10 zeitgeist songs we never want to hear again

‘Down With the Sickness’ – Disturbed

For all that’s been said about nu-metal, no one could deny the raw emotion behind it. The grunge movement opened everything up for rock stars to deal with their inner demons, and Disturbed did have genuinely haunting moments in their discography to choose from. But right from the very first song that people heard from them, it does get more than a little bit uncomfortable trying to look back on David Draiman’s voice.

Yes, the animalistic ‘Oo wa a a a’ noise that he makes in the beginning is practically a joke at this point, but the more you peel back the layers of the tunes, the lyrics surrounding domestic abuse has the potential to be borderline triggering for anyone who has experienced those kind of situations. And if the point wasn’t hammered home enough, it all gets downright, well, sickening by the time that you reach the midsection.

Because instead of the logical guitar solo section, all we get is the sound of the frontman roleplaying a domestic abuse episode that he had with his mother before vowing to take his revenge before the final chorus kicks in. Kudos to the band for making a tune that pitch black, but there’s never going to be another nu-metal hit that would make people want to relive childhood trauma like this.

‘Mr Roboto’ – Styx

The entire rock movement needed to undergo a change when MTV kicked in. Like it or not, every 1970s act had a new medium to work in, and they were going to have to either get with the times or move on with their lives. And while Styx did make a respectable entry into the MTV era, it’s easy to remember this as the moment where they jumped several sharks trying to stay relevant.

The concept album Kilroy Was Here is already a strange fascination in their discography, but ‘Mr Roboto’ feels like it comes from a distant planet altogether. Regardless of how anyone felt about synthesisers, this feels more like a rock and roll showtune half the time than a proper rock song, with Dennis DeYoung boasting that distinctive voice of his that was bound to become incredibly annoying when he reaches for the high notes in the chorus.

It does have the distinction of capturing the moment that prog-rock entered the conversation on MTV, but going this deep into new technology was bound to be a step too far, especially given the fact that Tommy Shaw would quit the band in protest after the tour wrapped up. There are pieces of the tune that work as a nice look at a bygone era, but even by the standards of 1984, this was already going to feel incredibly dated.

‘Cowboy’ – Kid Rock

The beauty of the 2000s was knowing that music could go in virtually any direction. With the invention of everything from nu-metal to hip-hop having a far greater prominence, it was open season in terms of where people could go. And while Kid Rock has successfully branded himself as one of the biggest trendchasers in the music industry, it’s easy to forget that he didn’t always have that gravelly voice in the beginning.

No, the ‘American Badass’ started playing himself up as a cowboy pimp repping for Detroit. It’s not like he doesn’t have the hick-hop flow down to a tee on ‘Cowboy’, but even at the time, there was no way to listen to a tune like this without it sounding incredibly cornball. Mr. Rock does have a way with words like a white-trash Walt Whitman, but the fact that the tune still holds some sense of relevance today is where things start to sound really dire.

Because had this song not become a product of its time, perhaps we could have avoided the bro-country boom that happened in the 2010s with everyone on country radio talking about their truck, drinking, or partying the night away. There’s no shame in playing up having a good time, but it gets a lot less cool when you realise what Rock represented. He came from a well-off family, and yet he somehow managed to pull one over on millions of fans who thought he was their version of Kurt Cobain.

‘Ho Hey’ – The Lumineers

Folk music will forever be the purest way for anyone to listen to music. When there’s nothing distracting the performer and the audience other than their guitar and maybe a little bit of percussion, it’s up to them to bring the sense of charisma to every song that they play. While the giants of the singer-songwriter did that perfectly, the era that came in when Mumford and Sons entered the conversation was a lot more underwhelming than people thought.

Stomp, clap, hey music did have a few bands that felt like flashes in the pan, but no one captured the zeitgeist more than the Lumineers in their prime. While ‘Ho Hey’ was nothing but a gentle little song about two people trying to make their way through life together, the legacy of the song is far from its origins. Its intentions have more to do with rootsy music, but the production behind it unintentionally became the soundtrack to anyone who has ever entered a department store in the past decade.

Which is a shame, because the Lumineers do have some genuine moments in their catalogue, only for all of them to be overshadowed by this sweet little tune. All they needed was a half-decent ukulele interlude in between everything and pop fans would have hit the absolute peak of 2010s indie pop. It checked all the boxes for a hit, but it did end up becoming a bit too saccharine along the way.

‘Addicted’ – Simple Plan

Pop-punk was always going to be a juvenile genre by nature. Blink-182 came into the world with their dick jokes firmly intact, and since one of Green Day’s first major hits was an ode to masturbation, it’s not like they were trying to be the most thoughtful band in the world. Once the genre reached its apex, though, Simple Plan became the melodramatic band that put genuinely whining into their material.

While a lot of people have taken the piss out of songs like ‘Untitled (How Could This Happen To Me)’, there’s a lot more crimes going on in ‘Addicted’. This was known as one of the band’s biggest hits for a while, but hearing an honest-to-God love/breakup song come out of someone that sounds like Weird Al Yankovic with a sinus infection was already going to be a tough sell. It wasn’t impossible, but hearing Pierre Bouvier come out of the gate with the line ‘I’m addic-/I’m addicted to you’ feels like a line that a middle schooler would carve into their desk because they thought it was funny.

To their credit, the band did end up growing a little bit and did have a handful of songs that were way less stomach-churning, but it’s not a big surprise why their best moment came from them singing the theme song to What’s New Scooby Doo?. Because regardless of how much it resonated with people back then, this was a band designed for children, and they at least knew how to look the part most of the time.

‘Cherry Pie’ – Warrant

The entire hair metal movement practically went on for about five years too long. It may have felt like a breath of fresh air once MTV kicked in, but it only took so much short hair for people to realise that things had gone a bit too over the top in places. Winger may have shown the warning signs, and Cinderella may have tried to bring some grit into everything, but if there’s a song that encapsulated the genre dying, it was ‘Cherry Pie’.

Warrant was far from the worst band in the world at the time, but when they came out with their own take on a song like Aerosmith’s ‘Love In An Elevator’, the innuendos started to become a little too on-the-nose, even for a song that’s all about sex. It’s no secret that the Sunset Strip lived every word of the ‘sex drugs and rock and roll’ credence, but when looking at the video where they spray down a model and end up dropping a piece of pie in her lap, it was clear that it had become completely ridiculous.

And when the grunge wave came in to blow everything out of the water, it wasn’t a shocker that Warrant was one of the first people on the chopping block when it came to tearing down the LA rock sound. Kurt Cobain certainly had his fair share of digs at bands like Bon Jovi and Guns N’ Roses, but this was the kind of song that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was designed to eradicate from the charts.

‘Courtesy of the Red White and Blue’ – Toby Keith

The entire post-9/11 era was a dark time for any American to find their way through. Regardless of how united the country was that day when trying to help the victims of the Twin Towers falling, everyone seemed to walk away with a different reaction to everything. While everyone was completely justified in feeling angry, hearing Toby Keith come out with one of the most passive-aggressive patriotic songs of all time may have been a case of rallying a bit too soon.

Yes, there were many people behind the Bush administration leading our country to war, but Keith’s approach on this song is a lot more brainless than most people would have wanted to hear. There’s hardly a way not to feel angry at terrorists after a tragedy, but whereas Bruce Springsteen had a lot more heart trying to get everyone through their grief, Keith figured that the best way for everyone to feel better was to take up a weapon of their own so that they could bomb the hell out of the Middle East for doing such a thing.

And it’s not like the rock and roll faithful didn’t let him have it, either, with Kris Kristofferson eventually reprimanding Keith for being this war-mongering figure if he didn’t actually live through any of the carnage of something like Vietnam. In no way should people not have the right to be angry at this problem, but it’s not going to do anyone good to champion a song that spews hatred back at the enemy.

‘Eve of Destruction’ – Barry McGuire

The Vietnam War era was always going to be prime fodder for rock musicians in the late 1960s. There was no silver lining for many of those young men forever lost in those jungles, but looking through the music coming out at the time, everyone from Black Sabbath to Neil Young to Bob Dylan were the ones calling for everyone to lay down their weapons and settle everything with civility. But for everyone painting a dark picture of the times, Barry McGuire was practically the king of pessimism on ‘Eve of Destruction’.

It’s not like he doesn’t have his fair share of points, though. Despite not writing it, McGuire does seem genuinely pissed off at the issues going on in the world, whether that’s talking about people being old enough to fight but not to vote or watching the Jordan River run red with blood. All that anger is entirely justified, but the only problem is that there’s no real resolution behind a song like this outside of being a cry of anger.

Granted, there are many genres that have songs without that kind of resolution, but for every Dylan song that sought to teach someone a lesson or give people hope for the future, McGuire’s biggest hit only serves to instill fear in people for not paying attention to the horrors going on in the world. In fact, McGuire might have been ahead of his time in that respect. Because if you think about, everything he’s singing is practically the 1960s-equivalent of doomscrolling.

‘Eat You Alive’ – Limp Bizkit

By the start of the 2000s, it was an extremely lucrative time to be an angry white kid on TRL. As much as the nu-metal movement was reviled by concerned parents and critics, there’s a reason why Korn and Limp Bizkit sold millions of records. People related to them in the same way that they related to the dark comedy of someone like Eminem, but at the height of their career, Fred Durst led his band through one of the most overtly misogynistic songs to hit the rock charts at the time.

‘Eat You Alive’ is already an off-putting title, but when going through the entire song, it’s clear that Durst is going full-on sexual predator. From the first verse alone, he almost seems to have a vendetta against women who dare to not look in his general direction, and when he does manage to attempt anything flirtatious, it all comes back to him wanting to sniff a woman’s panties.

The misogynist angle always followed the band around since day one, but it wasn’t until this tune where the whole thing seemed completely explicit. It could have very well have been a brilliant marketing move on Durst’s part to appeal to the 2000s version of incels, but judging by the fact that he ends up winning the girl at the end of the video, there’s no choice but to assume he thought he penned the greatest love song he could think of.

‘Disco Duck’ – Rick Dees

The disco movement has had one of the strangest trajectories in music history. Although the music was beloved all across the world when it first began, hearing people disparage it for years as a joke made the whole thing flip back around to the point where everyone loves the genre again. There’s nothing wrong with that four-on-the-floor beat as long as there’s a good tune behind it, but if those disco demolition kids had any convincing argument about how terrible the genre was, ‘Disco Duck’ would be its prime candidate.

Although there’s nothing wrong with novelty songs finding their way up the charts, radio DJ Rick Dees managed to ride the zeitgeist all the way to number one with one of the most mindless songs of all time. It’s clear that the whole thing was being played for laughs, but when the joke only comes from the fact that Dees is being painfully unfunny while a discount Donald Duck sings along in the background, it’s not exactly when this became one of the most hated songs from the time.

And while other musical crimes like ‘Disco-rilla’ did end up finding their way onto the hit parade, the size and scope of ‘Disco Duck’ is still one of the harshest blows to the genre’s credibility. It worked well whenever it was blaring out of Studio 54, but when listening to this song, all you can picture is the cheesy discount disco outfit that someone buys to look cool at a Halloween party.