It’s every artist’s goal to have a few memorable melodies in their arsenal on every album. Despite wanting to push themselves, it’s always better to leave the audience wanting one of those magical hooks whenever a song is played. But even giants like The Beatles have a few songs they could have easily discarded.
After all, no artist is perfect, and even if they think they have made one of the greatest songs of all time, there’s always bound to be a few people who say that they are in over their heads or are trying to make a tune that’s deliberately annoying. Even if it’s a masterpiece in the eyes of the author, there are more than a few songs on this list that are either vilely offensive or grossly underwritten by their standards.
It’s not even that hard to see why the most hated songs have gained the reputation they have. Some of them feel like they’re designed to be filler half the time, but sometimes it goes from being a bad song to a mild disturbance to a tune that should be surgically removed from people’s memories once they have had to endure them.
There are often moments where the artists themselves have disavowed their songs, but the fact that some of these records actually made the track listing on their mainline albums speaks to a whole different level of delusion rather than being a lapse of judgment. They might be funny to point and laugh at, but most of us are better off forgetting this kind of thing ever happened and move on to better things.
‘Wild Honey Pie’ – The Beatles
The Beatles’ White Album was always designed to be a bit of a hot mess. A lot of their greatest songs of all time end up on this record, like ‘Blackbird’ or ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, but what makes it an interesting listen is having to go through a couple of tracks that make you wonder what the hell you just listened to. And despite the infinite number of people that can’t stand ‘Revolution 9’, there’s a far better case to be made that ‘Wild Honey Pie’ is the worst song that ended up on the record.
First, ‘Revolution 9’ at least stands as a statement on the record. John Lennon wanted to make a musique concrete piece, and while it does sound scary and ominous, it does what it sets out to do a lot better than what Paul McCartney is doing here. Supposedly, Macca was messing around with a riff that he had, but since the guitars are out of tune, it doesn’t help when his strange warbly vocal delivery comes on the song.
While McCartney has said that the only reason why it ended up on the album was because Patti Harrison liked the tune, that doesn’t necessarily get him off the hook for this one. He may not have wanted ‘Revolution 9’ to be on the album, either, but even if Lennon’s piece is a lot longer than this little interlude, it seems to have more of a reason to exist than McCartney showing us what is essentially his attempt to make the most annoying song in the world.