How the “worst record ever heard” set off a trend of intentionally bad songs
There are few things worse in this world than a truly terrible song, but a truly awful, racially insensitive song is certainly one of them. That is precisely what Harry Stewart released into the world with ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’. Tragically, it would prove to be a wildly influential piece of music, proving once again that mistakes are an unfortunate pillar of our crooked society, keeping it forever off-kilter.
Stewart was a dialect comic, which is an unfortunate start. Dialect comedy was a term coined by David Marc when the social scholar analysed the style of sitcoms that proved pervasive from the 1920s up until the early ’50s in the US, whereby the joke largely centred on exaggerating stereotypes. Stewart was a calamitous master of this regrettable art.
So, when music began to rise in prominence, he found a way of working his craft into the expanding market of songs. He would use his chameleonic ways to create novelty bands that released tracks under various aliases, one of them being Harry Kari and His Six. This short-lived act decided to take on the 1925 hit ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’ and bring an oriental twist to it by appropriating and distressingly exaggerating Japanese stereotypes and sounds. This was also done very badly, if that matters much.
It was done so badly, in fact, that after one of its first spins on a large radio station, the disc jockey auspiciously announced it as “the worst record I have ever heard“. Rather than condemn it to the ash heap of history, this damned utterance propelled it towards hit status. People simply wanted to hear the worst song ever in the obverse reaction to being compelled to listen to the best song ever (which is William Shatner’s ‘That’s Me Trying‘).
The track became somewhat of 1953’s equivalent of a viral sensation, racistly gracing the airways with an aura of atrocity between records of emerging rock ‘n’ roll. With the music industry becoming increasingly competitive during this period and musicians scrambling to finally make money after years of striking against recorded music putting them out of jobs, a wave of them decided that if Stewart could have a hit with the “worst” song, then surely they could too.
Thus, it sadly came to pass that a string of skilled musicians intentionally trying to make disasterpieces became widespread. However, rather than kickstarting something truly despairing, it also weirdly tapped into eccentricities, and you had an avant-garde branch of intentionally terrible music that is certainly not without interest.
One of which was the other 1953 odious hit, ‘There’s a New Sound’ by Tony Burrello. The track simply repeats the chorus five times over each, resulting in a pitch shift as it reaches a caterwauling crescendo. “New sound … the strangest sound that you have ever heard”, the lyrics decree, “the sound that’s made by worms”.
So, as far back as 1953, there is proof that nobody has ever gone broke overestimating people’s appetite for a culture that sinks to the baseless depths of depravity.
