The ’90s were a bountiful time for new music: the explosion of genres like grunge, Britpop and gangsta rap, plus the emergence of underground scenes like shoegaze and neo-soul. But the decade also produced some of the most egregious and tasteless pop songs of all time, many of which continue to haunt us to this very day. We asked eight music writers to pick one song from the ’90s that they wish they never had to hear again.
Let us know what we’re missing in the comment section below. If life is a highway, then having to listen to Tom Cochrane’s pervasive 1991 hit is the 15-kilometre stretch of the Ontario 401 between Ajax and Oshawa during rush hour on a Monday in February: dull, suffocating and seemingly endless. Cochrane first wrote a demo for “Life Is a Highway” when he was still a member of the Canadian hard rock outfit Red Rider, but the idea was nixed.
Unfortunately, he revived it a few years later following a “shocking and traumatic” visit to impoverished and war-torn countries in Africa. The experience, , inspired him to write a “happy” song: “It became a pep talk to myself ..
. saying you can’t really control all of this stuff, you just do the best you can.” The result is a shlock rock anthem of toxic positivity built around one of the goofiest chord progressions known to man, and a harmonica part that drones in and out of the mix like a bloodthirsty mosquito.
And yet, the song was mushy and inoffensive enough to become a hit, topping the Canadian charts for six weeks and receiving a second life in the mid-aughts when it was covered by the insufferable country band Rascal Flatts. That we’re forced to listen to it at every hockey game and every time we enter the supermarket some 34 years later suggests that life is not in fact a highway, but a prison of our own creation. — There’s a nostalgic sweet spot reserved for songs that are so bad they’re good.
“Summer Girls” by LFO isn’t one of them. Released in 1999, the track bookends the decade with a reminder of its worst offences: frosted tips, boy band pseudo-rap and a dime-a-dozen pop beat that sounds like it came free in a karaoke sampler. Don’t be fooled by your urge to sing along to its “Abercrombie and Fitch” chorus; being an earworm can’t mask the fact that the track’s lyrics read like a chaotic round of pop culture ad-libs.
Did you know that “Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets?” Or that “Michael J. Fox was Alex. P.
Keaton?” By the way, this is a love song. When I was younger, I remember feeling perplexed by the singer’s dating criteria: a woman who looks like a model, laughs at all of his jokes, and loves Fun Dip and Cherry Coke. It’s a sonic version of one of those dating profiles you’d block on Hinge.
LFO frontman Rich Cronin claimed the song was only intended to be a demo, which rubs more salt in the wound of our collective track record for rewarding terrible music. “Summer Girls” might have been made in jest but, decades after its release, the joke’s still on us. — There’s only one context in which I’m an ardent Billy Ray Cyrus fan.
I watched hours of “Hannah Montana” as a kid (and let’s be real, I’ll still sometimes put the TV show on as background noise when I’m working) and growing up, I loved Cyrus’s performance as washed-up country star Robby Ray Stewart. Thanks to the naïveté of childhood, I was able to ignore Cyrus’s terrible acting skills — he added some amusing comic relief to a show that arguably shaped an entire generation’s taste in pop music. Alas, Cyrus’s biggest claim to fame (beyond his much more iconic daughter) is the 1993 atrocity that is “Achy Breaky Heart.
” It’s repetitive; it’s catchy; it will ruin any wedding reception. There’s a nursery-song smarm to the song’s rhyming couplets, where “ma” pairs with “Arkansas,” and “arms” echo “farm.” Already, I regret choosing this song for this roundup: it’s bound to be stuck in my head for weeks.
There’s also a case to be made that songs like “Achy Breaky Heart” haven’t aged particularly well, given recently leaked recordings that suggest Cyrus has been verbally abusive to ex-wife Firerose and daughter Miley. One recording seemed to show Cyrus calling Miley a “skank” and a “devil,” a disappointing development for the father-daughter duo who once lit up TV screens around the world. Cyrus has since apologized for his remarks, but the bruise remains.
And hey, while he’s apologizing for missteps, can he add a “sorry” for the worst country-pop song in history? — I love most ’90s music. Even the annoying stuff, like Eiffel 65’s “Blue” and Hanson’s “MMMBop,” has a nostalgic charm. Despite this overall mellowing, I cannot abide “Smooth.
” It has always been a song to endure. It was ” ” on the drive to ringette. It was “a hot one” as we passed transport trucks on Highway 402.
It was “a hot one” at the 42nd annual Grammys when everyone cheered for the unlikely duo as they . “Smooth” is still America’s third most popular song of all time, tucked behind the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” and “The Twist” by Chubby Checker on the Billboard chart. “Its potency derives largely from the fact that it is impossible to not react to — whether with excitement, exasperation, derision, or muddled, semi-ironic affection,” “It was meme bait before memes even existed: the rare cultural product whose very existence morphed into a sort of provocation.
” I’ve tried to make my peace with this song, but it always sounds like grocery store music. I joined the “Smooth” Facebook group looking for answers, but I only found jokes. The latest has them sweeping the 2024 Olympics: “Carlos and Rob pose with their medals, which they have melted down and recast into more Grammys.
” Nothing has helped. I can’t give it my heart. I can’t make it real.
I must forget about it. — The Star quizzed some zoomers on the movies, music and television of the 1990s. The results may surprise you.
I know what you are thinking: “‘Thong Song’ isn’t that bad! It’s cheeky (pun intended), catchy and fun!” Respectfully, kick rocks. If you only knew the massive amount of talent that went into Sisqó singing lines like, “She has dumps like a truck, truck, truck,” you would be fuming, too. On top of being a waste of Sisqó’s impressive vocal range (listen to “Incomplete” for a better example of his capabilities), the song is also a waste of great production by the legendary duo Tim & Bob, who were famous for helping to cultivate the ‘90s R&B sound, working with heavy hitters like TLC, Boyz II Men, Jennifer Lopez and Madonna.
Indeed, “Thong Song” samples the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” but it was never meant for the beat to go to Sisqó. In fact, it was initially meant for Michael Jackson! They played it for Sisqó accidentally during a meeting for his debut album, “Unleash the Dragon,” and he loved it so much that he insisted on using it himself. What happens next is the wildest detail; to elevate the song even higher, Sisqó hired “Star Wars” violinist Bruce Dukov to cover and add to the “Eleanor Rigby” sample, giving us the killer riff heard throughout the song.
So, to recap: Sisqó took some King of Pop-level production, the Beatles, Ricky Martin, a violinist good enough for John Williams and a couple of ’90s R&B pioneers and made a song about peeking at some underwear. I hate Creed. More specifically, I hate “With Arms Wide Open” because I was there when it landed in the Top 40 and it’s never left me.
That’s not because the song has some deeper meaning for me. It’s because that overwrought earworm arrived just in time to ride the crest of early 2000s to commercial success before inspiring countless imitators to suck the remaining life out of the post-grunge era. “With Arms Wide Open,” one of Creed’s biggest hits, is an arena-rock ballad with sludgy guitars, preachy, unintelligible lyrics and no sense of irony.
Frontman ( ) Scott Stapp sounds like Eddie Vedder with youth pastor energy and a head injury. Yet the song has become a mainstay in every aspect of my life. It echoes over the sound system when I’m at Loblaw’s, the bridge cut off by calls for price checks.
Every time I’m at my dentist’s office, it’s playing. I try to tune out Stapp’s mawkish wail — “C’mon let’s go , and make our ” — and grind my aching teeth together, praying for more laughing gas. The 10,000th time you hear “With Arms Wide Open” and those drums pick up before the first chorus that’s when you know what it feels like to be trapped at a purity ball with the exits blocked and your ears bleeding, forever.
If you had access to the radio in the decade after Creed leached into the popular consciousness like poison into the groundwater, you’d hate “With Arms Wide Open” too. To put it in the shallow “worship music” terms that Stapp would understand, I can only tell you what’s in my heart. And my heart says this song f—king sucks.
— If I had my druthers, the inarguable choice for all-time vomit-inducing pop hit would have been Starship’s “We Built This City,” sadly co-written by Bernie Taupin, one of my favourite wordsmiths, but that disgraceful blemish occurred five years prior to a decade whose Top 40 run didn’t start off so well musically. Instead, my crap-on-a-stick candidate for worst song of the ’90s was the decade’s first chart-topper, “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You,” done by an artist whose name immediately struck fear into the hearts of taste-making mortals whenever it was mentioned: Michael Bolton. Possessing a melodramatic, thunderous voice that, when on full bore, resembled a panicked flock of bleating sheep about to be devoured by a pack of starving wolves with nary a sheepdog in sight, Bolton’s leather-lunged, air raid siren tenor became synonymous with hoisting love ballads to new heights of pomposity, especially with this so-called “song” that occupied Billboard’s No.
1 spot in 1990 for three insufferable weeks. The plot of this 4:48 piece of dreck? Bolton’s lover is leaving the blue-eyed soul stealer because she found someone new and the idiot is too self-absorbed to realize that it’s his own intolerably grating warble that fuels her grounds for departure. To be fair, I’ve met and interviewed Michael Bolton in person and here’s what I can tell you about him: he’s a nice, funny guy who does great impressions.
But if I had a choice between hearing his excruciating vocal utterances poke daggers into my ears or undergoing a marathon eight-hour root canal without the presence of dental anesthetic ...
the latter would win out every time. — Led by an infernal fiddle and incessant Eurodance synth, Rednex’s electronic bastardization of the folk classic “Cotton-Eyed Joe” is the worst song of the ’90s. At least with songs like “Barbie World” or “Ice Ice Baby” you get a pleasurable earworm hook to help wash the verses down.
But “Cotton Eye Joe” is straight drivel with no chaser. The slurred “If it hadn’t been for Cotton Eye Joe, I’d been married a long time ago” is borderline unintelligible and yet the yodle-esque delivery of Göran Danielsson sticks like a wad of gum in your hair. The song’s yelping hook is so repetitive it haunts every moment of silence in your life.
Brushing your teeth in the morning, the lines swirl in your head like toothpaste down the drain: “Where did he come from? Where did he go? Where did you come from, Cotton Eye Joe?” And as you lay your head to rest at night, again: “Where did he come from? Where did he go? Where did you come from, Cotton Eye Joe?” There’s no solace. No escape. And that’s just the chorus! Sandwiched between them is the fingers-in-nose, nasally voice of Annika Ljungberg regaling us with four lines of Cotton Eye Joe’s misadventures.
Cotton Eye Joe, will you please come back and explain yourself to Danielsson, so he’ll shut up? Please? Release us from this eternal torment..
