Song covers, when done well, can serve as faithful homages to influential artists or cleverly reimagined versions of classic tunes. When done poorly, however, they can become irreverent slaps to the faces of both the original artists as well as anyone unlucky enough to listen to their unbearable renditions. These are those songs.
Yes, the quality of music is thoroughly subjective, but these covers are hot garbage and there is no debating that. Only studio-recorded tracks by relatively well-established artists were considered for this list. If live versions and unknown artists were considered, this would be a list of high school talent show fails. An equally valid list, but not what we’re doing here.
Pink Floyd’s classic emotionally ethereal hit got the electro-disco treatment in 2004 and became completely unrecognizable. What was originally a powerful and mysterious track turned into a baffling modernized Bee Gees ripoff.
If the source material was best enjoyed accompanied by a laser-light show and a blunt, the cover demands molly, body paint, a black light and a very short memory. What’s even more perplexing is that the track is immediately followed on the album by the song “Mary,” a heartfelt piano ballad that sounds way more like Pink Floyd than the Pink Floyd cover.
It’s always a spectacle when metal bands cover pop songs. It’s done with such a tongue-in-cheek attitude. So often it says “We do pop better than pop artists” without any self awareness. When the Finnish melo-death band covered Britney Spears on their 2009 album of cover songs, they did so with such irreverence that it can’t possibly be taken seriously, which feels like a bit of a cop-out.
Still, this cover manages to be enjoyable in a Sandler-esque way thanks to its pure, unfiltered silliness. Children of Bodom is an undeniably talented band, and making fun of them would feel especially bad considering the recent passing of front-man Alexi Laiho, but luckily the band was making fun of itself on this one. The track also sounds like it’s going to end about halfway through, and it really should have. That really would have sold the joke.
Oh sweet Jesus, William Shatner simply reading the lyrics to Queen’s classic song over an instrumental is one of the most unintentionally hilarious things you’ll ever hear. Captain Kirk’s 2011 collection of covers, “Seeking Major Tom,” features so many incredible musicians, including Zakk Wylde, Ritchie Blackmore, Alan Parsons and Sheryl Crow, just to name a few. He must really be throwing around that Priceline money.
The whole album is a riot that lasts for over an hour and a half. Sometimes you just have to be thankful to live during the same time period as something like this. You could pick any song from the track listing and it would work here, but the earnestness of “Bohemian Rhapsody” really sells it.
This cover of The Guess Who’s one hit wonder takes the original track and drags it straight down to hell. It’s so exhausting to listen to. You can’t listen to a band with a name like this and expect something totally normal, but this is really something else.
You can argue that this isn’t a cover at all, as the track changes the lyrical themes entirely, but it still uses enough of the original’s melodies and riffs to count. It’s also spelled with the plural form of woman on the track listing, and it can go either way as to whether or not that was intentional. Listening to this track feel like listening to the original while you’re trapped in a horrible nightmare from which there is no waking.
It’s practically cheating to put Limp Bizkit on a list about the worst of anything in the world of music, but George Michael’s hit was butchered so badly, it simply must make an appearance. Applying their brand of ultra-bro nu-metal to a pop standard ruined the original song so completely.
The track adds record scratching and the phrase “Get the fuck up.” As bad as that is, the worst part may just be hearing Fred Durst singing the actual lyrics of the song. He makes everything that much slimier.
The answer to the question “Who you gonna call?” should always be an emphatic “Ghostbusters!” and not Patrick Stump himself to inform him of all the ruined childhoods he caused with this cover. Turning one of the most iconic theme songs into a club banger is surely a good idea, right? Right? It’s not awful in execution, but it was doomed from the start because it’s just a terrible idea, plain and simple.
Now this one really takes you back to a specific time. The late 00’s crabcore scene signified that hair straighteners were always on hand, and Myspace was tragically on its last legs. If that sentence meant nothing to you, consider yourself lucky.
One would think a metal-adjacent version of a pop song would have less auto-tune, but that’s not how Attack Attack! rolls. The first half of this Katy Perry cover sounds like dance pop made by an algorithm, but then the breakdown hits and the screams take center stage for but a brief, fleeting moment, only to give way to the binary bopping of the chorus once more. What an unbelievable mess. It can be found on the collection “Punk Goes Pop, Vol. 2,” and while many of those tracks are solid contenders, none had the impact that this one did.
There’s really not much that needs to be said about this one. One of the whitest bands of all time covering Public Enemy is such a catastrophically bad idea, and the result is one of the worst song covers of all time, without question. The track is a mess, and not only are the socio-political ramifications of this cover obvious, 911 isn’t even the number for emergency services in England. The original song means absolutely nothing to Duran Duran.
White people are at it again, it would seem. While Duran Duran’s cover just feels silly, this song and the accompanying music video are just such a bizarre and unironic appropriation of what it means to actually live the gangster lifestyle. While Coolio himself appears in the video, giving tacit consent to this farce, the sincerity with which vocalist Ronnie Radke raps lyrics about gang activity is just so unintentionally hilarious. The “Punk goes” series strikes again.
Images via Polydor Records, Spinefarm Records, Cleopatra Records, Touch and Go Records, Interscope Records, RCA Records, Fearless Records and Parlophone Records
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