Author: MR90

There are 10 Collective Soul songs on this list, which is about twice as many as I thought there would be. The band’s first two albums have some enduring hits, the third one I didn’t remember existing at all, and the one that this tune comes from I assumed came out in the 2000s. “No More No Less” is harmless. It’s a rock band messing with the electronic sounds of the times to get played on the radio. And it worked. So why is this tune listed all the way down at 1,622? Because after the chorus, singer Ed Rowland proclaims, “So let’s shake it like this!” and what follows is the dullest, lamest, whitest, least-shake-it-like-this-possible wah-wah guitar you’ve ever heard. I laughed out loud the first time I heard it, and then laughed again each time he repeated it throughout the song, which I’m assuming wasn’t their intention.

The AV Club used to run a tremendous column every December entitled, “The Least Essential Albums” of the Year. It wasn’t a list of the worst music (though most of it was bad), rather it was a collection of music that seemingly had no audience. A recent-ish example being the collection(s) of Sinatra covers performed by the guitar player from Creed.

One of the most inessential albums of 1997 would have to be Deconstructed, an hour-plus worth of “electronica” remixes of songs by Bush. Even Gavin Rossdale didn’t seem to be too on board with it, saying: “It was an interesting idea, to try and mix two completely different genres, maybe influence the whole dance and techno scene with some good old fashioned rock. In a way, they are the old singles, but remixed they’ve got a completely different slant which is certainly interesting.”

Maybe I would have thought higher of this song if the album had been called Certainly Interesting.

The section about Candlebox in Mark Yarm’s excellent grunge oral history Everybody Loves Our Town makes you feel bad for these guys. It’s not their fault that they came from Seattle but didn’t spend years toiling in the underground club scene. It’s not their fault that Madonna gave them a ton of money so her record label could leave a big ol’ checkmark in an empty box that said “grunge band from Seattle,” and it’s not their fault that MTV played their videos non-stop. However, it is their fault that a lot of their music wasn’t very good, including this dour monster ballad that sounds like its performed by a high-school football player pouring his heart out five minutes after picking up a guitar for the first time.

Welsh rockers The Alarm were contemporaries of U2 in the 1980s, and had a string of solid, U2-adjacent singles like “Stand,” and “Rain in the Summertime.” Much like U2’s maligned Rattle and Hum LP, this tune seems indebted to the American Blues, and it’s pretty off-putting to hear a successful rocker go on and on about having the “Workin’ man blues” over some late 80’s beer commercial riffage.

I recently asked myself an important question: Which musical artist have I heard the most in my life without ever choosing to listen to? It’s possible the answer is The Offspring. They’ve been rock radio mainstays for over 30 years, and have a dozen songs you may hear in a restaurant, store, or other public location. And yet, I’ve never wanted to listen to this band.

Sure, they have some songs I don’t mind, which we’ll get to eventually. But they have more songs that I strongly dislike, including these two – which means that three of the first dozen of these 1,638 songs impressively come from the same album. A fourth one is coming later, and that one I actually dig, since it’s not a novelty tune about white guys getting too much into rap culture (aka “that brand new thing”), or a song about not wanting to deal with a girl who has emotional issues, which holds up about as well as the hair braids that Offspring singer Bryan “Dexter” Holland wore in the 90s.

My three least favorite forms of comedy are: old people doing young people things, blogging from the perspective of your own baby, and people rapping who shouldn’t be rapping. Rap music has been popular for decades, and to this day, people are still trying to get a laugh out of awkward white guys trying to rhyme. “One Week” is that in a nutshell. The Barenaked Ladies seem embarrassed by the popularity of it, and indeed they should.

Meanwhile, have you heard “Alcohol?” Of course not. That’s because it’s a jaunty little tune about having a drinking problem. Like “One Week,” it sucks. Unlike “One Week,” there’s no rapping on it. So at least there’s that.

Danny Elfman took a break from his successful movie scoring career to reunite his popular new wave band (minus the “Oingo” and the popularity), and return with a eight minute long 90s alt rock song about how empty 90s alt rock is. The rare mid-90s modern rock song that gives “performed by a divorced Dad” energy and not “about a divorced Dad” energy. 

The musical embodiment of “My culture is not your costume,” from what’s possibly the worst named band of the 90s – which is really saying something. Hard pass, Daddy-o.  

Before 1994, the Modern Rock chart had only faint traces of hippies. An Edie Brickell tune here, some early Lenny Kravitz over there, and that was it. Was it the surprise popularity of hippie-adjacent Counting Crows the gateway drug for the likes of Dave Matthews, Phish, and Blues Traveler to take up space alongside Hole and Soundgarden on the Modern Rock chart as the decade moved on? Perhaps. As for the Spin Doctors, they had two massive hits before Adam Duritz made the Modern Rock world safe for dreadlocked white guys of the non-aggressive variety. So while we won’t be seeing “Two Princes” or “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” on this list, we will see this nonsense.

The Spin Doctors were quite adept at writing Steve Miller Band-esque crunchy catchy pop songs that sound great on the radio, but “Cleopatra’s Cat” was very much not one of them. This jam leans heavily into the cringey, jazzy, scat singing tendencies the band was mocked for, and throws in a brief interlude of the Middle Eastern melody that school kids once used as a basis to sing about underpants. “Two Princes” may be playing at your local grocery store as we speak, but this is one song you’ll never hear at Whole Foods.

It’s incredibly easy to dunk (pun intended) on this song, which is indeed incredibly annoying. But the main issue isn’t what it sounds like, it’s that “All Star” was written with the sole purpose of appearing during sports highlight reels in perpetuity. The band claims it was written as “an anthem for outcasts,” which is like saying that Slim Jims were made for vegetarians.