There are no criteria on which to base this other than the singers/bands/artists, spanning all genres of music, who you feel are the very worst you’ve ever had the displeasure of listening to and/or seeing in a live concert setting. List as many or as few as you care to.
Since this thread was inspired by this thread, I’ll get the ball rolling by naming Bon Jovi one of the very worst bands still active and churning out product today. Are they the worst? No, but they’re certainly a good starting point.
What say all of you?
(Also: I started this in Cafe Society, but, mods, if it’d be a better fit for the Pit, then, please, by all means move it there. Thanks.)
Probably a bit of a cheat, since they set out to be kind of bad: The Thrown Ups performing “You Lost It.” Worth listening to, if only to help you imagine the looks on people’s faces when they ran across this in the early 1990s. “Hey, I love grunge! I love SubPop! This song’s gonna rock! … WTF?” This article demonstrates that they were kind of a prank/joke band, but they still managed to make a bit of a splash.
In the currently active and inexplicably successful category, I’m going with Nickelback. Way worse than Bon Jovi, who at least are endurable for single songs even if I would never sit voluntarily through an entire album by them.
Worst I’ve seen live? Manhattan Transfer. This was when they were changing their format from C&W/Psychedelica to jazz – Gene Pistilli had left, but they hadn’t fully rehearsed their new (and successful) style. They just were terrible – harmonies were no good, timing was off. It was complex stuff, and they weren’t ready. They probably booked the gig with the original lineup and were trying out the new material.
A few years later, their career took off, so they must have put a lot of effort into getting it right.
Bert Sommer played at Woodstock and had a minor his single, but was singularly unimpressive on stage.
Bizzy Linhart was upstaged by his opening act, Loudon Wainwright III, and knew it. He phoned in a performance.
Mark-Almond showed up two hours late for their concert (as the crowd waited in the cold), the came on stage and proceeded to do a sound check. When the crowd showed their displeasure, they got all snotty. No sign of an apology at all.
The Mahavishnu Orchestra was the most unpleasant concert I’ve attended. They liked to put their amplifiers up to 12 and it could make your ears bleed. The music was fine, but the volume made it a waste. I saw them later outdoors and I could finally hear the music (it was still loud, but at least being in the open dissipated it so you could hear them).
Sorry for the poor verbiage. What I meant was that it can be a band or artist you’ve seen live, or heard on the radio, or seen on MTV, or, well, just your personal choice(s) for the worst artist, ever.
And I’ll second (or third) Nickelback, as well as cast a vote for Hootie and the Blowfish,Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, and Rascal Flatts (since this thread isn’t genre-specific).
There was a band, a duo really, that called themselves IIRC, the Paisley Iguanas. They debuted, and I think, broke up the same day, at a local bar. My friends and I were strangely tempted to beat them up. We had never contemplated such a thing before or since, so I think that speaks poorly of them.
Here’s a different band that you can judge for yourself: APACHE, by the ???
Any band involving Yngwie Malmsteen and a vocalist. There’s no denying the man is a technically brilliant guitar player, but man does the music he makes suck!
Well, there is one group of “usual suspects” here – outsider artists who make music that does not really attempt to meet normal standards of musicality. Judged by conventional standards, some of these artists are unbelievably awful. However, there are those who consider them geniuses.
Examples: The Shaggs, Wild Man Fischer, Roky Erickson, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Jandek, the Portsmouth Sinfonia
Then there are acts who did apparently attempt to produce conventional music, but failed spectacularly. Examples: the Cherry Sisters, Florence Foster Jenkins
The is a supposedly scientific attempt to create the most hideous song possible. It includes accordions, bagpipes, a children’s chorus, an operatic soprano singing horse-opera passages, banjos, harps, tubas, Walmart jingles, political screeds and George Stephanopoulos. It lasts more than 20 minutes.
Nickelback are completely terrible, and to my mind they are worse than many others (like, say, ICP) because they have become so inexplicably ubiquitous. At work we listen to top-40 type music stations and they are inescapable. I can sort of see how they could have been a one-hit wonder (although I never personally liked them), but they just keep producing song after song after song, and they all sound exactly the same, and they all get lots of airplay. Even worse, they all have that nudge-nudge-wink-wink “I’m talking about sex!” quality, like they were written by 14 year old boys dreaming about the first time they’ll see boobies.
Rockwell was pretty terrible. It took a favor from Michael Jackson to make a song slightly bearable. Nickleback is the definition of what is wrong with music today though.
Gotta go with Britney Spears. If somebody can tell me that she at least wrote her own tunes- I don’t care enough to look it up myself- I’ll take it back and pick someone else. Assuming she didn’t, though, that leaves her not playing an instrument and singing in that awful croaky voice. No musical merit at all- purely a product of marketing based on her good looks. That’s true of some other acts, too, but none I can think of are as abominably bad. At least those boy band guys can sing in reasonably good harmony.
I’ve never quite gotten the hatred for Nickelback. I don’t think they’re good or anything, just another of the numerous Foo Fighters-ish bands of the last decade, all of varying degrees of lameness. OK, maybe more lame than the average band of the type, but still. If I was speeding through a crosswalk where a mother was pushing a double stroller and a Nickelback song came on the radio, I’d at least wait until I was past the crosswalk before turning my attention to changing the station, which is more than I can say for Britney.
ETA: I’m not saying the Foo Fighters are lame- they’re OK. Most of the other bands that take after them, however…
I know fans will call blaspheme but I nominate KISS.
Even at age 8 when my cousin first showed me his new KISS albums to which I thought “cool make-up, cool costumes, wow flames and fireworks, they must rock hard” I became immediately soured when I hear their music. Wussified. Lame.
I think my words to my cousin were “wow, they really suck.”
This band angers me. What I mean by that is I literally get pissed off when I listen to them. I worked at a place where they’d play various Cd’s from these guys and I couldn’t take it. I ended up banning them while I was working. I was the manger, I usually don’t do things like that but it annoyed me so much that I had to. It was either that or end up beating the crap out of someone while the Cd was playing.
I’ve never had a reaction like that to any other music. There is stuff I don’t like, stuff I think sucks as far as the musicianship goes but nothing compares to the Jon Spenser Blues Explosion. If it was on, within 5 minutes I’d want to kill someone. I think, though I don’t know for sure, that it had to do with the mix and frequencies around 1 k. I’d go listen again but I have a date tonight and rather not be all pissed off. After thinking about it some (and I did think about it, wondering why it affected me so much) I came to the conclusion that it was the production that got to me. The songs pretty much sucked, but that isn’t all that rare. It seems that it was the actual tones they used which drove me nuts. My guess is that they were heavy on 1k.
