Man, I like nearly half the songs mentioned in this thread. “MacArthur Park” – Sir Richard Harris, you heathens, though Maynard did a good job too – is my favorite song of all time. “Convoy” is a fun novelty tune. Meco’s “Star Wars” is fine for what it is. And “Candyman” is a good song made great by Sammy Davis, Jr., come on!
“Honey” is horrible, though. I hate all those tear-jerkers from that era, especially “Seasons in the Sun”.
“Ode to Billie Joe” came our before I was born, so to me it’s just a song; I wasn’t alive when it was being overplayed. So to me it’s a perfectly good song. It’s simple and repetitive, the kind of song you kinda wish was a minute shorter, but it’s a good tune and is well sung.
This is an aside, but Bobbie Gentry’s popularity as an artist was interesting in that she became famous with music she personally wrote - an unusual thing for a female artist at that time.
The song sometimes pops into my head when someone says, “Good Morning” to me.
I then sing it back to myself, "Good Morning Starshine, the Earth says, “F U”.
Good point about the release date. I was born in the UK in the 70s - by the time I heard it was just a song, nothing of the zeitgeist about it, no chance to get sick of it.
I quite like Ode to Billie Joe. It came out when I was 15. I find both the music and the story quite haunting.
Oakminster, who doesn’t seem to post here any longer, always started a Ode To Billie Joe-themed thread on June 3 of every year. If memory serves, he is a Mississippian himself, and familiar with the Tallahatchie River area.
Here’s one I had (thankfully) forgotten about:
I Love (Little Baby Ducks), by Tom T. Hall.
It really makes you want to go find some little baby ducks and kill them. And eat their parents.
And I checked. It did go to number one.
The absolutely worst song that actually made it to number 1 on the Billboard pop charts in 1958 is The Purple People Eater by Sheb Wooley.
S/he posted earlier today.
I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am by Herman’s Hermits was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1965.
But unlike these lazy Milennials, Boomers were hard-working youngsters raised by the Greatest Generation and I’m sure most would have achieved scholastic success by the advanced age of 2. If not, what were they doing with all their time?
The memory of that abomination is made only slightly less painful by substituting Heathen Dan’s parody version, “I Like”.
*I like smokin’ me some grass
Gettin’ cut with glass
Sniffin’ my cocaine
and pain
…
I like chancres on my tongue
Sniffin’ monkey dung
Scumbags of all sorts
and warts
And I like you, too*
OK, I just listened to “Ode to Billie Joe” for the first time in my life, having never even heard of it before. There must be something I’m not getting. Is there some significance to the preacher having seen a girl who looks like her with Billie Joe? Is the insinuation that she killed him? Because, absent that, it’s a boring song about chores and a mundane dinner table conversation.
To my mind, the true test of a terrible song as opposed to an overplayed song is - would someone who’s never heard this song before hate it?
I found “In The Year 2525” an utterly detestable song, for instance, the moment I first heard it. It, too, came out before I was born, and it’s not like my parents ever played it at home, so I can’t have gotten tired of it being overplayed. How it hit #1 (for SIX STRAIGHT WEEKS might I add) in a year that featured the Beatles, the Supremes, and the Rolling Stones I just cannot understand.
In fact, 1969’s list of USA #1s might be one of the most remarkable collections of talent you will ever find in a yearly list; it features The Beatles (twice) the Stones (twice) the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Elvis, Sly & The Family Stone, The Temptations, Peter Paul and Mary, and The Fifth Dimension, and hell even Henry MAncini for something a little different. Well, it had The Archies, too, but I like “Sugar Sugar.” And then there is… Zager And Fucking Evans, with that awful, awful song about people with no eyes or teeth.
Mine was
I love eatin’ baby ducks
My mannequin that fucks
Rapin’ In the rain
And pain.
And I’ll fuck you too.
Anyone mention “Pac-Man Fever”? Seriously, wtf was that? Ripping lyrics: “Got a pocket full of quarters and I’m heading to the arcade”.
And I did not see “Run, Joey, Run”. I think this may be the dumbest and worst recorded song ever.
I like “We Built This City” but I almost can’t defend it.
“Despacito” is not only good, it’s very good.
I like the 60’s sound of “Last Kiss”.
“Don’t you Want Me” is 80s Magic.
“What’s up” is 90s Magic.
That’s just from the posts that were before mine.
I’d like to nominate Desiderata by Les Crane, an insipid poem set to insipid music.
It did spawn Deteriorata however. A rare spoof / cover that is greater than the original.
Interesting side note: Melissa Manchester sang Deteriorata before the rest of her career really took off. So another questionably good thing to come out of the original dreck.
Edit: it hit number 1 in New Zealand. Does that count?
The subtext is that the narrator is in love, or infatuated, with Billie Joe. They’re at the beginning of a courtship - what my father’s generation would call "sparkin’ ". Perhaps when the preacher saw them on the Tallahatchie Bridge, they had just shared their first kiss.
In any case, Billie Joe meant something to the narrator, and she’s shocked and devastated by his death (“Child, what happened to your appetite? I’ve been cooking all morning, and you haven’t touched a single bite.”) Which is completely oblivious to her family, though, as they casually discuss Billie Joe’s suicide. The greatest tragedy of her young life is to her family, as you noted, a topic for a mundane dinner table conversation. Bobbie Gentry said the song was about “basic indifference, the casualness of people in moments of tragedy” and called it “a study in unconscious cruelty”.
Since this song was released, people have argued about what Billie Joe and the narrator threw off the bridge. It only just occurred to me today that, given the last verse of the song (“As for me, I spend a lot of my time picking flowers up on Choctaw Ridge/And dropping them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge”), she and Billie Joe might have been tossing flowers off the bridge when they were spotted by that nice young preacher Brother Taylor.