totally inappropriate.
And stop with the orgasms already, I don’t need to hear that in music, it is bad enough to be channel surfing and see someone mock screwing on the TV.
When “edited for radio” version have something ANNOYING AND STUPID in place of just blanking out the swear. A bleep is the least worst of these things, but so many versions have weird little sound effects that sometimes try to “fit in” with the song (I heard a version of “Thrift Shop” that substituted in a loud and annoying old-timey cash register “cha-ching” in place of the “fucking”,) or worse is something trying to be funny (in the 90’s, the popular Alanis Morrisette song “You Outta Know” has the line “when you fuck her!” and so many radio stations had a version that replaced “fuck her” with some stupid fucking Tarzan yell. WTF?)
The Thirteenth Floor Elevators were a legendary psychedelic band from Texas. The lyrics were often mystical but the real appeal was their hard-driving sound. “You’re Gonna Miss Me” still sounds good. (Roky Erickson actually wrote that one before he joined the band.)
Tommy Hall contributed the most brain-damaged lyrics, set himself up as the mystical guru & insisted the group take acid lots. Like, all the time. He wasn’t much of a musician, so he played the electric jug.
That insufferable jug is on nearly every track they recorded and does** not** add a thing to their music.
“Get Together” by the Youngbloods: All through the song, someone in the left channel is faintly repeating, “do do do do - do do do do - do do do do”. I really like the sound of the guitar in this song, but listening to it in even inexpensive headphones, I can clearly hear the, “do do do do”. I can’t NOT hear it. Found a mono version that doesn’t seem to have it, but I haven’t decided which is worse, the “do do’s” or mono.
Interestingly, it bothered me for a while, but doesn’t anymore. There’s a song by the band VNV Nation that always really bothered me - it’s called Electronaut and I’ve linked to the exact spot in the song that bothered me here. When it came out in 2002, that main analogue synth sound had a piercing, high frequency squeal the entire time and it bugged the crap out of me.
Now nothing in the song has changed, but after 11 years of seeing concerts and experiencing other loud events, I think I’ve lost the ability to hear that frequency. I hear the synth sound, but the squeal is gone. I can only assume that the band themselves had already lost the ability to hear that frequency when programming the song so they never noticed it was there.
This is a HUGE pet peeve for me. And I have to include radio commercials. The car is the only place I listen to the radio, and I can’t go into a panic and try to see where the siren or horn is coming from. As libertarian as I am, I wouldn’t mind if this were actually illegal.
Prince screeching really loud in the middle or at the end of a lot of his songs completely puts me off listening to them. Which is a shame, they’d otherwise be fine.
I’m surprised that the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” hasn’t been mentioned yet. (I personally don’t mind all the woo-woos.) This song seems to come up quite often in similar threads.
Cyndi Lauper’s song “Time after Time” has this annoying percussion that’s probably supposed to tie in with the line “I hear the clock tick and think of you.” But to oldsters like myself, it sounds like a vinyl record with the needle skipping. Strangely, I never noticed it before yesterday.
The Beatle’s “Blackbird” is even worse – it’s as if they timed the percussion to sound exactly like a scratched record.
One of the best female vocal performances I’ve ever heard, but it’s spoiled by the decision to have some fat guy slap his stomach all the way through the chorus.