Yesterday, we talked about good music -- picking one song from every year you've been alive to come up with a playlist for your life. Today, let's talk about the worst songs ever. CNN.com got 5,800 responses to its request to name the worst song of all time and compiled a top-five list (actually, it would be the bottom five, wouldn't it?). I don't quibble with the awfulness of the songs on the list they came up with:
5. "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks
4. "I've Never Been to Me" by Charlene
3. "You Light Up My Life" by Debbie Boone
2. "Muskrat Love" by The Captain and Tenille
and, drumroll, please, voted the absolute worst of all time:
1. "You're having My Baby" by Paul Anka
As correspondents raved, of Anka's song, "How can a person not be annoyed by lyrices like, 'You're a woman in love and I love what it's doing to ya'?" and " 'What a lovely way of saying how much you love me' -- if that isn't the most egocenter, solipsistic, revolting line of all time."
They missed what I would pick as the absolute worst of all time, however -- "MacArthur Park," written by Jimmy Webb (who actually penned some pretty good songs and should have known better) and "sung" by Richard Harris. Can there be lyrics any more pretentiously deep and sophomorically symbolic and just outrageously stinko than "Someone left the cake out in the rain, and I don't know if I can take it, because it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again"? You'll have to look hard to find anything more pathetic than people who actually like the song trying to figure out what it "means."
