STEVE MILLER BAND “Abra, abra, cadabra/I want to reach out and grab ya.” Lyrically, this song is an abortion. Steve Miller gets some kind of free pass musically, and I’m not sure why. His songs suck, whether it’s the joker-toker song, or “Take the Money and Run.” His lyrics sound as if they were written by an eight-year old who was stricken with fetal alcohol syndrome. Have you ever uttered this phrase: “I could go for a good Steve Miller song about now”? I’ve had notes left on my car windshield with more complex rhymes. Is there something I don’t know about Steve Miller? Did his wife drown his five kids in a bathtub? Does he have full-blown AIDS? Is there some reason why we can’t all say out loud how much his music sucks and what an insult his songs are to everyone’s collective intelligence? Right about now you’re saying, “Ace, don’t be so hard. ‘Jet Airliner’ is a pretty good song.” He didn’t write that one.
“STUCK WITH YOU” BY HUEY LEWIS (SORRY, JIMMY) Jimmy Kimmel’s favorite artist and one of the nicest guys in the world. So I’ll keep this short and give Huey the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure he was extremely high when he wrote this retarded nursery rhyme and never thought in his wildest dreams it would get picked up for airplay. This, by the way, is how you know you’re popular—when even your shittiest songs are getting a ton of airplay.
“THE GIRL IS MINE” BY PAUL MCCARTNEY AND MICHAEL JACKSON This song is lame enough while they’re singing, but when they start talking to each other and using each other’s first names, it goes into the gay stratosphere.
“BRASS MONKEY” BY THE BEASTIE BOYS It’s hard for me to bag on this song because if I couldn’t sing and had zero musical talent yet insisted on being in a band, I guess this is the kind of shit I would crank out too.
“BEAUTIFUL GIRLS” BY SEAN KINGSTON A great example of a modern shitty song. A lot of new songs sound as if they’re synthesized and it’s intentional. In the past, when they found some hot chick who couldn’t really sing, they’d clean it up in the studio—but the whole plan was not to let you catch on. Now there’s a whole new brand of music that sounds as if it’s being sung by a Roomba, which goes against the very essence of music. No soul, no human beings, no connection. When I was a kid, all the futuristic movies would show humans sitting down for dinner and on their plate would be a pill that said “Turkey” on it and another pill that said “Stuffing” next to it. That is what this feels like. Plus it’s just a straight rip-off of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me.”
“AMERICAN WOMAN” The Guess Who recorded the eight-minute version of it in ’69 and Lenny Kravitz did the four-minute version that feels like eight minutes in ’99. If you want to have fun, you can play a little musical Who’s on First: “Who had the shittiest song of 1970?” “The Guess Who?” “That’s what I’m asking.…” To be fair to Lenny, I don’t think he likes the song; he picks his music based on a complicated algorithm that boils down to what song he looks coolest playing in front of a full-length mirror.
“MANEATER” BY HALL & OATES I know you guys love “Sara Smile” and “Rich Girl” and expect me to give Hall & Oates some sort of pass based on the work they did before “Maneater.” Well, guess what? O.J. has a Heisman and he rushed for two thousand yards. This is not only one of the worst songs ever created, it’s one of the worst artistic endeavors ever undertaken, and I’m including “Piss Christ” and those enema painter guys. It uses a shitty metaphor to illustrate a fucked-out theme, and just when things couldn’t get worse, there’s a horrible generic eighties sax solo. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my sax solos to have some relationship to the song they’re in. That sax solo sounds as if Hall & Oates reached into a pillowcase that said “Eighties
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