I would have voted for anything by Bryan Adams

That’s ridiculous – Michael Bolton isn’t even mentioned!

I just wish Norris McWhirter had lived to see this list.

God help me, it’s like a car wreck, I can’t pass by this stuff without looking. Teevee Guide’s Top 50 Sitcoms? Where’d they put Dick Van Dyke? Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists? Does Joan Jett actually play guitar? I watched all four nights of Comedy Central’s 100 Greatest Stand Ups, fer chrissakes.

Half the fun is seeing what a bunch of twenty-and-thirtysomething magazine editors come up with in order to pretend their sense of history doesn’t begin with MTV. (If the Beatles just have to turn up, hadn’t anyone ever heard “Mr. Moonlight”? Would “You Know My Name, Look Up the Number” show a lack of incisiveness? )

But, yeah, “Sounds of Silence” is the sort of silly pose that gives the game away.

I also dropped my jaw when I saw “Sounds of Silence” on the list. Even if they’re refering to the more popular remix with musical backup instead of the mostly acapela (sp?) original, that is not BAD, just annoying. (Note- I am a post-baby bommer who first heard the remix.)

In that sense, this list reminds me a lot of the nominating list for the Razzies, in that a lot of the “honorees” are more annoying than awful. Potentially enjoyable for certain elements, but WAY overexposed. “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” and “Greatest Love of All” fall into this category, with the all time winner being “My Heart Will Go On,” which fit well in the movie and was pleasant the first few times I heard it on the radio, but which by the time the Oscars rolled around made me long for the millinium bug to wipe out technology so I would never have to hear it again.

P.S. The Razzie WINNERS are usually absolutely right.

I always feel that for some reason, people have to be reminded how bad Huey Lewis and the News actually were. Everyone agrees with me, once I remind them, that whatever they previously thought the worst song in the world was, “Hip To Be Square” was worse. It’s like a sort of Freudian repressed memory thing.

Richard, you’re absolutely right about “Lady in Red”, and thanks, it’s stuck in my head now.

In The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester toys with the idea of how to commit a murder in a world featuring telepathic bodyguards and cops. One of the approaches is to have your mind filled with something like a song from this list just as you’re about to do the deed. Law enforcement tunes in to Starship, misses dirty deed done dirt cheap.

The Germans, interestingly, have a word for this sort of thing (the song, not the aforementioned deed): Ohrwurm. Literally, ear worm.

Any such list not topped by Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking On Sunshine” is obviously defective. (Kill me now, I’ve got the horrible thing stuck in my head just by mentioning it!) Also, I’d back any of the Britney Spears efforts I’ve heard against “Seasons In The Sun” in the worst lyrics category, although I might place a sneaky counter-bet just in case.

(d^2: I like Huey Lewis and the News, but they did have a few real stinkers and yes, “Hip To Be Square” was one of them.)

As doghouse said, this sort of thing is irresistible; I can never encounter one of these debates unmoved. But I have to say that we are suffering here, as the late Bernard Williams used to say, from a “poverty of concepts.” The terms “bad” and “worst” are patently inadequate, and we require at least the following subdivisions (I invite further submissions):

a) Bad in the sense of just plain incompetent — like the bands who used to play for the neighbors back in high school. This kind of bad isn’t interesting enough to be on anyone’s list. We only make lists when there’s a twist of some kind, an adjective or two to attach to “bad.”

b) Bad-in-the-sense-of-incompetent, but in a weird enough way to be intriguing. Bands or singers like this attract attention usually because their incompetence seems to be a function of some sort of dementia. The Shaggs are the example par excellence, but their contemporary Tiny Tim would work as well. They love this kind of thing on American Idol.

c) Bad-in-the-sense-of-incompetent, but probably intentionally so — bad for effect. In this case we’re laughing (if we laugh, and aren’t just annoyed) with them, not at them. Example: Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers — though part of their appeal, for those who find them appealing, is that we’re not totally sure whether they belong in category c or b.

d) Bad in the sense of fatuous or sentimental: e.g., “Seasons in the Sun.”

e) Bad in the sense of pretentious, which is the chief criterion which would justify putting “The Sounds of Silence” on a “worst” list.

f) Bad in the sense of far-below-the-standard-set-by-this-artist, which is how “We Built This City” gets on the list — though its obvious affinity with d is worth extra points and (for some) sends it to the top.

These are not, of course, all the forms of badness, but some of the chief ones that appear in lists of this kind. (It’s interesting to consider what forms of badness don’t attract our attention.) In my judgment, the Eagles aren’t enough of anything to be on a list: they’re too vacuous even to annoy me all that much. I think of that great line from Steely Dan’s song “Everything You Did,” in which a couple is having a fight: “Turn up the Eagles, the neighors are listening.”

What about MacArthur Park? All That She Wants? Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft? In The Year 2525? I’ve Never Been to Me?

What a lightweight list. C’mon, bring on some *real* horror.

I anxiously await Tanya Headon’s take on this.

Zizka wrote:

“As a whole “The Little Drummer Boy” is the worst ever, but I get some relief by imagining him stepping on a landmine and slowly dying.”

A local humorist’s take on this song can be found at: http://www.ericdsnider.com/blog.php?id=26

My current girlfriend once kissed Huey Lewis. I’m not sure how this relects on her. Or me.

Aw geez, cat, we’re including show tunes? The list’s gonna exceed fifty songs if you do that: Stephen Schwartz alone has probably written fifty of the worst.

Surprised the collected efforts of the Eurovision songfestival have not gotten more. I would gladly recommend The Herreys “Diggi Loo Diggi Ley” as the worst song ever: http://www.bide-et-musique.com/song/2094.html

Surprised the collected efforts of the Eurovision songfestival have not gotten more. I would gladly recommend The Herreys “Diggi Loo Diggi Ley” as the worst song ever: http://www.bide-et-musique.com/song/2094.html