Bad Songs on Great Albums

The idea of a goofy, nursery-rhyme-type song about a deranged student named Maxwell Edison who kills schoolmates, a teacher, and a judge with a silver hammer is pretty crazy. What’s even crazier is the greatest band of all time laboring over it across several months, and then including it on their final opus when they could have included any number of amazing George Harrison-penned tunes instead, including “All Things Must Pass.” But for some reason, Paul McCartney was determined to get “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” onto Abbey Road. “That’s Paul’s,” John Lennon told Playboy in 1980. “I hate it. ’Cause all I remember is the track — he made us do it a hundred million times. He did everything to make it into a single, and it never was and it never could’ve been.… We spent more money on that song than any of them in the whole album.”

It takes quite a lot to get Bob Dylan to admit that he made a mistake. But releasing a painfully personal track about the dissolution of his relationship with Suze Rotolo and his battles with her sister Carla on 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan was such an egregious error that he fessed up two decades later. “I look back and say, ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that,’” he said in 1985. “I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.” Making matters worse, the song is eight-minutes long, and full of cringe-inducing lines like “For her parasite sister, I had no respect/Bound by her boredom, her pride to protect.” He seemed to have realized the mistake fairly quickly since he didn’t play the song in concert a single time. But it’s forever on Another Side of Bob Dylan, alongside “My Back Pages” and “Chimes of Freedom,” when it should have just remained a bitter page in his lyric notebook nobody ever read.

Scott Kannberg (a.k.a. Spiral Stairs) is a stellar guitarist and a pivotal member of Pavement going all the way back to their formation in 1989. But when it came time to cut 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, bandleader Stephen Malkmus had 11 near-perfect songs that would define the band’s legacy for decades to come. And Kannberg had “Hit the Plane Down,” an unsettling, bass-heavy tune where he repeats “Hit the plane down” in a distorted voice over and over and over. In an act of tremendous generosity, Malkmus made room for it near the end of the album. He should have held out until Kannberg coughed up stronger material, as he eventually would on Wowee Zowee, with “Kennel District” and “Western Homes.” They broke out both of those songs on their past couple of reunion tours. They didn’t play “Hit the Plane Down” a single time.

“La La Love You” is often called out as the worst song on Doolittle since it’s little more than drummer David Lovering singing, “I Love You,” and, “All I’m sayin’, pretty baby/La la love you, don’t mean maybe,” with a surf-guitar backdrop, but there’s a bright, childlike charm to the song that makes it work. The same can’t be said for “Silver,” the penultimate, plodding song that Black Francis co-wrote with Kim Deal. “It’s definitely an abstraction,” Francis said. “At least, that’s my interpretation of it. It was all about creating a mood, I think.” It creates a rather downcast mood that drags down the back half of the otherwise perfect record. Once again, the good people of Spotify called this one correctly. It has fewer plays than any other song on the album.

Appetite for Destruction was so ludicrously successful that none of the boneheaded, self-indulgent/self-destructive things that Guns N’ Roses did in the years that followed could dilute its legacy. On the strength of those songs alone, they could tour forever with whatever lineup of the band that Axl Rose could cobble together. But not every song rises to the level of “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” “Rocket Queen,” “Welcome to the Jungle,” and “Paradise City.” The only true dud, however, is “Anything Goes,” which dates all the way back to Rose and Izzy Stradlin’s pre-Guns band Hollywood Rose. The line “My way, your way, anything goes tonight” is repeated ad nauseam as Slash leans into the talk-box effect on his guitar. Desperate to bring anything new into their stale set list, the band brought it back into their live show in 2023. But it’s no better now than it was back in 1987.  

The overarching story of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars isn’t always easy to follow, but it involves a rock star named Ziggy Stardust who gives hope and inspiration to a planet that will cease to exist in just five years. But this loose narrative takes a complete pause just five tracks in for a glammed-up cover of the obscure 1970 Ron Davies folk tune “It Ain’t Easy.” Bowie recorded this long before the other Ziggy songs, it has nothing to do with the storyline, it’s the only track on the album he didn’t write himself, and it has no business being there. Bowie himself seems to have recognized this since he didn’t play it a single time on the Ziggy tour or any other time afterward.

If this were a list of the best debut albums in history, the Stone Roses’ 1989 self-titled LP would rank extremely high. But it might even be a few notches higher if they’d cut “Don’t Stop” from the final track listing. As many fans noticed when the album first hit, it’s merely the previous track, “Waterfalls,” played in reverse with new lyrics and additional instrumentation. This is a clever experiment that would have been a fun B side or hidden track. But it’s the fourth song on the album, and it’s literally the third song backwards. There’s a very good reason it has fewer Spotify plays than any other song on the album. The cleverness of the bit wears off pretty quickly, and you just want to skip past it to hear “Bye Bye Bad Man.”

When U2 released Pop back in 1997, fans and critics were less than impressed by their attempt to incorporate heavy elements of electronica into their sound. But time has been extremely kind to the legacy of Pop, which is now seen as a bold experiment that generated stellar songs like “Mofo,” “Please,” “Discoteque,” and “Staring at the Sun.” But the Pop haters weren’t wrong to call out “The Playboy Mansion” as a particularly dreadful track trapped forever in the amber of 1997 thanks to unfortunate lyrics like “If Coke is a mystery/Michael Jackson — history” and “If O.J. is more than a drink/And a Big Mac bigger than you think/And perfume is an Obsession/And talk shows — confession.” “It’s contemporary references work against it,” Bono said in 2006. “Jokes about Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson just aren’t funny anymore. The original lyric was much more emotional. I am not sure the best version ended up on the album.” (“Miami” is the other major misfire on Pop, but it doesn’t descend to the cringey depths of “The Playboy Mansion.” We love every single other song on the album, even “Do You Feel Loved.”)

According to Jim Morrison, and there’s really no way to challenge him at this point, he wrote this unsettling poem about a ship that shoves a bunch of horses into the water when he was a little kid. On the 1967 Doors LP Strange Days, he delivered a manic reading of it while his bandmates banged coconuts and soda bottles together and sped up a tape machine to simulate the sound of wind. The “song” delivers the awful image of drowning horses into your head, and there’s absolutely no reason to listen to it more than once. It’s everything that critics hated about the Doors shoved into 95 endless seconds. 

The Eighties was a time when Culture Club could include a jury in blackface makeup in their video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” Guns N’ Roses could use the n-word in a song, and Genesis could make a video where they dress up like Mexicans in a Speedy Gonzalez cartoon — and record companies and MTV would just go along with it. The Genesis video we’re referencing is “Illegal Alien,” from their 1983 self-titled LP, which also featured “Mama,” “That’s All,” and “Home By the Sea.” And even without the video, “Illegal Alien” is a painfully awful song where Phil Collins sings in a cartoonishly stereotypical Spanish accent and repeats the line “It’s no fun being an illegal alien” about 650 times. We can’t blame cocaine for this one. They were all quite clearheaded when they wrote this dreadful song, recorded it, included it on their album, released it as a single, shot a video for it, and played it live on the Mama Tour. We imagine they wish they could go back in time and erase every trace of “Illegal Alien” today, but that’s not possible. It’ll live forever in infamy.

After a solid decade where most everyone in the music business wrote him off as a hippie has-been, Neil Young came screaming back to life with 1989’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” He then reconnected with Crazy Horse to cut the staggeringly vital Ragged Glory. “Country Home,” “Over and Over,” “Fuckin’ Up,” and “Love and Only Love” rank up there with his greatest works from the Seventies. There isn’t a single weak moment until Crazy Horse departs the scene at the very end and Young sits down to deliver the mawkish environmental ballad “Mother Earth.” “Respect Mother Earth,” he moans. “And her giving ways/Or trade away/Our children’s days.” It’s hard to disagree with the message of the song, but it doesn’t fit well on the album. When he played Ragged Glory straight through at a private birthday party in late 2023 for Canada Goose CEO Dani Reiss, he skipped “Mother Earth.” It was a wise choice.

Let’s start by saying that it’s always a good idea to treat people with kindness. If you have to live your life with one basic code, that should may be it. But that doesn’t mean we want a sugary, gospel-tinged, Broadway-ready anthem where Harry Styles delivers this simplistic mantra over and over and over on his 2019 LP Fine Line. “[‘Treat People With Kindness’] is an awful chimera of Jesus Christ Superstar and Edgar Winter Group’s ‘Free Ride,’” wrote Pitchfork’s Jeremy D. Larson in a review of the album, “that confuses hand-claps with happiness.” Styles also confused “Treat People With Kindness” with a good song. And for some inexplicable reason, it’s become a concert staple that he’s played live 174 times.

The Beatles kept such a madcap schedule in late 1963 as Beatlemania exploded across England that they had little time to record material for With the Beatles. If they had had just a little more time, they would have realized that “Little Child” was the definition of filler and should never have made the cut for the album. Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote it for Ringo to sing, but wound up giving him “I Wanna Be Your Man” as his token song on the album. “‘Little Child’ was a work job,” McCartney told writer Barry Myles. “Certain songs were inspirational, and you just followed that. Certain other songs were ‘Right, come on, two hours, song for Ringo for the album.’” It wasn’t until they stopped touring in 1966 that they were able to take enough time on each album and make sure no “work job” tracks made the cut.

Red has a special place in the hearts of Swifties all across the globe. “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “22,” “We Are Never Getting Back Together,” and, especially, “All Too Well” are often ranked extremely high on lists of the best songs she ever wrote, and even deep cuts like “Stay, Stay, Stay,” “Treacherous,” and “The Lucky One” are revered. A very large exception is “The Last Time,” a duet with Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody. It’s a power ballad that chronicles the bitter end of a relationship, like many songs on Red, but their voices don’t mesh well, and the song just feels like a bad Snow Patrol song featuring Taylor Swift. It was inexplicably released as the last single from Red, but it didn’t even ding the Hot 100. Swift and Lightbody dutifully rerecorded the song in 2012 for the Taylor’s Version of Red, but did little to improve it.

In 1875, an article appeared in the Associated Press about a supposed cat and rat ranch that churned out cat skin cost-free by feeding rats to cats, skinning the cats, and feeding their remains to the rats. It was a complete fiction that has somehow circulated as an urban legend for the past 150 years. Minneapolis trio Hüsker Dü got their hands on the original 1875 text and delivered it as a spoken-word track on their 1985 indie-rock classic LP New Day Rising. It was meant as a clever novelty tune, but the gimmick wears thin after about 30 seconds. And four decades later, it’s the sort of song you skip before it even starts.

Lou Reed’s reasons for kicking John Cale out of the Velvet Underground have never been fully explained, but one of the big reasons was clearly a desire to move the group away from their avant-garde roots and closer to something that resembled mainstream music, especially after the commercial failure of White Light/White Heat. Their first post-Cale album was 1969’s The Velvet Underground, and songs like “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Candy Says,” and “Some Kinda Love” show a clear new commercial direction. The only outlier is “The Murder Mystery,” and it’s a pretty striking one. The nine-minute spoken-word track is a borderline unlistenable cacophony where the four members of the band recite lines of poems at the same time, accompanied by an organist. If Cale had still been around, it’s possible he could have turned this into something half-decent. In his absence, it’s just an embarrassing mess.

The Clash spent a lot of time in New York while cutting Combat Rock, soaking in creative vibes from the downtown arts scene and the growing hip-hop movement all across the city. This led to triumphs like “Ghetto Defendant,” “Overpowered by Funk,” and “Straight to Hell.” But it also inspired bassist Paul Simonon and longtime band associate Kosmo Vinyl to team up for the deeply misguided “Red Angel Dragnet.” They were inspired by the death of Guardian Angel Frank Melvin at the hands of a police officer, which they saw as evidence that the city was decaying. That’s a fine idea for a song in theory, but their execution — which involved Vinyl reciting lines from the movie Taxi Driver (“Here is a man who would not take it anymore/A man who stood up against the scum, the filth”) — didn’t work on any level. It’s just that boring, tuneless song everyone skips after “Rock the Casbah” so they can get to “Straight to Hell.”

Whatever you think of Kanye West as a human being these days, it’s impossible to deny the genius of his early work. His third LP, Graduation, is one of his greatest achievements thanks to “Stronger,” “Champion,” “Good Morning,” “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” and basically every single song on the album. The lone exception is “Drunk and Hot Girls,” a stunningly inept collaboration with Mos Def where West rants about his frustration with drunk women he encounters at clubs around town. “Stop dancing with your girlfriend and come dance with me,” he raps. “Stop talking ‘bout your boyfriend since he is not me/Stop running up my tab ’cause these drinks is not free/You drunk and hot girl.” It’s a lifeless, boring track that drags down the entire record. 

If we can, let’s put aside the fact that Joey Gallo was a vicious mobster who murdered several people and was justifiably locked up for a decade. Let’s try and overlook the fact that Bob Dylan and co-writer Jacques Levy made the baffling decision to lionize him on Desire, painting him as some sort of combination of Andy Dufresne, Jean Valjean, and Jesus Christ. “And someday if God’s in heaven overlookin’ His preserve,” Dylan and Levy wrote, “I know the men that shot him down will get what they deserve.” This is all secondary to the fact that “Joey” is an 11-minute slog of a song on the otherwise stellar Desire. In a 2009 interview with Bill Flannigan, Dylan attempted to put the blame for the crazy, ahistorical lyrics on Levy. “Jacques Levy wrote the words,” he said. “Jacques had a theatrical mind, and he wrote a lot of plays. So the song might have been theater of the mind. I just sang it.” In other words, “Don’t blame me for this crazy song I co-wrote, approved, featured on my album, and played live nearly 70 times. Blame the dead guy.”

We understand why Yes opted to include instrumental interludes on Fragile between epics like “Roundabout,” “South Side of the Sky,” “Long Distance Runaround,” and “Heart of the Sunrise.” They are palate cleansers designed to prepare you for the next prog-rock feast. And many of them work quite splendidly, including Steve Howe’s acoustic guitar tune “Mood for a Day” and the 37-second jam “Five Per Cent of Nothing.” But Rick Wakeman’s “Cans and Brahms” — an adaptation of the third movement of Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in E Minor — is a different story. It comes way too early in the album, after opener “Roundabout,” and does nothing but demonstrate the chops of Wakeman, the new keyboardist. He’s indeed a massive talent that helped the band massively up their game, but we don’t need to hear him playing Brahms. Yes seemed to have learned their lesson, since the next album, Close to the Edge, is just three prog epics and nothing else.

Genesis fans have been torn about “The Battle of Epping Forest” ever since the 12-minute track appeared on their 1973 landmark album, Selling England by the Pound. Some love the complexity of the prog-rock song about two East London gangs battling in a forest north of the city, and all of the madcap character voices that Peter Gabriel employs while spinning out the yarn. And others find it clunky, needlessly long, and irritating in the extreme when Gabriel jumps from character to character at breakneck speed. We’re going to place ourselves firmly in the latter camp, and we’re in good company. “It’s like, 300 words per line,” Phil Collins said decades later. “There was no space. All the air had been sucked out of it. If we had known we could have thinned it out.… In those days, we didn’t go back and rerecord things.” Gabriel agreed: “I spent a lot of time building up the characters. I was quite reluctant to edit as severely as I should have done. It did end up too wordy.” There are elements of the song that work, but it simply can’t compare to the majesty of “Firth of Fifth,” “The Cinema Show,” and “Dancing With the Moonlight Knight.”

After spending much of the Eighties battling his record label and alienating longtime fans with genre experiments like Trans, Old Ways, and Everybody’s Rockin’, Neil Young roared back to life with 1989’s Freedom and 1990’s Ragged Glory. He kept the momentum going in 1992 with Harvest Moon, where he reunited with his Harvest backing group the Stray Gators 20 years down the line. It’s a stunning record where he pays tribute to his wife, Pegi Young, and reflects on life in his late forties, even offering an apology for his missteps on “One of These Days.” But he takes a colossal misstep on the cringe-inducing piano ballad “Such a Woman,” where he sings of his eternal love for Pegi with the backing of a string section. “No one else can kill me like you do,” he sings. “No one else can fill me like you.” Nothing about the song works, and he hasn’t played it live a single time since 1992.

In the early days of Pink Floyd, guitarist Syd Barrett was the band’s resident genius and chief songwriter. And despite everything that came later, Roger Waters was merely the bassist. Their 1967 debut LP, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is packed with Barrett-penned classics like “Astronomy Dominé,” “Bike,” “The Gnome,” and “Lucifer Sam.” But Barrett gave Waters the chance to contribute a single song, “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk,” and the results were simply atrocious. The grating tune repeats “Doctor, doctor!” over and over again while spewing out nonsense lines like “Gold is lead/Choke on bread” at breakneck, psychedelic speed. It’s only three minutes long, but feels about 10 times longer. Judging by this song alone, nobody would have ever guessed that its author would take over the band in the Seventies and turn them into one of the biggest acts in rock history. They were more likely to assume he was on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown.

A large contingent of hardcore Madonna fans feel she reached her creative peak with 1989’s Like a Prayer. The title track is clearly one of the greatest accomplishments of her long career, but it’s followed on the album by “Express Yourself,” “Cherish,” “Love Song,” and lesser-known gems like “Spanish Eyes” and “Promise to Try.” But then there’s “Dear Jessie,” a lullaby that songwriter-producer Patrick Leonard wrote for his daughter. “If the land of make believe/Is inside your heart, it will never leave,” Madonna sings. “There’s a golden gate where the fairies all wait/And dancing moons, for you.” These words are paired with strings and synthesizers in deeply unsettling ways. It’s just a terrible song on every level that was somehow released as a single. Needless to say, it was a colossal stiff.

The Who by Numbers is a dark journey through the mind of Pete Townshend as he battles writer’s block, alcoholism, loneliness, intraband conflict, and a nagging feeling that his best days are behind him. But three songs in, the band puts all this aside for an aggressively silly ditty that compares a woman’s sexual organ to an accordion. “She goes in and out and in and out,” Roger Daltrey sings. “And in and out and in and out/She’s playing all night/And the music’s all right/Mama’s got a squeeze box/Daddy never sleeps at night.” We realize this will be a controversial choice since “Squeeze Box” was a hit all across the planet, and the only song on The Who by Numbers nonfanatical fans will even recognize. But we stand firmly by this. The Who by Numbers is a criminally underrated album that ranks high on the list of the Who’s best work. It’s only marred by this stupid, stupid song. (It’s so dumb that Poison regularly plays it. We rest our case.)

Britney Spears’ 1998 debut album, … Baby One More Time, is a journey through the mind of a heartbroken teenage girl as imagined by a small team of male songwriters and producers, hailing largely from Sweden. It turned Spears into a global a superstar practically overnight thanks to hits like “… Baby One More Time,” “(You Drive Me) Crazy,” and “From the Bottom of a Broken Heart.” The latter was written by Eric Foster White, who also penned “E-Mail My Heart.” It’s another sappy ballad about a young woman waiting by her computer and dial-up modem for her boyfriend to respond to an email. “And all I do is check the screen/To see if you’re OK,” Spears sings. “You don’t answer when I phone/Guess you wanna be left alone/So I’m sending you my heart, my soul/And this is what I’ll say.” We’ll ignore the fact that most teenage girls were chatting on AOL in 1999 and not writing emails, and just focus on the fact that this is a painfully mawkish song.

When Jerry Garcia looked back at “What’s Become of the Baby” in a 1991 interview with Blair Jackson, he had one question: “Why the fuck did everybody let me do that?” The answer is that it was 1968, everyone was stoned out of their minds, and a sparse, psychedelic track where Garcia chants incoherently for eight minutes felt like a good idea. “It was originally baroque,” Garcia said. “I had this melody worked out that had this counterpoint and a nice little rhythm. The original setting I’d worked out was really like one of those song forms from the New York Pro Musica. I just had a desire to make it much weirder than that, and I didn’t know how to do it.… It’s too bad, because it’s an incredible lyric and I feel I threw the song away somewhat.”

The best Creedence songs are two-and-a-half-minute bursts of brilliance without an ounce of fat on them. They came at the height of psychedelia, but their music was the antithesis of that indulgent movement in almost every way. But Creedence veered far from the formula in late 1970 with “Rude Awakening #2,” the final track from their penultimate record, where they’re already showing signs of burnout. (The presence of “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” and “Hey Tonight” still makes this a great record in our eyes.) “Rude Awakening #2” is an instrumental dripped in psychedelia that meanders for an endless six minutes and 22 seconds. If this was their attempt to be embraced by the cool kids, it failed miserably. Sadly, it also marked the end of guitarist Tom Fogerty’s stint in the band.

In early 1971, Neil Young went to England to perform on the BBC and play a gig at London’s Royal Festival Hall. At the end of the trip, he made the deeply unfortunate decision to head into a studio with the London Symphony Orchestra and record two new songs destined for Harvest, “A Man Needs a Maid” and “There’s a World.” They were both sparse tunes that worked quite well on the piano, but suffered greatly by overwrought, wildly unnecessary symphonic arrangements. The track that suffered the most was “There’s a World.” It’s a blight on the otherwise pristine Harvest, and the fact that Young didn’t touch it again in concert until 2017 suggests that he likely knows he screwed it up.

If Michael Jackson had just capped off Thriller with track eight instead of track nine, he would have created one of the most flawless works in music history. But for reasons that are hard to fathom, he tacked “The Lady in My Life” onto the end. And it wasn’t an easy process. “Quincy wasn’t satisfied with my work on that song, even after literally dozens of takes,” Jackson said. “Finally, he took me aside late one session, and told me he wanted me to beg. That’s what he said — he wanted me to go back to the studio and literally beg for it. So I went back in and had them turn off the studio lights, and close the curtain between the studio and the control room, so I wouldn’t feel self-conscious.” He did deliver a strong vocal, but it’s in service of a song that has no business on the same album as “Billie Bean,” “Beat It,” “Human Nature,” Thriller,” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”

The Beatles took a full month to record Rubber Soul in the fall of 1965. The goal was to finally devote enough time to a single album so that they wouldn’t be forced to pad out the running time with covers or filler. They kept the promise all the way to the final track, “Run for Your Life,” where they included a song John Lennon cobbled together with little thought. “It was a song I just knocked off,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. “It was inspired from — this is a very vague connection — from [Elvis Presley’s] ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’. There was a line on it — I used to like specific lines from songs — ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man’ — so I wrote it around that, but I didn’t think it was that important.” Many Beatles fans feel it’s one of the weakest Lennon-McCartney tunes in the Beatles’ entire catalog.

Bruce Sprignsteen signed to Columbia Records as a solo artist in 1972, and legendary A&R man John Hammond saw him as a sensitive singer-songwriter in the same vein as James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Carole King, and other stars of the day. But Springsteen had much more interest in cutting rock songs like “It’s Hard to Be a Saint In the City” and “Growin’ Up” with the earliest incarnation of the E Street Band. This meant his debut LP, Greetings From Asbury Park, was a compromise that teetered between acoustic tracks and E Street rockers. The two weakest songs on the album, without any doubt, are “Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “The Angel.” But there’s a romantic spark to “Mary Queen of Arkansas” that prevents the song from falling totally flat. We can offer no such praise for “The Angel.” It’s a mushy piano ballad about a biker with groan-inducing lyrics like “Wieldin’ love as a lethal weapon/On his way to hubcap heaven.” The only two live performances since 1973 took place at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1996 and Buffalo, New York’s HSBC Arena in 2009, when Springsteen played Greetings straight through. Odds are quite high he’ll never do it again. It’s up in hubcap heaven now.

In her 2014 Rolling Stone cover story, Taylor Swift said she had major beef with a fellow pop star who tried to “sabotage an entire arena tour” by poaching some of her dancers. “For years, I was never sure if we were friends or not,” she said. “She would come up to me at awards shows and say something and walk away, and I would think, ‘Are we friends, or did she just give me the harshest insult of my life?’” (It took about 16 seconds for internet sleuths to figure out she was talking about Katy Perry.) This inspired “Bad Blood,” on which Swift rails against her enemy (“You say sorry just for show”), but the song is limp and repetitive. And when Swift and Perry made peace, the whole thing just seemed silly. It did, however, lead to a glorious moment on the Eras Tour when Perry filmed herself singing along to the song at a stadium in Sydney. Maybe that’s a sign it’s time to permanently retire the song.

There’s really no such thing as a bad Smiths song, but they came pretty close with “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” on their final LP, Strangeways Here We Come. (A vocal contingent of fans felt the album was a big letdown after The Queen Is Dead, but nearly any album would feel that way following that staggering achievement.) “Paint a Vulgar Picture” is a screed against record companies capitalizing on the premature deaths of young stars. “At the record company meeting,” Morrissey sings, “on their hands at last!/A dead star/But they cannot taint you in my eyes.” The rant plods along for five and a half minutes, never coming close to the highs of “Girlfriend in a Coma,” “Death of a Disco Dancer,” “Last Night I Dreamed Somebody Loved Me,” or any of the other songs on the album. Morrissey wasn’t wrong to feel queasy about the way labels profited from the deaths of Ian Curtis, Marc Bolan, and other tragic figures. But this should have remained a rant in his diary. It didn’t need to be a song. 

John Lennon’s heart was in the right place when he wrote “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” to mock a young, wealthy American who hunted for tigers while he was staying at the Maharishi’s meditation camp in India. But it’s a simplistic nursery rhyme that repeats the line “Hey, Bungalow Bill/What did you kill, Bungalow Bill?” over and over and over, with yelps from Yoko Ono. It’s mildly amusing on first listen, but it grows deeply annoying very quickly. There are other weak moments on the White Album, including “Wild Honey Pie,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and “Good Night,” not to mention the sound collage “Revolution 9,” but “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” is the one that has us reaching for the skip button the fastest.

Despite his frequent assertions to the contrary over the years, the songs on Blood on the Tracks reflect the pain Bob Dylan felt while separated from his first wife, Sara Lownds. It’s the reason why so many people have connected to “Shelter From the Storm,” “If You See Her, Say Hello,” and “Simple Twist of Fate” over the years. But midway through the album, the narrative pauses for nine interminable minutes of “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.” It’s a Western saga about the Jack of Hearts, Lily, Rosemary, Big Jim, and the Hanging Judge that’s practically impossible to follow. Many listeners simply skip past it. (The stripped-down version on 2018’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 14: More Blood, More Tracks is far superior.) The only time Dylan even attempted it live was the final show of the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976, but no tape survives. That’s probably for the best. (It’s still very easy to argue that Blood on the Tracks is Dylan’s best album, but it would be even better if he’d included “Up to Me” and dumped “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.”)

If an AI was asked to write a Bruce Springsteen song, it would likely come up with something fairly close to “Factory.” As the title suggests, it’s about the pain and indignity of working at a factory, and was inspired by the struggles of his father. “Early in the morning, factory whistle blows,” Springsteen sings. “Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes/Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light.” The song was originally conceived as “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight)” with far better lyrics, but Springsteen decided to take it in a different direction during the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions. To be fair, “Factory” is far from an outright embarrassment. But it is the worst song on the otherwise flawless Darkness on the Edge of Town by miles. Making matters worse, he cut “Because the Night,” “Fire,” “The Promise,” and many other fantastic songs, but made room for “Factory.” It was an unfortunate decision. It seems as if Springsteen is aware of this — he’s played it live fewer times than any other song on the album.

Randy Meisner was a man of many talents. He was a gifted bassist, and his achingly tender voice was a critical part of the harmony blend that gave the Eagles such a distinct sound. His lead vocals on “Take It to the Limit” are simply magnificent, and all attempts to pull off that song without him have fallen flat. But he simply couldn’t compete as a songwriter in a band with Don Henley, Glen Frey, and Joe Walsh. And these guys were operating at their absolute peak when Hotel California came around. This was Meisner’s last album with the group, and they included his country-rock tune “Try and Love Again” on the second side. It’s the only dud on the otherwise perfect album. Vince Gill did his best with it when the remaining Eagles played Hotel California straight through about five years back, but it was a bathroom break for many between “Pretty Maids All in a Row” and “The Last Resort.”

When Neil Young finally released Homegrown in 2020 following a 46-year delay, fans had many questions: Why did he hold back such a brilliant collection of songs all these years? How would such an intense, personal LP have been greeted by the public back in 1974? And what the hell is up with that song “Florida”? The latter question refers to a bizarre, spoken-word track where a deeply stoned Young tells a rambling story about witnessing an out-of-control hang glider kill a couple on the ground, leaving an orphaned baby by their side. The only musical accompaniment is the sound of Young and guitarist Ben Keith rubbing piano strings and the rims of wine glasses. It’s a symbolic story about the dissolution of his relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress, and custody questions that linger over their child Zeke. It’s also the dream referenced in the opening lyrics of the next song, “Kansas.” But that doesn’t mean it’s an enjoyable listen. There’s absolutely no reason to hear it more than once.

If anyone thinks “Good Morning Good Morning” isn’t the clear low point of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, they should take a listen to John Lennon himself. “It’s a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought,” he told David Sheff in 1980. “The ‘Good morning, good morning’ was from a Kellogg’s cereal commercial. I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing, and it came over, and then I wrote the song.” Lennon did indeed nick the hook from a long-running Kellogg’s commercial. He turned it into something slightly more profound, but it’s still quite clearly something Lennon tossed off with little thought. George Martin went to his grave regretting the decision not to include “Strawberry Fields Forever” on Sgt. Pepper because it had already been released as a single. If they’d only dumped “Good Morning, Good Morning” to make room for it, it would be a much stronger record. (And if you love the song, it’s likely because you’ve heard it a million times and can’t imagine Sgt. Pepper without it. Listen to the song in isolation and see what you think.)

Pete Townshend conceived of the Who’s 1967 LP The Who Sell Out as an imaginary broadcast from a pirate-radio ship, complete with fake commercials for baked beaks and deodorant. It’s a clever concept that mostly works, but not every song lives up to the promise of “Tattoo,” “I Can See for Miles,” “Armenia in the Sky,” and “I Can’t Reach Out.” The clear low point is “Silas Stingy,” which was penned by bassist John Entwistle. It’s basically a nursery rhyme about a painfully cheap old man who keeps all of his money in a black box. Half the song is just a repeat of “Money, money, money bags/There goes mingy Stingy.” It’s annoying the first time you hear it, and unbearable the 10th time you hear it. It’s not just the worst song on The Who Sell Out, but one of the single worst songs the Who ever released. And that includes 1980s coked-out fiascos like “Did You Steal My Money?” 

The Mike Love of today is a proud MAGA Republican who spent New Year’s Eve rubbing shoulders with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The Mike Love of 1971 was significantly less politically inclined, but eager to jump on the anti-war bandwagon and find a way for the Beach Boys to be relevant in the era of Kent State and the Weather Underground. That’s why he took Leiber and Stoller’s 1954 song “Riot in Cell Block Number 9” and recast it as “Student Demonstration Time,” on Surf’s Up, writing lyrics about campus activism in response to Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. “America was stunned on May 4, 1970/When rally turned to riot up at Kent State University,” he wrote. “They said the students scared the Guard/Though the troops were battle dressed/Four martyrs earned a new degree/The bachelor of bullets.” This reads like some sort of parody, but those are the actual lyrics. Even 54 years later, it’s hard to listen to the song without cringing. And it mars a truly excellent Beach Boys album.

During the creation of their ambitious 1968 album, Bookends, Art Garfunkel visited the United Home for Aged Hebrews in New Rochelle, New York, and the California Home for the Aged at Reseda. The idea was to create a sound collage of senior citizens talking about their lives that would lead up to “Old Friends,” a poignant tune that Paul Simon wrote, where he imagined the two of them “sharing a park bench quietly” at age 70. This result was a painfully depressing two minutes and nine seconds of nursing-home residents sharing things like, “God forgive me, but an old person without money is pathetic,” and, “I couldn’t get younger, I have to be an old man.” It brings the album to a dead stop and reminds each and every listener of the inevitably of death. As the years passed, and the odds that any of these people were still alive slipped down to zero, the track grew even more maudlin.

As the old saying goes, cocaine is one hell of a drug. Black Sabbath were snorting it practically by the gallon when they recorded Vol. 4 at L.A.’s Record Plant in 1972. One particularly insane night, after hours in the studio, they ripped off their clothes and began dancing around. A cross that guitarist Tony Iommi wore around his neck brushed against his guitar string, making a distinct sound. “Everybody then danced around the guitar, hitting it,” Iommi wrote in his memoir, Iron Man. “I always put so much work in every song, putting all the different changes in and everything, and we had a track that came about accidentally because a couple of stone people were hitting my guitar.” This was surely good for a laugh in the studio, but featuring the track on Vol. 4 alongside legit songs like “Changes” and “Snowblind” is a decision only four guys blind to logic and reason due to “snow” would make.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin originally planned on cutting their 1973 double LP, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, at the same studio in Jamaica where the Rolling Stones recorded Goat’s Head Soup earlier that year. “It was not a good vibe,” Taupin told Rolling Stone in 2013. “I remember a lot of barbed wire around the studio and armed guards. We spent a lot of time congregating around the pool area of the hotel, feeling there was safety in numbers.” They eventually retreated back to the safer confines of the Château d’Hérouville in France and finished the album in a matter of weeks. The only trace of their Jamaica adventures is found in the deeply unfortunate song “Jamaica Jerk-Off,” where John delivers lines like “We’re all happy in Jamaica/Do Jamaica jerk-off that way” with a strong hint of an island accent. It has no place on the same album as true masterpieces like “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” “Candle in the Wind,” “Sweet Painted Lady,” and “Harmony.” John has never once played it live, and Taupin claims to have no memory of even writing it. That’s probably for the best.

Countless Guns N’ Roses fans have come across the final track on Use Your Illusion II over the years and had the same question: “What in God’s holy name is this insane industrial song ‘My World,’ where Axl Rose is rapping?” Founding guitarist Izzy Stradlin had the same question, even though he plays on the album and co-wrote many of the songs. “I didn’t even know it was on it until it came out,” he told Rolling Stone in 1992. “I gave it a listen and thought, ‘What the fuck is this?’” The answer is a song that Rose created in just three hours while tripping on mushrooms. “You want to step into my world?” he snarls. “It’s a socio-psychotic state of bliss/You’ve been delayed in the real world/How many times have you hit and missed?” The song is so horrifically, ludicrously awful that it needs to be heard to be believed. And decisions like “My World” played a role in Stradlin leaving the band midway through the Use Your Illusion tour. He had been living in Axl’s world for too long and was ready to get out.

Pink Floyd’s 1971 LP Meddle is bookended by two prog-rock masterpieces: “One of These Days” and “Echos.” The experimental tracks in the middle fail to reach those highs, but “Fearless,” “A Pillow Full of Winds,” and “St. Tropez” are beloved by Floyd aficionados and have aged extremely well. The same cannot be said for “Seamus.” The novelty blues tune features Steve Marriot’s border collie Seamus howling for two interminable minutes, and was basically included as a joke. But it wasn’t funny in 1971, and it’s definitely not funny now. It’s just the ridiculous song everyone skips past so they can hear “Echoes,” and a strong candidate for the worst song in the entire Pink Floyd catalog. (Sorry, Seamus. We’re sure you were a good boy.)

Police guitarist Andy Summers had an extremely overbearing mother. “I was sort of ‘the golden child,’” he said, “and there I was, sort of fulfilling all of her dreams by being this pop star in the Police. I got a certain amount of pressure from her.” It was certainly a difficult situation, and he wrote the manic “Mother” to vent his frustration, utilizing an unnerving 7/8 time signature, and handling the vocals himself. “Well every girl that I go out with/Becomes my mother in the end,” he wails. “Oh, oh, mother/Oh, mother dear, please listen/And don’t devour me.” These are the kinds of things you say to a therapist. You don’t include them on the Police’s final album alongside “King of Pain,” “Every Breath You Take,” “Murder by Numbers,” and other classics. It’s understandable that Sting felt the need to appease his guitarist by giving him one song on the album, but it didn’t have to be this embarrassing fiasco.