Many, many people call me a classic rock savant. I’m an “international icon” on TouchTunes. Because I own more CDs than Best Buy ever sold I single-handedly turned the compact disc into a popular music format. I constantly get asked to rank the best rock bands and songs and guitar players and albums of all time, so my opinion and judgment on these matters is, well, kind of a big deal.

So you can imagine my shock and utter amazement when I heard that SiriusXM had launched a channel dedicated to the top 1,000 Classic Rock Songs of All-Time. It’s playing these songs in a continuous loop day and night. How was this list compiled? How was it determined whether or not a band was a “classic rock” band? How could such a list exist without my approval?

Well, we listened to this channel off and on over the weekend and one thing became very clear – the list was a mess. Of course, such an endeavor is a huge undertaking and the choices that needed to be made to create it are subjective in the extreme. So you could argue night and day about this song being better than that song and you could get butthurt about your favorite song being fifty slots too low, but the real problem – the problem that results in lists like this losing all of their credibility – is that the list includes songs by the crappiest bands in the history of rock.

A thousand songs in all actuality is a pretty small list. There really shouldn’t be any duds here. The difference between a great band and a shit band is very simple – a great band has great songs, lots and lots of songs you love. Unfortunately, if you’re going to let shit bands participate in an exclusive list like the one SiriusXM attempted, then you’re going to end up with a bunch of shit songs.

This got me thinking … I’ve done a lot of “best of” lists and now the time has come to create, well, a shit list. What follows is a small list of the worst classic rock bands ever. These are groups that are massively overrated. They became overrated because people are sheep, they run with the crowd, and sheep have lousy taste in music. People who claim to like these bands make life decisions based on popularity polls, every thought they have is somebody else’s.

Across the board these bands belong on the shit list for one reason – they don’t have any good songs. Therefore it’s a travesty – an insult of the highest order – for these groups to have an entry on a list that claims to contain the 1,000 Best Classic Rock Songs of All-Time.

Here goes, the Crappiest Rock Acts Ever (crappiest first):

  1. Guns N’ Roses … every song is an instant channel changer; their fans are typically dangerous people who should be avoided … “Welcome to the Jungle” is one of the worst songs to ever come out of a speaker
  2. Billy Idol … total crap … “White Wedding” is a black moment in the history of civilization
  3. The Cars … synthesized, poppy nonsense … one of the very worst aspects of growing up in the seventies, a jalopy that has always been broken down on the side of the road
  4. The Police … everything you need to know, every reason the shit list exists is embodied in this song lyric: “da do do do, da da da da”
  5. Joe Walsh … a perfectly good guitar player loses his mind and decides to use his awful voice in some of rocks’ stupidest, most painful songs
  6. Def Leppard … never has a crappier set of songs been so overplayed; there are 1,000 hair metal bands that could outplay this group, a band named after an African cat that can’t hear
  7. Genesis … everyone owned at least one album which proves that no one is perfect … most of these records are now used in third-world countries as a cruel way to punish political prisoners
  8. Lou Reed/Velvet Underground … people often gravitate toward things they don’t understand, they call the unexplainable “genius” … you only have to listen to this music once to understand that the only way any of this noise is “listenable” is while under hypnosis or sedation
  9. U2 or as some people know them, YouAlso … people dig guys who give themselves lame nicknames; I don’t get it, I never have and I realize it just may be over my head … still, seems like self-absorbed, self-righteous political bullshit; they made tons of records, not a good song to be found
  10. ZZ Top … you wanna like ’em but they’re a clichéd version of a cliché … good beards, awful songs
Photo credit: Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and Live Music Photographer on Visualhunt /CC BY-SA