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

30. WHITNEY HOUSTON “Greatest Love Of All” 1986
“Sexual chocolate!”



Immortalized by Eddie Murphy’s lascivious funk band in Coming to America, this heartrending über-ballad is still best known as Whitney Houston’s career zenith, before the marriage and the drugs took hold. Backed by a piano and what may or may not be a high-school symphony, Whit is at her proto-Mariah overexuding best, belting out platitudes about the joys of loving oneself above all others. Truly an anthem for the ’80s.
Worst Moment Picture a whacked-out Whitney and Bobby staggering through Israel in his-n’-hers prayer robes, then listen to the climactic line, “They can’t take away my dignity.”


29. DEEP BLUE SOMETHING “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” 1995
So bland, you can actually forget you’re listening to music while it’s playing



Less a song than an experiment to see how mundane college rock can become before it ceases to exist altogether. Texas’s Deep Blue Something matched frantic acoustic guitars to a perky melody and a lyric that re-creates the experience of being cornered at a party by a stranger who insists on telling you his romantic problems in excruciating detail: “So I said.…She said.…And I said.…”
Worst Moment Has there ever been a more boring line in a song than “And as I recall, I think we both kinda liked it?”


28. JOHN MAYER “Your Body is a Wonderland” 2001
Get this man a cold shower



“Ohhh,” the women of the world sigh, “why can’t I just find a nice guy — you know, someone who’ll compare my breasts to a theme park?” Yearn no more, ladies! Drool never sounded as sweet as it does on this slow-stirred ode to daytime sex — but even from the otherwise charming Mayer, it’s still drool. What’s more, sunny acoustic guitars belie some creepy undertones: When Mayer rasps “Discover me discovering you” and “I’ll use my hands,” it sounds as though he’s sitting in a dark room, playing pocket pool to a camera he planted in the women’s lavatory.
Worst Moment Mayer describes the “deep sea of blankets” on his bed. Ewww!


27. EUROPE “The Final Countdown” 1987
The worst thing to come from both the band and the continent itself



Eschewing such traditional hair-metal concerns as girl-chasing and “steel horse”–riding, this Rocky 4 theme from the poodle-permed Swedes found frontman Joey Tempest announcing that he was off to Venus, “ ’cause maybe they’ve seen us!” — proof that English lyrics are best written by people with a working knowledge of the language. Tempest’s nonsensical caterwauling was backed by music that somehow managed to be fascist in its bombast yet also coma-inducingly dull.
Worst Moment The synth trills remind us that before they were a crappy metal band, Europe were a crappy prog-rock band.


26. THE DOORS “The End” 1967
The most pretentious rock star’s most pretentious song



Bombastic? Lugubrious? Sounds like it was recorded in a large metal shipping container and mixed by drunks? It must be a Doors song! Painful in so many ways, “The End,” for starters, has none. (OK, it’s 11 minutes and 45 seconds long.) Over anemic jazz noodling, Jim Morrison intones lyrics that would make the kid wearing the pentagram T-shirt in the back row of homeroom blush with shame. For example: “Father…I want to kill you/Mother…I want to unh-grblgrauauauauaugh!”
Worst Moment According to online lyrics guides, that last vocal eruption actually contains the words that constitute the most appropriate response to the song: &$#% you.