10 songs that nearly saved a terrible album

‘Discotheque’ – U2

The entire 1990s was supposed to be the decade that destroyed U2. No band that had that amount of self-righteousness about them would have ever been seen as the saviours of rock and roll when the slacker generation came to town, and yet Achtung Baby was the kind of record that no one ever would have expected out of the Irish legends. They seemed to be learning from all of those lessons from Rattle and Hum, but their post-ironic plastic rock star schtick was always in danger of getting too plastic.

And while Pop is more of a spotty album in execution than anything else, seeing them ham things up in the video for ‘Discotheque’ was the only time that the album seemed to truly work. Their dance moves as The Village People may have been more than a little bit cringy, but given that they were working with different electronic sounds, this could have been their moment where they moved into more expansive territory in the age of bands like The Chemical Brothers.

Bono’s comparison to this song and Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ does make a lot of sense, but that’s also the major problem with the entire problem. The last thing that the frontman wanted to do was make an album that was anywhere close to prog, and given how expansive their sound had become, it wasn’t necessarily a surprise when they threw these ideas away when ‘Beautiful Day’ came to them.

‘Queens Day’ – Run-DMC

The nu-metal era should have been the era when Run-DMC had their proper return to form. They never fell off per se, but when looking at their music in the 1990s, seeing them make records that sounded like New Jack Swing was never going to work with their hardened image. They were the progenitors of what tough hip-hop could sound like, but when you’re making a comeback record, it’s better to make sure that every single member is at least on the same page half the time.

Because while ‘Queens Day’ is a pretty decent posse cut with Nas and Prodigy delivering some decent bars, it’s missing one of the most important pieces of the band. DMC doesn’t show up for most of this album, and when Run does deliver a verse, it seems more like he’s trying to work on hyping himself up because he knows that his buddy isn’t there to finish his sentences like he used to back in the day.

But since we’re never going to get another album from them, this is the version of the group that would have made for a fitting epitaph. Run could rest on his throne as one of the kings of hip-hop for a little while, and if you stop after this one tune, you’re sparing yourself from watching the rest of them embarrass themselves trading lines with Fred Durst and thinking that doing a duet with Stephen Jenkins of Third Eye Blind was a good idea.

‘You’ – George Harrison

Anything that George Harrison ever played needed to come from the heart before anything. He never thought of his solo career as anything special, and even when working on some of his biggest albums, the most important part was being able to have fun jamming with his friends. The 1970s did seem like the golden age for his music half the time, but Extra Texture is the one moment where he seemed to bottom out after all those years of turmoil finally caught up with him.

While Dark Horse is unique for having some of the worst vocals of Harrison’s career, the fact that ‘You’ is on this album is the real miracle. His voice sounds fantastic, and the rest of the band are in fine form as well, but after the opening track, the whole thing takes a nosedive into more morose territory. Which is a shame, because this is the album where Harrison really shows off his soul chops. He had a real knack for these tunes, but he wasn’t going to get anywhere with songs like ‘Grey Cloudy Lies’.

And considering the album itself features another snippet of the song titled ‘A Bit More of You’, it was almost like they realised that they had a dud on their hands with this one. All of the jubilation that he felt after Dark Horse had to have felt good, but times were bound to get much better when he started having fun with his friends, making tunes like ‘Crackerbox Palace’ later.

‘The Nile Song’ – Pink Floyd

It’s hard to really fault Pink Floyd for their situation at the start of the 1970s. Syd Barrett had begun to slip away on every single release, and even though they were doing everything they could to help their friend, it was becoming abundantly clear that he was never going to be able to join the band in any capacity. So where the hell are you supposed to go once you’ve lost your frontman and leader? Simple: you start wondering what the world of soundtracks must be like. But More wasn’t necessarily Floyd doing what Phil Collins did with Tarzan.

Compared to their mainline albums, More is one of the more pedestrian records in their career, almost like they knew they needed a stopgap while they figured out where to go. A lot of it tends to work as subtle ambient music and the occasional catchy tune, but ‘The Nile Song’ is unlike anything that they had committed to tape before. No one really expected the band to get this heavy, but this is about as close to heavy metal as they ever got, complete with some of David Gilmour’s most haunting vocals.

There’s hardly anything substantial to get out of the rest of the record, but ‘The Nile Song’ is so good that it’s almost tempting to wonder what the band would have sounded like if they borrowed a few ideas from Black Sabbath. No, don’t look at me like that. It wouldn’t be that hard to turn ‘Money’ into a prog-rock version of ‘Iron Man’. It might be sacrilege to some fans, but if Waters could scream like he did on ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, he could certainly make a few heavy metal tunes.

‘Hollywood’ – Madonna

Half of what makes Madonna what she is always came back to the way that she presented herself. Image had a lot more substance to her than many other artists, and at the dawn of MTV, every single one of her videos felt more like major media events than proper promotion for a record. But right when she could have made one of the most pressing political statements of her career, American Life is one of the few albums that seems to fall flat on its face right out of the gate.

Could that be because of her rapping on the title track? Maybe, but the rest of the album isn’t much better, either. A lot of what she was doing felt like her attempt to merge dance and rock music together, and while that sounds great on paper, it makes for an awkward pairing when she starts breaking out the acoustics. But at the very least, ‘Hollywood’ is the kind of song that fits in with the themes of the album. Madonna knows firsthand about the vapidness of Tinseltown, so her acting like a star singing about how plastic everyone is actually is a decent jab.

But aside from the Bond theme that closes out the album, a lot of the rest of the album usually suffers from her trying and failing to merge both of her sounds together and only getting about halfway there on tunes like ‘I’m So Stupid’. Other artists have done a lot worse with a lot fewer new ideas, but given that she ended up cancelling the original video for ‘American Life’ when it was deemed too controversial, it’s hard to think of ‘Hollywood’ as anything other than her playing it safe.

‘Got to Get You Into My Life’ – Earth Wind and Fire

Now…hold on a minute. I understand that there are plenty of people who would want to kick my ass for having one of the greatest R&B cover songs of all time on a list like this. Yes, Earth Wind and Fire are beyond compare. Yes, they have made some of the greatest soul music and have vocal chops for days. But, unfortunately, yes, they are also a core piece of the version of Sgt Pepper that everyone who survived the 1970s likes to pretend doesn’t exist. 

The whole concept of The Beatles’ masterpiece may have been an acid-fuelled fever dream, but the movie is the cinematic equivalent of a bad trip. The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton are terribly cast as the titular band, and even if they had the chops to pull off some of these songs, all of the tunes on this album feel like the bizarro-world version of themselves, whether it’s sanitising the hell out of ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ or Alice Cooper getting released from a mental asylum just so he could show up and sing one of the worst versions of ‘Because’ you’ve ever heard.

So by the time that you hear Earth Wind and Fire doing their version of McCartney’s ode to pot, it’s almost like being granted a tiny bit of mercy before going back to the rest of the butcher jobs that everyone else has done. It’s always a gamble to cover a Beatles song on principle, but by making it their own, Earth Wind and Fire were the golden example of a band that actually seemed to know what they were doing when they got into the studio for a project like this. They could be counted on to make something great, but as for the rest of the album, everyone involved owes the Fab Four an apology.

‘Beyond Beautiful’ – Aerosmith

There’s a common question that has populated the circles of Aerosmith fans ever since the 2000s: when did the band get bad? It’s not that the group had suddenly decided to make terrible music overnight by any stretch, but when looking through their history, there’s definitely a distinct line that was crossed when the band gave up on making ‘Sweet Emotion’ and thought that their future was in ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’. They were following the money, and ‘Beyond Beautiful’ is the only song that sounded like the band fitting into the 2000s in the right ways.

Despite what Steven Tyler had in his head, there was no chance that the band were going to sell records to NSYNC and Britney Spears fans, and half of the album is made up of tunes with “hip” lingo that probably even looked dated at the time. When ‘Beyond Beautiful’ opens everything up, though, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you were about to listen to one of the most epic albums the band ever made. The guitars are roaring, and the use of sitar and other Eastern instrumentation on the tune is actually a welcome change of pace from what they had been doing.

But by the time the title track comes on, featuring Tyler’s processed vocals and lyrics that are goofy even by his standards, most of the hardcore fans had got the picture. The band had turned into something entirely different after Y2K, and while the new version of them wasn’t terrible, everyone knew that there was no chance that they were making another version of ‘Mama Kin’ ever again.

‘Got It Made’ – Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

The fact that Crosby, Stills Nash and Young managed to make it through the 1980s was practically a miracle. Neil Young could always be extremely fickle about the kind of music he was making, and given that he was off on his own and David Crosby was having a few brushes with death and addiction, it looked like they were in danger of becoming one of the casualties of the decade. But since Young promised that he would come back for another album if Crosby straightened himself out, we were left with the kind of album that sounds like the band are sleepwalking throughout it.

Half of the band didn’t really want to be there, but Stephen Stills did manage to deliver a stunning performance on ‘Got it Made’. The band are in rare form, the vocals are actually proper for the first time on the album, and considering what Crosby had gone through, this is the kind of serviceable tune that actually sounds like Stills wishing his bandmate well after his years of debauchery. And that’s great, because if you look at Stills’s other songs, he definitely made some of the worst on the album.

He was already having his own substance abuse issues, but given that ‘Driving Thunder’ made it on the album, Stills was probably counting his lucky stars that he had Young there to help him through finishing a lot of his songs. Every member of the band has songs that don’t work for entirely different reasons, but for an album that was all about getting that same rebellious spirit back, Stills could at least hunker down and make a decent tune if he tried just a little bit. 

‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ – Carpenters

When talking about the great forgotten bands of the 1970s, Klaatu doesn’t get brought up nearly enough. Some of their songs sounded almost otherworldly half the time they came on the radio, and even if there was the rumour that they were secretly The Beatles, it’s hardly an insult to compare them to one of the biggest bands in the world. And while ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ is a fantastic tune, it’s not exactly a song that seems to jump out as something that needs to be performed by the Carpenters.

But you have to understand that the duo were in a creative rut. The backlash they got from critics was starting to get to them, and since their albums stopped having that same punch, they needed to switch things up. And while this Klaatu cover is one of several strange detours that they take across the album Passengers, it is the only one that actually works well. Karen sounds fantastic across this kind of prog-rock instrumental, and since Richard hadn’t been singing for a while, he really gets to stretch his talents for arranging on a tune like this.

We may not have needed to hear her versions of Broadway showtunes like ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ or hear her channel her inner Steely Dan on the opening track, but even if this was one of the last major releases of Karen’s career, she deserved a lot more for making something this strange. Hell, given the extravagant phase that rock was going through a few years before, we were truly robbed of getting a full-on Carpenters side project centred around a rock opera in space. 

‘Under Pressure’ – Queen and David Bowie

There’s hardly a single person on this Earth who could ever claim that ‘Under Pressure’ isn’t one of the greatest songs ever made. Queen and David Bowie might not have had the best time getting on the same page while tracking the song, but the fact that they found common ground on a song all about finding happiness in the world made for one of the greatest duets in rock and roll history and the kind of song that will get you extra points if you can pull it off at karaoke. In fact, ‘Under Pressure’ being that good almost makes you forget that it came at the tail end of the album Hot Space. 

Because listening to the rest of the album that preceded it, Queen looked like they were ready to make a world-class dud. They were more than happy to make songs that were more danceable, but their version of making their answer to Michael Jackson’s Thriller feels way too stiff and weird. Tunes like ‘Body Language’ and ‘Staying Power’ are painfully average pop songs, so by the time that ‘Under Pressure’ does come on, it hits you like a splash of cold water when the bass riff starts.

There was no way that the stars would have aligned in just the right way to get a full-on collab album between Bowie and the rock monarchs, but maybe this one song was all they could have handled from their partnership. In fact, given that Bowie would end up making some of the more forgettable dance records of his career directly after this, maybe it was for the best that both of them quit while they were ahead.