Wow, tough crowd… but I find none to disagree with. I clicked in with “Muskrat Love” at the top of my list, and it remains there, but there’s some serious contention in here.
I’ll add Barry Manilow’s “Mandy,” though. In close competition with “Copacabana.”
We used to have a rock station that played this dreck every Wednesday morning for an hour, and it was painfully fun to listen through the hour. Can’t remember the name of the show - Crappy something. I still remember (and love) their catchline: “Don’t touch that dial… it’s got CRAP on it!”
No votes yet for McArthur Park? I’d say it wins in a landslide.
“Someone left the cake out in the raaaain
I don’t think that I can taaaake it
Cause it took so long to baaaake it
And I’ll never have that recipe agaaaaaaaain, oh nooooooo!”
While some of the songs mentioned are certainly bad songs, but most of them are not “cheesy”. A cheesy song in my opinion has trite, bad lyrics that make you wish you’d never spent the money on purchasing the record, because you paid too much. It’s a love song that makes you cringe with the over-used metaphors, a protest song that doesn’t make you want to do anything but roll your eyes. Star Wars was a great movie, though it certainly felt a lot like Bonanza in space. Battlestar Galactica (the original version), was a cheesy knock-off.
It’s not enough for a song to be cheesy that it have bad lyrics (else everything America sang would be cheesy). Many people consider Honey cheesy because it telegraphs exactly where it’s going long before you get to the final verse and the circle is completed. This fact, combined with the rather predictable key change before the last verse, the swelling of the orchestra, etc., for many people didn’t make them feel empathetic, but nauseated instead.
My personal cheesy favorite was going to be Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks. I had a friend in jr. high school who turned it into a song about being sad about appliance brands. Seemed very appropos, somehow. “We had Gaffers and Sattler, we had Maytag, too…”
I couldn’t find a YouTube of Clare Tory’s UK cover of Dolly Parton’s Love is Like a Butterfly, but I think you know what it sounds like.
The terrible, ireconcilable fact, however, is that Clare Tory also sang the female vocals on Pink Floyd’s Great Gig in the Sky, and even successfully sued for songwriting credit.
Certainly the most blatant of GP’s underage sex ballads, but to me it’s more pathetic/disturbing than cheesy. I actually had the “privelege” of seeing GP & The Union Gap sing these odes in 1968. Can’t remember who they opened for.
