Music hath charm to soothe the savage beast; it can also make you want to stick a sharp object in both ears just to make it quit. Ladies and gentlemen this is your warning, the next few paragraphs could ruin your day, your week or even dredge up painful memories that your subconscious mind has been working to repress for decades. These are the “earworms”: the songs that burrow into your brain and get stuck in the cracks. Your mind will play these horrendous songs over and over and over again driving you to madness. Do you think you are strong enough to face the 5 most God-awful songs in the history of music?

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    Its a Small World

    The song believe it or not was inspired by one of the tensest times in American history. The song came about because of the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962. A few years later in 1964 Walt Disney was looking for a song that could be translated into several different languages and be sung as a round, much like Row,Row,Row Your Boat, for an exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. The song filled the bill perfectly and this anthem of world peace and mind numbing repetition was born.

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    I Love You, You Love Me

    If you have children, or have had children since 1982 you probably have come to know the brain searing sound of a certain purple dinosaur singing his closing number. Barney the dinosaur, he loves you, we love him and the words “Daddy play it again” were about to be heard out of the mouth of your growing toddler. What is it about this song? Is it the nasally vocal delivery? Is it the fact that you’ve just sat through a half hour a some of the worst child acting you’ll ever see? Is it our basic adult cynicism that tells us this is not the real world?

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    The Chicken Dance

    I don’t know if we have ever been at war with the Dutch but for me this would be a good reason to cross the Atlantic and pull all the little boys fingers out of all the leaky dikes and just let the sea rush in. The Chicken Dance, it has a long and sordid past in Europe but believe it or not it didn’t migrate to the shores of the United States until 1981. This is where fate plays a cruel joke on all of us. The song is actually called “The Duck Dance” or “The Dance of the Little Birds” but leave it Oklahoma to mess things up for the rest of the country. In 1981 at an Oktoberfest celebration in Tulsa, the Heilbron Band was seeking to demonstrate the song and dance to the crowd. Alas, there were no duck costumes to be found in the great state of Oklahoma, there was only a chicken costume. The dance was demonstrated with the chicken suit and a local TV station picked up the story. To this day that is why Oklahoma is hit with so many terrible storms.

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    Peanut Butter Jelly Time

    Please let me know what awful act had to occur for this particular piece of alleged music to be thrust into the social consciousness? This is a lot like a joke your boss tells, it’s kind of quaint and you sort of chuckle the first time you hear it. Then you hear it again and because of your mastery of social skills you smile and pretend to be amused. The third time you hear it, you are getting totally annoyed and then any time after the third time you are ready to kill with an absence of malice. The song started out cute enough, a cartoon banana singing the phrase “peanut butter jelly time” over and over again. It takes a person with average intelligence about 17.3 seconds to go from slightly amused to blood lust killer so be careful if you listen to this song.

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    Surfin Bird

    In the early 1960’s America was still innocent, we had met Elvis but still the Beatles had not crossed the Atlantic Ocean. On the west coast of our country a new kind of rock and roll was washing toward the Rocky Mountains, it was the sound of the surfer bands. With a heavy beat, a fast paced rhythm guitar and vocals that pined for a perfect wave, a California babe and a beach and some moonlight the surf sound was born. Then in 1963 came the group the Trashmen and this perfect world went to hell in a hand basket when “Surfin Bird” was thrust upon an unsuspecting population. The song was a combination of two other hits by the band the Rivingtons, Papa-Omm-Mow-Mow The Bird and is The Word. The Trashmen took these two tunes and mashed them together like an Allied Waste Truck on garbage day and the rest is history.

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