City Pages pointed me to a Slate article about the Black Eyed Peas’ song “My Humps”. I’m sufficiently out of touch with pop culture that I had never heard of this song before, much less heard it. My curiousty piqued, I downloaded it, ready to give it a listen and decide to what extent I agreed with the people throwing their hats into the This Is A Terrible Song ring.

Is there a more emphatic way to express 100% agreement with someone? Athletes often express a desire to “give 110% percent;” can I do the same here? Is Bill Gates or Steve Jobs working on some kind of innovative new Agreement Machine, a USB peripheral, perhaps? Because I’d buy it just to agree with Slate, et al.

Because good lord, is that song awful. I’d never really been caught up in the allure of the Black Eyed Peas, but I could at least understand why others could. I thought “Let’s Get Retarded” was a dumb song, but its catchiness was hard to dispute. Fergie usually looks like a man in drag, but she had her hot moments. If “Shut Up” were their creative nadir, I don’t think they’d be worthy of much critical attention, derisive or otherwise.

But man. “My Humps”? I’m not even going any further, analytically speaking, than typing the song’s title. Slate’s already put it well enough: “Relativism be damned! There are bad songs that offend our sensibilities but can still be enjoyed, and then there are the songs that are just really bad—transcendentally bad, objectively bad. As a piece of music, ‘My Humps’ is a stunning assemblage of awful ideas.”

So this article, and City Pages’ link to Blender’s Worst 50 Songs of All Time (as well as my recent paean to the perpetrators of the list’s #1 entry) has gotten me thinking about bad songs a lot, lately.

It’s not easy for me to really hate a song. There are lot of really stupid songs out there that I can appreciate on some difficult level. It might be an irrelevantly inspired guitar hook, or a catchy bridge in an otherwise dull context. Plus, there are a lot of supremely bad songs out there (“awesomely bad,” as Slate would have it) that I can sort of, kind of, appreciate for that reason alone: “Who Let The Dogs Out?” is one such example—the kind of songs that are so obnoxious that it’s a point of stubborn pride not to admit to hating them.

Plus, despite my proclivities towards pessimism, I try to remain optimistic about the art and culture (pop- and otherwise) I consume. If I don’t like something, I try to avoid it; dwelling on how awful it is only serves to create a lot of negative psychic energy. I’ve never understood the critical impulse to spend more time tearing down something bad than celebrating something good, though I’ve spent considerable time lamenting that very tendancy.

This time, though, it’s an impulse I’m all too willing to indulge. So, while sitting in my last lecture of the semester today, I made a list of my own least favorite songs. First it was titled “Worst Songs Ever”, but that presupposes some impossibly empirical statement of quality. Besides, I can easily understand why many people, including peers and friends of mine whose aesthetic judgement I otherwise respect, might really enjoy some of the very songs I personally cringe upon hearing. So, “Songs I Cringe Upon Hearing” is a more accurate classification. Even better would be “Songs I Could Happily Go To My Grave Without Ever Hearing Again, Ever”. Yeah, let’s go with that, and let the disputandum cum gustibus ensue in the comments:

Eric Clapton: “Cocaine”
Three Doors Down: “Kryptonite”
Jewel: “Foolish Games” [but really, any song by Jewel]
Meatloaf: “Paradise By The Dashboard Light”
Sublime: “What I Got”
Crazy Town: “Butterfly”
Joss Stone: “Fell In Love With A Boy”
Gloria Gaynor: “I Will Survive”
Train: “Meet Virginia”
Garth Brooks: “Friends In Low Places”
Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band: “Old Time Rock n’ Roll”
George Thorogood: “Bad To The Bone”
Jet: “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?”
Paula Cole: “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?”
Sarah McLachlan: “Building A Mystery”
Violent Femmes: “Blister In The Sun”
Bad Company: “Bad Company”
Alanis Morrisette: “Ironic” [but really, any song by Alanis Morrisette]
Black Crowes: “Hard To Handle”
Darryl Worley: “Have You Forgotten?”
Alicia Keys: “Fallin’”