To be a truly creative artist, you have to be prepared to fail. For musicians who dedicate their lives to dreaming up something new and astounding, pushing the envelope and trying to move the art form beyond its accepted limits goes with the territory. It’s in the nature of experiments that not all of them will prove successful. Music, after all, is like all art – inherently subjective. The same song that moves one listener to tears of joy might send another scrambling for the nearest exit.
That’s why it shouldn’t be a surprise that even musical geniuses sometimes end up releasing utterly unlistenable garbage. In some ways, we should salute these noble failures: without the risk-taking spirit that inspired these awful songs, we’d never have had all the groundbreaking music that turned these musicians into legends. Still, all that said, we’d prefer not to be trapped in an enclosed space with the following wretched playlist stuck on repeat.
Featuring tracks by Prince, Lady Gaga and Elvis Presley, here is our pick of the most terrible songs ever released by some of the greatest musicians in history…
13. The Beatles, ‘Revolution 9’ (1968)
Music fans who came of age in the era of personalised playlists may not realise the lengths older listeners had to go to in order to remove unwanted songs from a favourite album. When I was growing up, my dad swore by his treasured copy of The Beatles’ White Album, which he’d painstakingly taped to cassette specifically so that he could excise “Revolution 9”. The bizarre and unsettling eight-and-a-half-minute avant-garde soundscape, said to be influenced by the work of composers Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen, may well be musically significant and groundbreaking, but it’s also undoubtedly bad vibes. Deleting it from the record gets you to Ringo Starr’s lovely closing lullaby “Good Night” with significantly fewer mental scars. As one YouTube commenter wrote of the latter song: “How can I sleep after you made me listen to ‘Revolution 9’?”
12. Elton John, ‘Jamaica Jerk-Off’ (1973)
A strange and unlikely inclusion on John’s stellar Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which for context also featured classics like “Candle In the Wind”, “Bennie and the Jets” and “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”. “Jamaica Jerk-Off” hasn’t enjoyed quite the same cultural longevity – indeed, John has never once performed the song live. It was written about John and lyricist Bernie Taupin’s abortive attempts to record in Kingston before they eventually sacked it off and decamped to a chateau in France. This jaunty song, which sees John deliver the chorus line “Do Jamaica jerk-off that way”, would perhaps have been best left behind too.
11. David Bowie, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ (1967)
A novelty single released a few months before Bowie’s debut album hit the shelves that answers a question few have dared ask: what would it have sounded like if David Bowie duetted with Alvin & The Chipmunks? Bowie exchanges various thudding puns with the titular squeaky-voiced menace, such as: “Haven’t you got a gnome to go to?” And “Didn’t they teach you to cut your hair at school? You look like a Rolling Gnome!” Just dreadful stuff, but at least Bowie had a sense of humour about it. He later toyed with the idea of performing it in the style of the Velvet Underground, and in 1999 he took the piss out of it for Comic Relief by playing a “Requiem for a Laughing Gnome”, very badly, on the recorder.
10. Drake, ‘Ratchet Happy Birthday’ (2018)
Arriving towards the end of Drake’s sprawling double album Scorpion, the aggravating “Ratchet Happy Birthday” is the last song you’d choose to soundtrack a party, birthday or otherwise. It strives for mellow introspection but the basic beat and cheesy lyrics about Reese’s cups make this an unsatisfying gift on every level. “It’s your f***in’ birthday…” Drake opens the song. “It’s a f***in’ celebration.” Doesn’t sound like it.
9. Dee Dee Ramone (as Dee Dee King), ‘German Kid’ (1989)
Dee Dee Ramone wasn’t just the bassist and occasional lead singer of punk rock trailblazers the Ramones, he was also their most prolific lyricist and songwriter. He was responsible for some of their greatest moments, including “Chinese Rock”, “Rockaway Beach” and “My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg)”, which makes it all the more confounding that at the tail-end of the 1980s he decided to quit the band and launch an ill-conceived rap career. He released just one poorly received album, of which this song might be the nadir. Dee Dee’s nursery-rhyme delivery is not improved by his switching into German mid-rap. Who’d a thunk?
8. Taylor Swift, ‘Me!’ (2019)
Sometimes bubblegum pop can deliver just the rush you need, but other times it’s so sickly it’ll make your back teeth ache. When Taylor Swift announced her seventh album Lover with single “Me!”, featuring Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie, it became a massive hit but the taste soon soured. The Independent branded the song “so toothless that it’s almost admirable”, and the juvenile tune pales in comparison to the superior material that would later appear on the same record, such as “Cruel Summer”. It’s notable that Swift herself, after heavily promoting the song throughout 2019, has played it live just once since.
7. U2, ‘Get on Your Boots’ (2009)
There are plenty of perfectly logical reasons why “Get on Your Boots”, the lead single from U2’s 12th album No Line on the Horizon, has never been as loved as their other, better songs. Bassist Adam Clayton argued in an interview: “Instead of executing one idea well, I think we had probably five ideas in the song and it just confused people.” Drummer Larry Mullen Jr agreed, calling the song a “catastrophic” choice as lead single. Maybe they’re right and there’s just too much going on, from the synths and the riffs to the verses delivered at “Subterranean Homesick Blues” pace. Personally, though, I suspect it’s just Bono purring “Sexy boots… get on your boots” that gives people the ick.
6. Lady Gaga, ‘Christmas Tree’ (2008)
Recording a Christmas song is something of a rite of passage for artists of a certain stature, but sadly Lady Gaga’s festive attempt sounds like the result of scraping the bottom of the Christmas stocking. Interpolations of “Deck the Halls” and “The Little Drummer Boy” get mixed with standard-issue synths and egregious sexual innuendo like “Under the mistletoe … We will take off our clothes … My Christmas tree’s delicious.” In 2009 it was re-released as a free download by Amazon, but that may still have been overpriced.
5. Prince & The Time, ‘Donald Trump (Black Version)’ (1990)
Even Prince’s most dedicated fans will accept that one of pop music’s greatest ever geniuses didn’t always have the sharpest eye for quality control. Of all his forgettable releases, surely nothing has aged worse than “Donald Trump (Black Version)”. This slow jam was written and produced by Prince for The Time, his R&B/funk group, and he had singer Morris Day intone lines like “Donald Trump (Black version), maybe that’s what you need/ A man that fulfills your every wish, your every dream.” What an image.
4. Madonna, ‘Auto-Tune Baby’ (2015)
This song, a bonus track from the Queen of Pop’s 13th record Rebel Heart, has a surprisingly literal title: it opens with the sound of a baby crying and wailing, which is then auto-tuned throughout the rest of the song. Credit, if you can call it that, goes to a production team that includes Diplo and Kanye West. The result is unlikely ever to be performed live, and certainly wouldn’t trouble any collection of Madonna’s greatest hits.
3. Duran Duran, ‘911 Is a Joke’ (1995)
This song played its part in Duran Duran’s Thank You topping our list of awful albums by classic bands, but it’s so bad it’s worth mentioning again. That record saw the Brummie pop rockers covering songs by their favourite artists, including Bob Dylan and Sly and The Family Stone, but whoever suggested that Simon Le Bon was the right person to rap Public Enemy’s protest song “911 Is a Joke” needed to have the authorities called on them immediately.
2. Kanye West, ‘XTCY’ (2018)
In the last few years, Kanye West has spent his time and his significant financial resources pulling the sort of sexist, racist and antisemitic stunts that make releasing bad songs pale in comparison, but strictly musically speaking, “XTCY” is surely among his greatest crimes. As if the pornographic groans edited into the beat aren’t cringe enough, then come the lines about his then wife Kim Kardashian’s family: “You got sick thoughts/ I got more of ’em/ You got a sister-in-law you would smash?/ I got four of ’em”. That’s sheer poetry compared with later lyrics – such as “Scoop, whoop-dee-woop/ Scoop poop” – although you’d be forgiven for having reached for the off switch long before then.
1. Elvis Presley, ‘Confidence’ (1967)
1967’s beach-party musical Clambake was the final movie Presley made for United Artists, and it has been reported that it was his despondency with the quality of the films he’d been making that led to his overeating and ballooning weight. If he thought the films were bad, one dreads to think what he made of the soundtracks. “Confidence” is the worst of the worst, a lazy rehashing of Frank Sinatra’s “High Hopes” given yet more insipid lyrics and the full backing of an exasperatingly earnest choir of child actors. It would have taken a lot more than confidence to save this disaster.
