My vote goes to a song I happened to hear last night: Taylor Swift’s version of “Last Christmas”.
It is the WORST performance of any recorded song I have ever heard. Complete with her signature nasal tones, it’s shrill and from a non-professional standpoint, it sounds to me as if she is completely off key. It’s as if she went into the studio, cut the tune, told them to do with it what they want, and then got out of dodge. The performance is so bad, I’m shocked it was allowed to be distributed to the public.
Agree, disagree, or provide your own examples…let me know what you come up with.
In the mid-'80s, a fellah named Stevie B released “Because I Love You (The Postman Song).” Bargain basement Michael Jackson. I swear he just recorded the vocal first, sans accompaniment, then the instruments were recorded, he is that off-key/off-timing.
Now that I think of it, I linked to The Shaggs doing It’s Halloween a few weeks ago. I won’t do it again here. Syd, and that song above in particular, is my vote in this category.
Gotta go with a classic. “Louie Louie” had a certain class, and it had a beat. But I think it’s a vocal FAIL when you can’t understand at least one fourth of the words in the song (and you can’t, even when you know what they are).
The sad thing is, when I’m not paying much attention to it, I actually like this song. But holy God. She can’t sing, and she fills space in what is already a short song by literally doubling every single lyric in the song. “Awful” doesn’t really cover it.
Also, this thread caused me to watch the video for the first time. Didn’t help.
Are you unfamiliar with a fella named Syd Barrett, who I am a big fan of?
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Upon seeing this I of course knew this had to be “If it’s in you”. Even though it is 90% intentionally bad, the other half isn’t good, it’s just 10% actually horrible! (but I do like the semi-intentional double entendre of “please hold onto the steel rail”.)
Okay, I thought that there was a lyric with an intentionally bad pathetic fallacy of “all the frogs croak ‘Henrietta’” which is an amazing dance upon the fine line between genius and crapitude since “Henrietta” is just an unaesthetic enough name that frogs might croak it ugligly, but apparently that ISN’T the real lyric. One of the many instances where my misheard lyric was better!
OP here…to clarify, my thought when posting was not to include recordings which were intentionally made to be poor. I used my example of Taylor Swift because it was a serious attempt at recording a song…one which went horribly wrong. Some good example posted…Kim Carnes (although I like that song)…Bonnie Tyler and Steve Perry…which I thought highly amusing.
I’d like to nominate a song that I actually like, by an artist that I actually love: All I Really Want from Alanis Morissette.
I have a friend who's been trying (unsuccessfully) to get me to join in on a girl's night out at a local karaoke bar. If she ever talks me into it, this is the song I'm gonna do. No one will ever know if I'm actually off tune, or just doing an accurate version of this song.
