Looking back on the final years of CCR read like some prolonged soap opera. After years of being the sidemen to John Fogerty, the rest of the group conspired to push Fogerty to loosen the reins in the studio and give them more creative freedom. Unfortunately, those ideas probably should have been fleshed out more if ‘Take it Like a Friend’ was the best they had to work with.

Although most of the group’s swansong Mardi Gras was about their breakup, Stu Cook’s first turn behind the mic is one of the most incompetent vocal performances on a mainstream rock record. Instead of trying to sing in his normal vocal range, Cook tries to sing in the same holler Fogerty does and comes off more like a tone-deaf grandpa who took one singing lesson and figured he was ready for prime time.

While Cook’s other song, ‘Door to Door’, is just as bad, ‘Take it Like a Friend’ is a huge case of irony, as Cook tries to let Fogerty down easily for being a manipulative jerk to him the past few years. Unsurprisingly, Fogerty did not take it like a friend, and Mardi Gras went from an album with promise to one of the most perplexing final albums to be released by a classic rock act.

The emerging Seattle scene was a musical cornucopia most of the time. Even though most acts might have liked to play detuned music that had to do with their inner torment, it was pretty easy to distinguish Soundgarden from Pearl Jam when listening to them side by side. Although Soundgarden was into the bombastic side of rock, they still loved their punk rock and decided to screw around for most of ‘Circle of Power’.

Played like some bizarro world version of a Dead Kennedys song, this short track off of their debut Ultramega OK was sung by bassist Hiro Yamamoto, who is taking the piss throughout most of the song. Although he might be trying to channel Jelly Biafra with his delivery, the words’ wild vocal cracks and strange annunciation make the song that much more comical.

Despite being one of the most unintentionally funny songs on the record, it’s not like Soundgarden were looking to become the next Beatles on their debut either. This was a long way from the ‘Black Hole Sun’, but underneath that terrible vocal delivery is a hungry band that’s waiting for permission to take over the world.

Something changed in rock and roll songwriting when The Who came out with Tommy. After years of protest songs and tunes about having a good time partying all night long, Pete Townshend blew open the doors for something more ambitious, telling the story of a deaf, dumb, and blind kid that was looking to find his calling playing pinball. The story behind this concept record might be a little loose, but ‘Tommy’s Holiday Camp’ is a carnival tune ripped straight from one’s nightmares.

In the context of the album, Tommy has built a sort-of commune where all his followers can gather around him, with his sexually abusive Uncle Ernie working the door. For a silly song, though, they needed to throw the mic over to Keith Moon, who turns this entire track into a farce, especially in the chorus bits where he sings two notes in a truly horrifying display of harmony that no human ears should endure.

Even though this song should be absolutely terrible to put in the middle of a Who record, it serves as this demented theme song to a camp that’s quickly going to be torn apart in ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’. Townshend always had the idea for Tommy before pressing it to vinyl, but no one can blame him for making a song intended to sound bad.

The later years of the 1990s started bringing the backwash of the alternative scene. Although many people had high hopes for the genre after ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, acts like Live and Matchbox Twenty showed fans what alternative music could sound like if it had been completely neutered of all its attitude. So what’s that much more cringy than the phoney rock bands? Bands with a Christian edge.

Though Creed have an incredible backing group behind them, the entire appeal of ‘With Arms Wide Open’ is Scott Stapp’s voice, sounding equal ways between Eddie Vedder, a kid coming back from the dentist, and a dying walrus. Written as a tribute to his young son, the lyrics aren’t terrible to start with, only for Stapp to add some of the most insipid ad-libs over it, as if he’s channelling the ghost of Kurt Cobain live on the spot.

The song only gets more hilarious when accompanied by the video, showing Stapp with the open jacket and trying to play the rock and roll heartthrob while coming off as one of the most genuinely hilarious rock stars ever. For everything wrong with this song, on principle, the pure cheese sprinkled through the tune is enough to make anyone like it at least a little bit.

The Vitalogy era of Pearl Jam has always been a strange case to dissect. After two blockbuster albums in a row, the band was starting to get uncomfortable with all the massive attention happening at once, all while struggling with creative differences in the studio, as Eddie Vedder became the de facto boss of the sessions. In between some of the great material on the record, there are moments like ‘Bugs’ that leave the listener shaking their head at what they just heard.

Written on a beat-up accordion that Vedder found during recording, most of this song is him droning on a single chord and singing about bugs crawling all around his room. Throughout the song, the listener is constantly waiting for a real song to kick in, only for Vedder to talk about becoming friends with the bugs, almost having an existential crisis about what to do with these insects before submitting to them.

Although no one will consider this one of their favourite Pearl Jam tracks, the tune has a bit of charm to it, especially when Vedder attempted to play the tune live and was left with bewilderment from a crowd full of people. Whereas Pearl Jam usually made songs that could be belted from the rafters, this is the kind of demented carnival music that should be playing in the background of a B-movie horror scene.

The members of Anthrax never claimed to be snobs about their musical taste. They may have cut their teeth in the thrash metal scene, but every member of the group had a vast musical palette, oftentimes covering classics from everyone from the Sex Pistols to Radiohead to the French rock band Trust. In early-80s New York City, though, hip hop and metal went hand in hand, and it was only a matter of time before they started trying their own rhymes.

Although ‘I’m The Man’ was meant as a cheeky joke about rappers, hearing every non-singer in the thrash outfit try their hand at rapping is both pathetic and adorable at the same time. Every one of them is far from a monster behind the mic, but some of the segues are fairly cute for what they are, like the fact that they can never finish one of their lines with a word that rhymes or when they are catching up to the beat during the chorus.

Despite them goofing around in the studio, Anthrax did get some traction off of their fluke hit, causing the single to go gold and eventually opening the door for their future collaboration with Public Enemy on their version of ‘Bring the Noise’. Every single piece of ‘I’m The Man’ is a complete disaster, but in its own weird way, it’s also a game-changer.

There’s a good chance Paul McCartney went berzerk when making McCartney II. Coming out of his notorious drug bust on the last Wings tour, Macca folded his new outfit and decided to make his next record on his own, complete with some of the wildest sounds he had ever made at that time. Though ‘Coming Up’ made his fellow Beatle John Lennon take notice, ‘Temporary Secretary’ is one of the most singularly weird songs that McCartney would ever release.

Built around a simple sequencer figure, McCartney is playing around with spaces in his own voice, playing the role of a man needing a secretary after his original one fell ill. Though there is a bit of sexual innuendo around the verse, any seriousness is thrown out the window when the chorus hits, as McCartney sounds like he has the worst sinus infection in the world while saying the song title.

Despite some faithful McCartney fans pushing back on it, the song has an indelible charm, as Macca tries out different spaces within his vocal range and comes up with a scattered electronic backing track to hold everything together. If this song were played in a dance club, it might elicit some strange looks from the crowd, but the good vibes probably wouldn’t stop.

Any song that is so bad it’s good could have easily been replaced by any nu-metal song that came out in the early 2000s. Though acts like Slipknot and Korn may have an agenda and some genuine pain behind their lyrics, acts like Limp Bizkit brought about the frat bro-ification of the genre, where the audience became populated with moshers that just wanted to break stuff. So in the middle of that scene, how the hell did an act get away with writing a love song?

For all of the tough guy posturing in ‘Butterfly’, the weirdest part about it is how sincere it is, as both emcees trade lines about loving their partners. Although a man with a name like Shifty Shellshock doesn’t typically scream romantic prowess, his attempts at seducing his lady are pretty funny for what it is, as he talks about getting ‘sprung’ by her tongue ring and never knowing true love until he saw her.

Granted, the amount of time that this relationship is bound to last is probably a few hours at max, but the song’s vibe is at least catchy in all the right ways, despite being directly lifted from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’s ‘Pretty Little Ditty’. This might have been a song for the meatheaded rock fans everywhere, but even the meatheads need ballads, too.

Throughout Oasis’ tenure, Noel Gallagher made a habit of writing songs that weren’t meant to be deep. Although he may touch on a few heartstrings here and there on ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’, he admits that half of his lyrics don’t mean much outside of serving the melody. In the middle of their B-sides sessions, though, ‘Bonehead’s Bank Holiday’ is the kind of time capsule that’s too charming to pass up.

As the group celebrated some days off between touring, Noel wrote this song without regard for lyrics, describing Bonehead’s missus as having a mum who ‘had a face like a nun in vain’. Despite the goofy nature of the song, the one thing keeping it lower is how it had the chance to be ten times funnier if Bonehead was more involved.

According to everyone in the studio, Bonehead was originally supposed to sing the song himself, only to “loosen up” with a few beers beforehand and arrive at the studio shit-faced. Oasis may have been on an upward rise, ready to take over the world, but underneath these rock gods were the charming lads from Manchester who were always up for a bit of humour now and again.

The mid-’90s didn’t have time for any hair metal acts anymore. Most of the plastic acts from the Sunset Strip had been jettisoned after Nirvana arrived on the scene, so why would they be coming back in the age when acts like Korn and Marilyn Manson were breaking on the scene? Though Mötley Crüe thought they could weather the storm, their experimentation on Generation Swine reached a hysterical conclusion on ‘Brandon’.

After enduring some of the darkest songs The Crue would ever write, their decision to close their industrial-adjacent opus was to have drummer Tommy Lee sing a soft piano ballad dedicated to his son. Not necessarily a terrible idea… until Lee opens his mouth. From the first line, this man has no business singing, much less writing lyrics, as he waxes poetic about his relationship between his child and wife with lines like ‘I love you/I love her/she is your mom’.

Even though Nikki Sixx’s lyric sheet doesn’t always make a ton of sense, it’s easy to tell what he was going for on those first few Mötley Crüe records. Tommy Lee may like to put out his solo material, but a topic like this deserves a photo album instead of a placement on the final recording.