Blender's worst

Crazy house of music lists at Blender's, including a list of the 50 worst bands. Most picks are all too deserving of their entries, though a few are more hype let downs than truly awful or boring music acts. A few protestations:

#37 - The Doors

Hard to argue with this assessment:

While in college, many young men still choose to immerse themselves in such ill-advised subjects as Nietzsche, black magic and Native American folklore. Most get over it; Jim Morrison, unfortunately, inflicted his terminally adolescent views on the wider world. The consequences included overblown screeds of nonsense such as "The End" and "The Crystal Ship," plus, effectively, the invention of goth. Then he got fat and died.

However true, the Doors were a great band. They were unique instrumentalists and no one ever said rock lyrics always had to make perfect sense. No band with a stable of songs like "Break on Through," "Light My Fire," "Love Me Two Times," "People Are Strange," and "Riders on the Storm" should be anywhere near a worst 50 of all time list.

#21 The Alan Parsons Project

Ok, so "The Raven" was a little over the top.

Having conquered the Dark Side of the Moon, EMI Records’ beardy staff engineer Alan Parsons decided that what the universe really needed was a prog-rock concept album based on the work of nineteenth-century horror novelist Edgar Allan Poe, narrated by Orson Welles. It didn’t, of course, but an undeterred Parsons soldiered on, swapping prog-rock for vapid AOR in the ’80s.

Half the top ten of this list is comprised of arena and/or prog-rock, so it seems a given these guys were gonna get dumped on. Placing 21st is a little harsh as "Eye in the Sky," "Don't Answer Me," and "Time" were terrific pop songs.

#12 Tin Machine

(Tin Machine) found Bowie voluntarily subsuming his genius beneath chorus-free tunes and guitarist Reeves Gabrels’s habit of playing his instrument with a vibrator.

Another superband with too much talent coming on too strong. No pun intended on the name, but the band was too rigid and mechanical, in both image and sound. Though they were a letdown by Bowie standards, they weren't this bad. Their music was simply unnoticeable.

Incidentally, the worst band according to the list is Insane Clown Posse.




The 50 worst songs list is near perfect. Number one would probably be a more agreed upon pick than the worst band:

#1 Starship "We Built This City (1985)

The truly horrible sound of a band taking the corporate dollar while sneering at those who take the corporate dollar.

... who spend the song carrying on as if they invented rock & roll rebellion, while churning out music that encapsulates all that was wrong with rock in the ’80s: Sexless and corporate, it sounds less like a song than something built in a lab by a team of record-company executives.