The 50 Worst Songs Ever! Watch, Listen and Cringe!

5. VANILLA ICE “Ice Ice Baby” 1990
When hip-hop stopped being the “black CNN”



Making fellow early-’90s pop-rap pioneer MC Hammer look cutting-edge by comparison, the chart-topping “Ice Ice Baby” was mindless white rap for mindless white people, set to the plodding bass line from Queen’s “Under Pressure” for easy move-busting. Lyrically, the Iceman recounts a trip to Palm Beach, where he is forced to reach for his “nine” by some moody dope fiends. It later emerged that this nice suburban boy fabricated his tough past and would probably soil himself at the sight of a real gun.
Worst Moment “To the extreme I rock a mic like a vandal/Light up the stage and wax a chump like a candle.” None of this was remotely true.


4. LIMP BIZKIT “Rollin’” 2000
In which nü-metal veers from disaffected rage to “Will this do?”



Sounding like a middle-aged man trying to fight his way out of his son’s frat party using only random words of youth slang and an unconvincingly gruff tone of voice, Fred Durst dictates a light aerobic workout (“Hands up, now hands down.…Breathe in, now breathe out”) against a background of histrionic metal noise. The song is meaningless and embarrassing in equal measure.
Worst Moment Being addressed as both “partner” and “baby” in Durst’s drawling intro, shortly before being told, bafflingly, “You know what time it is.”


3. WANG CHUNG “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” 1986
If this song was a party, you’d lock yourself in the bathroom and cry



Initially called Huang Chung, but in no way Chinese, London-based funk tools Wang Chung changed their name to make it easier for whitey to pronounce, thus patronizing Asia and Europe in one stroke. Musically one of history’s least convivial party songs, “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” was both lyrically preposterous (“On the edge of oblivion/All the world is Babylon”) and sung by Jack Hues as though he would turn to sulphur at the very thought of “fun.”
Worst Moment That chorus: “Everybody have fun tonight/Everybody Wang Chung tonight.”


2. BILLY RAY CYRUS “Achy Breaky Heart” 1992
At least the haircut never caught on. Oh, wait…



Country, but not as we know it. Written by Vietnam vet Don “Pickle Puss” Von Tress in the style of a brain-dead “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Achy Breaky Heart” represented every prejudice non-believers have about country: It was trite, it was inane, it was big in trailer parks and it was thoroughly enjoyed by the obese. Strangely, it was covered by Bruce Springsteen, with slightly less irony than you might imagine; still, this does not make it good.
Worst Moment An instrumental break that single-handedly rejuvenated the line-dancing fad.


1. STARSHIP “We Built This City” 1985
The truly horrible sound of a band taking the corporate dollar while sneering at those who take the corporate dollar



The lyrics of “We Built This City” appear to restate the importance of the band once known as Jefferson Airplane within San Francisco’s ’60s rock scene. Not so, says former leader Grace Slick, who by 1985 had handed her band to singer Mickey Thomas and a shadowy team of outside songwriters. “Everybody thought we were talking about San Francisco. We weren’t,” Slick says. “It was written by an Englishman, Bernie Taupin, about Los Angeles in the early ’70s. Nobody was telling the truth!”Certainly not Starship, who spend the song carrying on as if they invented rock & roll rebellion, while churning out music that encapsulates all that was wrong with rock in the ’80s: Sexless and corporate, it sounds less like a song than something built in a lab by a team of record-company executives.The result was so awful that years afterward, it seems to bring on a personality disorder in the woman who sang it. “This is not me,” Slick remarks when reminded of the 1985 chart-topper. “Now you’re an actor. It’s the same as Meryl Streep playing Joan of Arc.”
Worst Moment “Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names,” sneers Slick — whose band had changed its name three times.