Saturday, March 19, 2011

The Worst Songs in the World: the Quiz

I keep a blog, or rather I once kept and hope again to resume a blog, called "The Worst Songs in the World... Ever!" It's dedicated to bad vibes: it's all about me dissing songs throughout history. I also, for karmic balance, keep a blog called "The Best Songs in th World... Ever!", though it says something about human nature that it gets fewer hits.

Anyway, I've decided to make a quiz out of it. I've selected certain choice sound-bites, single sentences, from my screeds. Match the sentence to the song it's excoriating: I'll list all 42 songs that I presently have articles about, though I've only excerpted from 15 of them. Here we go:
  1. He feels at times like a song-composing computer: the result seems convincing on first glance, but if you look a little deeper it fails the Turing test conclusively.
  2. He's a puppet in the video, driving home the point that it's all a big cartoon, but that's no mitigation: I don't listen to the Teletubbies either.
  3. Wikipedia reveals that the song was written with only one chord: which makes sense, as everything about is screams monotonous and dull.
  4. This was a band that had abandoned incisive social criticism for purposeless button-pushing, a band that had, like lexicographers before and after, confused anarchy with mere chaos.
  5. Which brings to mind the word 'flaccid' – a perfect word to describe this song, which despite all of its huff-and-puff is as empty as a deflated balloon.
  6. This is macho belligerence of the ugliest sort, and it mocks the sympathy the world had for the United States by glorifying its insular world-view and proudly displaying its ignorant disregard for the rest of the world.
  7. The most frustrating thing about his apparent assertion that, after crudely describing Kennedy's assassination, there is nothing else to say is that nonetheless he keeps on gibbering anyway.
  8. It’s the organ, you see. That’s what makes it ‘baseball music’. The rinky-dinky rink organ that just calls out ‘me and the boys having a good time with beer and barbecue’.
  9. What I see is a bunch of wealthy white English men taking the real and tragic plight of immigrants and turning it into a clown-show worse than Pat Boone’s “Speedy Gonzales”.
  10. This ridiculous piece of nonsense ultimately got the nod for inclusion here because it takes itself seriously: it's a 'sad' song about a girl who has fallen out of love with the protagonist, who like a mealworm writhes up to her mother to complain about it.
  11. It’s not an excessive outbreak of political correctness but mere common sense to say that songs like this cheapen and exploit the trauma battered women undergo and not only make domestic abuse socially acceptable but even imply that it’s what women want.
  12. A man afflicted with the same disease as Mick Jagger and forced to sing all of his lyrics through pouted lips, Hart gamely grunts out the line “it's time to send our message everywhere” (since until this time Canadian musicians were operating in silence on the topic of African famine) before adding a faux-Michael Jackson “cha-know” that ups the ridiculousness one point, before heading into...
  13. It's merely the navel-gazing of a celebrity who appears to have problems being satisfied despite all of her material wealth.
  14. Spooky, I guess, if you go for that sort of thing, but perhaps if she'd survived, she'd have pointed out that this a capella nightmare is little more than a silly joke sung in an annoying voice.
  15. Songs don't have to rhyme, but in the absense of anything else that would indicate it took her longer than two minutes and nine seconds to compose the song, a rhyme or two would be nice.
And here is the full list of songs, fifteen of which are described as above. Match the 15 up and disregard the other 27.
  1. "Johnny Get Angry" by Joanie Sommers (1962)
  2. "Barbara Ann" by the Beach Boys (1965)
  3. "Iko Iko" by the Dixie Cups (1965)
  4. "Mrs Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter" by Herman's Hermits (1965)
  5. "Petunia, the Gardener's Daughter" by Elvis Presley (1966)
  6. "The Black Angel's Death Song" by the Velvet Underground (1967)
  7. "The End" by the Doors (1967)
  8. "Helter Skelter" by the Beatles (1968)
  9. "Young Girl" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap (1968)
  10. "Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow" by Funkadelic (1970)
  11. "Coconut" by Harry Nilsson (1971)
  12. "Mercedes Benz" by Janis Joplin (1971)
  13. "My Ding-a-Ling" by Chuck Berry (1972)
  14. "Squeeze Box" by the Who (1975)
  15. "Lay Down Sally" by Eric Clapton (1977)
  16. "Dreadlock Holiday" by 10cc (1978)
  17. "No One is Innocent" by Ronnie Biggs and the Sex Pistols (1978)
  18. "Breakfast in America" by Supertramp (1979)
  19. "What's Your Name?" by Depeche Mode (1981)
  20. "China Girl" by David Bowie (1983)
  21. "Born in the U.S.A." by Bruce Springsteen (1984)
  22. "Illegal Alien" by Genesis (1984)
  23. "Addicted to Love" by Robert Palmer (1985)
  24. "Tears are Not Enough" by Northern Lights (1985)
  25. "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits (1985)
  26. "Girls" by the Beastie Boys (1986)
  27. "Hip to be Square" by Huey Lewis and the News (1986)
  28. "Bullet the Blue Sky" by U2 (1987)
  29. "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega (1987)
  30. "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin (1988)
  31. "Got My Mind Set on You" by George Harrison (1988)
  32. "One in a Million" by Guns 'n' Roses (1988)
  33. "How am I Supposed to Live Without You" by Michael Bolton (1989)
  34. "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel (1989)
  35. "I Love You" by Vanilla Ice (1990)
  36. "Barbie Girl" by Aqua (1997)
  37. "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (the Angry American)" by Toby Keith (2002)
  38. "American Life" by Madonna (2003)
  39. "Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani (2005)
  40. "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas (2005)
  41. "Ass Like That" by Eminem (2005)
  42. "We are the World 25 for Haiti" by Artists for Haiti (2010)

Answers tomorrow!

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