Worst Covers ever

Ground Rules -

1. No 16 year old youtubers with a guitar in there bedroom. That's like shooting fish in a barrel.
2. No live performances by nobody bands - It's easy to find some club band playing a sloppy wet drunken cover of anything. Now if you find an otherwise established artist really out of their depths that can be funny.

My submission :




/I had a dream that Barney and I formed a group like this in college.
//We were huge in Finland!
///He was the Andrew Ridgely of the group FWIW

Man, I just want to put ICE ICE BABY by VANILLA ICE and get it over with.

Can I pick a live performance by a "professional" band or person?

If so, then I'm pretty sure this is my pick:



/ i can't masterbate to this at all

This is dreadful. It's as if William Shatner got Jennered, but with a she-mohawk.

Yeah - i edited the ground rules just for you - You know what, I blame Miley's band. Someone should have Will Smith'd her - "Oh Hell, Nah." They probably earned themselves the musical karma that''s going to doom them to play in casino cover bands for the remainder of their careers.

You are an awful person, SuperflyTNT. Dreadful was an understatement.

It's Pete, mate, and yes, I have the intrinsic ability to find the worst shit on earth and share it.

The only redemption that band could have had is if she had recited the last line, "I've got diarrhea, too drunk to fuck!" And only because women saying they have diarrhea is always funny.

No, that's not misogynistic, it's proven:

It's really hard to top PJ Proby's cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart". I don't even know what the hell is going on with it. Obscure/cult-ish 1960s rocker taking on a post-punk masterpiece...sort of like a cock-rock song but with orchestral hits in it. And the lyrical change "Why is the bedroom so dad-gum cold?". For extra WTF, listen to the live version where he also uses a racial slur and rides out the song hollering "eat your heart out, negro". I had heard about this version for years and never heard until it- amazingly- turned up on Spotify. It is really dreadful.

Covers can kind of get a bad rap...especially when you're talking about songs that a lot of folks don't know are covers. Like Joan Jett & The Blackhearts' version of The Arrows' "I Love Rock n' Roll". Or "All Along the Watchtower" for that matter. Some of The Clash's best tracks are covers- "Police and Thieves" (Junior Murvin), "Police on My Back" (The Pyramids featuring a young Eddy Grant)...Bowie did an excellent covers collection, "Pin Ups" that sort of culturally bridged the gap between glam and the rest of the rock world. "Tainted Love" is a cover- but few listen to Gloria Jones' version Northern Soul version anymore, it's regarded as a Soft Cell song forevermore.

Cash's version of "Hurt" was actually quite profound and moving, especially with that video...

And then you have something like Laibach's cover of Queen's "One Vision", which is just freaking amazing...because they take all of that bombast and crank it up to new levels.

And then there's the "why bother" kinds of covers, like The Pixies covering Jesus and Mary Chain's "Head On" like a year after the original version...and releasing it as a single. Or Bauhaus covering "Ziggy Stardust" and "Telegram Sam" when they were more or less the late 70s/early 80s version of Bowie and Bolan.

But let's get back to just plain bad...how about Rebecca Romijn-Stamos' cover of "Darling Nikki", that's pretty execrable. Megadeth's "Anarchy in the UK" just points out how terrible Megadeth is. Most of GNR's covers on "The Spaghetti Incident are pretty bad...the biggest band in the world (at the time) trying to cover The Misfits, UK Subs and Dead Boys didn't work at all.

Lords of the New Church did an intentionally awful cover of "Like a Virgin"...speaking of the Dead Boys...

UB40's cover of Neil Diamond's "Red Red Wine" is one of my most hated songs of all time. It is like the low water mark for lame white people reggae.

Tori Amos did a horrible covers record where she did Eminem, The Stranglers, Joe Jackson, Slayer...pretentious and laughable. Par for course, I suppose.

Robin Thicke's cover of Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give it Up" was pretty bad. He changed the lyrics and everything.

The only thing Robin Thicke has ever gotten right is the Blurred Lines video.

Wait, I thought it was Motley Crue that butchered Anarchy in the UK?

I don't mind a band doing a cover live. It's a cheap way to get a pop and liven a crowd if need be. I'm not such a big fan of covers on albums. I'm buying _your_ album to hear _your_ songs. Still, there are some good ones, such as the Clash covers mentioned above.

About 2-3 years ago, Tim (Armstrong) Timebomb did this thing where he was releasing a new song a day...for like 200 days. Now, he's a pretty prolific writer, and I take nothing away from the man, he's got talent, but I think he wore it out a bit on some of the song selections. There are a lot of covers...some great! Some, eh.

I'm not sure why he'd record a cover of In The City (the Jam) , Working (Cock Sparrer) or She Goes to Fino's (Toy Dolls) as straight up punk songs. Not really adding anything there. Same with doing Concrete Jungle (The Specials), Lip Up Fatty (Bad Manners), or Too Much Pressure (The Selector) in the same 2-tone style. What's the point? All the above songs are great, but if you're aren't really changing them up, why record the cover?

Also, I'm not sure he needs to cover songs he already sang for others like Television (for Bad Religion) or songs he wrote for other's like Children's Bread (Jimmy Cliff - still, an awesome song either way), much less record covers of _Rancid_ songs, but hey he's rolling in cash and I ain't, so what do I know?

I did find his covers of pop, country, folk, and swing songs interesting. His Sixteen Tons (Merle Travis) and I'm Going Down (Bruce Springsteen) are decent with his Adalida (George Strait!) being shockingly good.

However, Bryan Adam's Summer of '69 is...ugh...ill advised. I guess I can see he was maybe going for the whole Spirit of '69 thing,and that's a cute reach if so, but I'm not into this cover at all...

Michael Barnes wrote: It's really hard to top PJ Proby's cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart". I don't even know what the hell is going on with it. Obscure/cult-ish 1960s rocker taking on a post-punk masterpiece...sort of like a cock-rock song but with orchestral hits in it. And the lyrical change "Why is the bedroom so dad-gum cold?". For extra WTF, listen to the live version where he also uses a racial slur and rides out the song hollering "eat your heart out, negro". I had heard about this version for years and never heard until it- amazingly- turned up on Spotify. It is really dreadful.

I had to hear it for myself. Wow. Many levels of bizarre going on here...

I'm not sure what the worst is because there are so many to choose from but here's a couple that spring to mind.

I've always had a special place of hatred in my heart for Bryan Adams singing 'O Sole Mio.



I was also just mentioning to my brother last week how much I hate Eddie Vedder's cover of Walking the Cow. His pretty voice and polished delivery take away most of the awkward power that Daniels songwriting has.

It's super easy to find a song you like covered by someone you don't, but how many of you have felt the pain of a shit cover by a band you adore? I'm not talking pointless junk like the Pixies' JAMC cover that Barnes mentioned (on the other hand, the JAMC did a fantastic "Who Do You Love?"). I'm talking an absolutely head-shaking indefensible non-"ironic" dump taken into an album by a beloved band.

No one else cares about them, but one of my all-time fave bands is Shriekback, and in 1987 they released "Go Bang!", which followed "Oil and Gold" and "Big Night Music", two excellent albums. They were on Island Records at the time, who decided they needed to be bigger than they were. As a result, this album tries to be a lot more poppy and friendly than their previous ones, resulting in some fairly bad and lackluster songs. Still, there's enough there for a fan to hang his hat on. And then there's the centerpiece: a cover of KC and the Sunshine Band's "Get Down Tonight". It's not fun. It's not kitschy. It's just terrible. Did I mention it has a rap in the middle of it? It has a rap in the middle of it. It's the kind of thing where if you didn't know the band at all, you would hear it and easily believe that they were incapable of making anything good. If you hear it first, it will forever destroy any possible future impression of the group. There is no recovering from it.

And it was released as a single, with several remixes, because Island really thought this was going to do the trick for putting a band previously known for rhyming "big black nemesis" with "parthenogenesis" on the map. If you're a completist like me, you have several instances of this awful thing in your mp3 library, just waiting to pop up when you randomize the whole thing.

I don't hold it against the band. They made several excellent albums before this and several after it (following being dropped by Island because somehow this just didn't sell millions of copies) and band leader Barry Andrews just kind of shrugs now and says "hey, they thought it would work for us and we wanted a bigger audience, so it was worth a try". Even the rest of "Go Bang!", which isn't great, has grown on me despite that steaming turd in the middle of it.

So yeah, I don't think much of excluding amateurs on YouTube and then hauling in Official Hate Object Miley Cyrus. Big risk there. Tell me about someone you adore who made one terrible, awful decision you have to live with as a fan.

(Oh, and for the record, I effin' hate Cash's "Hurt" and his "Personal Jesus" is embarrassing, but not as much as the dismal version Nada Surf did.)

Legomancer wrote: So yeah, I don't think much of excluding amateurs on YouTube and then hauling in Official Hate Object Miley Cyrus. Big risk there. Tell me about someone you adore who made one terrible, awful decision you have to live with as a fan.

Uh oh, Lego doesn't think much of my submission I just thought it was an absolutely terrible cover, is all.

You're right though that it's a deeper pain when it's a band you like doing something terrible. Let's see if I can dig one of those up...

oh man, this is absolutely terrible. I used to sort of like The Corrs being irish and all, and also cuz they're all sort of cute. But MAN, is this cover ever phoned in:



Go to 2:30 and watch as they sing-talk it. Why did the producer green light that take?!?

For some reason the forum wont let me post this embedded (it deletes my post) in this thread, so here's a link to Fred Durst and the guy from the Goo Goo Dolls doing a cover of Wish You Were Here, complete with changed lyrics for the 9/11 tribute they are doing:

Link