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Bad music. We generally try to avoid it, but some is so awful that we just can’t help but listen and laugh. Typically, artists who are self-indulgent, high out of their minds, trying to be profound, and/or unaware of their skill (or drug consumption) limits create the worst music. For my monthly AnalogPlanet playlist feature, I’ve compiled for your pleasure a list of the worst music in the history of mankind. Since some of this music is only available on certain streaming platforms, I’ve included underneath each individual song or album a streaming link. It’s also worth noting the list’s strategic structure: as you keep reading the music gets worse. Read at your own risk, but if you’re willing to subject yourself to the final entry (what I believe to be the absolute worst album ever created by anybody), I guarantee you will have a good laugh. Anyway, let’s get your suffering over with and begin the proceedings right away…

Paul McCartney - “Fuh You”

Every great artist of any kind has duds. Paul McCartney’s duds, however, are especially disappointing considering the greatness of The Beatles. His solo career is an extremely mixed bag of mostly forgettable material with a few highlights, but as the decades roll on, McCartney seems to focus more on perfecting the art (or lack thereof) of the annoyingly terrible song.

“Fuh You” is among the worst of them. Labeled by Macca himself as a “raunchy love song,” the third single from his 2018 pile of mediocrity Egypt Station is appallingly dumb. First of all, his voice drastically deteriorated in the five years between NEW and Egypt Station. With the life McCartney lived for decades, his vocal decline was inevitable, but nobody expected it to occur as fast as it did, given that in the early 2010s, for his age he still sounded shockingly good. Now, his voice is weak and he’s trying to reach notes that for him to do so, require digital manipulation. Some aging artists recognize their strengths and weaknesses; Bob Dylan does nothing these days but croak through his original compositions, as well as renditions of the Great American Songbook, and songs made famous by Frank Sinatra that well suit Dylan’s voice. Paul McCartney, on the other hand, is still trying to make hits and connect with a generation that doesn’t want to listen to his new material.

Pop music’s early 2010s sound was defined by predictable melodies, unnecessary “oh oh oh”ing, stadium-filling instrumentals compressed to death, and generally forgettable songs that are so bad you never want to hear them again, but not bad enough for you to remember why you don’t want to again hear them. An example of this sound that first comes to mind is Katy Perry’s obnoxious 2013 hit “Roar.” Despite this style of pop music being dated to earlier this decade (most audiences seem to have moved on from it), McCartney thought it fitting to make a song in this style as a then 76-year-old man and release it in 2018.

The “fuh” in “Fuh You” is supposed to mean both “for” and “f**k.” “For you” as in “I want to do something for you, my love,” and “f**k you” as in, well, I’m not gonna go there. The “fuh” line in question on “Fuh You” goes “I just wanna fuh you.” “I just wanna for you” makes no sense, so “I just wanna f**k you” is the automatic answer to what the “fuh” is. Again, Paul McCartney was 76 when he released this; he has several grown children and many grandchildren. If he made a song with this message back when he was 20-some years old, it would’ve made sense. But at 76??? It sounds like a miserably failed attempt to connect with a younger audience who’s mostly smart enough to see through his desperation to get them to listen.

Worse than the “I just wanna fuh you” line is the one that precedes it: “You make me wanna go out and steal.” Again, Paul McCartney was a then-76, now 77-year-old married man with several grown kids, an abundance of grandkids, a musical and cultural legacy that transcends space and time, and all the money in the world. Yet he drops a song with the line “you make me wanna go out and steal.” WHY DO YOU NEED TO STEAL WHEN YOU HAVE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS? Why would a hugely successful 76-(or 77)-year-old legend want to even think about wanting to steal?

Oh! I almost forgot the music video! This is one of the most confusing music videos ever made. It’s just some kid running around, and what else? For a song like this, it makes no sense, but then again, neither does the song. This entire mess of a song leads to the one essential question: what the “fuh” were they thinking?

And don’t even get me started on the Egypt Station outtake “Get Enough.” It’s Macca making his best attempt at mimicking Bon Iver meets 808s & Heartbreak-era Kanye, creating another epic failure that I do my best to forget. Apparently, Paul had the voice of Elvis Costello running through his head, telling him not to release this terrible song, but release it he did. For the sake of his reputation, Paul McCartney really just needs to make another great album (8/10 or higher) and call it quits before he starts ruining everything. And he needs to stop using the word “fuh” because it makes no “fuh”ing sense.

Lil Pump - “Vroom Vroom Vroom”

Lil Pump first gained public notoriety in 2016 when at age 16, he emerged onto the SoundCloud rap scene with short, repetitive bangers that required a staggering amount of braincells (ie, none at all) to comprehend. Colorful braids, eccentric designer outfits, and overwhelming drug consumption (the dude’s blood is like 30% THC and codeine) became Pump’s trademark, helping him rule part of 2017 with the mind-numbing hit “Gucci Gang” (in which he says “Gucci gang” over 50 times within the 2-minute track). In fact, many of his early singles (the aforementioned “Gucci Gang” as well as “Boss,” “D-Rose,” “Flex Like Ouu,” and “Molly”) are genuinely catchy, fun, and good songs. Pump’s self-titled 2017 mixtape will never make its way into heavy rotation for me, but it’s an enjoyable listen every now and then.

Following a year’s worth of record label drama and seemingly endless teases, Lil Pump finally graced the world with the long-awaited Harverd Dropout this February. The album’s title stems from a well-known joke that he dropped out of Harvard - err, Harverd - to save the rap game (in reality, Pump actually just got expelled from 10th grade). I listened to it on the night it dropped, expecting to hear a fun Lil Pump album. The first song “Drop Out” is decent enough, if not nearly as good as Pump’s breakthrough hits. Then the second song “Nu Uh” came on. Aside from having the dumber hook of “don’t talk to me, nu uh, nu uh/don’t stare at me, nu uh, nu uh,” it’s essentially the same song all over again with the only lyrical topics Pump knows of: drugs, bitches, chains, and cash to buy all those things. By the fourth song “Ion” (which features SmokePurpp’s line “get smoked like a juul” blurred to the point where it sounds like “get smoked like a Jew”), I realized that Harverd Dropout is a waste of 40 minutes. The middle of the album, however, offers the most entertainment in that these songs are at a new level of human stupidity. “Vroom Vroom Vroom” is the dumbest of them all; the hook is literally “vroom vroom vroom vroom vroom” and the opening adlibs are a messy “vroom vroom.” Further, the backing vocals are a nonsensical, growly “VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM!”.

In fact, “Vroom Vroom Vroom” is so dumb that I think it could be used as a new form of medicine. For those who want or need to renew their brains, all they need to do is listen to “Vroom Vroom Vroom” (and the rest of Harverd Dropout for that matter) to kill all of their braincells (because if you listen to enough Lil Pump, that will happen). Once all their braincells are gone, then they need to create new ones, therefore wiping their brains clean and giving themselves a fresh start!

However, I don’t recommend doing that. Lil Pump likely won’t make it past 25, yet is on enough drugs that he thinks that he’ll still be smoking weed at 95 (seriously). Yet I most likely will make it to 80 (and hopefully 95) to tell the kids of 2086, “Back in my day, we listened to a genius named Lil Pump…”

Van Halen - “Fire In The Hole”

Upon Sammy Hagar’s exit from Van Halen in 1996, the VH brothers hired Gary Cherone (of 80s metal band Extreme) as their third lead singer. The resulting album, 1998’s Van Halen III, failed, and not without good reason; it’s bad. There’s a Trainwreckords episode on YouTube that goes into detail why VHIII failed but in short, it’s because Gary Cherone okayed all of Eddie Van Halen’s terrible ideas, “producer” Mike Post’s only prior experience was making TV theme songs (among other stuff, but nothing rock-related), and because Cherone’s lyrics and singing are terrible. Nothing demonstrates the latter better than “Fire In The Hole.” I mean, just read these lyrics:

“In a word to, yeah, the wisdom tooth/To tell, or not the truth (yeah)/So open up and say ahh-men/Rinse cup, and spit again/Forked tongue in double speak/Pretty soon you just might/Spring a leak/Inhale before you begin/Your iron lung's a bag of wind.”

Rinse cup and spit again? Any lyricist who uses that line in a serious context automatically loses all credibility. None of these lines make any sense, and they make even less sense put together. So open up and say ahh-men??? I think Cherone meant to say “amen” but it sounds like “ahh, men.” If only all male supremacists (for lack of a better term) were so outspoken! And that’s just the first verse. Here’s the third verse:

“Chew your words, lest you choke/You better watch your mouth/Wash it out with soap, yeah!/Tongue tied in a tangled web/Your bile inside better left unsaid.”

You better watch your mouth, wash it out with soap??? If Cherone was so obsessed with talking about the dentist in the first verse, shouldn’t he know that you wash your mouth with mouthwash and/or toothpaste and not soap?

Also worth noting is the second verse’s line “you got a mind full of decavities.” In case you’ve been living under a rock since you graduated kindergarten, “decavities” isn’t a word. In fact, the second Google result for “decavities” is actually the Genius page for “Fire In The Hole,” proving that “decavities” isn’t a word. Well, at least we know to avoid Gary Cherone’s future dental practice!

Furthermore, the vocal performance is crap and the instrumental is pretty generic. Most of Van Halen III sounds as if Houses Of The Holy-era Led Zeppelin existed in the 90s and tried to sound like Blood Sugar Sex Magik-era Red Hot Chili Peppers. Believe it or not, however, people actually like this song and album. If you actually think “rinse cup and spit again” is a good lyric, you need help. Now I’m going to listen to the first VH album (specifically, the 2008 Warner pressing that uses the Kevin Gray/Steve Hoffman DCC metal parts) and forget that Van Halen III ever existed…

NAV - “Glow Up”

NAV might as well be a computer algorithm. In fact, we don’t really have any evidence to the contrary so let’s just say he is a computer algorithm. (Does the name NAV means he’s like a GPS NAVigation system? No, that can’t be it, he’s more monotonous than my family’s Garmin.) If you fed all the mediocre modern trap songs into a computer, the result would be NAV. His beats are generic, his flow and Autotune are generic, and his lyrics even worse. “I taste codeine when I burp,” “I bought a Bentley forgot it insured,” “I couldn’t tell nouns from a verb,” “I could sell tags to a shirt,” “Your label’s new artist is really a nerd,” and “Driving on xannies I might hit the curb” are among NAV’s genius lyrics. While Lil Pump turns his stupidity into fun bangers, NAV forces you to realize how dumb he is without giving you anything to compensate for it. Surprisingly, RECKLESS isn’t even regarded as NAV’s worst album; this year’s Bad Habits is the second lowest rated #1 rap album ever on Metacritic, with a rating of 45/100 (info from @HipHopNumbers on twitter). There’s a saying how NAV’s worst habit is not installing the latest software update. I can only imagine what a NAV record will sound like in 10 years with an unsupported operating system.

Mike Dece - “Donald Trump”

Donald Trump. He’s our POTUS now, but before that he maintained a reputation as a “businessman” who only made money by stiffing people like contractors who he used to regularly offered cents on the dollar on signed contracts, (and borrowing money he couldn’t and still can’t pay back). Because of this, he’s been namechecked in dozens of rap songs over the last three decades. In fact, Mac Miller (may he rest in peace) even made a hit song called “Donald Trump”, which caused Trump to demand money from Mac (simply because he had a popular song named “Donald Trump”). Ironically, on Kanye West’s “So Appalled” (from 2010’s overrated but still masterful My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy) there’s the line “balding Donald Trump taking dollars from y’all” (and no, I’m not getting into a rant on how misperceived the Kanye/Trump friendship is).

In 2016, however, Mike Dece made his own song called “Donald Trump,” and it’s full-on MAGA. Who’s Mike Dece? He’s a talentless white rapper from Miami who introduced the talented Denzel Curry to SpaceGhostPurpp and the group Raider Klan, therefore jumpstarting Curry’s career. Anyway, “Donald Trump,” killed whatever scrap of a career Dece had up until that point.

“Got a lotta money like I’m Donald Trump!” Dece begins. It only goes downhill from here. “Lotta bitches tryna f**k me like I’m Donald Trump.” A more accurate line would’ve been “Tryna f**k a lot of bitches like I’m Donald Trump,” but I digress. “Pull up in a foreign whip looking rich as f**k/Told the bitch to suck my dick cause I’m Donald Trump/Got a wall around my crib like I’m Donald Trump/Yes I’m very f**king rich, oh I’m Donald Trump,” Dece continues. Well, Donald Trump is in a lot of debt... and Mike Dece was never rich to begin with (he obviously has a day job, and he’s not Donald John Trump).

The most entertaining version of this song is Dece’s filmed performance from a Breitbart event. I don’t want to support the idiots at Breitbart (who are also reportedly in debt) by linking the video here, but it’s hilarious. He comes out wearing a MAGA shirt and hat, then begins the song with an oddly distorted microphone. He’s grabbing his crotch the entire time and even the alt-right audience laughs at how bad the song is. At the end, he randomly screams “Trump 2016! Hillary for prison! Trump gang! Trump boy!” before leaving the stage. This incident cost him his career (he tried to unsuccessfully make a comeback in 2018, though nobody really liked him in the first place) as well as his friendship with Denzel Curry, and I can only imagine what other damage it did to him. But whatever happened to him, he deserved it.

Lauryn Hill - MTV Unplugged No. 2.0

How do you follow up one of the most critically and commercially acclaimed debut albums in history? To Lauryn Hill, the answer is releasing an utterly confusing live album demonstrating your personal and creative instability as you hold a couple hundred people hostage for nearly two hours.

In 2001, Lauryn Hill graced the stage at MTV Studios in New York to tape an episode of MTV Unplugged No. 2.0. Instead of performing material from The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill or the Fugees songs that first made her a star, she dedicated her entire hour and 45 minute set to performing brand new songs from her supposedly upcoming album (which still hasn’t come out). She sang with a scratchy voice, (because, you know, that’s reality), and played unfinished 7-10 minute, two-chord monstrosities on an acoustic guitar she couldn’t play. If that’s not bad enough, Lauryn rants about the “reality” of her bad performance and how she no longer considers herself a performer (rather someone who’s sharing the music they’ve been “given”) for over a quarter of the LP. As the show drags on, the audience is clearly only clapping in hopes to get her to stop, as they were most likely locked inside the venue during filming. It starts off okay but gets increasingly excruciating the more you listen. Hill ranting about the courts on “Mystery Of Iniquity” and Adam and Eve on “Adam Lives In Theory” are bad enough, but on “I Gotta Find Peace Of Mind,” she plays her two chord monotony for 9 minutes and has an emotional breakdown at the end of it. Sure, many artists get reasonably emotional over their work, but having an emotional breakdown in the middle of your terrible album? Not a good idea.

Why did this ever see the light of day? Since Columbia didn’t have any new Lauryn Hill studio material to release (and still don’t), they pushed this 2CD (or 2LP) live album out to make some money. Did anybody like it? Some critics appreciated these two hours of delusion as honest and pure, but most justifiably panned it. Robert Christgau gave it a D- calling it “one of the worst albums ever released by an artist of substance,” and Entertainment Weekly called it “perhaps the most bizarre follow-up in the history of popular music.” The best thing that came out of this miserable album was Kanye’s interpolation of “Mystery of Iniquity” on his own masterful single “All Falls Down,” but otherwise, MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 is a steaming dumpster (I’m just being real with you here, because you know, steaming piles of trash and human waste are reality).

Dee Dee King - “Funky Man”

How do you go from being the bassist of one of the most iconic punk bands of all time to making crap rap songs? Well, heroin will do it.

During a 1986 rehab stint for heroin addiction (which eventually killed him in 2002), Ramones bassist Dee Dee Ramone gained exposure to the then-brand new rap genre. A year later, he rebranded himself as rapper Dee Dee King and released “Funky Man” as a 12” single.

And man, it’s awful. While Paul McCartney sings “fuh you,” Dee Dee King says “FUH FUH FUH FUH FUH FUH FUH FUH FUNKY” over a beat based on a dated gated reverb snare (from a drum machine, of course). What is it with these terrible songs using the word “fuh?” The beat sucks (but it’s 1987, what did you expect?), Dee Dee’s flow is clunky (again it’s 1987 but still), and the lyrics are straight garbage. “I like rap/And hip-hop/I like hardcore and punk rock/I like hot, dogs/Franks and beans/I grew up in Forest Hills, Queens/I’m a funky/Funky guy/I’m a funky/Funky guy/Fuh fuh fuh fuh fuh fuh fuh fuh funky/Fah fah fah fah fah fah fah fah funky/ I’m a funky guy, I got funky bones/I’m a funky guy/My name is Dee Dee Ramone,” he raps. It makes Lil Pump sound like Kendrick Lamar.

The music video is also, in nearly every way possible, a cringefest. Normal rap videos show the artist flexing on the world in some way or another. The best rap videos might double as a form of art, adding to the story of the song and/or it’s associated album. “Funky Man”’s video does neither of these things. During the first verse, the video depicts Dee Dee getting out of bed fully clothed while his music video girlfriend (who has the ugly 80s makeup, haircut, and everything) nonsensically rolls around in bed. On the bedroom wall are photos of the Ramones as well as Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life album cover, the latter of which sort of makes sense given Dee Dee’s addiction struggles. However, things get batshit insane really fast. As Dee Dee walks downstairs and opens the door to leave the house, the “FUH FUH FUH FUH FUH FUH FUH FUH FUNKY” part plays. Each “fuh” shows him starting to open the door before it restarts for the next “fuh” and every following “fuh” for that matter. He exits his house onto the street and walks around, temporarily followed by perhaps the most embarrassed African American men in the history of music videos. Throughout the video, he keeps running into this creepy middle-aged white guy smoking a disgusting cigar (but it never shortens in length, nor is there smoke coming from it - so is he really smoking the cigar?). How does this have anything to do with “Funky Man?” Don’t ask me. He keeps walking, eventually with an entourage of white kids (one of whom is carrying a boombox) who look like they only showed up to be on camera. It ends with Dee Dee’s girlfriend ditching him after the terrible song ends, leading to Dee Dee having a seizure in the street. The more you watch the video, the funnier it gets as you realize everything wrong with it.

Overall, “Funky Man” is a complete mess yet it provides hours of entertainment within its awfulness. And if Rhino ever reissues the 12” single for a Record Store Day event of some kind, best believe that I’ll be lining up at 4AM for it.

Corey Feldman - Angelic 2 The Core

Actors should NEVER try to make music. NEVER. Historically, any actor that tries to launch a music career drops a fail of epic proportions that nobody wants to even go near. Yet former child actor Corey Feldman is too delusional and on too many drugs to be dissuaded from trying. Ever since the late 80s, he’s released music on and off and none of it has been good. Except his 2016 opus Angelic 2 The Core: Angelic Funkadelic/Angelic Rockadelic is so bad that it’s actually brilliant.

A decade in the making (you read that right: this shit took a DECADE to make), Feldman finally, in 2016, unleashed his masterpiece upon the world. Most notably, he appeared on the Today Show erratically performing the album’s lead single “Go 4 It!” (Snoop Dogg, the man who will never turn down a check for anything, appears on the studio version while Doc Ice filled in on the Today Show). The terrible reaction meant that Feldman became the internet’s laughingstock for a short while. And instead of just dealing with the criticism himself and taking it into consideration for next time, he goes on Facebook Live crying because nobody liked his shitty music. It’s not our fault that your music sucks!

Angelic 2 The Core is at a level of musical torture that we’d never before seen. If there’s an album that makes you want to choke yourself, this may be it. Many outlets didn’t review it (either because they don’t care about Corey Feldman or because nobody wanted to subject themselves to it), but Anthony Fantano spent a whopping 50 minutes reviewing/reacting/suffering to the album in a mostly unscripted review on his YouTube channel. Most reviews shouldn’t take 50 minutes to consume, but fitting descriptions for the album evaded Fantano. As I wrote this list, I scrambled for weeks to explain how bad Feldman’s double CD is and why it’s bad because it has simply too many particularly bad ideas to list. Honestly, I don’t know if there’s a single good scrap of a thought on here.

Imagine every single bad musical idea from the last four decades compiled onto one 95-minute album. That’s what this album is. Terrible 80s pop? Check. Smooth jazz? Check. Generic 2000s workout music that sounds like the 90s? Yes. Dubstep? Of course. Ineptly-used autotune? No problem. A song that sounds like phone hold music from 1990? Terrible Michael Jackson impersonations? Fred Durst? Bad John Lennon covers? Nonsensical skits? Rapping that sounds like Dee Dee King reincarnated as Lil Dicky? Fake woke anthems? Angelic 2 The Core: Angelic Funkadelic/Angelic Rockadelic has all of the above plus more bad ideas than you ever could’ve had nightmares of. There are several musical genres and narrative themes that Feldman starts but never commits to all the way, with his terrible “singing” ruining everything further. The album cover shows two “angels” supposedly pulling Corey out of a greenscreened hell, but I really hope they were surgically inserting him back in. Also worth mentioning is the atrocious font and lack of cropping that makes the album cover a visual catastrophe that should never have happened.

The sound is truly atrocious as well. Any album this bad would have a terrible sound quality score just because there is sound coming out of it, but here the mixing and mastering (or lack thereof) is also mind-bogglingly bad. ProTools Ultimate (the top tier, most expensive version of ProTools) can handle up to 384 simultaneous tracks, and if software designers at AVID heard Angelic 2 The Core, they’d probably cancel Corey Feldman’s subscription as well as reduce the track limit to 0 (that is 0 tracks, not “zero limits”). Feldman layers track upon track upon track to make one mess of a song, then throws on even more tracks. There’s always something that is unreasonably covering up something else, and due to all those tracks, there’s just too much going on in the “music.” It also sounds like nobody did anything even closely resembling mastering, as the volumes of the tracks vary drastically throughout the album. It’s simply appalling that nobody in Corey Feldman’s vicinity told him that any of this sounded bad and unprofessional (forget amateurish; this is straight up unprofessional).

Remember the four characteristics common to bad albums that I mentioned at the beginning? While most albums on this list fit only a couple of those criteria, Angelic 2 The Core fits all of them. Corey Feldman was high out of his mind making it, failed to make a profound statement on whatever it is this album is trying to be about, is under the impression that he has enough skill to do anything (because he’s high out of his mind), and it’s a self-indulgent creation for the one person who thinks it’s great: Corey Feldman.

I struggle to see how anybody can have the skill to make anything this bad. The thought of anything even being close to this terrible astonishes. Even if you intentionally tried to make something bad, I don’t think you could make anything nearly as bad as Angelic 2 The Core: Angelic Funkadelic/Angelic Rockadelic. It makes us wonder what’s going on in Corey Feldman’s mind, how he even thinks it’s good, and what drugs he could possibly be on. This must be the worst album of all time. It has to be. Unfortunately, the AnalogPlanet score knobs don’t go into negative numbers, because if they did, I’d give this album a double negative 11. It’s so bad that it almost leaves me speechless.