The worst is marching band music – that is ANY music played by a marching band.
Next comes any music sung or narrated by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, or any other Star Trek figure.
Finally, any music played on a calliope.
Yeah, me too. That’s why I mentioned Kenny Rogers first, above all others. I think of today’s mall-country pap as “post-Kenny Rogers” country music. He was the first to really put the pop in the country to the point where there was almost no country left; just bland, bleached-out pop with a manufactured twang.
I don’t listen to country music but I have to admit that I did hear the Carrie Underwood song “Jesus Take The Wheel” and I just about had an aneurysm.
Traditional chinese music. Chinese is already a tonal language so in order to have lyrics make any kind of sense you’re left with a jumbled cacophony of pitch and wailing.
This pretty much sums it up for me. Other people’s loud music is like other people’s loud sex, with other people’s preferred gender.
Here you go, Biffy. Of course you’ll still have to mix in the Ono counterpoint from something in your private collection. 
IMHO, the most grating is the brand of music played in low-end Chinese restaurants, flutes and synth accompanied by very squeaky, high-pitched female vocals.
I’ll defend British rap. Dizzee Rascal, Miss Sovereign, Wiley et al show alot more lyrical ingenuity and have a freshness of style that makes most other music being made in Britain of late a bit :o . It’s not to everyone’s tastes and I doubt it’ll ever become mainstream in the way US rap has but dismissing the whole genre in one fell sweep merely displays your ignorance of it.
LOL. I thought it was going to be a link to this one. Which I have.
I can’t stand reggaeton.
I have a special place in my heart for norteño though. So sue me, I like oompa music of any nationality.
Ladies and Gentlemen may I present Wing.
Warning: click link at your own risk. Your ears may bleed from her voice.
Checking YouTube for “The Shape of Jazz to Come”, I found this. And yes, that is exactly the painful sort of stuff I was describing. The two horns are discordant, the drums and bass seem to have no connection to the rest of the music - it sounds like a bunch of people soloing, who occasionally manage to hit the same melody. I presume you mean Miles Davis’ “On The Corner” and found this - the sort of musical jerk-off that makes me want to claw my own ears off. For the life of me, the trumpet part in that clip sounds like noises any random person could make if they picked it up. If it makes you feel better, I also believe Jackson Pollack was an asshole who dribbled paint.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean here. As much as I loath doodly jazz that destroys an innocent song, the only thing worse is doodly jazz that doesn’t even have a song to cling to.
Sorry, first reply ever to a fora,
I would like to nominate r’kelly- i believe i can fly-
There’s a “special” place in my heart for that jazz style where everyone’s playing in their own key, the piano player is banging randomly on the keyboard with his fists, and the horn player is trying to expel a small rodent from his instrument.
For some reason I seem to associate this kind of thing with Sun Ra, but I may have been mistaking it for someone else’s crap.
Wonderfully evocative phrase, thanks!
A few more:
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Low bass boom-boom music that was composed specifically to be played in cars with loud stereos.
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Smooth jazz. It all sounds alike, not in the way that the elderly think “that roll and rocking music all sounds alike, now get off my lawn!”, but rather that every song really does sound like an excerpt of the same long composition, and every performer has the same style. It’s music for yuppies to make sweet love in elevators to.
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Production music: the blinking-sounding music that was hard in television theme songs, industrial films, and so many other film and television venues in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Eastern European interpretations of rock, adult contemporary and rap. Such music just seems to have enough amateurishness and ethnic folksy influence to make it sound … well, really, really off.
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Bluegrass. Okay, not really, but if I listen to it for an hour it all sounds the same; mountain this, valley that, hollow something else, ridge whatever. The lyrics often sound like they’re reading a list of geographical features common to West Virginia, accompanied by plinging banjos.
UB40’s cover of “Red Red Wine.”
Oh, and a somewhat broader category that I haven’t seen mentioned: music that’s been aggressively sanitized for kids, sung by kids. Like Wee Sing.
The three weeks my toddler was obsessed with that CD were some of the longest three weeks I can remember. Who’d expect to get sick of stuff like “She’ll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain”?
Note: There’s plenty of music recorded for kids that’s just fine – even pretty great. But the stuff that strives for inoffensive non-controversy? Ugh.
In the '90s Russian artists Komar and Melamid created a series of paintings called “People’s Choice”. These were based on survey results from different countries about what kinds of art were most and least popular. Based on these results, Koman and Melamid created a “most wanted” and “least wanted” painting for each country (with pretty amusing results).
They went on to do the same for music, based on the results of an Internet poll. Their “Most Wanted Song” and “Least Wanted Song” were released on CD, and I’m sure if you try you can download them somewhere. (Looks like the “Most Wanted Song” is available as an MP3 from Amazon.)
These two songs are hilarious. The survey results indicated that participants disliked (among other things) unusually long songs, rap, opera, cowboy songs, holiday music, advertising jingles, children singing, accordians, and bagpipes. So the “Most Unwanted Song” combines all of these into a 25 minute opus that features a soprano rapping in operatic style about life on the prairies, a chorus of children advising you to do your holiday shopping at Wal-Mart, and a bagpipe solo. I laughed 'til I cried.
Interestingly, everyone I’ve played these two songs for agrees that the “Most Unwanted Song” is actually more enjoyable than the “Most Wanted Song” that was designed to appeal to the majority of the population: a rock/r&b love duet featuring electric guitar and saxophone.