10. Can't Touch This - MC Hammer: This one was ridiculous even for the early 90s. Big parachute pants, dance moves no normal person would perform, and even spandex make this one memorable for all the wrong reasons.
9. Big Me - Foo Fighters: I could see how some people could judge this one either way. The Mentos parody is funny the first time, but not for a whole music video. Laughed the first time and just changed the channel the rest of the times. Plus, I don't think this image really presented the Foo Fighters at all.
8. I Disappear - Metallica: This song is probably more notable for the sparks it ignited begining the feud over Napster and illegal music downloads. But the video is full of self ego with a bunch of old rockers trying to look cool doing movie style action sequences. The whole section where Lars is running through a room with glass exploding all around him kills the video. He looks like he is about ready to cry and is deathly afraid of getting hurt. It didn't really scream action hero to me.
7. Lets Get Physical - Olivia Newton-John: First, they play dumb on the obvious connotations of the song by having it look like a workout video. Next, they take a sexy song with Olivia looking pretty good and stick her with a bunch of out of shape sweaty men. That is a major miscalculation for anyone involved. It was all over the top and very unappealing.
6. Garden of Eden - Guns N Roses: They filmed the band in a warehouse through a fish eye lens and had the words scrolling across the bottom with the bouncing ball. Yeah that's it. I had a VHS of all the Guns N Roses videos and I even used to enjoy most of them. But this one was always skipped because it made me want to stab my eyes out and made me think how November Rain should be made into a movie.
5. MMM Bop - Hanson: Maybe the worst thing was that you couldn't watch music videos and not have this one come up every 20 minutes during its hay day. The footage of the kids playing in their house and even roller blading through a parking lot could be tolerable. But the stupid sequences of the 3 brothers trying to act out scenes in front of a green screen, it screamed corny. It showed they didn't know what the hell do to with them.
4. Californication - Red Hot Chili Peppers: I wouldn't care if it was about the Chili Peppers, this is a video game I would not play. Yes, maybe I am ignoring the deeper meaning of the song, but it was a cheap attempt to try to appeal to the younger gamer generation. It all seemed too blatant of an attempt to be cool during their comeback. What makes it worse is that they didn't need to be, they already were cool.
3. Waiting On A Friend - The Rolling Stones: Maybe their age caught up to them on this one. It looks like they basically phoned it in. I could have made this video just walking around for 20 minutes. The atmosphere of New York is nice, but we should all expect a little more out of the biggest rock band in the world.
2. Ray of Light - Madonna: This one was an assault on the senses. The super speed clips of people going through life don't really mean too much. An old Madonna dancing in front of the camera trying too hard to look young and fresh is by far the worst. Moving at speeds out of sequence with the music never really makes sense to me, it looks fake.
1. Black or White - Michael Jackson: With all great success lurks the biggest possibility for epic failure. I remember being an impressionable youth sucked into watching this video premiere after the Simpsons on Fox. Everything about the video is ridiculous & the ending still is absurd and painful. Whatever good meaning he was trying to put into the song (and I will agree there is a good message there) was lost by his insane vision. When your reasoning for smashing cars, grabbing your crotch & dancing like a freak is that it was your interpretive dance against racism, you probably are not going to connect with most of America. Just as Thriller was the signal of Michael reaching the top, Black or White was the sign he was turning into the freak show he is today.
Almost Bad Enough:
Call Me Al - Paul Simon
Party All The Time - Eddie Murphy
You Might Think - The Cars
I Believe In A Thing Called Love - The Darkness
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2 comments:
I think the hardest part of picking the worst list is trying to get over not picking songs that are just bad, which in turn make it hard for the video not to be crap.
I wonder what our list would look like if we had to pick good songs or songs we like, but that had bad videos.
I guess that could jump a video onto the worst list if it damages a genuinely good song.
I would say mine is at least half & half. I would say I definately dont like Black or White & Ray of Light. The others I have listened to with some kind of regularity.
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