From Muse to U2: 10 unintentionally hilarious rock songs
All good rock and roll has to have at least a little sense of humour about itself. Even though there are more than a few bands who take themselves way too seriously every time they have the spotlight, getting the audience on your side sometimes means poking fun at yourself or making the occasional tongue-in-cheek song to get everyone going. Artists like U2 certainly got people laughing at their tunes, but were the songs in question really meant to be laughed at?
Because it’s not like these bands intended to make a comical song when they entered the studio. All of the songs on this list were at least meant to be taken seriously in their time, but when you look at them without the nostalgia goggles, they sound like the kind of period pieces that could put most parody artists to shame.
Then again, it’s not just limited to songs that have not aged well. Even in their time, most of these tracks were pretty funny, if only to see some of the biggest artists in the world either try a new genre on for size or embarrass themselves with some new sound. It’s worth it to experiment, but some fans are hoping that they never try these sonic avenues for the rest of their careers.
Granted, the pedigree of every artist makes the laughing mean different things to every listener. We might be laughing, but the only reason we are doing this is to keep ourselves from crying, knowing that some of our favourite acts ended up diving off a cliff on one of their hits. They had the potential to do great things, but what we were left with is some of the most questionably funny moments in rock history.
10 unintentionally funny rock songs:
10. ‘We Are Fucking Fucked’ – Muse
There’s usually a decent place for swearing in every rock song. The biggest rock stars of their time talked about something they were passionate about every time they played, so it usually requires strong language to get their point across. There is such a thing known as subtlety in music, but it appears that Muse lost that trait in the final song of their latest album, Will of the People.
Although most of the track list of the album is the traditional bombastic Muse that everyone remembers, hearing Matt Bellamy sing about the end of the world with the language of a 13-year-old who discovered just what the word ‘fuck’ is is actually pretty funny, if only for how much drama he puts into the chorus every time he sings it.
If this had been considered a parody, it might have worked, but considering the rest of the album was about the same type of nameless dystopian leaders trying to take away their freedoms, it can only be played as sincere for most of its runtime. Muse has the capacity to make great music, but leave it to them to turn in lyrics that felt like lines from a Team America soundtrack that Trey Parker threw out.
9. ‘Troublemaker’ – Weezer
Part of Weezer‘s charm back in the day was how much they were anti-rock stars. Regardless of how much crunch they put into their guitars or the amount of incredible riffs they had, no one was looking at someone like Rivers Cuomo and thought that he should be on the same level as the Robert Plants of the world. Cuomo wanted that kind of adulation by the 2000s, and during Weezer’s reinvention, ‘Troublemaker’ became one of the most glorious dad rock songs of all time.
While there’s a time and place for retro rock, this song feels like it’s being sung from the perspective of someone who believes nobody can touch them. This kind of braggadocious delivery works well on almost any other rock song would be great, but considering it’s the same guy who once wore Buddy Holly glasses and sang about playing Dungeons and Dragons, it just comes off as a nerd doing what he thinks being cool is.
It came with the energy of one of the towering rock gods of yesteryear, but the more the song goes on, the more it feels like it’s coming from one of those dads who had a band back in the day but never really got to see the big time. Cuomo could certainly take on any character he wanted, but seeing him try on his rock star chops is like watching David Byrne suddenly trying to be Gene Simmons.
8. ‘Bugs’ – Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam were never that comfortable with being mainstream. As much as it might be nice to have people chanting your name in stadiums, no one in Seattle expected their scene to get famous that quickly, becoming ground zero for the hottest bands in the world virtually overnight. Vitalogy may have been Eddie Vedder’s way to shake off the casual Pearl Jam fans, but ‘Bugs’ feels like it’s trying to piss you off from the moment it starts.
When the album delivers decent songs like ‘Nothingman’, it works great, but halfway through the record, Vedder straps on his accordion and goes berzerk. Much like the other “experimental” songs of decades past, Vedder delivers a spoken-word song about the bugs crawling around his room and whether he should kill them or become one with them.
The word “alternative” was just starting to become a genre of music at the time, but hearing Vedder croak out what sounds like a forgotten piece from a Tom Waits album is almost compelling if it weren’t incoherent throughout the entire track. This feels more like an outlet for every member of the group to vent through their instruments than a proper song, and my sympathies go out to any Pearl Jam who had to see this played live.
7. ‘Get On Your Boots’ – U2
Most of the time, we have to tell U2 to tone down some of their more serious moments. Bono is definitely a commanding presence whenever he steps up to the microphone, but there are just as many times that he puts his foot in his mouth by becoming too pretentious or inflating his head to the size of Mars. So a U2 song that’s all about getting back to writing great tunes should be fine, right? Well, not quite.
Although No Line on the Horizon boasts some of the dreariest songs that U2 ever committed to tape, ‘Get On Your Boots’ at least has some energy to it. Once Bono comes in with the massive singalong chorus, though, it tends to feel like him making what he thinks the pop market of the 2000s wanted, practically begging for some hotshot producer to remix it into something almost salvageable.
There are decent callback lines to tracks like ‘Pump It Up’ by Elvis Costello in Bono’s melody, but this isn’t the kind of sexy, nervy punk rock song most people thought of. This is just Bono staking his claim as a rock god who wanted to have a pop hit, but he needed to really hear the truth: no amount of chant-along backing vocals automatically makes a song good.
6. ‘Again’ – Alice in Chains
For most of Alice in Chains’ post-Dirt life, they were practically being held together by duct tape and faith. Regardless of the amount of great material that they could still work with, Layne Staley’s addiction to heroin was leading him to an early grave, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. We needed levity where we could find it, but ‘Again’ probably wasn’t what any of us were expecting.
After the band’s self-titled album started with songs like ‘Grind’, ‘Again’ feels like it should be a natural extension of the first tune. There’s still a lot of grit in the delivery, but there’s also a more metallic sound that they got through touring with metal bands before ’DOOT DOOT’ comes in to wreck the vibe.
Although they created something far more menacing than anything they had done before, the backing vocals on this song feel like they were intentionally put in to throw people off. Given that Staley was collapsing and the rest of the band were struggling with their own demons, though, it’s nice to know that they at least had a little bit of fun in the studio.
5. ‘Teardrops’ – George Harrison
George Harrison’s career was never about the gigantic hit singles. If he had one that reached the top of the charts, it might have been nice, but that didn’t matter as long as he was singing what he was feeling in his heart half the time. By the time people stopped riding the hype train of songs like ‘My Sweet Lord’ and ‘Crackerbox Palace’, Harrison got to read the riot act by his record company and out popped one of the most dated songs a Beatle has ever made.
Since his record company felt that the “right” George Harrison album needed a breakup song, Harrison went back to the drawing board for Somewhere In England with what he thought his label wanted to hear with ‘Teardrops’. While it’s typically a good thing to do what your boss tells you to do, Harrison’s instincts are really working against him here.
Dominated by some of the squelchiest keyboards this side of A Flock of Seagulls, Harrison’s breakup ballad feels like something that you would come out of an Adult Swim show about a 1980s rock band down on their luck. It might have been more commercial for his label, but a hit single is sometimes about making something better than making a track that could be featured in a commercial.
4. ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ – Limp Bizkit
The idea of taking a band like Limp Bizkit seriously really isn’t something anyone should do. The nu-metal scene was populated by some of the most intense acts of the late 1990s, but no one was looking to get smarter by taking cues from a guy wearing a backwards hat and sounding like a 4th-grade bully. Fred Durst did have a sensitive side, and the rock world has never forgiven him for showing it.
While it feels like cheating to put a cover song on a list like this, hearing Durst try to match the intensity of Roger Daltrey is one of the funniest attempts at depth that any band has ever tried. As if his monotone voice isn’t enough, the robotic tone playing throughout the interlude feels like they crammed whatever angsty poetry they could into a Speak and Spell and hoped for the best.
There’s no shame in trying to expand your sound, but this is the kind of cover tune that could have been pumped out by someone at their local pub and not be that different. Even for the most hardened nu-metal fans in existence, there’s a good chance that this one song is the reason they started to grow out of that phase of their adolescence.
3. ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ – Pink Floyd
Let’s get one thing clear before we start: The Wall is a bonafide masterpiece from Pink Floyd. Roger Waters’s internal pain about being a rock star is still one of the most compelling rock operas ever made, and hearing him create an entire world throughout the course of one album is a superhuman feat to pull off. If you take them outside the context of the story, ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ comes off more pitiful than it does sympathetic.
It’s not like no one can see what Waters was going for here. This is the point where Pink hits an all-time low just before closing himself off from the world, and hearing him crying to himself could have been a nice bit of emotional pathos. Instead we get Waters’s attempts at being an actor, and it comes off like someone trying to overenunciate to the back of the crowd with a beginner’s level command of their voice.
A lot of people would still stand by this kind of song by looking at it in the context of the album as a full-stage production, but it’s not that simple. The song still has to work as a piece of music before anything else, and without all the bells and whistles, ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ is the first moment when The Wall starts becoming uncomfortable to listen to.
2. ‘Let’s Put the X in Sex’ – Kiss
Part of every rock and roller’s growth as an adult is getting to the point where you can laugh at Kiss lyrics. Even though they have written anthems that have stood the test of time for a reason, a lot of their lyrics surrounding sex are so hamfisted that you’d swear that they were being written out by actual swine. Gene Simmons may have the more deplorable lyric sheet, all things considered, but Paul Stanley takes the cake for one of the dumbest odes to carnal knowledge imaginable.
Whereas most Kiss songs can be chalked up to innocent fun, this feels like the kind of song that could be used as a parody for the entire genre of hair metal. Sure, Kiss started the idea of glammifying rock and roll well before the Poisons of the world, but this toothless attempt at writing a sexy jam sounds like Stanley is a snot-nosed kid trying to figure out what makes a good pickup line and failing miserably.
And since it was the 1980s, let’s not forget that casual rock and roll misogyny, especially in the video where Stanley looks more like a hair-metal Tarzan trying to find his next prey. Kiss’ days in makeup may always get the spotlight a lot more often, but their turn as 1980s superstars reads like someone who listened to the entire Steel Panther discography and didn’t realise it was a joke.
1. ‘My World’ – Guns N’ Roses
Guns N’ Roses should be commended, at the very least, for making songs that actually felt like rock and roll. Half of the greatest hair metal bands sounded like they made most of their songs on a committee, so hearing someone sculpt actual hooks that you could sing along to and not singing about partying all night all the time was a breath of fresh air. Once Axl Rose felt the need to stretch out, though, his attempt at being the hair metal Nine Inch Nails is one of the strangest tonal clashes you will ever hear.
While most of Use Your Illusion is about making the most gargantuan statement possible, ‘My World’ is where they chuck everything out the window. Outside of it featuring one of the most wretched industrial beats known to man, hearing Rose sing about how no one should step up to him is like watching a middle school bully taking on the biggest dude he can find before he gets laid out on his ass.
‘Get In the Ring’ could be even funnier by hearing Rose list off the names of actual music critics, but ‘My World’ might actually surpass if only for where it’s placed on the album. This was supposed to be their defining statement as one of the reigning kings of rock, but hearing everything wrap up with this song almost implies that this long journey was all for nothing in the end.
