CARLTON FLETCHER: Never forgetting music’s really bad stuff

When it was over, she’d laugh at you.

— Cashman and West

I got an interesting email a while back from a real music man, Tom Lashley, and, as these correspondences so often do, it got me to thinking.

Here’s the email:

… I know music is one of your “go-to” column themes; maybe some time you can give us a list of well-known (popular) artists whose music you really have a distaste for.

Russell Martin used to dislike Garth Brooks intensely, for instance. I think it was because he was so wildly popular. (For me, it would have been because of the yodeling.)

Since your tastes are pretty varied, maybe there aren’t enough dislikes to write about. If not, well, nothing to see here, folks.

While I’ll admit that my initial dislike for Mr. Brooks has mellowed somewhat (thank you, Shannon Tilley), and since I have a tendency to give pretty much all artists the benefit of the doubt out of respect for their craft, it was harder than I thought it would be to come up with such a Hall of Shame-worthy list.

Oh, but I love a challenge. So here goes, in descending order, the dirty baker’s dozen plus seven songs that deserve discerning music lovers’ derision:

20. “I Keep Forgetting” — The Doobie Brothers. Funny story. While driving from Albany to Rome, New York, for Woodstock ‘99, my son and I were on the road very late at night. As Fletchers have a tendency to do when they get sleepy, everything turned funny. This song came on the radio. We got to singing along to Michael McDonald’s histrionics, improvising our own nonsense lyrics, and it got funnier and funnier. (OK, so you had to be there, but it got this song on my list.)

19. Anything by Bill Anderson. Yeah, I know he’s a good ol’ Georgia boy, but the whispering thing never worked for me.

18. “Frankenstein” — The Edgar Winter Group. Now this song was pretty much a staple of my misspent youth, and I had no real problem with it. But one day my colleague Brad McEwen called it out as one of those unnecessarily overplayed songs on the local rock radio station, and I started hearing it at least once a day, sometimes two and three times. So I soured on the song … damn you, Brad.

17. “I Shot the Sheriff” — Bob Marley. I know, I know. It’s blasphemy to say anything bad about Bob if you want to hang onto your cool cred. Sorry, but Clapton’s version — which will never make anyone’s top anything list — is far better. There, I said it.

16. Crowds singing “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond. OK, so it’s a fun song, but I find it annoying when everyone goes “Bom bom bom” after the title words in the chorus, and I bet Neil himself cringes every time he hears a drunken crowd chime in, “So good, so good, so good.” (This distaste also applies to Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville.” How about we keep those worn-out ad libs to ourselves and let these folks sing their songs the way they wrote them, hmm?)

15. “Bad to the Bone” — George Thorogood. He’s not. It ain’t.

14. Hair metal in general (with the exception of “Something to Believe In” by Poison.) It’s just really derivative and bad, its misnamed “metal” tarnished beyond repair.

13. Any song sung by Helen Reddy. How did this woman ever get on the radio?

12. “Disco Duck” — Rick Dees. Novelty songs have a pretty short shelf life, but this one ended about 14 seconds after it was released.

11. Ariana Grande … when she quit singing and started shrieking.

10. “Stressed Out” — 21 Pilots. Yes, their “Heathens” changed my opinion of them a good bit, but this song is horrible, pantsless Grammy win notwithstanding.

9. “Seasons in the Sun” — Terry Jacks. This was supposed to evoke a sympathetic response. Instead, it was the gag reflex.

8. “Honkytonk Badonkadonk” — Trace Adkins. The title says it all. (Note: This would have been closer to No. 1 had our homeboy Dallas Davidson not co-written it. It got his foot in the door, so I give it extra points.)

7. “Ice Cream Man” — David Lee Roth. You could put up with DLR’s out-of-tune screaming when Eddie Van Halen was playing guitar behind him. But when he went solo, the real Roth emerged … and it was ugly.

6. “Barbie Girl” — Aqua. This is just universally, infinitesimally bad.

5. “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” — Kenny Chesney. Whoo … I forgot how awful some of these songs were. Thanks for the reminder, Tom.

4. “Work” — Rihanna. I think I figured out the words .. “wor’ wor’ wor’ wor’ wor’ … wor’ wor’ wor’ wor’ wor’.” Proof that Grammy nominations carry a lot less weight than they used to.

3. “Achy Breaky Heart” — Billy Ray Cyrus. You want an explanation for that whole Miley twerking thing? There you go. Thanks, dad.

2. “Straight Up” — Paula Abdul. Definitive proof that whatever minuscule amount of talent she might have had was on the dance floor, not behind a microphone.

1. “Thong Song” — Sisqo. Still champion after all these years. The man who would “make people forget the Beatles” is now working at a car wash somewhere, trying to pick up females by telling them he did this. Good luck with that.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.