My neighbor worked in a record store when he was a teen, many years ago, and he loves to tell and laugh at the story of someone who bought Lou Reeds Metal machine music..and later came back to return it for a new copy because he was convinced the copy he purchased was damaged…..he couldn’t believe it was intentional.
MMM actually has some redeemable qualities, I think. I was born a big noise guy, I think. I used to like to sit in my dad's car and listen to the polyrhythms of the fan belt, the timing system, and so forth. Then turn on the radio and find some decent AM crackly noise or better still a heterodyne whine of two signals over-modulating one another, and I'd jam away... MMM may be overwhelming in its wretched excess, but it does have its moments. And hey, feel free to put any Elton John album you want on the list. It just never did it for me. There were decent songs here and there, but not everywhere. Nice bloke, seemingly, a likeable person, by most accounts. But there's not one bit of it I'd yearn to hear "just one more time". Like, for example, Moby Grape's APOCALYPE or HORSE OUT IN THE RAIN, which I'd like at my memorial service. Along with PILGRIM'S PROGRESS and A SALTY DOG. Later.
Haha! I bought the Replacements' "Shit Hits The Fans" cassette while on a trip, and when I realized I didn't have enough money for gas to get home I returned it to the store as "damaged". The clerk was adamant that he wasn't going to refund my money and in no uncertain terms indicated that he believed I was a lying, thieving POS. The album comes from a pirate recording of the band which their manager had ripped from the deck when he caught the perp (RIP Roscoe) in the act, so the music stops midsong at the end, which is what I had claimed was its "defect". Boyoboy, was that clerk *furious* when he played the tape in-store to prove my deceit, only to have the music abruptly cut off exactly as I had claimed! He (very) begrudgingly gave me my money back and I made it back to Austin safely.
At least Yoko Ono's album has a purpose. When it gets late and party guests don't get the hint, put on that album, crank it up, and listen to the sound of squealing tires in your driveway. Some people even leave their coats behind.
@@alandesgrange9703 Then...Sound of tyres suddenly coming to violent brake 200m away from the house, with the ominous sound of RPG's been launch, back towards the 'noise'...
I remember buying Sometime in New York, bringing it hoem putting it on the turntable in great expectation..... and immediately lifting the pick-up arm to the next track in the hope it was better than the first track. It waas then rinse and repeat for the remaining tracks on the album. Boy, was I pissed off.... Though maybe the Cold Turkey track with Zappa wasn't so bad.
"Yoko's muff" should be in the Oxford dictionary as something so unexpectedly offputting that you recoil and flinch in pathological disgust. Like a severed head in a food pantry.
Did you know there was an indie rock band from Manchester back in the '80s called Yoko's Muff? They seemingly had serious problems getting bookings with that name and in the end they changed it to Sheena Easton's Muff.
Bought 'Cut the Crap' from Woolworths for 50p! - discount rack classic. About a week later I encountered Strummer and co busking on Edinburgh's Princes Street. I said to Joe 'Hey, I bought your last album!' His response - 'Christ, someone actually bothered to buy one!'
I've got the blu-ray audio version! Supposedly, the original Quad version just had each side played backwards in the extra speakers. I mean, how could you tell?
Maybe you should rename this worst ROCK albums. Because there are a TON of god awful, completely irredeemable R&B, Hip-Hop, Soul, Country, Rap and Indie Records out there. While I’m not disagreeing with you about this list, some of the music here is listenable and outright great in comparison to records from other genres you didn’t touch on.
The thing with any list like this is that it is subjective. What one person deems to be 'the worst' another could think they are 'the best'. It is all just a matter of opinion - and we all have our own.
@@jtt8886 Right. If they're not legendary, well who cares how bad it is, most music is utterly forgettable. Just like most movies, tv, and video games.
I have some friends who went to see Lou Reed and his band in the 80's. The opening act was so bad my friends went into the lobby to wait for Reed. Turns out there was no opening act; yep, that was Lou Reed.
I think that "Metal Machine Music" is a great album - well ahead of it's time using modulated symphonic sounds and incorporating Whale sounds. My Doctors say that if I improve they may eventually release me.
When I was getting radiation therapy, the machine was really loud, but they had a music player in the room (you'd be there for fifteen minutes to a half hour). I'd always request Metal Machine Music because it blended perfectly with the sound of the machine, and it baffled the techs, who couldn't figure out why the machine was making funny noises.
As a person who went through 6 weeks of radiation therapy, I can relate to what you are saying, and only wished I would of thought of requesting Metal Machine Music!
The irony is these are well known crap albums.There must be literally thousands of truly terrible records that are quite rightly swept under the carpet and forgotten about.
The “worst albums by great artists” would be a better description. I found an album in a used car that I purchased, it is indescribably horrific, on youtube none of the tracks have more than 500 plays. But it’s the only album from a band that no one ever cared about, so it doesn’t really register.
True, but for an album to be truly terrible, it kinda needs to have come from a known, big act. Like movies, I'd say Legends of the Fall is way worse than ssy Robot Monster cuz the former had stars, budget and a studio behind it.
I think since "worst" is intrinsically highly subjective, it should be a given that reputation, expectation and disappointment are major factors in compiling the list.
I don't really believe in "Worst Albums Ever" as much as I do "Notoriously Bad Albums". Worst albums I've ever heard are Eurodance records from the 90s
Here's two albums from the 1990s I played the once and then dropped them both off at the nearest charity shop ___ Be Here Now by Oasis and On Every Street by Dire Straits. Appalling would be complimentary to both of those audial tragedies.
Roger Waters' Dark Side of the Moon Redux: all the rest are just bad albums with bad songs but DSOTM Redux manages to take a great album with great songs and make it bad. That's a special type of awful.
think he was just trolling Gilmour with that one - and it seems to have worked - did not expect Gilmour to get down into the media mud pits and slog it out with old Roger - and with his wife Polly helping him no less - but they did it ..
Well look at Zep's career, their influential early stuff is ironically full of plagiarism, their middle period was patchy, their late 1970s stuff was disappointing. After that it's been a slew of bad solo albums and terrible reunion concerts (and yes the 2007 reunion WAS terrible)
The Wagner joke at the start-.....that joke about good moment but dreadful quarters of an hour was a fashionable joke in the mid 1800s that was applied to many different musicians. It was allegedly the instance of Rossinni applying the old tired joke to Wagner that people remember, so perhaps it's a bit unfair on Wagner.
Please keep these coming! Although I live and breathe good music, there's something very compelling to me about bad music, especially when it's recorded by artists who should have known better. Many thanks for these videos. They're very informative.
I was in high school when they css as me out, and I have never liked them. Listened to the super vapid, repetitive Christine Sixteen once on the radio. Boring!
The VH3 album was certainly better than the dreadful "Balance". Needed a good frontman with character to keep the band going which EVH's ego could not tolerate.
that's true, but only 4 sound like ccr- those 2 and mary lou and cooks door to door which shows that john did as much to sabotage the record as his band members. his story that they presented him with an ultimatum is horseshit. he may have been tired of their attitudes but he put this out as ccr.
I actually own a copy of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" on CD. I couldn't resist it when I found it at a friend's record store. It's so uniquely notorious as a terrible album that it's practically a must-have for people like me. (William Shatner's "The Transformed Man" is another one I have.) Probably Reed's biggest sin was releasing it as a double album. He admits in the original liner notes that "no one I know has listened to it all the way through including myself." But he was genuinely interested in creating the sounds you hear and didn't initially expect to release it to the general public. The album clearly has its fans and apparently influenced important bands like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, so I don't think it should be referred to as one of the worst albums of all time. Its appeal is extremely limited, but the same could be said of many albums that are acknowledged classics.
What are you on about? CAS is a good album and doesn’t deserve nowhere near the level of criticism that it gets. Have you even listened to the album or just go along with what everyone says?
@@63mckenzieGabriel sucks, So is shite and Sledgehammer is pop nonsense. And dont get me started on that drippy, godawful Dont Give Up.I wish they would.
It's the only album by Metallica that I will NEVER own - to the point that I told my family members (who know all too well how much I love Metallica!) that they are not to even consider buying that album for me as a gift!
I remember seeing the Lou Reed / Metallica combo on the TV (Jools Holland?). As someone with a great admiration for Reed's earlier work, I sat there watching with my ears trying to pull themselves off my head. Memorable, I suppose but for all the wrong reasons!
"Cut the Crap" was made after the Clash had split up ;it was just Strummer and Simonon who dragged it out for CTC and both-I think-regreted it. Combat Rock was really the last true Clash album.
Apparently Bernie Rhodes also had a big hand in this with drum loops and early sampling. Moral of the story is, if you want to save time, money and also destroy the groups legacy let the manager make the records and cut out the middle men!
Anything by John Cougar Mellencamp. Saw him get booed off the stage when he opened for the Kinks in Indy. He only made it through a song and a half before being pummeled by drinks from the crowd. What a turd.
My teen proto-punk band the Gizmos invited him into the studio against my wishes in early 1977 to record a song he wrote called "Boring (Part 1)" with one of our guys singing lead. It was so BORING it only got a release in 2000 as a bonus track on CD. He is so loathed here in Bloomington IN, where he lives, that graffiti periodically appears around the city reading "SUCKING ON A CHILI DOG." I've also been told by young punk-rockers who work as delivery drivers that the very rich Mellencamp is a very bad tipper.
Don’t agree! His body of work is too good! May have had bad songs and was well past his prime by the mid 90’s but the 80’s were all his and there wasn’t a bad song that got radio play.
That's kind of like when I tell people I jammed with Van onstage once. And I did, except we were 3000 miles apart and he didn't start playing until 10 hours after I went home -- but this was during the Austin Gloriafest featuring a 24-hour-long live rendition of "Gloria" which he participated in via satellite!
Even people who don’t like it have to admit it provides a focal point for an unfocused album. It’s like all the chaos of the ’60s brimming though the album is finally bubbling up to the surface.
It is a flawed masterpiece. If it were a tad shorter, and 2-3 more interesting bits would have been added, it might have been one of their best. I appreciated that John concept.
@@DeflatingAtheism After Pepper, the Beatles intentionally aimed for unfocused. George Martin often said the White Album should have been distilled down to one disc. But look how the public embraced the whole. And a lot of those throw-away songs have been made into wonderful covers by other artists. Chaos of the 60s is another name for Romanticism, and Bohemianism. The Beatles brought balance to an Industrialized world post WW ll, particularly the United States. Sgt. Pepper, then the White Album was their zenith.
Never approach Van Morrison with a record to be signed - it will invariably result in varying degrees of humiliation, depending on how much you happen to worship the ground he walks on - certainly not me but I could tell a tale or two. 😉 You'd be better off with an Amazon forgery
Without a doubt one of the most disappointing live performances I’ve ever seen was Van Morrison at the local folk festival some years ago. Never said a word to the audience, butchered his own songs, and stomped off without so much as a ‘thank you’ when he was done. After a lifetime of loving his music now I can barely listen to his music as I realize how much contempt he has for his own fans.
The best way to approach Van for an autograph is to simply say, “Mr. Burdon, I loved House of the Rising Sun and Spill the Wine. Will you please make this out to “Bob”? The reaction will be worth more than any autograph. He was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Americana Music Association at their annual event a few years back. The event is held at the historic Ryman in Nashville. Emmylou Harris, one of the nicest musicians you will ever meet, was the presenter. My recollection was that Morrison was curt with her, mumbled a few words to the audience (I don’t remember “Thank you” being 2 of the words) and when he did the obligatory song, he sang for about 45 seconds, brought out his daughter and left the stage. I would add this postscript, he did a concert the next day at the Ascend Amphitheater in Nashville and I had a ticket. Given the behavior at the award show, I almost skipped the event, expecting the worst. I could not have been more wrong. It was a great concert. He played a lengthy set that included the classics, some deep cuts and some new stuff. He is a complex artist but still when he is on, he is a true genius. If he did nothing after Astral Weeks, that album alone gives him icon status for me. Finally, my description of how he behaved at the award show is from memory. Others may have not seen it differently. I am still a fan but he simply reinforced a rule I have about not meeting artists you really like. If they are having a bad night or just aren’t nice people, I don’t want it tainting their art for me. And, after all, it is the art that I love, not necessarily the human that created it.
Morrison did a few things I liked, but overall, I'm not a fan. A couple of guys who used to work on his road crew hated him so much they used to piss in the glass he soaked his harmonicas in - or so they claim.
@@johnbgood52 Looking to kill some time while we were in NYC, we walked into the Fillmore East to see an afternoon show by Morrison - and unbeknownst to us, the US debut of Brinsley Schwarz, featuring Nick Lowe, who was unknown. Morrison was horrible: nasty, disrespectful and abusive to his (sparse) audience, and arrogant. Neither of us were particular fans, and we left midway through what I suppose you'd call his set. The Schwarz's weren't memorable, but they were on first, so we sat through them to get to "the good stuff" that was supposed to be Van, but wasn't. Never again. When? I want to say April 1970 - but it was a long time ago, and it was the sort of memory that's best forgotten.
@@ThursoBerwick Gilmour has called the album "shit" and "a load of rubbish." Waters said the album "should be thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again."
Great video! There are two I might quibble with. First, I am one of those crazy Neil fans who really enjoys Neil Young's 80s output. "Hippie Dream" alone (his sarcastic stab at Crosby and others) makes the album worthwhile. If you want terrible Neil, go into the 21st century. Stuff like Storytone. Also, while the worst CCR album, Mardi Gras isn’t really that bad. A good replacement: the late 80s Jefferson Airplane reunion album is one of the worst things I've ever heard.
'Trans' is far better IMHO but agree about Hippie Dream, also 'Touch the Night' is a great song; there are some absolute clunkers like 'People on the street' though and it was let down by some pretty bad production and awful 80s digital mastering
That’s an extremely valid and interesting point!! The old “ dinosaur “ acts , came across badly , yet we had some corkers like gracelands, hounds of love , the queen is dead , Joshua tree , for example. Very weird !
@@williammorris1384 In my humble but honest opinion, the '80s were one of the worst decades for popular music, and for the arts in general. While there were exceptions, the music, the movies, the TV shows and yes, the fashions, were tacky and strange. The entire decade was characterized by a kind of bizarre cheesiness that can't really be described, and that no one who didn't live it could ever really understand. If you were a kid who grew up in the '80s, you probably saw it as normal, but to a lot of us older folks, there was definitely something off-kilter. Then again, maybe I'm just remembering the bad stuff because it was just so freaking crappy it's hard to forget. 😁
@@johnbgood52 Well if the “52” in your tag, is a clue to your age , then we are only 2 years apart and I did indeed grow up in the 80’s. It was definitely the decade where technology was trying to find itself and some aspects of it, definitely suffered ! Through reading absolutely endless reviews and clips and responses to things, it doesn’t half garner a huge amount of respect and appreciation and fondness !
Absolutely. Victim of Love is definitely a terrible falling off - after his pretty good collaborative work with Tom Bell, and A Single Man which I still love as an album
Yeah, 1979 seemed to be the year where rockers jumped on the disco bandwagon. But while Rod, Macca, The Stones and The Doobies limited it to one song, Elton decided to do a whole album.
@@davej.meister5421 Not for me really, but it is in my bottom tier. Problem wwas there were quite a few excellent outtakes from those sessions, "The Retreat" being one of them. He later slapped that gem on a B side a couple of years later. Elton had a bad habit of leaving better songs off of his albums and would relegate them to B-sides. Most of side 2 and a couple from side 1 couldve enhanced that album greatly. But noooooo, he had to include crap like "Dear God", "Take Me Back" and "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again"
Honorable mentions: Emerson Lake and Palmer-Love Beach, Ringo Starr-Ringo the 4th, Roger Hodgson-Hai Hai, Robert Fripp-1999 Soundscapes Live in Argentina, Gregg Allman and Cher-Two the Hard Way, Attila (1970 Billy Joel), Keith Moon-Two Sides of the Moon, Peter Criss (1978 solo album), and most of the TV albums not available in stores from the 1970's.
Been collecting albums since 1963. I have a rather large collection. Frankly, I've never heard of any of these albums. I guess I didn't miss anything!!!! 😂😂😂😂😂😂
When it comes to Two Virgins, I think what it represents is a great artist (John Lennon) learning what the boundaries are by going too far with it and ultimately learning to dial it back enough to find the sweet spot in terms of creativity. Revolution 9, I think, was also part of that process of artistic definition.
The most damning part of CCR's Mardi Gras wasn't even mentioned. Not only were Stu and Doug's songs horrible, but John's "Someday Never Comes" and "Sweet Hitchhiker" (by no means even close to the band's best) were so conspicuously the best, as well as identifiable as CCR, it really was his vindication.
@@Peter-gu9ph I disagree on the last two words, there are good songs on that album (“This Side Of Love”), excellent performances, and a stack of good ideas but he poisoned it by following up an absolutely classic debut LP with an overblown and ridiculously self indulgent production, a monument to his all consuming ego of the time. I don’t think the true unlistenable rubbish started until “Symphony or Damn”.
@@tpbrcombo OK - I admit I wasn't able to listen long enough to find any hidden treasures. I think you sum up the album well with the term "self indulgent".
I am really glad that “Leather Jackets” is the Elton John album being trashed and not the “Victim Of Love” album which I love. The song you called “Don’t Trust a Woman” was actually “Don’t Trust That Woman.” I am a big fan of Yoko Ono’s work. I think “Revolution 9” is a true masterpiece in the first place. My favorite Lou Reed albums are “Metal Machine Music” and “New Sensations.” I hope to find The Beach Boys’ “Summer In Paradise” album to buy. Have a nice day.
My addition would have been The Mamas and the Papas People Like Us mind numbing contractual obligation boring mess , but that one seems like a masterpiece comparatively speaking.
You can tell how desperate and defensive he was at that stage by the title of the album. I remember the quote from Shakespeare "I think he doth protest too much"
Mardi Gras by CCR has two good songs on it, Someday Never Comes and Sweet Hitchhiker, which were the two songs they released as singles. The rest of the album is pretty disposable. The guys in Creedence weren’t even trying to hide how bad most of the material on this album is, they are literally breaking up over your stereo speakers as you listen. A very sad end to a great band indeed. Pendulum is their last *real* album in my opinion, and even John Fogerty has said as such.
I think this could top them all if I can get word to Pat Boone to do a cover album of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, it would be called "Dark Side of the Boone".
Squeeze is the worst because it's a complete con. It's not in any shape or form a Velvet Underground record, no founding members or principal songwriters remain. It's like Triggers broom. It's not even a good imitation of The Velvet Underground. At least the others were by the actual artists you were expecting. You know what you're getting when you buy a Yoko Ono album so if you don't like it there's no one else to blame.
Squeeze is a Doug Yule solo album. It was released under the VU banner to attract extra sales, when it didn't. Ian Paice, incidentally, is alleged to have played in it. Although Paice himself can remember nothing of it!
I almost spit my coffee out when you said Metal Machine Music. That's the kind of album these lists are made for. Of course, you could also include the Neil Young and Crazy Horse album Arc in that category. Roger Waters' DSOTM Redux crossed my mind. As well as any of the albums The Doors made with no contribution from Morrison. Making a list of the worst albums is almost as difficult as making a list of the best.
Metal Machine Music may have not been understood by critics and some audiences at the time, but in retrospect, it was right up Lou Reed's alley and inevitable. He loved the idea of noise as music, anti-music, free-improvisation, and drones produced by feedback and distortion. It may have been a middle-finger to RCA, but for those of us in the industrial scene at the time, that middle finger made a lot of fans very happy. It was a bold and punk move. And Reed himself certainly doesn't consider it his worse album. He went on to make more industrial noise music, performed the album live in the 2000s, and formed the Metal Machine Trio. It's definitely a challenging listen, and not my favorite of the first-wave industrial and noise records from the late Seventies and early Eighties, but I think helped in the solidification of industrial as a genre, and inspired many more future artists. Industrial is definitely a niche scene requiring a bit of work to appreciate its genius, but I certainly understand why folks find it unpleasant and wouldn't appreciate Lou Reed assaulting their ears with this experiment.
Add Lulu as well. I'm not Metallica fan, but from what I've heard the drums were criticized (they sounded funny to me), if the drums were changed would St. Anger have been a decent album?
To me, anything after And Justice For All was a big letdown. You could fill a whole top 10 list very easily with disappointing albums from thrash bands, foremost among them being Megadeth's Risk, Destruction's Human Cannonball.
Considering that they were not professional musicians but hostages of their father, I actually give them credit for trying, whereas these established pros who chose to put out site have to get moved past the Shaggs up the list of worst albums ever.
Lou made MMM as an epic FU to the record company! It was meant to be 'the worst album ever made'. Just Lou with amps and speakers and mics all over the place, no instruments. Just colossal volume, feedback, and noise. On a double album. He did this with such a biting and distinctly intelligent manner as he was pressured for product, at end of contract, and angry. But his picture was cool. You can't even call this the birth of drone music because drone music has actual music in it. He even had it pressed so that when you got to the very end, the pressing was intentionally made to skip, so not only was it terrible, Lou said, 'you physically had to get up and turn the damn thing off', as typical record players would automatically return the tone arm at the end of a record and it would shut off. The intentional skipping was one of his ultimate 'so Lou' moments. What's hilarious is there are these artists, and I believe some hard-core Japanese notably actually approach MMM as an important work and have attempted to play the thing live. So would that be a goof on a goof? Or is it a case of a serious take on a goof? What do you call that. Serious musicians, seriously taking and playing and believing that MMM should be performed-thus enlightening even more suckers to it's existence? Listen for just more than a couple minutes and understand MMM is Lou's ever-loving everlasting FU to so, so much. God I miss him.
I want to take issue with your take on Lennon's Two Virgins. It clearly wasn't meant to be a solo album it was experimental Lennon took his art seriously and saw you could do far more with a 12' record than a dozen pop songs and no pundit l've ever read saw it.Its not meant to be listened to like a pop record it's just there like a painting or a statue you are not meant to like it or dislike it .This is what he was getting at .l doubt if any record company would allow anything like that these days it's like Picassos Three Dancers ,you should think again
Metal Machine Music doesn't belong on this list. It was exactly what it was supposed to be and it did exactly what it was intended to do. All the others were trying and failing to be something much better than they were. I'd replace it with ELP's Tarkus instead.
Tarkus is far from ELP's worst album: I'd list Brain Salad Surgery as the point where the self-indulgence took over from the talent, the triple live "Welcome Back My Friends" being more of the same but even more drawn out and boring, and the contractual obligation Love Beach as the absolute pits: though at least the tracks are reasonably short.
Sadly, The Clash sold out and tried to turn themselves into Americans long before 'Cut the Crap' came along. Most punk bands were hooked on some kind of drug, usually speed, sometimes coke if they had a particularly lucrative record deal. The Clash were the only band I ever knew who were addicted to the ink on dollar bills.
You mean the band that insisted their double and treble albums sold at the same price as a single meaning they took the hit in money rather than their record label and insisted the warning ‘Home taping is killing music’ wasn’t on ‘Sandinista’ because they didn’t care how many copies were made of their albums?
As a minor contribution to the 'unredeemable shite by great bands' genre, I would suggest 1976's 'Locked In' by Wishbone Ash, the title of which can surely(?) only be a reference to a contractual obligation. Well played and produced, it is marred only by the absence of a single half-decent song or melody yet was chucked out the same year they released 'New England', an album chock full of catchy and original tunes.
Yeah, terrible album by their standards if you are a fan of their stuff (not that there seem to be too many of us). However, it did contain "Rest In Peace" which had some very nifty guitar parts.
I sense a pattern here: Artists go through that heady, revolutionary start, settle into a so-so period of craft-over-art, before hopefully re-emerging for an uncompromising era of rediscovered creativity; but there's potential for a stage between mid-period craft and late style where they simply don't care, letting somebody behind a desk turn stuff they found down the back of a sofa into an album.
I figured if you mentioned Two Virgins, you might as well have also included Life With The Lions and Wedding Album. However, the later comes in a pretty cool boxed set.😂 Awesome video as always!!!👍👍
The Doors - Full Circle makes my list. The album cover is the only thing cool about it. As for Bob Dylan, I suppose I will forever be a Philistine to his recordings, though I enjoy his paintings very much.
That marked the beginning of the end of Elton's drug addiction phase. Even he asked himself: "Why am I doing this -- and why am I dragging another person into it?" It wasn't exactly "loveless." Anybody else ever mistaken friendship for romantic love? Yeah, that "straightened him up" -- by forcing him to acknowledge he was "officially gay."
To be fair, if I was strapped down naked to a table in an underground bunker, vulnerable and terrified, and the interrogator holds up two pairs of headphones and says, Right! Twelve hours, either Yoko Ono or Elton John, you choose! I would choose Yoko without a second thought.
YOKO ONO/PLASTIC ONO BAND and FLY are classic noise records. The first is especially amazing, with great guitar by Lennon and Ringo on drums. Very influential stuff. TWO VIRGINS and LIFE WITH THE LIONS, which she did with Lennon before that, are pretty pointless.
Re CCR and Mardi Gras,the alternate story is that Stu and Doug just wanted to have more of a hand in running the band to take some pressure off John but John read the room wrong and insisted that Stu and Doug write songs which they didn’t want to do.
that's bullshit. Clifford and Cook wanted to write songs and thought five minutes of playing G and C would get the job done. They were envious of John's talent and songwriter royalties. That's why they altered the band name and played parking lots to make a minuscule living glomming onto what John had written.
This video reminds me of the glorious dj Kenny Everett in 1977 on London's Capitol Radio with the 30 worst records ever. He played them all and it was hilarious except for the #1 titled ( wait for it ) ' I want my baby back, I'm going to dig my baby ' about a guy who lost his girlfriend in a car accident at her grave. Yikes. William Shatner and Richard Harris' songs were there too. Liked and subbed.
1986 was an abysmal year in pop music. I remember how Chicago went from an excellent band in the late sixties and early seventies to the most generic sounding group imaginable by 1986. Kenny Loggins went from making songs like Danny's Song, This is It, and Whenever I Call You Friend in the seventies to the pointless, soulless Danger Zone by 1986.
Agreed about 1986 being an awful year for music, I would say the worst year of the 80's. Example? Nick Berry's Every Loser Wins was the second biggest selling single of 1986. How? How??
You can add Pink Floyd's last album "The Endless River" (of money in their pockets) from 10 years to this list. What a let down that was bar the first track.
I quite like "The Endless River", personally. I keep listening to it from time to time. My personal worst let down was when Genesis released "Calling All Stations", and I was so hyped for new music by my favourite band. I stood outside the door to the record store when they opened in the morning, so I could buy it immediately when it came out. Biggest musical disappointment of my life.
For me, the worst album of all time is Bob Seger's 1971 release "Brand-New Morning". Even the title is hysterically bad. Seger himself says that he has a copy buried somewhere in his backyard. I believe the album was made out of spite to fulfill a contractual obligation.
Before watching the video I hit the 'like' button as I already knew it would be a fun ride. #1, I want that Traffic shirt! They are in my top 3 of favorite bands & 'Shoot Out' is underrated. OK, a rich plethora of flotsam to enjoy you ripping apart in your wonderful dry wit style. Hard to believe Metal Machine Music could be 'surpassed' by anything. Apparently the Beach Boys managed it (released on vinyl only in NORTH Korea...brilliant). The Beach Boys have been self-parody since the late-70s in my opinion. A follow-up worst list is definitely worth it if you don't mind losing a few more brain cells muddling through more bad excuses for music. But we fans hang on your wonderful reviews. Whatever direction you take, we shall follow and enjoy. Great work as always.
Alice Cooper put out three albums in the '80s that he admitted that he didn't remember making. Special Forces, Zipper Catches Skin and Dada were pretty well panned by critics and die hard AC fans. I actually liked them, especially the first two. Alice always surrounded himself with great musicians which helped the albums and they were recorded well.
@@tonystevenson26 He did get a bit silly in the lyrics of Zipper, Dada was a big departure from the previous two, it took me some time to warm up to it.
@edaleman2758 agree, I mean I don't listen to it much, but know a couple of visual artist who claim it's their favorite Cooper album.....Of course Killer and Love it to Death are the ones that changed my life....( back in the day ! )
@@tonystevenson26 Flush The Fashion got me into AC back in 1982. I bought Billion Dollar Babies on vinyl when I got my first hifi in 1985 and Dada not long after, I was 17 in 85. Seen him live more times than I can remember 😎🤘🖤
I love it how one of these albums suffers from a lack of Lou Reed whilst another of them suffers from being Lou Reed's.
Gotta hand it to Lou for having a discography that includes MMM and Lulu
I never got Lou Reed, still don’t.
@@Robert_St-Preux this is Lou Reed fandom, hours of abuse interspersed with moments of brilliance
Squeeze is a very decent album. Ian Paice on drums is amazing.
@@MrButtonpresser he made DIY music. MANY followed his example.
My neighbor worked in a record store when he was a teen, many years ago, and he loves to tell and laugh at the story of someone who bought Lou Reeds Metal machine music..and later came back to return it for a new copy because he was convinced the copy he purchased was damaged…..he couldn’t believe it was intentional.
Hee hee, love it!
@@peterrex8191 Legend has it that Sides 3 and 4 are Side 1 and 2 backwards....
MMM actually has some redeemable qualities, I think. I was born a big noise guy, I think. I used to like to sit in my dad's car and listen to the polyrhythms of the fan belt, the timing system, and so forth. Then turn on the radio and find some decent AM crackly noise or better still a heterodyne whine of two signals over-modulating one another, and I'd jam away... MMM may be overwhelming in its wretched excess, but it does have its moments.
And hey, feel free to put any Elton John album you want on the list. It just never did it for me. There were decent songs here and there, but not everywhere. Nice bloke, seemingly, a likeable person, by most accounts. But there's not one bit of it I'd yearn to hear "just one more time". Like, for example, Moby Grape's APOCALYPE or HORSE OUT IN THE RAIN, which I'd like at my memorial service. Along with PILGRIM'S PROGRESS and A SALTY DOG.
Later.
NEVER liked Lou Reed (solo artist) except for Transformer
Haha! I bought the Replacements' "Shit Hits The Fans" cassette while on a trip, and when I realized I didn't have enough money for gas to get home I returned it to the store as "damaged". The clerk was adamant that he wasn't going to refund my money and in no uncertain terms indicated that he believed I was a lying, thieving POS.
The album comes from a pirate recording of the band which their manager had ripped from the deck when he caught the perp (RIP Roscoe) in the act, so the music stops midsong at the end, which is what I had claimed was its "defect".
Boyoboy, was that clerk *furious* when he played the tape in-store to prove my deceit, only to have the music abruptly cut off exactly as I had claimed! He (very) begrudgingly gave me my money back and I made it back to Austin safely.
Disappointed it wasn’t 10 Red Hot Chili Peppers albums
you probably think Creed is a great band
You mean the one about California? Oh wait, They're ALL about California.
At least Yoko Ono's album has a purpose. When it gets late and party guests don't get the hint, put on that album, crank it up, and listen to the sound of squealing tires in your driveway. Some people even leave their coats behind.
That is not purpose.
Bravo🎉.
I used to put "Lumpy Gravy" by Zappa on the turntable for that purpose.
@@alandesgrange9703
Then...Sound of tyres suddenly coming to violent brake 200m away from the house, with the ominous sound of RPG's been launch, back towards the 'noise'...
Diamanda Galas “Plague Mass” does the trick, too.
"Worst" lists are always sketchy. That abyss is truly bottomless.
They really bad albums are the ones no one has ever heard of.
I've heard the John Lennon/Yoko live album is used by the CIA in it's black sites for enhanced interrogation.
@@Gary-zq3pz That should be in breach of the Geneva convention!
No. Surely they use Ed Sheeran albums for that!?
I remember buying Sometime in New York, bringing it hoem putting it on the turntable in great expectation..... and immediately lifting the pick-up arm to the next track in the hope it was better than the first track. It waas then rinse and repeat for the remaining tracks on the album. Boy, was I pissed off.... Though maybe the Cold Turkey track with Zappa wasn't so bad.
😂
If the music doesn’t work, show them a picture of Yoko bearing her growler.
In my opinion, CCR's Mardi Gras is redeemed solely for its inclusion of "Someday Never Comes", which is arguably one of the band's best songs.
Sweet Hitchhiker rocks well, too.
Underrated classic
Mardi Gras is a good album. JF is a genius but a troubled one. Others were good songwriters too.
@@mitchelllevine5664 Even Fogarty said it was crap
John’s songs are good!! The other guys are better off playing their instruments and shutting up!!
I think you can do another 100 episodes just like this
At least another 💯
Easily, as the list is endless.
Yes, at least, and he can take half of my complete record collection to do so.
it seems like he already has......!
Every Bob Dylan and Rolling Stones album after the 1970s.
"Yoko's muff" should be in the Oxford dictionary as something so unexpectedly offputting that you recoil and flinch in pathological disgust. Like a severed head in a food pantry.
or the viz profanisaurus
Did you know there was an indie rock band from Manchester back in the '80s called Yoko's Muff? They seemingly had serious problems getting bookings with that name and in the end they changed it to Sheena Easton's Muff.
@@nobbynoris more palatable
Thanks so much, not laughed so much in ages. At least with the head, it may have some artistic merit.😂😅
@@nobbynoris
Did Sheena Easton's Muff snare more bookings?
Bought 'Cut the Crap' from Woolworths for 50p! - discount rack classic. About a week later I encountered Strummer and co busking on Edinburgh's Princes Street. I said to Joe 'Hey, I bought your last album!' His response - 'Christ, someone actually bothered to buy one!'
What kind of person has to lie to strangers in the TH-cam comment section?
WOW - Busking?!
I have a SACD copy of Metal Machine Music in Quadraphonic Sound. Why listen in Stereo when you can experience / torture your Ears in four Speakers.
Spot the person who worked as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay . . .
I like it!
I like die krupps track of the same name
I've got the blu-ray audio version! Supposedly, the original Quad version just had each side played backwards in the extra speakers. I mean, how could you tell?
.......at least "Sister Ray" had some kind of tune & vocals !
Worst albums or worst albums of typically well respected artists? There are worse.
Alot worse and many many of them too
Maybe you should rename this worst ROCK albums. Because there are a TON of god awful, completely irredeemable R&B, Hip-Hop, Soul, Country, Rap and Indie Records out there. While I’m not disagreeing with you about this list, some of the music here is listenable and outright great in comparison to records from other genres you didn’t touch on.
Maroon 5's albums could make up a good chunk of this list.
@@chrisritchie3923at least Nickelback didn’t make the cut
I'm sort of taking this list as artists we all know and love who released something terrible.
The thing with any list like this is that it is subjective. What one person deems to be 'the worst' another could think they are 'the best'. It is all just a matter of opinion - and we all have our own.
@@jtt8886 Right. If they're not legendary, well who cares how bad it is, most music is utterly forgettable. Just like most movies, tv, and video games.
I have some friends who went to see Lou Reed and his band in the 80's. The opening act was so bad my friends went into the lobby to wait for Reed. Turns out there was no opening act; yep, that was Lou Reed.
The album that inspired Glenn Tilbrook to call his band Squeeze
Fortunately, I missed the concert
I Saw him in denmark, he was strung out, awful concert. Then I saw him in Madrid 30 years later and he was great
I saw Lou in late 80’s it was great. Maybe he was sober that night in Mcr
It’s funny how Mick Jones’ Big Audio Dynamite does exactly what “Cut the Crap” wanted to do and does it really well
loved BAD
I think that "Metal Machine Music" is a great album - well ahead of it's time using modulated symphonic sounds and incorporating Whale sounds.
My Doctors say that if I improve they may eventually release me.
When I was getting radiation therapy, the machine was really loud, but they had a music player in the room (you'd be there for fifteen minutes to a half hour). I'd always request Metal Machine Music because it blended perfectly with the sound of the machine, and it baffled the techs, who couldn't figure out why the machine was making funny noises.
As a person who went through 6 weeks of radiation therapy, I can relate to what you are saying, and only wished I would of thought of requesting Metal Machine Music!
I had an MRI a few months ago and requested the Krautrock classic CLUSTER II as background music, but METAL MACHINE MUSIC would've been good too.
Probably my schoolboy humour, but I do applaud you for squeezing muff, tossing and rack into the same sentence re the John and Yoko Album.
Yoko:
She of the Cat in minefield vocal.
Hey, don't apologise. There is more artistic integrity there than Yoko ever cracked out in her entire life.
What about “splashing out”? 😂
John and Yoko on stage with Zappa was amusing. Not so sure Zappa was amused...
The irony is these are well known crap albums.There must be literally thousands of truly terrible records that are quite rightly swept under the carpet and forgotten about.
The “worst albums by great artists” would be a better description. I found an album in a used car that I purchased, it is indescribably horrific, on youtube none of the tracks have more than 500 plays. But it’s the only album from a band that no one ever cared about, so it doesn’t really register.
@@freefall8243who are them?
The promise by Mike Pinder is one of them. He was the weak link in Moody Blues
True, but for an album to be truly terrible, it kinda needs to have come from a known, big act.
Like movies, I'd say Legends of the Fall is way worse than ssy Robot Monster cuz the former had stars, budget and a studio behind it.
I think since "worst" is intrinsically highly subjective, it should be a given that reputation, expectation and disappointment are major factors in compiling the list.
I don't really believe in "Worst Albums Ever" as much as I do "Notoriously Bad Albums". Worst albums I've ever heard are Eurodance records from the 90s
Eurodance records? Like the music they played on Sprockets, hosted by Dieter?
Here's two albums from the 1990s I played the once and then dropped them both off at the nearest charity shop ___ Be Here Now by Oasis and On Every Street by Dire Straits. Appalling would be complimentary to both of those audial tragedies.
@@PeterGreen-t8c On Every Street by Dire Straits? Really? Not their best, OK, but bad? 😢
@@renaudoo Aside from the title track a total yawn fest. I thought halfway through I had put on a country and western CD by mistake
Roger Waters' Dark Side of the Moon Redux: all the rest are just bad albums with bad songs but DSOTM Redux manages to take a great album with great songs and make it bad. That's a special type of awful.
Good call ...
think he was just trolling Gilmour with that one - and it seems to have worked - did not expect Gilmour to get down into the media mud pits and slog it out with old Roger - and with his wife Polly helping him no less - but they did it ..
I feel RW version has some really good moments
@@JeffRogers1962 Wagner reference..nice one.
Came here to say this, but you've already described it much better than I could.
You know it must be a really bad record when it's only released in North Korea on vinyl.
It wasn't released. It escaped.
At least it can be burned for heat.
Not even big in Japan :)
Also, 'Outrider' by Jimmy Page, 1988. Sorry Led Zeppelin fans ( and I'm a big fan too ), but that album was terrible.
Outrider had some good tunes.
Maybe he was still on the smack.
@@timbennett6644 I liked that LP!
Beautiful blues playing on "Prison Blues" and other wonderful guitar work as well. Nope, not a bad album. Just the timing was off.
Well look at Zep's career, their influential early stuff is ironically full of plagiarism, their middle period was patchy, their late 1970s stuff was disappointing. After that it's been a slew of bad solo albums and terrible reunion concerts (and yes the 2007 reunion WAS terrible)
The Wagner joke at the start-.....that joke about good moment but dreadful quarters of an hour was a fashionable joke in the mid 1800s that was applied to many different musicians. It was allegedly the instance of Rossinni applying the old tired joke to Wagner that people remember, so perhaps it's a bit unfair on Wagner.
Please keep these coming! Although I live and breathe good music, there's something very compelling to me about bad music, especially when it's recorded by artists who should have known better. Many thanks for these videos. They're very informative.
Right. NASCAR is only good for the Wrecks. We agree.
Starship- Knee Deep in the Hoopla.
It was knee deep alright......
Should have been called 'Knee Deep in the Poopla'. :)
I liked it at the time 🤣
Two Us no.1s from it,not bad in the slightest
@@AidenSwords-gy5ko we built this city is one of the worst songs ever made
@@macheesmo3 no ,genesis who dunnit has that honour much as I luv the band
Kiss albums. Honestly, never heard a single one or saw them. Songs i did hear were vapid, no depth and flushable. Just a marketing marvel.
Back in the day, I consudered Kiss to be a novelty act. Funny how they have enduring popularity and are still active.
I was in high school when they css as me out, and I have never liked them. Listened to the super vapid, repetitive Christine Sixteen once on the radio. Boring!
Hey, "The Elder" was their absolute BEST LP musically - I proudly have a copy in my collection!
WOW. Never listened to one but forms an opinion. Myopic at best!
As opposed to?
"If you make it through side 4, you're even dumber than I am."
-Lou Reed on Metal Machine Music
@@mikeh892 Did he really say that?
@TheJman2600 He did. Classic Lou.
These bands are lucky that social media didn’t exist when they released their dumpster fires
Indeed. I remember some scathing reviews of "Cut the Crap" and "Knocked Out Loaded" (which is cited here as nearly as bad as "Down in the Groove")
Cut The Crap was the first time I went back to the record shop and asked for my money back!
Ha !!!! 😂
Is that true ?!
Gang of Four, 'Hard'. OMG...I'm still embarrassed (and mad) I actually bought this.
It was the Vapors for me....I knew I never should have bought it
@
Just goes to show, I really enjoyed New Clear Days and I still love News At Ten
I think I gave my copy away
Van Halen 3 deserves an honorable mention. That CD filled used bins in record stores only weeks after being released.
That's a fantastic album.
Such a tuneless and badly produced muddled mess. EVH shouldve stuck with Mitch Malloy.
It still went gold . It's very avg but it's actually decent songwise just the prod was dreadful
Never liked Extreme
The VH3 album was certainly better than the dreadful "Balance". Needed a good frontman with character to keep the band going which EVH's ego could not tolerate.
The CCR album had 2 good songs both written by John - Sweet Hitchhiker and Someday Never Comes.
that's true, but only 4 sound like ccr- those 2 and mary lou and cooks door to door which shows that john did as much to sabotage the record as his band members. his story that they presented him with an ultimatum is horseshit. he may have been tired of their attitudes but he put this out as ccr.
@@papajohnloki And not to forget he did the vocals.
@@mammothenterprises2921 on the live ccr door to door came off as a credible rocker - cook should have stopped there
Most of the songs were good.
Sweet Hitchhiker is just a shit Grand Funk song. So obvious the man was getting divorced at the time 😂.
"Maybe Yoko in all her glory is why so many have splashed out on this album." Quite made me choke on my tea.
I actually own a copy of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" on CD. I couldn't resist it when I found it at a friend's record store. It's so uniquely notorious as a terrible album that it's practically a must-have for people like me. (William Shatner's "The Transformed Man" is another one I have.) Probably Reed's biggest sin was releasing it as a double album. He admits in the original liner notes that "no one I know has listened to it all the way through including myself." But he was genuinely interested in creating the sounds you hear and didn't initially expect to release it to the general public. The album clearly has its fans and apparently influenced important bands like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, so I don't think it should be referred to as one of the worst albums of all time. Its appeal is extremely limited, but the same could be said of many albums that are acknowledged classics.
If only they followed Peter Gabriel's mantra of never releasing an album until you have something worth listening to.
Shame Gabriel didn't follow his own advice
@@stewartporter7140 And when was your last album released?
What are you on about? CAS is a good album and doesn’t deserve nowhere near the level of criticism that it gets.
Have you even listened to the album or just go along with what everyone says?
@@63mckenzieGabriel sucks, So is shite and Sledgehammer is pop nonsense. And dont get me started on that drippy, godawful Dont Give Up.I wish they would.
@@CrystalShip8899 Sounds like Trumpton is your intellectual level.
Disappointed that neither of my albums were included.
Lest we not for get Lou reads other fascinating collection of bollocks “Lulu” with Metallica.
I AM THE TABLE
At least when Lou Reed puts out flops, they’re INTERESTING failures.
Ha! I just made a comment on the same
It's the only album by Metallica that I will NEVER own - to the point that I told my family members (who know all too well how much I love Metallica!) that they are not to even consider buying that album for me as a gift!
I remember seeing the Lou Reed / Metallica combo on the TV (Jools Holland?). As someone with a great admiration for Reed's earlier work, I sat there watching with my ears trying to pull themselves off my head. Memorable, I suppose but for all the wrong reasons!
"Cut the Crap" was made after the Clash had split up ;it was just Strummer and Simonon who dragged it out for CTC and both-I think-regreted it. Combat Rock was really the last true Clash album.
Apparently Bernie Rhodes also had a big hand in this with drum loops and early sampling. Moral of the story is, if you want to save time, money and also destroy the groups legacy let the manager make the records and cut out the middle men!
I've heard the Demos for Cut The Crap. They're actually pretty good. Too bad "Jose Unidos" (Bernie) didn't know when to stop.
Poison - Look What The Cat Dragged In. They literally should have done time for that.
ANYTHING by Poison!!!!
So the Clash have one of the worst albums of all time and one of the best - some would argue THE best, in London Calling.
Combat Rock too possibly ? very mercurial.
Combat Rock too possibly ? very mercurial.
The Clash?? Ew.
London Calling is one of my top 5 'desert island' records. One of the best ever made by ANY band.
I actually like Cut the Crap better than their acclaimed self titled album (UK version).
Anything by John Cougar Mellencamp. Saw him get booed off the stage when he opened for the Kinks in Indy. He only made it through a song and a half before being pummeled by drinks from the crowd. What a turd.
I live in Indy & the radio stations here have OD’d on “Johnny Cougar”….
@thomasadrian9854 totally agree....with him, less is more
My teen proto-punk band the Gizmos invited him into the studio against my wishes in early 1977 to record a song he wrote called "Boring (Part 1)" with one of our guys singing lead. It was so BORING it only got a release in 2000 as a bonus track on CD. He is so loathed here in Bloomington IN, where he lives, that graffiti periodically appears around the city reading "SUCKING ON A CHILI DOG." I've also been told by young punk-rockers who work as delivery drivers that the very rich Mellencamp is a very bad tipper.
Don’t agree! His body of work is too good! May have had bad songs and was well past his prime by the mid 90’s but the 80’s were all his and there wasn’t a bad song that got radio play.
@@eddieflowers1720 You were in the Gizmos?! "Polish sausage, sauerkraut! Polish sausage, sauerkraut!" 😆
I'm in the Frank Zappa camp about music writers. So generally if the NME back in the day said this album is rubbish I would rush out and buy it.
Too bad every artist couldn't put out an endless string of easy snark, sarc asm and ridicule.
Getting a signed copy of Van’s worst album is pretty funny
Especially when you own the truly underrated Veedon Fleece.
That's kind of like when I tell people I jammed with Van onstage once. And I did, except we were 3000 miles apart and he didn't start playing until 10 hours after I went home -- but this was during the Austin Gloriafest featuring a 24-hour-long live rendition of "Gloria" which he participated in via satellite!
any post poetic champions album is van just milking the formula; cant blame him i guess
Very entertaining. Though, IMHO, Revolution 9 IS something of a masterpiece. Over the decades, I've grown to love it.
Even people who don’t like it have to admit it provides a focal point for an unfocused album. It’s like all the chaos of the ’60s brimming though the album is finally bubbling up to the surface.
It is a flawed masterpiece. If it were a tad shorter, and 2-3 more interesting bits would have been added, it might have been one of their best. I appreciated that John concept.
@@DeflatingAtheism After Pepper, the Beatles intentionally aimed for unfocused. George Martin often said the White Album should have been distilled down to one disc. But look how the public embraced the whole. And a lot of those throw-away songs have been made into wonderful covers by other artists. Chaos of the 60s is another name for Romanticism, and Bohemianism. The Beatles brought balance to an Industrialized world post WW ll, particularly the United States. Sgt. Pepper, then the White Album was their zenith.
Yes, Cut the Crap was abysmal...but St. Anger is a special kind of bad.
they should have titled it ... "St. inker"
"This is England" is a brilliant song though.
That album should have been called "St. Over Indulgent Bullsh*t"
St. Anger is still light years ahead of Lulu.
@@davidtoups4684There are some decent songs on St Anger. The title track and Frantic for example.
Never approach Van Morrison with a record to be signed - it will invariably result in varying degrees of humiliation, depending on how much you happen to worship the ground he walks on - certainly not me but I could tell a tale or two. 😉 You'd be better off with an Amazon forgery
Without a doubt one of the most disappointing live performances I’ve ever seen was Van Morrison at the local folk festival some years ago.
Never said a word to the audience, butchered his own songs, and stomped off without so much as a ‘thank you’ when he was done.
After a lifetime of loving his music now I can barely listen to his music as I realize how much contempt he has for his own fans.
The best way to approach Van for an autograph is to simply say, “Mr. Burdon, I loved House of the Rising Sun and Spill the Wine. Will you please make this out to “Bob”? The reaction will be worth more than any autograph. He was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Americana Music Association at their annual event a few years back. The event is held at the historic Ryman in Nashville. Emmylou Harris, one of the nicest musicians you will ever meet, was the presenter. My recollection was that Morrison was curt with her, mumbled a few words to the audience (I don’t remember “Thank you” being 2 of the words) and when he did the obligatory song, he sang for about 45 seconds, brought out his daughter and left the stage. I would add this postscript, he did a concert the next day at the Ascend Amphitheater in Nashville and I had a ticket. Given the behavior at the award show, I almost skipped the event, expecting the worst. I could not have been more wrong. It was a great concert. He played a lengthy set that included the classics, some deep cuts and some new stuff. He is a complex artist but still when he is on, he is a true genius. If he did nothing after Astral Weeks, that album alone gives him icon status for me. Finally, my description of how he behaved at the award show is from memory. Others may have not seen it differently. I am still a fan but he simply reinforced a rule I have about not meeting artists you really like. If they are having a bad night or just aren’t nice people, I don’t want it tainting their art for me. And, after all, it is the art that I love, not necessarily the human that created it.
A problem I'll NEVER have lol
Morrison did a few things I liked, but overall, I'm not a fan. A couple of guys who used to work on his road crew hated him so much they used to piss in the glass he soaked his harmonicas in - or so they claim.
@@johnbgood52 Looking to kill some time while we were in NYC, we walked into the Fillmore East to see an afternoon show by Morrison - and unbeknownst to us, the US debut of Brinsley Schwarz, featuring Nick Lowe, who was unknown.
Morrison was horrible: nasty, disrespectful and abusive to his (sparse) audience, and arrogant. Neither of us were particular fans, and we left midway through what I suppose you'd call his set. The Schwarz's weren't memorable, but they were on first, so we sat through them to get to "the good stuff" that was supposed to be Van, but wasn't.
Never again. When? I want to say April 1970 - but it was a long time ago, and it was the sort of memory that's best forgotten.
Any album by Coldplay.
AMEN!!!!!!!!!!!
Why anyone likes Coldplay is beyond me. Just bland drivel!
Exactly. I can’t stand that damn group. They are as annoying as Oasis.
Well I’d say every Elton John album is his worst.
Lots of snobbery here and in the replies, me thinks, or is it Limp Bizkit envy?
I’d like to hear your take on the 10 worst Prog albums. I would anticipate the term ‘bloated’ used quite generously
Yes please!!!
Love Beach will lead the way.
Atom Heart Mother is Pink Floyd's worst, although Summer '67 or whatever it's called is a great song.
@@ThursoBerwick Gilmour has called the album "shit" and "a load of rubbish." Waters said the album "should be thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again."
... Hey! I happen to like my prog quite well-bloated.
Great video! There are two I might quibble with. First, I am one of those crazy Neil fans who really enjoys Neil Young's 80s output. "Hippie Dream" alone (his sarcastic stab at Crosby and others) makes the album worthwhile. If you want terrible Neil, go into the 21st century. Stuff like Storytone.
Also, while the worst CCR album, Mardi Gras isn’t really that bad.
A good replacement: the late 80s Jefferson Airplane reunion album is one of the worst things I've ever heard.
'Trans' is far better IMHO but agree about Hippie Dream, also 'Touch the Night' is a great song; there are some absolute clunkers like 'People on the street' though and it was let down by some pretty bad production and awful 80s digital mastering
Hippie Dream is a great song (did Crosby ever write an answer?) but not with this lineup on this album. Crazy Horse was the band to do that one.
Frankly, I also DO like Young's "Landing on Water"....and "Hippie Dream" is a GREAT song!
The list of 60's and 70's artists who utterly failed in the 80's seems to be endless and yet that decade had many many fantastic albums.
That’s an extremely valid and interesting point!! The old “ dinosaur “
acts , came across badly , yet we had some corkers like gracelands, hounds of love , the queen is dead , Joshua tree , for example. Very weird !
@@williammorris1384- U2 were not considered “dinosaurs” during the 80s as they released their debut album in 1980.
@@williammorris1384 In my humble but honest opinion, the '80s were one of the worst decades for popular music, and for the arts in general. While there were exceptions, the music, the movies, the TV shows and yes, the fashions, were tacky and strange. The entire decade was characterized by a kind of bizarre cheesiness that can't really be described, and that no one who didn't live it could ever really understand. If you were a kid who grew up in the '80s, you probably saw it as normal, but to a lot of us older folks, there was definitely something off-kilter.
Then again, maybe I'm just remembering the bad stuff because it was just so freaking crappy it's hard to forget. 😁
@@johnbgood52
Well if the “52” in your tag, is a clue to your age , then we are only 2 years apart and I did indeed grow up in the 80’s.
It was definitely the decade where technology was trying to find itself and some aspects of it, definitely suffered !
Through reading absolutely endless reviews and clips and responses to things, it doesn’t half garner a huge amount of respect and appreciation and fondness !
@@williammorris1384 '52 is the year I was born, not my age. I grew up in the '60s. 😁
“Leather Jackets” is Elton’s second worst, his worse album would be “Victim Of Love” 1979.
21 By 33 (1980) has to be in your Top 5 worst Elton albums.
The world just wasn't ready for a disco version of Johnny B Good.
Absolutely. Victim of Love is definitely a terrible falling off - after his pretty good collaborative work with Tom Bell, and A Single Man which I still love as an album
Yeah, 1979 seemed to be the year where rockers jumped on the disco bandwagon. But while Rod, Macca, The Stones and The Doobies limited it to one song, Elton decided to do a whole album.
@@davej.meister5421 Not for me really, but it is in my bottom tier. Problem wwas there were quite a few excellent outtakes from those sessions, "The Retreat" being one of them. He later slapped that gem on a B side a couple of years later. Elton had a bad habit of leaving better songs off of his albums and would relegate them to B-sides. Most of side 2 and a couple from side 1 couldve enhanced that album greatly. But noooooo, he had to include crap like "Dear God", "Take Me Back" and "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again"
Honorable mentions: Emerson Lake and Palmer-Love Beach, Ringo Starr-Ringo the 4th, Roger Hodgson-Hai Hai, Robert Fripp-1999 Soundscapes Live in Argentina, Gregg Allman and Cher-Two the Hard Way, Attila (1970 Billy Joel), Keith Moon-Two Sides of the Moon, Peter Criss (1978 solo album), and most of the TV albums not available in stores from the 1970's.
Love Beach actually not too bad.
Normally I come to this channel to learn about new music I must hear. Thanks for turning me onto albums I simply do not want to hear!
Chuckle
"...learn about new music I must hear." It's Classic Album Review, mate.
Welcome!
I now want to listen to these albums just because they're bad!
I don't own and have never heard a single note from any of these ten albums...and will keep it that way hopefully.
Then I'm scared as to what you DO listen to!
Been collecting albums since 1963. I have a rather large collection. Frankly, I've never heard of any of these albums. I guess I didn't miss anything!!!!
😂😂😂😂😂😂
Bob Dylan not giving a shiny shite!!.. pretty much the case when i saw him recently!!😫😫
When it comes to Two Virgins, I think what it represents is a great artist (John Lennon) learning what the boundaries are by going too far with it and ultimately learning to dial it back enough to find the sweet spot in terms of creativity. Revolution 9, I think, was also part of that process of artistic definition.
The most damning part of CCR's Mardi Gras wasn't even mentioned. Not only were Stu and Doug's songs horrible, but John's "Someday Never Comes" and "Sweet Hitchhiker" (by no means even close to the band's best) were so conspicuously the best, as well as identifiable as CCR, it really was his vindication.
The worst album I ever bought was Terence Trent D'Arby - Neither Fish nor Flesh... Pretentious, unlistenable rubbish...
He certainly thought he was the rage.. and then, BOOM, he was out of sight. That’s what happens when you’re full of yourself.
@@Peter-gu9ph I disagree on the last two words, there are good songs on that album (“This Side Of Love”), excellent performances, and a stack of good ideas but he poisoned it by following up an absolutely classic debut LP with an overblown and ridiculously self indulgent production, a monument to his all consuming ego of the time. I don’t think the true unlistenable rubbish started until “Symphony or Damn”.
@@dma124 When he was asked at an airport for anything to declare, didn't he reply 'Yes, my genius' or something like that???
@@tpbrcombo OK - I admit I wasn't able to listen long enough to find any hidden treasures. I think you sum up the album well with the term "self indulgent".
Welcome to the club!😅
There was a John and Yoko bootleg with them naked with pigtails and pig faces! That's a terrible album too. Help we need somebody!
Not just anybody!
I am really glad that “Leather Jackets” is the Elton John album being trashed and not the “Victim Of Love” album which I love. The song you called “Don’t Trust a Woman” was actually “Don’t Trust That Woman.” I am a big fan of Yoko Ono’s work. I think “Revolution 9” is a true masterpiece in the first place. My favorite Lou Reed albums are “Metal Machine Music” and “New Sensations.” I hope to find The Beach Boys’ “Summer In Paradise” album to buy. Have a nice day.
My addition would have been The Mamas and the Papas People Like Us mind numbing contractual obligation boring mess , but that one seems like a masterpiece comparatively speaking.
Michael Jackson's 'Invincible' from 2001.
You can tell how desperate and defensive he was at that stage by the title of the album. I remember the quote from Shakespeare "I think he doth protest too much"
Nice t-shirt, Traffic are class, oddly, shoot out....is the only one I don't own on wax.
The worst album ever hands down is The Shaggs. Or anything by Billy Joel.
52nd Street was ok tho !
Definitely the Shaggs....
👍 ? Billy Joel is wretched. Completely grating !
Mardi Gras by CCR has two good songs on it, Someday Never Comes and Sweet Hitchhiker, which were the two songs they released as singles. The rest of the album is pretty disposable. The guys in Creedence weren’t even trying to hide how bad most of the material on this album is, they are literally breaking up over your stereo speakers as you listen. A very sad end to a great band indeed. Pendulum is their last *real* album in my opinion, and even John Fogerty has said as such.
@@Mr3Submarine I agree and I don’t mind the cover of “Hello Mary Lou”, but it’s a straight copy of the original that adds nothing.
I think this could top them all if I can get word to Pat Boone to do a cover album of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, it would be called "Dark Side of the Boone".
😂
Squeeze is the worst because it's a complete con. It's not in any shape or form a Velvet Underground record, no founding members or principal songwriters remain. It's like Triggers broom. It's not even a good imitation of The Velvet Underground. At least the others were by the actual artists you were expecting. You know what you're getting when you buy a Yoko Ono album so if you don't like it there's no one else to blame.
Squeeze is a Doug Yule solo album. It was released under the VU banner to attract extra sales, when it didn't. Ian Paice, incidentally, is alleged to have played in it. Although Paice himself can remember nothing of it!
I almost spit my coffee out when you said Metal Machine Music. That's the kind of album these lists are made for. Of course, you could also include the Neil Young and Crazy Horse album Arc in that category. Roger Waters' DSOTM Redux crossed my mind. As well as any of the albums The Doors made with no contribution from Morrison.
Making a list of the worst albums is almost as difficult as making a list of the best.
Its only redeeming quality is that it was very influential on industrial/experimental bands like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire.
Metal Machine Music may have not been understood by critics and some audiences at the time, but in retrospect, it was right up Lou Reed's alley and inevitable. He loved the idea of noise as music, anti-music, free-improvisation, and drones produced by feedback and distortion. It may have been a middle-finger to RCA, but for those of us in the industrial scene at the time, that middle finger made a lot of fans very happy. It was a bold and punk move. And Reed himself certainly doesn't consider it his worse album. He went on to make more industrial noise music, performed the album live in the 2000s, and formed the Metal Machine Trio. It's definitely a challenging listen, and not my favorite of the first-wave industrial and noise records from the late Seventies and early Eighties, but I think helped in the solidification of industrial as a genre, and inspired many more future artists. Industrial is definitely a niche scene requiring a bit of work to appreciate its genius, but I certainly understand why folks find it unpleasant and wouldn't appreciate Lou Reed assaulting their ears with this experiment.
I've always loved Land on Water! Better than most every thing Neil put out after Ragged Glory. By the way, how can you omit the first Godz album!
Harvest Moon is his best work. Next
What about the mother of all letdowns - the one and only -
the useless sack of musical .... called St. Anger ?
Add Lulu as well. I'm not Metallica fan, but from what I've heard the drums were criticized (they sounded funny to me), if the drums were changed would St. Anger have been a decent album?
To me, anything after And Justice For All was a big letdown. You could fill a whole top 10 list very easily with disappointing albums from thrash bands, foremost among them being Megadeth's Risk, Destruction's Human Cannonball.
@@lonewolf8667I am the Table!
Metallica was done after Black album
from big fan to wtf was that? and nothing since. when Jason left they were done
That Summer in Paradise was released on vinyl in North Korea only (of all places) should tell you all you need to know about this album:)
As if they have records in NK.
"Summer in Paradise" is just auditory punishment. As if the poor North Koreans had enough abuse!!!
I'm sure they had revolution music on 78rpm back in the '50s
The Shaggs "Philosophy of the world" is still unbeatable for me.
Strong case for that one.
Considering that they were not professional musicians but hostages of their father, I actually give them credit for trying, whereas these established pros who chose to put out site have to get moved past the Shaggs up the list of worst albums ever.
How about Half Japanese 1st album Half Half Gentlemen Not Beasts
Brilliant one.
I think the point with his list is these are mainstream artists...the Shaggs were obscure as hell
I actually really like "Landing On Water". #1 is the worst for sure!
It was my intro to him actually back in the early 80s. I will always remember "touch the night" and its eerie video, the song grabbed me immediately
I had a promo cd and i had most Neil's stuff
Don't remember loathing it but don't remember playing it
Lou made MMM as an epic FU to the record company! It was meant to be 'the worst album ever made'. Just Lou with amps and speakers and mics all over the place, no instruments. Just colossal volume, feedback, and noise. On a double album. He did this with such a biting and distinctly intelligent manner as he was pressured for product, at end of contract, and angry. But his picture was cool. You can't even call this the birth of drone music because drone music has actual music in it. He even had it pressed so that when you got to the very end, the pressing was intentionally made to skip, so not only was it terrible, Lou said, 'you physically had to get up and turn the damn thing off', as typical record players would automatically return the tone arm at the end of a record and it would shut off. The intentional skipping was one of his ultimate 'so Lou' moments. What's hilarious is there are these artists, and I believe some hard-core Japanese notably actually approach MMM as an important work and have attempted to play the thing live. So would that be a goof on a goof? Or is it a case of a serious take on a goof? What do you call that. Serious musicians, seriously taking and playing and believing that MMM should be performed-thus enlightening even more suckers to it's existence? Listen for just more than a couple minutes and understand MMM is Lou's ever-loving everlasting FU to so, so much. God I miss him.
I want to take issue with your take on Lennon's Two Virgins. It clearly wasn't meant to be a solo album it was experimental Lennon took his art seriously and saw you could do far more with a 12' record than a dozen pop songs and no pundit l've ever read saw it.Its not meant to be listened to like a pop record it's just there like a painting or a statue you are not meant to like it or dislike it .This is what he was getting at .l doubt if any record company would allow anything like that these days it's like Picassos Three Dancers ,you should think again
Yoko's Muff
I’ve had better … 🤵♂️
Great name for a punk band!😂
🕳🙊
YT seems to think that needs translating.
Whahaha. YT wants to translate Yoko’s Muff to English 😂😂
"snowploughing" seemed to work for Black Sabbath's Vol.4 though
LOL, but that formula imploded with Never Say Die.
@@Ifoughtpiranhas I have always liked Never Say Die. Some great riffs on that record.
@@Ifoughtpiranhas Still infinitely better than most garbage put out.
'Cut the Crap' is a terrible album but 'This is England' is one of my 10 favourite Clash songs.
I agree 🎸
In terms of dreadful record a from an established artists, Bruce Springsteen "Working on a dream". It is an absolute stinker.
...as ALL his albums were!
Queen Hot Space… so bad they added Under Pressure… Calling All Girls was great tho…
I liked Cool Cat a lot. David Bowie even recorded a version of it with Queen.
Played live the songs were great though. I think Hot Space was over-produced/cold.
Metal Machine Music doesn't belong on this list. It was exactly what it was supposed to be and it did exactly what it was intended to do. All the others were trying and failing to be something much better than they were. I'd replace it with ELP's Tarkus instead.
Some people just have no taste...
Tarkus is far from ELP's worst album: I'd list Brain Salad Surgery as the point where the self-indulgence took over from the talent, the triple live "Welcome Back My Friends" being more of the same but even more drawn out and boring, and the contractual obligation Love Beach as the absolute pits: though at least the tracks are reasonably short.
Sadly, The Clash sold out and tried to turn themselves into Americans long before 'Cut the Crap' came along. Most punk bands were hooked on some kind of drug, usually speed, sometimes coke if they had a particularly lucrative record deal. The Clash were the only band I ever knew who were addicted to the ink on dollar bills.
You mean the band that insisted their double and treble albums sold at the same price as a single meaning they took the hit in money rather than their record label and insisted the warning ‘Home taping is killing music’ wasn’t on ‘Sandinista’ because they didn’t care how many copies were made of their albums?
As a minor contribution to the 'unredeemable shite by great bands' genre, I would suggest 1976's 'Locked In' by Wishbone Ash, the title of which can surely(?) only be a reference to a contractual obligation. Well played and produced, it is marred only by the absence of a single half-decent song or melody yet was chucked out the same year they released 'New England', an album chock full of catchy and original tunes.
Yeah, terrible album by their standards if you are a fan of their stuff (not that there seem to be too many of us). However, it did contain "Rest In Peace" which had some very nifty guitar parts.
I sense a pattern here: Artists go through that heady, revolutionary start, settle into a so-so period of craft-over-art, before hopefully re-emerging for an uncompromising era of rediscovered creativity; but there's potential for a stage between mid-period craft and late style where they simply don't care, letting somebody behind a desk turn stuff they found down the back of a sofa into an album.
The Shaggy's Philisophy of the World is só underrated that is not mentioned even in the "10 Worst albuns"
I figured if you mentioned Two Virgins, you might as well have also included Life With The Lions and Wedding Album. However, the later comes in a pretty cool boxed set.😂
Awesome video as always!!!👍👍
Thank you
The Doors - Full Circle makes my list. The album cover is the only thing cool about it. As for Bob Dylan, I suppose I will forever be a Philistine to his recordings, though I enjoy his paintings very much.
I think the cover sucks as well.
Full Circle is very decent one and they would go on but Ray crashed with others and so they split.
Oh yes, the 80s were so straight, Elton John married a woman. 😂
It's the eighties and I'm down with the ladies.
That marked the beginning of the end of Elton's drug addiction phase. Even he asked himself: "Why am I doing this -- and why am I dragging another person into it?" It wasn't exactly "loveless." Anybody else ever mistaken friendship for romantic love? Yeah, that "straightened him up" -- by forcing him to acknowledge he was "officially gay."
he married her here in Australia - Melbourne - I remember watching the footage at school for some reason
To be fair, if I was strapped down naked to a table in an underground bunker, vulnerable and terrified, and the interrogator holds up two pairs of headphones and says, Right! Twelve hours, either Yoko Ono or Elton John, you choose! I would choose Yoko without a second thought.
@@nobbynoris Well, it takes all kinds, I guess...
"snowplowing his way through....." Plus being 1986 make me believe Cocaine was involved in that terrible Elton John album.
👉Insert 10 records that Yoko Ono got near.🤢
She destroys everything she touches.
YOKO ONO/PLASTIC ONO BAND and FLY are classic noise records. The first is especially amazing, with great guitar by Lennon and Ringo on drums. Very influential stuff. TWO VIRGINS and LIFE WITH THE LIONS, which she did with Lennon before that, are pretty pointless.
Re CCR and Mardi Gras,the alternate story is that Stu and Doug just wanted to have more of a hand in running the band to take some pressure off John but John read the room wrong and insisted that Stu and Doug write songs which they didn’t want to do.
that's bullshit. Clifford and Cook wanted to write songs and thought five minutes of playing G and C would get the job done. They were envious of John's talent and songwriter royalties. That's why they altered the band name and played parking lots to make a minuscule living glomming onto what John had written.
This video reminds me of the glorious dj Kenny Everett in 1977 on London's Capitol Radio with the 30 worst records ever. He played them all and it was hilarious except for the #1 titled ( wait for it ) ' I want my baby back, I'm going to dig my baby ' about a guy who lost his girlfriend in a car accident at her grave. Yikes. William Shatner and Richard Harris' songs were there too. Liked and subbed.
Cuddley Ken did a second bottom 30 in 1979 which was er 'won' by Reginald Bosenquet's Dance with Me
Yes, that song by Jimmy Cross appears on Rhino's "The World's Worst Record " complication. Now THAT's a bad record!
1986 was an abysmal year in pop music. I remember how Chicago went from an excellent band in the late sixties and early seventies to the most generic sounding group imaginable by 1986. Kenny Loggins went from making songs like Danny's Song, This is It, and Whenever I Call You Friend in the seventies to the pointless, soulless Danger Zone by 1986.
Agreed about 1986 being an awful year for music, I would say the worst year of the 80's. Example? Nick Berry's Every Loser Wins was the second biggest selling single of 1986. How? How??
Different Light (1986) by the Bangles is one of the best pop albums of the 80's.
@@russellhunter83781986 also gave us I Wanna Wake Up With You. Breathtakingly a number 1 for Boris Gardner... What were people smoking back then..?
Danger Zone has a camp charm. I saw Top Gun at the right age. Probably any other and I would have hated it.
You can add Pink Floyd's last album "The Endless River" (of money in their pockets) from 10 years to this list. What a let down that was bar the first track.
I quite like "The Endless River", personally. I keep listening to it from time to time. My personal worst let down was when Genesis released "Calling All Stations", and I was so hyped for new music by my favourite band. I stood outside the door to the record store when they opened in the morning, so I could buy it immediately when it came out. Biggest musical disappointment of my life.
"Atom Heart Mother" is my choice despite loving one song on it and a few bits of the title track (which is all over the place)
For me, the worst album of all time is Bob Seger's 1971 release "Brand-New Morning". Even the title is hysterically bad. Seger himself says that he has a copy buried somewhere in his backyard. I believe the album was made out of spite to fulfill a contractual obligation.
Before watching the video I hit the 'like' button as I already knew it would be a fun ride. #1, I want that Traffic shirt! They are in my top 3 of favorite bands & 'Shoot Out' is underrated. OK, a rich plethora of flotsam to enjoy you ripping apart in your wonderful dry wit style. Hard to believe Metal Machine Music could be 'surpassed' by anything. Apparently the Beach Boys managed it (released on vinyl only in NORTH Korea...brilliant). The Beach Boys have been self-parody since the late-70s in my opinion. A follow-up worst list is definitely worth it if you don't mind losing a few more brain cells muddling through more bad excuses for music. But we fans hang on your wonderful reviews. Whatever direction you take, we shall follow and enjoy. Great work as always.
Alice Cooper put out three albums in the '80s that he admitted that he didn't remember making.
Special Forces, Zipper Catches Skin and Dada were pretty well panned by critics and die hard AC fans.
I actually liked them, especially the first two.
Alice always surrounded himself with great musicians which helped the albums and they were recorded well.
Zipper was pretty lame...I enjoyed the other two....
@@tonystevenson26 He did get a bit silly in the lyrics of Zipper, Dada was a big departure from the previous two, it took me some time to warm up to it.
Dada is pretty mixed up but some good tracks on it. The title track, Former Lee Warmer and Pass The Gun Around 😎
@edaleman2758 agree, I mean I don't listen to it much, but know a couple of visual artist who claim it's their favorite Cooper album.....Of course Killer and Love it to Death are the ones that changed my life....( back in the day ! )
@@tonystevenson26 Flush The Fashion got me into AC back in 1982. I bought Billion Dollar Babies on vinyl when I got my first hifi in 1985 and Dada not long after, I was 17 in 85. Seen him live more times than I can remember 😎🤘🖤