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

20. LIONEL RICHIE “Dancing On The Ceiling” 1986
The world’s least convincing party song



Sounding suspiciously as if it was written in order to fit a video treatment rather than the other way around, this dispiritingly unfunky celebration appears literally to be about dancing on a ceiling — “People starting to climb the walls.…The only thing we want to do tonight is go round and round and turn upside down.” Even more troubling is the thought that in the ’80s, this rancidly thin stew of AOR dynamics and curiously Rick Wakeman–ish keyboards was Motown’s idea of a hot party record.
Worst Moment The fake party ambience, clearly the work of bored studio employees forced to whoop and cheer.


19. MR. MISTER “Broken Wings” 1985
The thoroughly nasty sound of yuppie angst



“Broken Wings” is primarily annoying not for its anodyne mid-’80s production, nor for its lyrics, which make its central protagonist sound like someone you would seek a restraining order against (“You’re half of the flesh, and blood makes me whole,” he sings, reaching for the duct tape and the nail gun). It’s primarily annoying because it’s a four-minute intro with no song attached. When the booming drums finally kick in, they announce the arrival not of a fantastic chorus or an epic finale, but the greatest anticlimax in pop, featuring what can only be described as a synth bass solo.
Worst Moment The synth bass solo.


18. CHICAGO “You’re the Inspiration” 1984
And you thought the Cubs were the biggest losers in this town? Wrong!



It’s hard to believe, but at one point Chicago were a fairly well-respected rock band. Then Peter Cetera joined, and they jettisoned any remaining street cred in favor of soft-rock ballads your grandmother would deem harmless. In this, their most egregious offense, Cetera’s gratingly affected and overmodulated vocals float over 1984 standard-issue electric piano, and a nation of greasy, awkward seventh graders slow-danced for the very first time.
Worst Moment That power-rock drum fill before the second verse, apparently designed to mollify hatas who thought the band had lost its edge.


17. HAMMER “Pumps and a Bump” 1994
Next stop: bankruptcy court!



It takes a special kind of awful to destroy a career. This song is that kind of awful. Four years after winning our hearts with his Rick James samples, deft footwork and baggy pants, Hammer (né MC Hammer) took an ill-advised stab at gangsta rap. Over third-rate Dre beats and high-pitched synth samples, the former Saturday-morning cartoon star freestyled about his love of women with gigantic asses. Soon after it nosedived off the charts, Hammer gave up chubby-chasing and devoted his life to Jesus.
Worst Moment The line “You wiggity-wiggity wack if you ain’t got biggity back” must have been found on Sir Mix-a-Lot’s cutting-room floor.


16. 4 NON BLONDES “What’s Up?” 1993



To grunge what “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” was to the Woodstock Generation Whenever a new genre comes along, one thing is guaranteed: Sooner or later someone will reduce its values to platitudes, then set them to music so trite you could use it to sell soft drinks. “What’s Up?” stapled grunge angst to the AOR that grunge was supposed to stamp out, then added the remarkable vocals of Linda Perry, a woman so tormented by what she referred to as her “lahf” — which she had apparently spent trying to climb that “heeyuhl of howp” — that she had invented her own accent.
Worst Moment The first chorus, in which Perry unleashes the one thing ’90s rock had lacked to that point: yodeling.