Important Note: To ensure that the song is judged with a clear mind and the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction, as well as to allow opinions to properly form, examples should not be added until at least one month after release. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.
- Pornstar Riley Reid released a short rap song called "8 Ball Shawty"
in order to demonstrate her multifaceted talent. It...didn't work. It features terrible lyricism that gets extremely graphic and at times doesn't rhyme or even fit to the beat. What's even worse, the song's entire last third consists of Reid, a white woman, using the N-word over and over again.note The beat also samples Reid's voice as recorded in her previous body of work, sort of defeating the point of the song as a stylistic departure. Cr1TiKaL did a video about it here. - "Accidental Racist" by Brad Paisley and LL Cool J is the ultimate example of how not to do a song about racism. The song was intended to find common ground between Good Ol Boys and inner-city black folk, but it ends up making both white Southerners and African-Americans look bad. Paisley comes off as whiny, defensive, and ignorant of the loaded history that the Confederate flag holds with a large segment of the population, while LL comes off as a walking "hood rat" stereotype with his lyrics about sagging pants and gold chains. Here's Todd in the Shadows and The Rap Critic tearing the song apart while debating over which artist has the worst parts of the song in general.
- Regardless of how people feel about Soulja Boy, everyone agrees that his song "Anime" is utterly terrible. He discusses the subject with all the thought and research of a pothead pacing through a comics store, it closes with the audio equivalent of Leave the Camera Running, and it sounds like it was recorded in his bathroom. But hey, don't take our word for it - ask Y Ruler of Time about it (with guest cameos by Michael "Skitch" Schiciano and Todd in the Shadows).
- "Asian Girlz" by Day Above Ground is a "love ballad" that surpasses Race Fetish and lands squarely into just plain racist. It features insipid, poorly written lyrics that mostly just list racial stereotypes (even going into Interchangeable Asian Cultures and Asian Speekee Engrish) with the occasional Non Sequitur to force a rhyme, layered on top of a bland acoustic pop-punk track. The band quickly tried to pull a Parody Retcon on the song and claimed it was about decrying race fetishes, which is easily disproven by the song's trashy, fetishistic music video.note The song fails as a comedy since it's no more clever than Googling "list of Asian stereotypes" and reading them out, it fails at being sexy thanks to bizarre lines like "Ninja pussy I'm stabbing" and "17 or 23, baby, it doesn't matter to me", and it fails at being good music because of its dime-a-dozen production. The band would later apologize for releasing the song, as well as fire their lead singer for writing it. You can watch Sad Boyz cringe their way through the song here.
- Mötley Crüe's Generation Swine is already considered an album that's mediocre at best and awful at worst, but it's agreed that the worst song on both the album and their entire career is "Brandon". Tommy Lee sang this in honor of his newborn son... and there's a reason why he doesn't sing. Tommy's voice is absolutely rough and off-pitch, and the lyrics (which include such lines as "Your mother gave birth to you with love" and "I love you. I love her. She is your mom.") are Narmy to a heavy degree. Todd in the Shadows listens and cringes to the song here.
- Weezer were one of the biggest bands in the rock music scene in the mid-90s, and to an extent the early 2000s, but things took a bad turn with the release of Make Believe in 2005, and the band hit their creative nadir in 2009. Released as a single from Raditude (which is considered a generally bad album overall), "Can't Stop Partying" is the band's attempt at creating a club anthem. According to frontman Rivers Cuomo, it's actually meant to be a darker song about someone who literally cannot stop partying, to the point where it's dangerous- but it comes off a lot more like a serious ode to the party animal lifestyle. Not helping is Lil Wayne popping up in the middle of the song to sing a verse that's really the only part of this song that doesn't feel out of place because he's always rapping about this stuff. The strange thing about this song is that it started out as a much better acoustic song from the Alone II demo compilation that Rivers wrote a couple of years before note , so God knows why he decided to remake it into this. Thankfully, the band has never recorded another song like this until the somewhat better received "Feels Like Summer" (Which even then has nothing to do lyrically with this song), and things started to look up for them with the release of Everything Will be Alright in the End and Weezer (White Album) some years later.
- The Clash's final album Cut the Crap is already considered to be an awful album overallnote , but one song in particular stands out: the opening track, "Dictator". While the rest of the album is at least passable production-wise, this track stands out as being the most unlistenable and poorly produced song on the album. It features a murky vocal mix that renders the lyrics unintelligible, a drum machine track that doesn't flow with the rest of the song, and a synth track that sounds like a toddler banging on the keyboard. Production aside, Joe Strummer does not sound like he's into this song at all, as he delivers a half-assed vocal performance where he sounds off-key and is slightly late delivering some lines. While that's all happening, there's this strange chatter going on in the background for the entire song, like someone left their radio in the recording booth during recording. What makes it even worse is that there are bootlegs of the album with a demo version of the song, which is far more in line with a traditional Clash song with an actual melody and hook, but it (as well as the rest of the album) became a victim of Bernard Rhodes' Executive Meddling. It got some reviewers like Todd in the Shadows to question whether or not their equipment was malfunctioning. You can watch his review of the song here.
- "This song is bad. Not So Bad, It's Good, and not Michael Jackson "Bad". Just plain bad." That's Doctor Who Magazine regarding the ill-conceived 1985 charity single "Doctor in Distress". You can practically hear Doctor Who's last remaining scrap of dignity being wrenched away. The generic instrumentals — performed by a young Hans Zimmer of all people — and near-unsingable lyrics would've been bad enough, but combined with having some of them performed by actors from the show who clearly have no musical talent whatsoever, and you get what Colin Baker described his participation in as "one of the worst decisions [he] ever made". It was so bad that The BBC refused to air it on any of its television or radio stations, even though it was performed almost entirely by network celebrities. The single sold less than 1,000 copies and came nowhere close to recouping production costs, leaving no money to actually donate to charity (Baker and a few of the other participants instead donated out of their own pockets). In 2005, former series advisor Ian Levine (who wrote and co-produced the song) actually apologized for the entire thing, calling it "a balls-up fiasco". Academic Elizabeth Sandifer found similarities between the song and Live Aid and accused it of equating the hiatus of a television series with famine in Africa—that it came out between Live Aid and its predecessor "Do They Know It's Christmas?" didn't help.
- "Funky Man" is a strong contender for the worst rap song in history. A little backstory: In 1987, Dee Dee Ramone, bassist and co-founder of The Ramones, noticed that Hip-Hop was becoming more and more popular on the charts and he decided to capitalize on it. So, under the name "Dee Dee King", he released this repetitive, ego-stroking mess of a song that is simply one of the most embarrassing moments in punk rock history. Very few bought the single, and even fewer liked it. Still, Dee Dee decided hip hop was the route he wanted to go, left The Ramones, and released a whole album that, while not exactly a masterpiece, can at least be enjoyed as So Bad, It's Good unlike this song. For more information, see The Happy Spaceman's review of it.
- In 1986, nine players on the New York Mets recorded a rap song called "Get Metsmerized", inspired by the Chicago Bears' "Super Bowl Shuffle". No effort was put into making it good at all; everyone is out of rhythm, Rafael Santana's verse is barely intelligible, the rhymes are all over the place, and more than half sound like they'd rather be doing something else. The single is now just a footnote in Mets' history and was pushed aside in favor of "Let's Go Mets Go", another cheer that defined the '86 season. It's so bad that, for a time, if you put "Worst song ever recorded" in YouTube's search, this song would be the first result. Years later, Tim Teufel called it "unlistenable".
- It's no secret that The Beach Boys went downhill from The '70s, but no other song they've ever released comes close to the disgusting "Hey Little Tomboy", originally intended for their unreleased 1977 album Adult/Child and released commercially the following year on M.I.U. Besides the blatant sexism in the concept, the lyrics are just plain creepy, with the then 37-year-old Mike Love starting off the song by telling the titular tomboy to sit on his lap and saying he'll teach her to kiss. Worse, everyone in the song except Carl Wilson sounds bored to tears. Peter Ames Carlin unsurprisingly named this "the most unsettling moment in the entire recorded history of the Beach Boys".
- In 2020, Wolfmother engaged in one of the most baffling genre shifts in history with the song "High on My Own Supply", which abandons the psychedelic Hard Rock the band is known for in favor of a generic EDM/future bass sound in an extremely obvious attempt to cash in on the then-ongoing popularity of electronic music. Beyond that, the Ode to Intoxication lyrics are extremely basic and Andrew Stockdale puts no effort into his performance, with his grating, off-key vocals frequently failing to match the song's rhythm. Anthony Fantano placed it #10 on his Ten Worst Songs of 2020 list.
- Heidi Montag of The Hills fame made a music video for an incredibly bad single entitled "Higher". The video simply shows her dancing, writhing, and walking at the beach, with said video most likely being shot with a camera phone. This becomes a painful experience when combined with Heidi's incredibly poor vocals and the video's ridiculous amount of jump cuts. This is what happens when The Agony Booth gets exposed to it.
- Van Halen III is already considered a bad album, and it's universally agreed that "How Many Say I" is the worst song in the band's history. This is the only song where guitarist Eddie Van Halen sings lead, and here you can see why: he sounds like a bad imitation of Roger Waters, and the lyrics read like a drunken man's ramblings. Both Todd In The Shadows and TheHappySpaceman Reviews, in their reviews of the album, have both agreed that it was the lowest point in Eddie Van Halen's career.
- "I'm a Slick Rick" by comedian Nick Cannon is his attempt to diss Eminem, but he ends up failing miserably. The song is loaded with out-of-place references to Slick Rick and Cali Swag District, forced rhyming and lyrics, and pathetic excuses for insults that amount to Nick calling Eminem a liar. The song is commonly called the worst diss track in history, and for good reason.
- Kim Kardashian's single "Jam (Turn It Up)", which was badly received by both critics and the public. It's monotonous and lifeless to the point of sounding almost depressing, and not even Auto-Tune can save Kim's voice since she still sounds slightly off-key. She has since disowned the song, and admitted she isn't a good enough singer to pull it off. The Music Video Show bashes the song and video here. Anthony Fantano named it the 13th worst song of the 2010s.
- "Literally I Can't", by Play-N-Skillz, Redfoo, Lil' Jon, and Enertia McFly was chosen by Billboard as the worst song to touch the weekly Billboard charts in the entirety of the 2010s, and listening to it, it's not hard to see why. Putting aside the irritating beat and unpleasant performances by the rappers, the song may have been intended as the ordinary type of woman-bashing anthem, with the concept of female chatter ruining the good time of male partiers. However, the specific things the female voice sample is saying make the implications even worse, with her being portrayed as annoying for...declining alcohol and refusing to perform sexual acts on Lil' Jon. It didn't take too long for backlash to hit, and not long afterwards, the artists involved took the song down from all official sources online. The Double Agent tore into it on his Top 20 Worst Almost Hits of the 2010s video, where he gave it the #2 spot while unfavorably comparing it to the infamous "#selfie" by the Chainsmokers. Listen to it here, if you dare.
- Jenna Rose's "My Jeans". She sings about this pair of jeans she wants and that apparently every celebrity wears, throwing in anecdotes about her "swag" and how celebrities "wore those jeans just like me". Her voice is so AutoTuned that it makes you wonder if she even sang on it at allnote , and the repetitive beat often overpowers her voice. Not helping is the token rap that happens about halfway through the song. The cover of the single doesn't even have Jenna wearing jeans. JuniorfanReturns bashes the song here. Nearly a decade later, Jenna reacted to her own video and expressed regret for uploading it, though she conceded that it got her into music (her recent music has been better received). She later recalled how much intense harassment she got because of it (including getting her Twitter and YouTube hacked and her home address doxxed), to the point that she needed a bodyguard at her high school.
- While Bill Nye Saves the World garnered a lot of controversy during its run, it still has a sizable fanbase. Despite that, even the fans agree that the song "My Sex Junk", performed by Rachel Bloom and DJ Seahorse in the episode "The Sexual Spectrum", is the single worst part of the show. The song's message about gender and sexuality is hopelessly overshadowed by forced rhymes, uncomfortable amounts of detail, cheesy sex jokes, and a forced, inexplicable strawman who is won over almost immediately, all to the tune of a succession of generic EDM loops. Overnight, the show became a popular target of mockery, with even the show's audience, LGBT groups, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fans finding it too cringeworthy to take seriously. You can watch Bloom's performance here.
- Tennis star Caroline Wozniacki released a charity song called "Oxygen", and through this she proved that she should stick to her day job. She wrenches out insipid, generic lyrics through a mountain of AutoTune that makes her voice sound less human and more like a robot (as several comments on the linked video will remind you), over a beat that, if it's a preset, is an insult to presets.
- While the entirety of the album Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven by Kid Cudi can be spared since there are fans that defend the album, not even hardcore fans can defend "The Return of Chip Douglas (Demo)". While most of the songs from Speedin' Bullet can be considered So Bad, It's Good, "The Return of Chip Douglas" just takes the issues that plagues those songs and increases them tenfold. It has a repetitive acoustic guitar four-note loop with scrapes included, nasally and whiny vocals, lyrics that are laughable at best, and an ending where he's just more yelling incoherently than anything else.
- X-tReMe PoWeR is a band composed of children trying to be cool, and their only song, "Respect and Obey Authority", reflects this. On a technical level, the vocals switch between monotone and sing-songy, the instrumental is repetitive and bland, and the rhymes lack in variety or creativity. It's also a spectacular example of a Clueless Aesop: the lyrics sound like something a dictator would say to their people ("Do what [we] say, and everything will be okay!"). Many people who have heard the song assume that it's propaganda.
- Brian Wilson (yes, the one from The Beach Boys)'s song "Smart Girls", released only as a radio promo from the unreleased album Sweet Insanity, in which Brian raps over a jumbled mess of samples from many of his earlier hits (some of which are in the wrong key for the song) about how sexy women with a PhD are. The results are rather sad. Unsurprisingly, Sire Records straight-up rejected the album as soon as they heard it. In the interests of total fairness, it's important to add that at this point Brian was dominated by his Svengali-like, highly-unethical "therapist" Eugene Landy, whose meddling behavior was already known, and remarked on by Andy Paley during the sessions for Brian's solo Self-Titled Album. At least one good thing came out of the Sweet Insanity fiasco - it resulted in a lawsuit that allowed Brian to disentangle himself from Landy and later undergo a Career Resurrection, while Landy himself was hit with more legal action and lost his medical license due to the gross malpractice and abuses that he had indulged in towards Brian.
- "Spectacular" was former Cheetah Girl Kiely Williams's attempt to reinvent herself as Darker and Edgier, likely to cash in on Rated R-era Rihanna. It instead made her come off as the most vapid woman on Earth thanks to its idiotic lyrics that celebrate binge drinking, unprotected sex with strangers, and date rape. Williams later tried claiming that it's actually meant to warn against these behaviours, which is hard to buy with lyrics like "he was built like a stallion", "the sex was spectacular", and "what he did to me last night felt so good, I must've been on drugs", with only a single offhand reference to the risks involved ("I hope he used a rubber or I'ma be in trouble"). As the cherry on top, the song has a weak beat, a repetitive chorus and vocals that alternate between gruff and wispy, so it's not even enjoyable as music. It's no big surprise that it ended her solo career before it even began.
- "Stimulated" by Tyga is a song about Tyga's sexual relationship with Kylie Jenner. At the time, Kylie was 17 and Tyga was 26. Already not off to a good start, but that's only the start of the song's problems. Tyga portrays himself as an abusive Bastard Boyfriend, admitting there was no love in the relationship and he was only in it because he enjoyed the sex, calling Kylie a "bitch" and writing lines like "Shut [up] and let me finish, baby, I'll let you finish later," as well as having the song centered around the line "They say she young, I should have waited," so even someone who didn't have any knowledge of the context in which the song was created can know exactly why they should hate Tyga. And even if the listener either does not understand English or just does not care about the lyrics, Tyga is an unimpressive rapper at the best of times and this is one of his most flat and lifeless performances, and the beat, the only part of the song that is in any way pleasant to listen to, is ripped wholesale from another song, specifically a Robert Miles song called "Children". The song has a rating of 0.6 out of 5 on rateyourmusic.com, along with the song having the tags "disturbing", "crime", "hedonistic", and "vulgar", every music critic who acknowledged the song's existence tore it apart, and The Double Agent labelled it as the worst song to chart anywhere in the entirety of the 2010s by a large margin in his video on the Top 10 Worst Almost Hits of the 2010s.
- Most of the music created by AJR is generally contentious at best, but they do have a fanbase who generally enjoys their avant-garde musical ideas. Even those fans won't defend "Thirsty". The song opens with a yodel breakdown, which is a very strange addition to a song about a drunken hookup. The rest of the song isn't that much better, with basic and underwhelming lyrics and production that only serve to make the yodeling more jarring. Even the brothers themselves consider it the weirdest song they've ever made, and their fans and haters alike tend to agree it's one of their worst, with the comment section of the official video being filled with people mocking the song.
- The COVID-19 Pandemic inspired a lot of songs of varying quality, with repeat offendernote Mike Love's single "This Too Shall Pass" being one of the more terrible ones. The song combines a dissonantly upbeat tune with amateurish lyrics about the death and disruption caused by the pandemic that read more like a high school student's first draft of a poetry class assignment, all drenched in Mike's trademark robotic production. It fell into obscurity almost immediately after release except as yet another target of mockery for fans of both The Beach Boys and Todd in the Shadows, but even that didn't last. To its credit, it at least encourages following CDC guidelines.
- Gnesa's "Wilder" suffers from terrible, off-key singing; downright ear-screeching instrumentals; and horrible visuals. The producer must have realized this since they obviously attempted to hide her voice using extremely loud background music. It doesn't help that whoever posted the video not only hired a bunch of people to post fake positive comments, but ratings are also disabled, and any negative comment will get deleted. Interestingly, the song itself turns out decent when done by a person who can actually sing. Aaron Isles made a pretty good cover.
