The 10 Worst Bands/Artists Of All Time

So I woke up this morning thinking about terrible music, as I often do. And it occurred to me that I should write this list. Now, lists like these have been written before. Plenty of 'em. But I often find that people let their personal prejudices get in the way. I tried to come up with a list of, objectively, the worst bands of all time. "Worst" meaning some sublime kind of badness, a badness that is almost spiritual. I, personally, would be honored to be on this list.

What I'm saying here is, I'm not going to pick on bands that I just don't like because I think their music is, in some way, lame. For instance, you'll never catch me listening to and/or enjoying the music of Styx. Sorry Styx fans, I'm just not sold on the majestic beauty of songs like "Lady" and "Come Sail Away", no matter how hip it is to ironically appreciate "bad 80's music." These bands are a different breed of bad than Styx. These bands take sucking to an art form.

So I'm gonna do these bands one at a time, and write a little essay on each. I don't know how frequently I'll update this. Probably every day, or when I get a chance.

So, it begins:


NUMBER TEN:

BROKENCYDE


Brokencyde is the newest band on this list, and so, I decided to put them at #10. Let's give them a little room for improvement. They've only got one album, it's called I'm Not A Fan... But The Kids Like It! This is probably the best thing about this band. It's a self-aware title, and the only evidence I see towards this band being a big, elaborate joke. If this band really is a joke, it's a fucking great one, and I applaud them heartily on their spot-on parody of exactly what's wrong with this generation.

Now I don't know if you've heard Brokencyde. Let's assume you haven't. First of all, I'm jealous of you. I will never get the chorus to their single, "FreaXXX" out of my head, now that I've heard it.

For the uninitiated, here's a link to the song on Youtube.
WARNING: This song is really awful.

Now, I like to compare Brokencyde to Linkin Park. Remember Linkin Park? In the early 2000s, Linkin Park released a single called "One Step Closer" which I heard, as a young lad, on the now-defunct Philadelphia alternative/modern rock station Y100. As a young man of taste and refinement, I instantly hated it. This band, as I understood, was a marketing ploy, combining "rebellious" teenage punk/hardcore/metal fashion with that nineties classic, the boy band. I called Linkin Park "N'Sync with a Nose Ring" and derided my peers and classmates for their enjoyment of this emerging genre of music, nu-metal. I preferred my teenage angst from the likes of The Smashing Pumpkins and The Who, thankyouverymuch.

Essentially, Linkin Park took the two genres that parents found the most annoying (hip-hop and metal) and combined them, with a family-friendly (no swearing, boys!) pop sheen that mixed Vanilla Ice-style rapping and Backstreet Boys-style autotuned harmonies with big angsty rock guitars and turntables. Of course, they were a massive success.

But something tells me Brokencyde isn't going to be a massive success.

How is Brokencyde like Linkin Park, you ask? Well, they've updated Linkin Park for the Jersey Shore generation. The music scene of today has genres of music even more annoying to parents than ordinary rap and metal. Now we have "crunk" and "scene metal" Now, I don't really follow scene metal. I guess kids call it "metalcore" or "emo" or what have you, but where I'm from, Converge is metalcore and Indian Summer is emo. These bands sound nothing like "scene metal." But I digress.

To top it all off, Brokencyde combines crunk and scene metal with the emerging genre of "Disney Pop", like The Jonas Brothers, 2010's answer to 90's boybands. The genius of Brokencyde is that, as I mentioned before, I can't tell on what level of irony they're operating on. Sure, their music is awful, but it's almost like it's been designed by record execs to be the most annoying music ever concieved. What's even more genius about this band is that I'm pretty sure they weren't created by record execs, like Linkin Park, but rather were just a group of 17 year old kids who wanted to make music. and it just happens that this group of kids made the 10th worst band of all time. Um, congratulations? It's certainly a feat, if anything. It's better to have a band that everyone hates rather than a band that everyone is ambivalent about.


Coming up next: #9.