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Authors: Dave Barry
Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs (Backlist eBook Program) (2 page)
The thing is, I got at least as many letters, just as strongly worded,
attacking
Neil Diamond. But that was just the beginning: I got a whole lot
more
letters from people who wanted to complain about other songs that they hated to hear on the radio. And these people were
angry
. These people were advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons against the next radio station to play, for example, “American Pie.”
I have, in my twenty years as a newspaper columnist, written about many vitally important issues—politics, the economy, foreign policy, mutant constipated worms, etc.—and none of these topics has ever stirred up so much passion in the readers as the issue of bad songs. People were stopping me on the street, grabbing me by the shirt, and, with cold fury in their eyes, saying things like: “You know that song about the piña coladas? I HATE THAT SONG! I HATE IT!!”
So I realized that I had tapped into a throbbing artery of emotion. I realized that Americans—who are so often accused of not being interested in or informed about the issues—care very deeply about song badness. I also realized that, by probing deeper into this subject, I had a chance to do something that could provide a truly significant benefit to the human race; namely, I could get an easy column out of it.
And thus I decided to conduct the Bad Song Survey. I asked my readers to vote for what they considered to be the worst songs, the songs that cause them to poke finger holes in their car radios in their desperate haste to change the station.
The response was unbelievable. I think more people voted in the Bad Song Survey than in the presidential election. Certainly the Bad Song voters were more enthusiastic. Here are some typical quotes from the voters:
- “The number one worst piece of pus-oozing, vomit-inducing, camel-spitting, cow-phlegm song EVER in the history of the SOLAR system is ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.’ ”
- “I’d rather chew a jumbo roll of tinfoil than hear ‘Hey Paula’ by Paul and Paula.”
- “Whenever I hear the Four Seasons’ ‘Walk Like a Man,’ I want to scream, ‘Frankie, SING like a man!’ ”
- “I wholeheartedly believe that ‘Ballerina Girl’ is responsible for 90 percent of the violent crimes in North America today.”
- “I nominate every song ever sung by the Doobie Brothers. Future ones also.”
- “Have you noticed how the hole in the ozone layer has grown progressively larger since rap got popular?”
- “I nominate ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ by Harry Chapin. Harry’s dead, of course, so we’ll never have to worry about hearing it performed live again, but darn it, Dave, the next disc jockey here in K.C. that plays that song is going to get smacked across the head with a tube sock full of wood screws.”
I ended up writing
two
columns on the results of the Bad Song Survey. These columns generated still
more
mail, some from people who wanted to cast additional votes (“I can’t BELIEVE you left out ‘Eve of Destruction!’ I HATE THAT SONG!”); some from people who were very upset about certain songs that were voted as bad (“Perhaps your readers are not aware that ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ is a very fine traditional...”). And I heard from some people whose lives had actually been changed by the survey. Here’s one of my favorite letters:
Dear Dave,
Your articles on Bad Songs were wonderful. I laughed ’til I cried. However, when I tried to read it to my boyfriend, much to my dismay he knew the words to all of the songs and
likes
them. I had to repeatedly stop reading so he could sing each one, and then listen to his exclamations of “What’s wrong with THAT one!?” and “He doesn’t like ‘Honey’?!!!” etc. I knew he was a sentimental fool, but had no idea how bad his taste was. Now I’m afraid we’re too incompatible to continue the relationship.
Thanks a lot, Dave.
Susan Bolton “Alone again, naturally”
And that was not the end of it. I don’t think there will
ever
be an end to it. We’ve had an entire presidential administration
2
since the Bad Song Survey, and I am
still
getting mail about it from people wishing to vote for songs they hate, as well as from fans whom I have offended.
Special Note to Neil Diamond Fans
Please stop writing! You have convinced me! Neil is a music god! I worship Neil on a daily basis at a tasteful shrine to him erected in my living room! I love
all
the songs Neil sang to us! Not to mention all the songs he brang to us!
Why do people feel so passionate about this subject? Because music is
personal
. The songs we hear a lot—particularly the ones we hear when we’re young—soak into our psyche, so that forever after, when we hear certain songs, we experience sudden and uncontrollable memory spasms taking us back to specific times—some good, some bad—in our lives.
For example, I cannot hear a Beach Boys car song without being immediately transported back to the summers of 1962 through 1965. These were good summers for me—I was in high school and had never heard of gum disease—and Beach Boys car songs got played on the radio all the time, and I have loved them uncritically ever since. To this day, when I’m alone in my car, if the radio plays “Shut Down,” a song about two guys drag racing—one driving a Corvette Stingray and the other driving a Dodge with a 413 engine
3
—I’ll crank the volume all the way up and sing along:
Pedal’s to the floor, hear his dual quads drink
And now the 413’s lead is startin’ to shrink
On a technical level, I have no idea what the Beach Boys mean by the term
dual quads
. I’m not a car guy. I’m the kind of guy who, if there’s a warning light on my dashboard that won’t go away, will repair it by putting a piece of duct tape over it.
But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that when I’m singing along to “Shut Down,” I’m no longer a middle-aged guy driving to the laundry to pick up my shirts; I’m seventeen, and it’s a summer night with tantalizing possibilities of adventure and romance hanging semipalpably in the humid air, and I’m cruising the roads around Armonk, New York, and even though the vehicle I’m cruising in is my mom’s Plymouth Valiant station wagon, which boasts the performance characteristics and sex appeal of a forklift, I am feeling
good
, and I am stomping on the gas pedal (not that this has any measurable effect on my mom’s Valiant) and imagining that I’m at the wheel of a Stingray, singing triumphantly along with the Beach Boys as we roar past the Dodge 413:
He’s hot with ram induction, but it’s understood
I got a fuel-injected engine sittin’ under my hood
Shut it off, shut it off
Buddy now I SHUT YOU DOWN!
So I don’t care how many times I hear “Shut Down,” or “Little Deuce Coupe,” or “Fun, Fun, Fun.” They’re always welcome on my radio; I’ll go back to that summer night any time. On the other hand, I’ve always had a violent hatred for “I Got You Babe” because when it came out back in 1965 it was presented as some kind of anthem that spoke for America’s youth; whereas in fact it was a flagrantly inane song (“So put your little hand in mine; there ain’t no hill or mountain we can’t climb”), on top of which, as an American youth, I did not wish to be spoken for by a whining little puke like Sonny Bono.
So songs evoke powerful emotions, both positive and negative. I think the negative ones tend to be stronger because, as I noted in the preintroduction warning to this book, your brain, as part of its lifelong effort to drive you insane, insists on remembering the songs you hate and playing them over and over and over.
That’s why people still write and talk to me about the Bad Song Survey. They seem to have this powerful need to get their feelings about certain songs out into the open; somehow, this makes them feel better. It’s kind of like psychotherapy, where the goal is to get patients to probe their subconscious minds, deeper and deeper, until they finally realize that the root of all their emotional problems is the fact that, during early childhood, they were exposed to the hit song “The Name Game” by Shirley Ellis (“Shirley Shirley bo Birley, bo nana fana fo Firley, fee fie mo Mirley, Shirley!”).
Anyway, for whatever sick, masochistic reason, people have been bugging me for years to write more about the Bad Song Survey. Okay, people—you asked for it. In this book, you’ll find the survey results presented in far greater detail than in the original columns, along with many more bad songs and comments from the over ten thousand people who responded to the survey.
Before we get to the survey results, however, I want to stress a couple of points. The main one is that this survey does NOT attempt to cover all songs ever written. It basically covers pop and rock songs that were popular in the United States from roughly 1960 through 1990 because this is the era that shaped what is left of the brains of the vast majority of the people who responded.
There were some votes for older songs, especially the schmaltz-o-rama songs of the 1950s, such as “Oh, My Papa,” “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window,” and “That’s Amore” (“When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore!”). There were a couple of votes for “anything by Wagner.” And there was one response from an opera fan who admitted that many impressive-sounding operatic lyrics become pretty stupid when translated into English:
BARITONE
: Say you love me!
Say you love me!
SOPRANO
: I love you.
BARITONE
: Oh! I’m so happy!
There were quite a few Bad Song Survey votes for rap music in general, but virtually none for any specific rap song, perhaps because it is very difficult, even with sensitive laboratory instruments, to distinguish one rap song from another.
4
And obviously, since the survey was conducted in 1992, there are no votes for songs that have become popular since then. I think this is okay; to qualify as
really
bad, I think a song has to be sincerely hated by a lot of people for a minimum of five years.
Also, I arbitrarily ruled out certain songs, even if they got a lot of votes. For example, many people voted for two legendary songs by The Rivingtons, “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” (“Papa-oom-mow-mow, papa-oom-mow-mow”) and “The Bird’s the Word” (“The bird bird bird, bird is the word”). These songs are bad, yes, but The Rivingtons were obviously
trying
to be bad, and they succeeded spectacularly, which means these songs are
good
. For a song to qualify as truly bad, the artist had to be trying, on at least some level, to be good.
For this reason I ruled out the novelty songs that are clearly intended as jokes, such as “The Purple People Eater,” “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini,” “Short Shorts,” “Alley-Oop,” “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor (on the Bedpost Overnight),” “Transfusion,” “Monster Mash,” “Grandma Got Run over by a Reindeer,” and “The Ballad of the Green Berets.”
5
Using similar reasoning, I ruled out the whole enormous category of country music, which has a long-standing tradition of songs with deliberately comical titles (“Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goal Posts of Life”; “I’ve Got Tears in My Ears from Lyin’ on My Back While I Cry in My Bed over You”; “The Only Ring You Gave Me Was the One around the Tub”; “Take the Dice Away from the Baby, Momma, Before He Craps All over the Floor”; “Get Off the Stove Grandma, You’re Too Old to Ride the Range”; etc.).
So I’m not saying this book is a definitive list of all the bad songs ever: It’s just a bunch of arbitrarily selected ones from a survey of my readers, bless their twisted little minds. But believe me, there are
plenty
of bad songs in here. In researching this book, I spent weeks squatting on the floor, sifting through huge mounds of survey-response postcards, virtually every one of which triggered some god-awful song in my brain (“My boy LOLLIPOP! You make my heart go GIDDY UP!”).
It was painful, but I did it.
I did it for
you
.
You you bo boo, bo nana fana fo foo, fee fie mo moo, you.
1
For example, I really like “Play Me,” especially the part where Neil sings, “Song she sang to me; song she brang to me.”
2
If you want to call it that.
3
Whatever the hell
that
means.
4
I realize this statement makes me sound like an old fart, but in many ways I
am
an old fart.
5
This guy was kidding, right?
Bad Song Survey Results: The Big Vote Getters
“I don’t think that I can TAKE it...”
I
won’t keep you in suspense. The worst song in modern history, at least in the opinion of the people who responded to the Bad Song Survey, is—better sit down and put your head between your legs—“MacArthur Park,” the 1968 hit written by Jimmy Webb and sung hyperdramatically by Richard Harris. Come on now! Everybody sing along:
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can TAKE it!
’cause it took so long to BAKE it!
And I’ll never have that recipe againnnn...
Oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Although there are many songs that I hate more than “MacArthur Park,” it’s hard to argue with survey respondents who chose it as the worst. All the elements are there: A long song with pretentiously incomprehensible lyrics that was popular enough to get a huge amount of air play and thus was hammered deeply and permanently into everybody’s brain. Most of the votes for this song included some comment along the lines of “What the HELL is this song about?”
Naturally it turns out that there is a small but vocal group of people who like, even LOVE, “MacArthur Park.” After the survey results were published, these people wrote me irate letters arguing that this song is a masterpiece and that the people who hate it do not understand that the cake is a
metaphor
. This is known, in legal circles, as the “metaphor defense.” My response is, okay, maybe it’s a metaphor, but it’s a really
stupid
metaphor.
One of the people who voted in the survey, Lee Jones, told this amusing story:
During high school, I played electric bass in the school jazz band. The night of the final spring concert, we were performing one of our band director’s favorites, “MacArthur Park”—a song well established in the Pretentious Trash Hall of Fame. We get to the very end of the song, the band plays “BOM! BOM! BOM!”; the band director pauses to give the signal for the last crashing chord...George Roth, a senior trombonist, stands up (in the front row), slaps his forehead, and says, “Oh, Jesus! The CAKE!”
What I think really put “MacArthur Park” over the top on the Bad Song Survey Hostile-O-Meter is the fact that in 1978, just when it had started to fade from the national consciousness, it was brought back to life, Jason-like, by Donna Summer. This meant that in addition to the length factor and the cake factor, you suddenly had the disco factor.
Oh NOOOOO...
Donna Summer also sang another song that got some votes in the Bad Song Survey; this is “Love to Love You Baby,” which is about three hours and fifty-two minutes of Donna singing the words “I love to love you baby” and moaning like a person in the throes of either uncontrollable passion or severe intestinal distress.
Speaking of intestinal distress: The number-two
1
song in the Bad Song Survey was “Yummy Yummy Yummy (I Got Love in My Tummy),” the 1968 hit by Ohio Express. This is the same group that later did “Chewy Chewy,” which is not to be confused with another much-hated song, “Sugar, Sugar”
2
which was performed by the Archies, who were so soul-free they made Ohio Express sound like Wilson Pickett. The Archies and Ohio Express, along with such bands as 1910 Fruitgum Company (perpetrators of “Simon Says”), were part of a genre of music known as “bubble gum,” which gets its name from the fact that many people would jam wads of used bubble gum in their ears to avoid hearing it.
“Yummy Yummy Yummy” is an excellent example of the bubble-gum form. It’s a love song, a sensitive, lyrical expression of romantic yearning, a plaintive, passionate plea, worded thusly:
Yummy yummy yummy I got love in my tummy
And I feel like loving you
Talk about your poetry! What woman could resist?
One interesting fact about “Yummy Yummy Yummy” is that Ohio Express did
not
do the worst version of it. A much worse version—so bad that it is wonderful—was performed by actress Julie London. Her version is part of another distinct genre of bad music, Songs Performed By Actors Who Unfortunately Do Not Have Any Friends Courageous Enough To Tell Them That, Although They Might Be Good At Acting, When It Comes To Singing, They Suck.
If you want to hear some great examples of this genre, you should get hold of a CD put out by Rhino Records called
Golden Throats
, which includes William Shatner performing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Mister Tambourine Man”; Leonard Nimoy performing “Proud Mary”; Mae West performing (I swear I am not making any of this up) “Twist and Shout”; Eddie Albert performing “Blowin’ in the Wind”; Sebastian Cabot performing “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Like a Rolling Stone”; and Jack “Dragnet” Webb
3
performing a version of “Try a Little Ten-derness” that is guaranteed to void even the strongest bladder.
But getting back to the Bad Song Survey: The song voted the third worst—speaking of love in a tummy—was “(You’re) Having My Baby,” by Paul Anka, who is widely suspect of also being Neil Sedaka. Many people, in voting “(You’re) Having My Baby,” cited these touching and very tasteful lyrics:
You could have swept it from your life
But you wouldn’t do it
We should not be surprised that Paul Anka was able to come up with these words. Paul has been giving the world memorable lyrics since way back in 1957, when, in his hit “Diana,” he sang:
I’m so young and you’re so old
This my darling I’ve been told
In that era Paul also gave us “Puppy Love” (later re-recorded, needless to say, by Donny Osmond) and “You Are My Destiny,” which contains this extremely perceptive observation:
You are my destiny
You are what you are to me
But if you want my opinion, Paul Anka’s ultimate achievement, the one that puts him head and shoulders above all the other songwriters, with the possible exception of Mac Davis (see below), is “My Way.” This song, which has become the international anthem of drunken untalented businessmen in karaoke bars, has some of the most classic lines ever written, including:
Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention
And of course:
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption
And let us not leave out one of the most inspirational images ever put to music:
Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew,
When I bit off more than I could chew.
But through it all, when there was doubt,
I ate it up, and spit it out
Speaking of eating, the song that finished fourth in the survey, just out of medal contention behind “(You’re) Having My Baby,” was “Timothy,” performed by the Buoys. It’s a real tribute to this song that it got so many votes because it was nowhere near as a big a hit as the three songs that finished ahead of it. But “Timothy” compensates for its relative lack of exposure by being
extremely
memorable, in the sense that the singer of the song appears to be saying that he...well, he
ate
the subject of the song. Really. What happened, according to the lyrics, is that there was a mining disaster:
Trapped in a mine that had caved in
And everyone knows
The only ones left were Joe and me and Tim
Naturally, in a situation like that, after a while people are going to get hungry, and they’re not going to be picky:
Timothy, Timothy, Joe was looking at you
Timothy, Timothy, God what did we do?
The singer is somewhat vague about what, specifically, happened next, but you can draw your own conclusion:
My stomach was full as it could be
And nobody ever got around to finding Timothy
I think it’s a real tribute to the tastefulness of the Buoys that they did not attempt to boost sales by entitling this song “Yummy Yummy Yummy, I Got Tim in My Tummy.”
Here is a significant fact: “Timothy” was written by Rupert Holmes, who wrote and sang
another
one of the songs most hated by the Bad Song Survey voters: “Escape,” also known as “The Piña Colada Song.” This song tells the moving story of two people who are losing interest in each other, so each one independently decides to cheat on the other, and when they find out about this,
it brings them together
. They deserve each other! Have another piña colada!
Rupert Holmes definitely should get some kind of special achievement award because he also wrote and sang “Him,” the song that goes:
Him! Him! HIM
Whatcha gonna do about him?
You’re gonna have to do without him
Or do without me! Me! ME!
No one’s gonna get it for free
It’s me or it’s him
I don’t know about you, but I would pick him.
Moving on with the survey: After the four leaders—“MacArthur Park,” “Yummy Yummy Yummy,” “(You’re) Having My Baby,” and “Timothy”—came a clump of songs that all got about the same number of votes. One of these is the Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight,” which, at risk of being deemed a weenie,
4
I will admit that I actually kind of liked it when it was popular, but which apparently produces a near-violent negative reaction in many people. So does Debby Boone’s inspirational “You Light Up My Life,” which inspires a lot of people to hit the radio with a hammer. (Debby’s dad, Pat, also got a solid survey vote for doing the world’s whitest version of “Tutti Frutti.”)
A lot of people also said they hate the Village People’s hit “Y.M.C.A,” but I think a lot of people also still love that song, judging by the fact that whenever it gets played at a sporting event, half the spectators leap to their feet and start forming letters with their bodies. (I think a lot of people are unaware that the song is about men picking up other men.)
Also getting a very strong vote—particularly from high-school students
5
—was “Achy Breaky Heart” by Billy Ray “Take A Gander At THESE Pectorals” Cyrus. Technically, I should exclude “Achy Breaky Heart” from this book on the grounds that it’s a country song, made popular by people who did a complex line dance to it. But I’m making an exception and including this song, for two reasons:
- I want to set forth my Mathematical Theory of Line Dance Complexity versus Intelligence, which states: “The complexity of a given line dance is inversely proportional to the average IQ of the people doing it.”
- I want to share the survey response of Mark Freeman, who, in voting for “Achy Breaky Heart,” said he wasn’t sure, but he thought the lyrics went something like:
You can tell my lips
Or you can tell my hips
That you’re going to dump me if you can
But don’t tell my liver
It never would forgive her
It might blow up and circumcise this man!
Another song in this clump—one that I warned you about at the beginning of this book—is The Captain and Tennille’s “Muskrat Love,” a tender, poetic, squeak-filled ballad about rodents having sex. The Captain and Tennille
6
also got some survey votes for their 1972 number-one hit record “Do That to Me One More Time,” which begins with the words:
Do that to me one more time
Once is never enough
With a man like you
Is it just me, or does that sound to you like a
serious
criticism of the guy’s lovemaking technique? I mean, she seems to be saying, “Yo! Romeo! That’s
ALL
? You’re
DONE
??”
But by far the most deserving song in the second-tier clump, in my opinion, is “Honey,” a song so cloying and saccharine and smarmy that it makes “It’s a Small World” sound like heavy metal. “Honey”—a song about a really sweet person named Honey who has been tragically taken away by the angels—was sung by the legendary Bobby Goldsboro.
One survey respondent, Adam Groden, wrote: “Why does everybody hate Bobby Goldsboro’s ‘Honey?’ I hate it too, but I want to know WHY.”
To answer that question, let’s consider this verse:
She wrecked the car and she was sad
And so afraid that I’d be mad
But what the heck
Tho’ I pretended hard to be
Guess you could say she saw through me
And hugged my neck
Memories like this cause Bobby to sing:
And Honey, I miss you
And I’m bein’ goooooood
As survey respondent Tom Cashin put it: “Bobby never caught on that he could have bored a hole in himself and let the sap out.”
(Another respondent, Richard Silvey, wrote: “ ‘Honey’ is bearable if you assume that it’s the Hell’s Angels that took her away.”)
Several readers, using Bobby Goldsboro as the prime example, proposed the theory that any song connected in any way with the name Bobby is bad. Here’s some additional evidence
7
supporting this theory:
- Bobby Vinton, who sang—actually, whined—“Mr. Lonely” and “Roses Are Red.”
- Bobby Vee, who sang “Take Good Care of My Baby” and “Rubber Ball.” (“Bouncy bouncy! Bouncy bouncy!”)
- Bobby Rydell, who sang “Wild One” and—I will never forgive him for this—remade “Volare.”
- Bobby Sherman, who sang various songs I can’t remember the names of, but I figure they were probably lame because his name is Bobby.
- Bobby McFerrin, who gave us “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” which I have long suspected was part of a giant plot to boost sales of Prozac.
- Bobbie Gentry, who sang “Ode to Billie Joe,” a fun tune about throwing something off the Tallahatchee Bridge and suicide and just generally the joys of rural life.
- “Bobby’s Girl,” sung by Marcie Blane, who courageously proclaims: “If I were Bobby’s girl, what a faithful, thankful girl I’d be.” (For more on this musical genre, see the section of this book entitled “Songs Women Really Hate.”)
- “Bobby Sox to Stockings,” a song by Frankie Avalon about the time “...when a girl changes from bobby socks to stockings; and she starts trading her baby toys for boys...”
- “Me and Bobby McGee,” which is actually a fine song when sung by Janis Joplin, but which is usually butchered by other people, although this has not stopped a lot of other people from recording it, among them repeat bad-song offender Olivia Newton-John, who also sang “I Honestly Love You” and “Have You Never Been Mellow,” not to mention “Let’s Get Physical,” which contains the incessantly repeated line “Let me hear your body talk.” As survey respondent Abby Goldstein put it: “I don’t
want
to hear anyone’s body talk.” - “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along.”