For some reason, this mention of Starship's "We Built This City" led me down a hole of Internet research on my own personal Mandala Effect rabbit hole. I remembered as a kid, the Residents - who I only knew at the time as a bunch of guys wearing eyeballs as their heads - being part of the video for "We Built This City". I later became a fan of the Residents, who hadn't mentioned this at all. No evidence of them appearing with Starship, including the video for "We Built this City". But I hadn't been able to shake this vision for decades. Did I imagine it?
Tonight, digging deeper, I found it! I found the source. In 1984, just a year before "We Built this City", Jefferson Starship (the progenitor of Starship, we won't mention the Airplane here) released a video for their ostensible hit single "Layin' it on the Line".
There they were! The Residents! In a terrible, terrible Jefferson Starship video! Sung by Grace Slick and, uh, that dude from Starship!
Strangely, I'll be able to sleep deeply tonight knowing that this mystery that was knawing at my soul for so many years has finally been solved.
I feel like I should be familiar with this song but I'm not, and I have to say, truly one of the great choruses of 80's rock: "we're layin' it on the line (layin' it on the line) ---just layin' it all, right on the line".
I remember having my own rabbit hole with the Residents band.
In junior high I used to stay up late and watch Letterman. He used to have Chris Elliot the comedian on doing various bits. He had one that imitated the Residents where Chris and several other people dressed up in weird outfits called something like "Maumoshcantz" or something French sounding. Chris' costume had a big black box with three toilet rolls for the face on it and played bizarre, "avant-garde" music. When they finished, Chris came over to sit with Dave. Dave tried to announce the name of the band and Chris scolded him by over pronouncing the name. Then Dave asked what part Chris played and he exclaimed, "I played the guy with toilet rolls on his head Dave! Shesssh!"
I recounted the bit to a friend and he instantly said the whole bit was a tilt of the cap to the band The Residents and it poked fun at their outfits and members on purpose.
This lead me, pre-internet to start digging around to find out what I could about the band. A few weeks later there was some MTV News story about a musician who died that apparently was one of the members. They made light of the fact nobody knew this since the band had purposefully concealed their identities so they could rotate out people as necessary and then say they just wanted people to focus on the music instead. Strangely enough, there was a similar story making the rounds on the internet about something similar that Slipknot was doing and Corey Taylor even used the same reason they wear masks - so fans can focus more in the music! This of course, brought back memories in my own research that eventually concluded with an older brother of a friend who was into really weird stuff and gave me a somewhat sordid history of the The Residents, and some the eerie connections to their management team Cryptic Corporation. He even pulled out several albums saying there's a possibility The Beatles WERE the Residents and showed me the two albums "Meet the Residents" and "Meet the Beatles" album as proof. Keep in mind, I was like 10, my buddies brother was like 16; so imagine how that conversation went down.
Anyways, thanks for bringing this up, it was really fun remembering my own rabbit hole with that band. Which interestingly enough, started with a David Letterman bit and ended with similar rumors swirling around Slipknot.
The Letterman bit must have been parodying Mummenschanz, an avant-garde Swiss theater group that was pretty popular (as those things go) at the time. They do feel a bit in the same corner of the arts universe as the Residents...
The idea of a worst song of all time is silly, but I want to use this as an excuse to juxtapose We Built this City with another Starship hit: Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now. The latter is just as fluffy and corny, but instead of generic corporate rock it's a soaring silly power ballad duet.
I think the secret sauce is Diane Warren. It's the same reason I love belting out I Don't Want to Miss a Thing at karaoke, or listening to If I Could Turn Back Time on a loop while working.
This post has been sponsored by the Committee to Get Diane Warren into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (CGDWRRHF).
The idea that "We Built This City" is somehow worse than all the garbage pop music hits that have come out in the past 20 years is absurd. Sure, "We Built This City" is pretty cheesy, and certainly not the best example of 80s rock, but at least it's listenable, unlike the overly-compressed and Autotuned crap that modern pop is.
I agree that a "worst song of all time" is a bit silly, but if someone was trying to make the worst song of all time that would still get regular radio play and you asked me for ideas, "put a traffic report in the middle of the song" would be pretty high on my ideas list.
I say that with love as I absolutely love the We Built This City (and Starship for that matter)
I know your description includes "still get regular radio play", but one of my favourite pieces of troll music is "The Most Unwanted Song". They surveyed people to find the things they liked least in music and put it all together. I don't want to spoil just how creatively awful it is or what's in there, so I'll just drop the link and go.
I mean...c'mon..they could have at least picked a "worst song of all time" that wasn't a Billboard Top 100 #1 hit. Ditto for "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now"...
The same one that hates Nickelback (they're not great, but terrible?, nah), clowns ("eek, let's collectively decide to feign fear at the humorously funny looking people with big shoes at the circus, even without having read "It"!"), and "moist" (who wants an arid cupcake?).
Haha these internet fads are great. Especially when you hang out with people who aren’t chronically online.
There was also the bit about gauges and hipsters (which just became the most mainstream). Then there was the fedora hate which I think was the funniest because I knew about it (because I’m chronically online) and then one day I’m traveling through Japan with my friends and the girls are all like “you should try out these hats at this store” and it’s piece for piece exactly what Reddit would hate. But the girls loved it on the lads and I’m married to one now.
It’s like how here people are always like “oh I’d never give X a buck they’re stealing all your data” and then out in the real world people love Google, like adore it. What’s the deal with that?
One of my coworkers stated this a few years ago: "i'm on an interesting musical journey right now: trying to identify musicians/groups/bands/artists, etc. that i've over looked because they were "mainstream" popular"
And I always thought that was kind of a hilarious thing to go through. Most people I know who are music snobs are generally anti-pop music and it seems like they miss out on the fun stuff that everyone gets into.
I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.
I remember REM self-nominating 'Shiny Happy People ' as the worst song. And even though it was one of their most successful songs in the charts they refused to play it live.
Denis Leary: I want you to pull this bus over on the side of the Pretentiousness Turnpike! I want the shiny people over here, and the happy people over here.
I think you're missing the point. WBtC is a "bad" song in exactly the same way that Swift's songs are "bad". It's unashamedly pop, aimed at tastes that sophisticated listeners try to escape, and critically: is so good that those sophisticated listeners find themselves listening to it anyway.
It's basically a bouncing, bopping reminder that we aren't as smart as we think we are.
Yeah, if you're looking at it from a composition/music theory angle, it's not your typical 4 chord pop song. There are thirds in the bass all over place that provide interesting contrary motion to the chords, and the verse and chorus are technically in different keys. It's not genius writing but it's definitely not lazy.
I had forgotten just how much I hated that inescapable song in the 80s. Definitely close to my worst song ever. There's plenty of 80s pop that I've softened my views on as I got older and even started to grudgingly appreciate, but not "we built this city".
I don't think I'd even recognize a single Taylor Swift song. I plan to keep it that way, currently she's just a name and a face to me, knowing her music would probably only cause me to dislike her unfairly.
Eh. Swift isn't my cup of tea; you're much more likely to find me at an industrial metal show. However, she's crazy talented, and her music is well-produced and wildly catchy. She's really good at what she does.
Along those lines, I'd never pay to see Britney Spears perform, but "Toxic" goes hard.
Their music shouldn't make you dislike them. It's not objectively awful, not by a long shot. If anything, just acknowledge we're not the target audience and move on.
As the father of a middle schooler I was recently forced to listen to a lot of Taylor Swift. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that she's enormously talented, even if I don't like her pop era or public personality. (And my daughter has moved past it, mostly because of the personality thing. I'm proud.)
Most of the comments here are going to predictably call out that "We Built This City" is not the worst song of all time and offer up an example that's ostensibly worse.
But I think a very important caveat missing from the article and all of the comments here is that Blender/VH1 never said it was the worse song of all time. They said it was the most "awesomely bad" song of all time. To which I 100% agree with. Its not worst songs, its good catchy songs that are also objectively bad. And I think "awesomely bad" is just a great way to title it. We can all agree "We Built This City" is a catchy ear worm you can rock out to in the car, it lifts my spirits whenever it gets played. It stands on the pantheon of terrible but awesome hits like "Ice Ice Baby", "She Bangs", and the Ghostbusters theme song.
Nobody is saying you shouldn't listen to "We Built This City". Its a guilty pleasure. Crank that mother up on your car ride home alone and rock the fuck out.
It's a brilliant song for this reason: Read the lyrics to the song. It's a song about what they now call gentrifcation. The video and song are in the post-corporatized/gentified world where once true rock reigned. It's supposed to sound phony as hell.
Jordan Peele does a fantastic impersonation of Ray Parker Jr. (“the Ghostbusters guy”) promoting his lesser known movie theme songs he’s submitted through the years. Talk about bad songs! Jumanji, Passion of the Christ, Apt Pupil. lol. https://youtu.be/GxjNOv5QPzM?si=zSduoOlbIULoKOMC
I didn't know Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to this song. Man, that's gotta sting.
But if I was making a list of Awful, Terrible Songs, I'm not sure I would have even included this one, mostly because I wouldn't remember it existed. Maybe that's what makes it bad--it was in constant rotation in the 80s, but as soon as they stopped playing it regularly I just... forgot it existed.
Looking at various lists of "Worst Songs" always confuses me. A lot of them are just really popular songs that got overplayed. Wikipedia's page says the Spandau Ballet's "True" is one, which is just nuts.
Phil Collins and Sting both went from hard-rocking tunes to elevator music with very little warning. It’s hard to believe Sting went from The Police to the sublime Bring On The Night to Fields of Gold.
It's a consequentialist sort of "worst": (lack of) artistic quality multiplied by exposure and impact. Couple that with how hard aesthetic quality is to assess and you get some odd lists.
This song brings back good memories for me. Other songs from that era I remember are "Life in a Northern Town", "Walk Like an Egyptian", some Corey Hart songs.
There's a lot of weird revisionism when it comes to judging 1980s music (eg [1]). It actually feels like a lot of 90s kids just being haters. There's been analysis that you basically like whatever was popular when you were 14 [2].
Additionally, it seems like more modern music just isn't enduring [3] in the same way music from the 1950s to 1980s was. Just the fact that people today know about "We Built this City" nearly 40 years after it was released tells you something. I honestly think that unless you grow up in the 2000s you could go and play the music from 2000 to 2010 (as an example) and it would overall be much less recognizable than music from the 1960s and 1970s is.
Anyway, it seems silly to call this the "worst song of all time". It's recognizable. People know it. It has a vibe. Millenials who grew up on 90s grunge may see it differently but that doesn't really mean anything.
Modern music isn't as recognizable because there's way more of it, it's more varied, and doesn't get played a billion times over radio and MTV to a huge audience. The record industry isn't what it was at all, as detailed in your link. Jukeboxes with a selection of hits used to exist, now they're like spotify clients instead. I don't agree with you saying it's less enduring, though. That's a different thing. You shouldn't confuse popularity and number of plays for quality. For me there are some songs I'll hold on to a long time that I first heard in the last 10 years. There's still great music being made, IMO, but then pop from any era rarely was what I'd call good.
Speaking to that, the most played song on Spotify, ever, is "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd. Came out 5 years ago, and it's "okay"; funny enough, it triggers a lot of 80s nostalgia with its instrumentals. So, there's a data point for you to ponder.
What I find really interesting of late is YouTube Music suggesting sleeper hits to me, that were big 20-30 years ago, but somehow missed out on them. "Somewhere Only We Know" has been on rotation in some shopping venues & showed up on my playlist; it was a hit, 20 years ago, yet somehow missed out on it.
> There's been analysis that you basically like whatever was popular when you were 14 [2].
I was clearly excluded from this analysis, seeing as how out of the entries in the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 2006, I can see exactly three songs that I somewhat enjoy alongside dozens of songs that I hate with a passion. I'd sooner listen to "We Built This City" on repeat for 24 hours straight than listen any of the Top 10 of that year even once (with the sole exception of "Crazy").
I'd find that analysis to be more believable if it filtered by genres/subcultures a bit. I hung out with the metalheads when I was 14, so a lot of rock and metal artists/groups that were popular in 2006-ish - SoaD, Disturbed, Evanescence, Lacuna Coil, Mushroomhead, Nightwish, Dream Theater, Lacuna Coil, Dethklok, Blind Guardian, and the like - are the ones that stuck around at the top of my personal rankings.
> There's a lot of weird revisionism when it comes to judging 1980s music (eg [1]).
Disclaimer, I grew up in the 90s and became an adult around 9/11.
All 80s pop music is terrible with the exception of Thriller. There was an over reliance on cheesy synths and reverbed drum machines, (and cocaine) and almost none of it is redeemable 30 years later. To me, it all sounds dated and bad. If you grew up in the 80s it probably sounds good.
Pop producers and technology finally reached a point in the 90s where electronic synths and drum machines sound cohesive and more natural.
> Anyway, it seems silly to call this the "worst song of all time".
There may be other contenders, but if this song doesn't make the short list for you, I can't explain it. I doubt I could pay anyone to make such an outrageous claim.
Right there in the first paragraph: “At the time, Starship's most famous member, singer Grace Slick, was 46.”
Grace Slick was born in 1939, so she was among the oldest of her cohort already in the Sixties. She’s one of the strangest things about pop history for me, right up there with Debbie Harry being over thirty when Blondie hit it big, and Stuart Murdoch being accepted by Glasgow hipster circles well into his late 30s. Pop music is so youth-centered, and that youth audience has often been highly suspicious and deprecating of people much older than them, that it baffles me that these performers still flourished.
A lot of the leaders of the hippies were actually older than that generation, despite the classic "don't trust anyone over 30" and "hope I die before I get old" sentiments of the movement. For example, both Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin (who founded the "Youth International Party" or yippies, which mutated into hippies) were born in the 1930s, a decade or more older than most hippies.
Aerosmith was about to call it quits, they did that duet with Run DMC and had another handful of platinum records afterward. Tyler was ~38 when Walk This Way charted the second time. Many of their greatest hits are from after they were old.
And then there was Tom Petty, who had hits in three decades. Practically David Bowie levels of staying power.
Dylan's gospel albums are classics. Documentaries have been made about how good they are. IIRC "Shot of Love" is one of Dylan's favorites of his own records.
Many fans rejected them at the time because of the culture shock of his religious pivot, but that reaction was about the content, not the music, and has long faded. Nowadays it's understood that the sudden-fan-alienation-move is a Dylan thing, just like when he went electric at Newport in the first place.
I'm not gonna argue that "Man gave names to all the animals" is one of Dylan's finest, but I'd be interested to know which specific tracks you think are terrible, because those records are full of great songs, and so are some of the outtakes.
If you want awful Dylan I think you're a few years too early–Empire Burlesque anyone?
Whenever the topic of strikingly bad songs comes up, I always like to link to Spaced Out - The Best of Leonard Nimoy & William Shatner[1] which is an album truly breathtaking in its badness. Everyone I've ever played the CD for has agreed it's the best bad music they've ever heard.
The Muzak system at a retail job I worked played it all the time and we came to despise the song. It became a bit of a proto-Rickroll for those of us who worked there to trick others into hearing it. But the song became much more interesting once I learned about the urban legend connecting it to Mary Ellis. That the writer of the song says there's no connection just makes it that much more enticing.
What are you... Total Eclipse of the Heart is all in power. Were you alive when it was playing on radio all the time? Being played too much doesn't make it bad.
What's wrong with Ghostbusters? It was a perfect song to go with the movie.
On its own, it's probably not something I'd want to listen to much, but while watching the movie, it was fantastic, just like the rest of the movie.
It's much like any soundtrack music. The music by Howard Shore on Lord of the Rings probably isn't something you want to listen to by itself while you're jogging or whatever, but in the movie it's a perfect complement.
Their early work was a little too "new wave" for my taste, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically.
15 years ago when video chat with strangers was still a popular thing to do on the Internet, whenever I hosted a room, I always used the name "NumberOneBonnieTylerFan" and played her hits in the background. That you do not appreciate her music tremendously saddens me.
Readit News
Tonight, digging deeper, I found it! I found the source. In 1984, just a year before "We Built this City", Jefferson Starship (the progenitor of Starship, we won't mention the Airplane here) released a video for their ostensible hit single "Layin' it on the Line".
There they were! The Residents! In a terrible, terrible Jefferson Starship video! Sung by Grace Slick and, uh, that dude from Starship!
Strangely, I'll be able to sleep deeply tonight knowing that this mystery that was knawing at my soul for so many years has finally been solved.
That really was just a completely incoherent mess. But the guys with eyeballs on their heads were there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqLnVgR7fLw
https://youtu.be/UJ1tBVtYOBc?si=gSho4eXJMV96onaw
Surely this must have been when some new "clip art for video" technology had just appeared?
The song slaps though.
In junior high I used to stay up late and watch Letterman. He used to have Chris Elliot the comedian on doing various bits. He had one that imitated the Residents where Chris and several other people dressed up in weird outfits called something like "Maumoshcantz" or something French sounding. Chris' costume had a big black box with three toilet rolls for the face on it and played bizarre, "avant-garde" music. When they finished, Chris came over to sit with Dave. Dave tried to announce the name of the band and Chris scolded him by over pronouncing the name. Then Dave asked what part Chris played and he exclaimed, "I played the guy with toilet rolls on his head Dave! Shesssh!"
I recounted the bit to a friend and he instantly said the whole bit was a tilt of the cap to the band The Residents and it poked fun at their outfits and members on purpose.
This lead me, pre-internet to start digging around to find out what I could about the band. A few weeks later there was some MTV News story about a musician who died that apparently was one of the members. They made light of the fact nobody knew this since the band had purposefully concealed their identities so they could rotate out people as necessary and then say they just wanted people to focus on the music instead. Strangely enough, there was a similar story making the rounds on the internet about something similar that Slipknot was doing and Corey Taylor even used the same reason they wear masks - so fans can focus more in the music! This of course, brought back memories in my own research that eventually concluded with an older brother of a friend who was into really weird stuff and gave me a somewhat sordid history of the The Residents, and some the eerie connections to their management team Cryptic Corporation. He even pulled out several albums saying there's a possibility The Beatles WERE the Residents and showed me the two albums "Meet the Residents" and "Meet the Beatles" album as proof. Keep in mind, I was like 10, my buddies brother was like 16; so imagine how that conversation went down.
Anyways, thanks for bringing this up, it was really fun remembering my own rabbit hole with that band. Which interestingly enough, started with a David Letterman bit and ended with similar rumors swirling around Slipknot.
It should be Mandela effect, but this is the 2nd time I've seen Mandala in its place.
Damn that song is great! Seems to have an anti-war message too.
I think the secret sauce is Diane Warren. It's the same reason I love belting out I Don't Want to Miss a Thing at karaoke, or listening to If I Could Turn Back Time on a loop while working.
This post has been sponsored by the Committee to Get Diane Warren into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (CGDWRRHF).
I say that with love as I absolutely love the We Built This City (and Starship for that matter)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
I'd rather hear We built this City 10 times in a row than any 10 songs of Taylor Swift's. How about that?
There are anti-fads, too.
There was also the bit about gauges and hipsters (which just became the most mainstream). Then there was the fedora hate which I think was the funniest because I knew about it (because I’m chronically online) and then one day I’m traveling through Japan with my friends and the girls are all like “you should try out these hats at this store” and it’s piece for piece exactly what Reddit would hate. But the girls loved it on the lads and I’m married to one now.
It’s like how here people are always like “oh I’d never give X a buck they’re stealing all your data” and then out in the real world people love Google, like adore it. What’s the deal with that?
And I always thought that was kind of a hilarious thing to go through. Most people I know who are music snobs are generally anti-pop music and it seems like they miss out on the fun stuff that everyone gets into.
I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.
In this universe where 90% of music-related journalism boils down to competitive hipster snark.
I love the song, but I was ten when it came out, so of course I do.
It's basically a bouncing, bopping reminder that we aren't as smart as we think we are.
I don't think I'd even recognize a single Taylor Swift song. I plan to keep it that way, currently she's just a name and a face to me, knowing her music would probably only cause me to dislike her unfairly.
Along those lines, I'd never pay to see Britney Spears perform, but "Toxic" goes hard.
Their music shouldn't make you dislike them. It's not objectively awful, not by a long shot. If anything, just acknowledge we're not the target audience and move on.
In the universe where William Shatner covers it, as he did with "Rocket Man."[0]
So yes, there are many worse songs and even worse renditions of better songs.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Lq8hRIw8c
But I think a very important caveat missing from the article and all of the comments here is that Blender/VH1 never said it was the worse song of all time. They said it was the most "awesomely bad" song of all time. To which I 100% agree with. Its not worst songs, its good catchy songs that are also objectively bad. And I think "awesomely bad" is just a great way to title it. We can all agree "We Built This City" is a catchy ear worm you can rock out to in the car, it lifts my spirits whenever it gets played. It stands on the pantheon of terrible but awesome hits like "Ice Ice Baby", "She Bangs", and the Ghostbusters theme song.
Nobody is saying you shouldn't listen to "We Built This City". Its a guilty pleasure. Crank that mother up on your car ride home alone and rock the fuck out.
It makes sense in hindsight, but I'm pretty sure it was not intentional :)
"Objectively bad"? What are the "objective criteria" they're using? I'd argue that no art can be "objectively bad". That's not how art works.
But if I was making a list of Awful, Terrible Songs, I'm not sure I would have even included this one, mostly because I wouldn't remember it existed. Maybe that's what makes it bad--it was in constant rotation in the 80s, but as soon as they stopped playing it regularly I just... forgot it existed.
Looking at various lists of "Worst Songs" always confuses me. A lot of them are just really popular songs that got overplayed. Wikipedia's page says the Spandau Ballet's "True" is one, which is just nuts.
I wouldn't. It's not a great song or anything, but I can easily come up with a lengthy list of songs that are far, far worse.
It would Sting more if we were talking about a song like "Fields of Gold."
Additionally, it seems like more modern music just isn't enduring [3] in the same way music from the 1950s to 1980s was. Just the fact that people today know about "We Built this City" nearly 40 years after it was released tells you something. I honestly think that unless you grow up in the 2000s you could go and play the music from 2000 to 2010 (as an example) and it would overall be much less recognizable than music from the 1960s and 1970s is.
Anyway, it seems silly to call this the "worst song of all time". It's recognizable. People know it. It has a vibe. Millenials who grew up on 90s grunge may see it differently but that doesn't really mean anything.
[1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/readers-poll-...
[2]: https://archive.is/zM4xq
[3]: https://stereomonosunday.com/2019/03/23/why-modern-music-is-...
What I find really interesting of late is YouTube Music suggesting sleeper hits to me, that were big 20-30 years ago, but somehow missed out on them. "Somewhere Only We Know" has been on rotation in some shopping venues & showed up on my playlist; it was a hit, 20 years ago, yet somehow missed out on it.
I was clearly excluded from this analysis, seeing as how out of the entries in the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 2006, I can see exactly three songs that I somewhat enjoy alongside dozens of songs that I hate with a passion. I'd sooner listen to "We Built This City" on repeat for 24 hours straight than listen any of the Top 10 of that year even once (with the sole exception of "Crazy").
I'd find that analysis to be more believable if it filtered by genres/subcultures a bit. I hung out with the metalheads when I was 14, so a lot of rock and metal artists/groups that were popular in 2006-ish - SoaD, Disturbed, Evanescence, Lacuna Coil, Mushroomhead, Nightwish, Dream Theater, Lacuna Coil, Dethklok, Blind Guardian, and the like - are the ones that stuck around at the top of my personal rankings.
Deleted Comment
Disclaimer, I grew up in the 90s and became an adult around 9/11.
All 80s pop music is terrible with the exception of Thriller. There was an over reliance on cheesy synths and reverbed drum machines, (and cocaine) and almost none of it is redeemable 30 years later. To me, it all sounds dated and bad. If you grew up in the 80s it probably sounds good.
Pop producers and technology finally reached a point in the 90s where electronic synths and drum machines sound cohesive and more natural.
There may be other contenders, but if this song doesn't make the short list for you, I can't explain it. I doubt I could pay anyone to make such an outrageous claim.
Grace Slick was born in 1939, so she was among the oldest of her cohort already in the Sixties. She’s one of the strangest things about pop history for me, right up there with Debbie Harry being over thirty when Blondie hit it big, and Stuart Murdoch being accepted by Glasgow hipster circles well into his late 30s. Pop music is so youth-centered, and that youth audience has often been highly suspicious and deprecating of people much older than them, that it baffles me that these performers still flourished.
And then there was Tom Petty, who had hits in three decades. Practically David Bowie levels of staying power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/reader-center/ric-ocasek-...
Dick Taylor was an early member of the Rolling Stones and then in his 40s joined the Mekons and played guitar on some of their best records.
I'm sure there are more fun examples.
Especially when we live in a world where "Sweet Caroline" (specifically sung by Neil Diamond) is a thing.
Bob Dylan made three records of Christian music and 80% of the tracks from those are definitely worse than anything anyone’s discussing here.
There’s bad, and then there’s bad. The bad stuff is so bad it doesn’t even come up in worst-song conversations. Nor in so-bad-it’s-good conversations.
Many fans rejected them at the time because of the culture shock of his religious pivot, but that reaction was about the content, not the music, and has long faded. Nowadays it's understood that the sudden-fan-alienation-move is a Dylan thing, just like when he went electric at Newport in the first place.
I'm not gonna argue that "Man gave names to all the animals" is one of Dylan's finest, but I'd be interested to know which specific tracks you think are terrible, because those records are full of great songs, and so are some of the outtakes.
If you want awful Dylan I think you're a few years too early–Empire Burlesque anyone?
1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k8rGB_NGkgen0y...
It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender
It's bittersweet
More sweet than bitter
Bitter than sweet
It's a bittersweet surrender
(these 8 lines are repeated 4 times through the song)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellis_grave
Or "Ghostbusters" (sorry, Ray, loved your earlier stuff)?
Or Huey Lewis and the News entire catalog?
Under no circumstances can "power of love" be a bad song
On its own, it's probably not something I'd want to listen to much, but while watching the movie, it was fantastic, just like the rest of the movie.
It's much like any soundtrack music. The music by Howard Shore on Lord of the Rings probably isn't something you want to listen to by itself while you're jogging or whatever, but in the movie it's a perfect complement.
Their early work was a little too "new wave" for my taste, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters_(song)#Lawsuit