‘Don’t Try Suicide’ – Queen

The 1980s were the beginning of a very different time for Queen. They had been the darlings of rock and roll for so long, but they were never afraid to get a nutty idea and throw something strange into the mix. So for them, The Game might as well have been another chance for them to flex their muscles and work with a little bit of disco this time around, but they should have really run some of their lyrics by a few trusted sources before going ahead with ‘Don’t Try Suicide’.

But it’s not like the message isn’t worthwhile. The idea of a song all about reaching out to people to not end their lives is admirable, but the tone of the song is all wrong. It’s halfway to being meaningful in the verses, but the chorus feels all wrong. From the hurky-gurky rhythm to Freddie Mercury’s swarmy delivery, this could have easily been interpreted as a joke song, especially when Mercury says you shouldn’t kill yourself because nobody will care in the long run.

The rest of the album does move than enough to make up for it, but you’ve critically misunderstood suicide if you think that making something this peppy is going to convince someone to leave that existential depression behind. Because if they switched only a handful of lyrics around and threw in a few crude jokes, Trey Parker and Matt Stone could have easily created something this infectiously ridiculous.

<em>Unplugged </em>interludes – Lauryn Hill

No artist is required to bear their soul every time they make a record. Anyone can prefer when their favourite artists are honest with them, but sometimes the material hits a little close to home, and people have to take a step back before they start writing their newest tunes. It takes a long time for any musician to have the bravery to bear their real feelings in song, but Lauryn Hill unintentionally created an uncomfortable voyeur in her life during her performance on MTV Unplugged.

While the show was always meant to capture a vulnerable side of an artist, Hill was clearly not in a good state of mind when she performed that night. There are already songs on the record that are genuinely unfinished, but when she goes through the different ‘interludes’ in between songs, she may as well be talking to her therapist rather than her audience, often droning on about how her version of reality is much different from what everyone else is feeling in that crowd.

Whereas someone like Bono could sound absolutely pretentious saying something like that, it gets even worse when Hill starts singing a handful of her songs and starts breaking down in the middle of the set. For as much as artists can share what they want, the real fault lies with the people who put this record together. The editors of the show didn’t need to capture one of the reigning queens of R&B in one of her most unstable moments, but that makes for good TV, right?

‘Seamus’ – Pink Floyd

It was a long road before Pink Floyd had the kind of drive to create another great album after Syd Barrett’s departure. No one has a rulebook for how a band should move on past a lead singer, and yet, slowly but surely, Roger Waters took the reins and managed to get them back on track once Meddle dropped. They had finally found the formula that worked for them on ‘Echoes’, so why bring a random dog into play for a bit of cacophony on ‘Seamus’?

Granted, Pink Floyd were no strangers to sound design. ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ and ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ were great examples of dabbling with avant-garde pieces, but deciding to throw Steve Marriott’s dog on the track as they are playing a genuinely decent blues number is nothing but distracting. The pup might not be hurting his ears or anything, but right when the song gets going, it keeps getting interrupted at the worst possible moment.

It might have been a way for the band to spice up a song they didn’t think was all that interesting, but that’s no excuse for them to make the song deliberately hard to listen to. Because even if they made a tune they weren’t 100% confident in, this is the musical version of that old joke when someone unintentionally farts and blames the dog for it. Leave the pup out of it.

‘Get On Your Boots’ – U2

One of the biggest parts of U2’s sound is about evolution. They never liked to stay in one place for too long, and even if they had bold ideas for what they wanted their music to be, it was about them defying trends to make new avenues to explore. That usually meant trying things outside their comfort zone, but ‘Get On Your Boots On’ was the first time they felt like they were trying way too hard to sound like they were the best hip new band for the kids.

The band already had a fantastic working relationship with Apple, but even when songs like ‘Vertigo’ started to take off in the iPod commercials, this was them trying to follow the party trends of the time. Aside from sticking out like a sore thumb on No Line on the Horizon, the song has the same beat as Elvis Costello’s ‘Pump It Up’, but with none of the fun added to it, especially when Bono starts singing in his higher register.

There’s nothing wrong with a band refusing to rest on their laurels, but this offers the best case for the phrase ‘original doesn’t mean good’. U2 can expand all they want and try their hardest to move music in a new direction, but there’s no way for someone to be taken seriously when they change over the course of one song.

‘Drawbar’ – Linkin Park

It’s deceptively difficult for anyone to make a good instrumental track. The prog rock giants usually have that area covered whenever people like Yes or Rush released their magnum opuses, but Linkin Park were no slouches when making their various instrumental interludes on their albums. The scratch tracks on Hybrid Theory and Meteora were perfect chill-out moments, and even the short tracks on A Thousand Suns offered a sense of ambience, but ‘Drawbar’ was the first one where they sounded like they were wasting time.

Even earlier on The Hunting Party, the band did a better job building up the tension on ‘The Summoning’ before getting to ‘Guilty All the Same’. That was a perfect juxtaposition of someone mellowing out before hitting everyone with a slap in the face, but this feels like the kind of slow plodding schlock that wouldn’t even pass for royalty-free music you’d find online for musicians to solo over.

In fact, the only reason it’s here is probably because Tom Morello is on it, who plays some of the most forgettable licks of his career that could have been played on anyone’s first day playing the instrument. The ethos of this album was meant to bring the band back to the music they loved when they were kids, but compared to the other collaborators like Daron Malakian and Page Hamilton, this only exists because of the name on the feature.

‘Zombie Zoo’ – Tom Petty

Full Moon Fever might be the best example of record labels having no idea what they’re doing. Despite being one of the greatest albums of Tom Petty’s entire career, the initial cut of the record with ‘Free Fallin’ and ‘I Won’t Back Down’ was rejected by his record company and was considered subpar compared to everything else he had done before. While he did eventually get some suits with less of a stick up their ass to release it, their decision to beef it up may have been a mistake.

The album isn’t exactly a long sit even in its longer state, but compared to everything else they had to work with, ‘Zombie Zoo’ is far from Petty’s best offering. It does have the added value of being produced by Jeff Lynne and containing backing vocals from Roy Orbison, but had this not had 60% of the Traveling Wilburys on it, it would have been considered filler on any other Heartbreakers, and not particularly good filler at that.

Even Petty tended to agree later, saying that the album was almost perfect before he threw that song into the mix against his better judgment. And if you look at the massive box set Playback containing all of the odds and ends from these sessions, it would be easy to swap out any of the B-sides and still walk away with a better closer than what we ended up getting on the final version.

‘Oh Yeah’ – Green Day

Green Day has been around long enough to the point where some embarrassing moments were bound to happen. The Tre Cool comedy songs were good for a laugh back in the day, but it’s not like they were breaking new ground, and the less said about the experiments on the trilogy, the better off most of us will be. But while many people would single out ‘Nightlife’ as the moment everyone wanted to forget, the truly boring parts wouldn’t come until a few years later.

Because while you can still latch onto a hook on ‘Nightlife’, ‘Oh Yeah’ feels like the sketch of a Green Day song with a Joan Jett sample thrown on top of it to make it sound finished. Outside of Billie Joe Armstrong’s voice, the backing is one of the most generic things that the band have ever come up with, complete with a one-chord vamp and a riff that feels like a mix of every 2010s rock and roll cliche that was happening at the time.

There was never a moment on Father of All… where people were thinking all that hard, but compared to every Green Day album that felt like an event, this was the first time they sounded middle-aged. American Idiot may have lit a fire in a lot of kids, but all this song makes anyone want to do is grab another overpriced beer as they make their way into a stadium to listen to some “real rock and roll”.

‘Summer of Love’ – The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys’ best music has always been a bit hard to gauge. As much as Brian Wilson gave them some of the greatest melodies in popular music, there was always a little drop-off when Mike Love took control of the group while the pop genius was going through his darkest days. But even by Love’s standards for what a Beach Boys song could be, ‘Summer of Love’ is enough to make someone prematurely age 20 years over the course of its runtime.

Love always wanted to keep the band up to date with the new trends happening at the time, but whereas ‘Kokomo’ was at least a slice of mindless fun, this is like watching a drunk uncle show how cool he is. From name-checking their old hits to his feeble attempts at rapping, it’s as if Love looked at what Wilson had attempted on ‘Smart Girls’ and figured that he could make something even more ridiculous, which gets even more gross when you see the Baywatch video of them performing the tune.

It’s nice to see them attempting to change with the times, but the look on Brian’s face in the video says it all. He was checked out by this point, and while the John Stamos years of the band do hold a special place in the hearts of everyone who’s enjoyed an episode of Full House, this is the one moment where things started to get too uncomfortable for anyone to take seriously.

‘Purify’ – Metallica

Much of Metallica’s St Anger tends to sound like a therapy session that no one asked to be let in on. The thrash titans were always willing to show sides of themselves that most people would be scared to admit, but throughout the Some Kind of Monster documentary, the anger and hostility they had towards each other don’t make any part of the album any more fun to listen to. The band were going through a rough patch, but even if they were at half-capacity, ‘Purify’ is the sound most pop fans think of when they say that metal is nothing but noise and screaming.

Outside of Lars Ulrich being completely haphazard with his performance, James Hetfield sounds checked out of working at this point. He had gone through his greatest struggles throughout the recording process after going to rehab, and while that kind of pain does turn up on this song, hearing him sing so deliberately off-key is excruciating to listen to.

It might all have been done in the name of making a dark record, but at this point, neither I nor most of the listening public cared to hear what sounds like one of the greatest singers in metal getting a hernia halfway through recording one of his vocal takes. Any artist falls victim to filler more than a few times in their life, but rarely has any other band managed to make music that sounded like they were mentally short-circuiting as they were playing.

‘Wild Honey Pie’ – The Beatles

The Beatles’ White Album was always designed to be a bit of a hot mess. A lot of their greatest songs of all time end up on this record, like ‘Blackbird’ or ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, but what makes it an interesting listen is having to go through a couple of tracks that make you wonder what the hell you just listened to. And despite the infinite number of people that can’t stand ‘Revolution 9’, there’s a far better case to be made that ‘Wild Honey Pie’ is the worst song that ended up on the record.

First, ‘Revolution 9’ at least stands as a statement on the record. John Lennon wanted to make a musique concrete piece, and while it does sound scary and ominous, it does what it sets out to do a lot better than what Paul McCartney is doing here. Supposedly, Macca was messing around with a riff that he had, but since the guitars are out of tune, it doesn’t help when his strange warbly vocal delivery comes on the song.

While McCartney has said that the only reason why it ended up on the album was because Patti Harrison liked the tune, that doesn’t necessarily get him off the hook for this one. He may not have wanted ‘Revolution 9’ to be on the album, either, but even if Lennon’s piece is a lot longer than this little interlude, it seems to have more of a reason to exist than McCartney showing us what is essentially his attempt to make the most annoying song in the world.