Idolator

If you're not voting for "Here's To The Night", clearly you haven't heard it.

How is Doll Parts a ballad?

This is too difficult. Like deciding between dog shit and cat shit. You can make your arguments, but at the end of the day, it's all excrement.

Gotta go with Lifehouse on this one.

Five minute major for sneaky Jesus rock.

@hortense: It is too hard to pick just one.

it was a tough choice between lifehouse & eve 6, but i went with the successor to Apollonia & Vanity. and for what it's worth, there are at least 3 songs on that list that i freely admit to enjoying.

Orwell talked about the boot stamping down on a human face forever; this is the boot kicking in your eardrums.

@DanGibson: That got my vote too. It was my graduation song in high school and was the last "slow dance" at our prom. People actually started to cry when the song started. Needless to say, this was the point at which I decided that I wasn't going to speak to any of these people after graduation. People love this sappy shit.

Pillory me if you must, but I'd like to say that this list is *not* all shit. If I were listening to that station and these songs came on, I would not feel the need to change the channel for at least half of those songs.

I would, however, be likely to pull a muscle in my shoulder/arm/hand/finger due to the speed with which I was lunging for the dial if any of ## 4, 5, 11, 15, or 16 started playing, for sure.

Also, Paula Cole's "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?" and "I Don't Want To Wait" would probably be channel-changers for me.

Oh man, it's so hard to choose...I went with Live after much soul-searching. It was hard to ignore Lifehouse and Eve 6 and ESPECIALLY motherfuckin' Default (and that is their title, much like "Rocker Tommy Lee"), but I feel Live really kickstarted the gut-earnest, pseudo-Christrock phenomenon that was the only mianstream alternative to nu-metal and sludgy post-grunge for the better part of a decade. Slow enough for your parents to "rawk" out to, but "hard" enough to still delude one into thinking that it was somehow not just MOR pap. And Christ, the self-importance...

Fuck, I should have picked other...the actually "winner" isn't even on there.

"Freshmen" by the Verve Pipe.

ECH.

Any song by Sugar Ray is immediately the worst song on the list

"NOW That's What I Call (insert elitist, snarky smackdown, possibly alluding to the fact that any one of these songs could have been chosen as the worst)!"

You haven't truly lived until you've heard my impression of Stephan Jenkins singing "Jumper."

@TheMojoPin: "Freshman" for sure...and also Sublime's "What I Got"...

That Fuel track still causes me pain, but I've come to really, really hate the lyrics to Glycerine.

All of these tunes, with their bombast-os attempting the slow burn before they get all loud 'n hard 'n shit, trying to hold off climax as desperately as a sixteen-year-old virgin with a tube of Lidocaine, are about equally bad; so the prize has to go for quantity, rather than quality.

To wit: the worst of these songs is the one that makes me suffer longest. I don't have the respective runtimes in front of me, and I'm sure as hell not going to check, but I have a gut feeling that Counting Crows is the longest - it's even got "long" in the title! - so it gets my vote.

"What's Up" by 4 Non Blondes is a million times worse than any of these choices, though.

to paraphrase the minutemen, 18 way tie for last. they are all equally craptacular.

I'd pick 'every single one, except maybe "Santeria." But we've already argued about that song, and my side lost. So fuck it - burn 'em all!

Though "Lightning Crashes" definitely has it's eyes on the prize, both in terms of craptitude and subject matter, I have to ask, where, oh where, is "I Want You" by Savage Garden?!

Oh, my god. Eve 6? I had forgotten about that band but yeah, boy did they suck. Yuck. I'm getting this for people I hate this Christmas. And Default. I cannot forget about Default. I'm Canadian so CANCON laws pretty much guarantee that you'll hear them on the radio once a day. Urghh.

Lifehouse in 07!

wow. i forgot so many of those songs. thanks for bringing back terrible memories. also, i forgot that i actually enjoy Bush. interesting.

I went with the Sugar Ray song, but I can't blame anybody for voting for any of the others. I'd probably actually change my vote to "Here's To the Night," but I only scanned over the options.

Haha! Yeah... those songs suck! Whew, glad you guys made fun of them!

[typing in credit card information]

Seriously, though... CDs like this ONLY exist for hipster bar jukeboxes. Sometimes you just need to here "Linger", but who wants to invest in the other 11 songs?

Having said that, though -- "Here's to the Night" needs to burn. God DAMN, Eve 6 sucks.

(final side note -- Verve Pipe's "Villains" was the album purchase that drove me to Kazaa for the next 6 years)

i torrented this collection for a 90's party i threw last summer...the commercial made it irresistible.

I voted for "Glycerine." that song is like an 8-year-old reading Hamlet. it beat Live narrowly because Live have even worse songs, plus when I'm really feeling self-loathing and in the mood for that sort of thing I go straight to "Pure Massacre."

(note: at no point in history have I ever actually owned "Pure Massacre," nor do I intend to unless a Project X necessitates it. I just mean in my mental iPod.)

this is basically the most upsetting poll i've ever seen.

@Matos: Wait, like the Silverchair song "Pure Massacre"? Wasn't that song "Tomorrow" the ballad? Am I missing something here? The fact that it's not even noon yet on Monday and I'm talking about Frogstomp is depressing.

Who did Soul Asylum pay off to be excluded from that list?

Hello? Staind? Staind people! I can't even articulate an argument here. It's...Staind. It's just Staind. If you put all of these songs and bands on an infinite line of sucktitude, Staind is the only one that would be visible from the pack.

@whoneedslight: Dave Pirner's new band has a song in a Chevy commercial -- he was in a position to say "No."

Also, Jess - "Desperately Wanting" did actually have a video, as I recall... I guess the cultural memory has forgotten it (who says the internet has everything).

Forcryinoutloud, people - the winner is clearly Default. Their name is Default!!

I will freely admit to liking about one-fourth of that list to varying degrees. Including "Glycerine," which is like an eight-year-old reading Hamlet, which is the source of its accidental genius. I mean, "I'm never alone/I'm alone all the time"? That shit's bro poetry!

Dan is right that I've blocked out that Eve6 song from my memory, otherwise I might've voted for that. Those guys were teh lame. And finally...

@Jack Fear: "What's Up" by 4 Non Blondes is a million times worse than any of these choices, though.

"Million" is a strong word, but yeah, word.

This is truly a miserable collection(that sells). The thing that makes most of these songs suck is that a lot of them still get airplay. Default(produced by Nickelback's multi talented singer) are garbage, but I don't hear that song on the radio that much. Eve 6's "Here's To The Night" is really lame, but I like that "heart in a blender" song. I have to go with Everlast and his Sublime rip off.

@Halfwit: Yes indeed "Desperately Wanting" had a video, and a pretty darn good one: but the band doesn't even have a full version on its site.

I firmly protest 'linger' being on this-- that is a perfectly good song.

@The Van Buren Boys: you can count me as one of them-- that video gets me everytime. Good times, the late 90's were. Although you apparently would not agree with me there.

@antistar: That "heart in a blender" song is called "Inside Out", BTW. I love that song.

the majority of these songs i really only claim to hate more than i actually do, but sugar ray makes me lose all self control. everlast and eve 6 do similar, but don't incite quite the same level of rage in me. i'm sure doll parts is only on here to avoid looking like the sausage party that 90's alt-rock obviously is.

Wasn't the lead singer of Eve 6 propped up by his label as some kind of teenage songwriting prodigy? I remember hearing such hype before that first song of theirs came out...and then it was all dashed as soon as I heard someone trying to turn "I will choke on the rinds but the lack thereof will keep me empty inside" into an acceptable song lyric.

@fishnotfried: Yes, I mean "Pure Massacre," because it sucks many of the same ways the Live song does, except it's funnier. "Tomorrow" sucks too but it doesn't make me laugh as hard.

@Aquemini: Agreed about "Linger," though "Dreams" is my all-time Cranberries fave. (I like the whole first album, actually, though nothing afterward.)

I need more votes, I hate too many of these songs.

Weren't Vertical Horizon basically the Indigo Boys before they plugged in for that one big album?

I forever associate "Jumper" with an ancient season of Road Rules. One episode's competition consisted of who could make the "better" crappy homemade PSA on suicide scored to that song. That makes it cool, right?

@dennisobell: That shit's bro poetry!
Broetry!

Staind FTW.

Frankly, there's no question.

Full disclosure: I actually like about half of those songs. But Staind is just beyond suck.

i think the worst song is santeria. i play this game with myself sometimes where i think "you know, somewhere in this world, there is at least one happy couple who considers this to be THEIR song." and as much as i'm horrified by the thought that people are really into Do They Know It's Christmas, or Hot Cross Buns, or My Humps, it's even more disturbing to think that some couple somewhere in this world is probably RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND making out to santeria.

also, i thought Abuse Me was Silverchair's ballad. (One time I had a friend crush on a girl until we were in the car one morning and Abuse Me came on and she said she was upset because she had pretty much written exactly that song and now Australian boys had gone and made it popular.)

oh my god, i didn't even notice everlast was on there. i'm changing my vote!

This thread has led to me discovering that Silverchair actually has a single on the charts right now with a video where the lead singer is wearing a vest and nothing else up top and wailing about walking in a straight line.

What a weird world.

I voted for Everlast, but I agree that "Freshmen" wins easy if that was on there. Is it possible that whoever compiled this album hated that song enough to leave it off too?

And what of Semisonic? "Closing Time" is just too 90s to not have on a compilation like this.

@The Notorious T:
Far and away! Staind is the worst excuse for a "rock" band I have ever heard.

@dennisobell: I think Default wins the suck contest if for no other reason that it was ripping off Staind, the erstwhile winner of this contest.

Default wins, Staind places, Eve 6 shows.

@Jack Fear: No way, dude. "What's Going On" is, at worst, only 75,000 times as bad as anything on this list.

For the record, that Better than Ezra song is pretty kick-ass. And it had a good video, too... they're playing in a terminal at LAX at like 5 in the morning.

@The Notorious T: Totally. My vote went to Staind because it came out right around the time I lost all tolerance for alternative top 40 radio.

Man, there are a few songs on here that I grew to like because of their ubiquity. I suppose it's a mental defense mechanism - you have to find something to enjoy about these MOR "rock" songs when your insomnia forces you to watch hours upon hours of MTV2 (in 2001, of course).

Ok Seriously, I don't know how anyone could consider Hanging by a Moment as one of the worst songs. Hanging by a Moment is an amazing and awesome song, and it has great lyrics. After all, it was the most played song of 2001. God, you people obviously don't know good music. Lifehouse rocks.=)