Tuesday, July 25, 2017

A Big Fun Game Leaves Me With Questions

Today in my office, we discovered that one of my law partners' Sonos system is accessible by anyone with a Sonos app on their phone so long as their phone is connected to the office Wifi. This led to a discussion about the proper way to prank him with terrible music. I offered up a couple of suggestions before doing a Google search and finding what might be the worst song ever.

Try this one on for size:


English bands have put out some of the best music ever. Unfortunately, England also produces some of the worst shlock in the history of music. This song is called "Fast Food Song" and it's by the unimaginatively named Fast Food Rockers. This band was a novelty act in 2003 and 2004. It's catchy, right? But is it catchy enough that it should have reached #2 on the UK Singles chart? It did, and it failed to reach #1 only because of the band Evanescence.

Moving to songs an American audience would recognize, there is one song that even the band that sang it has disowned -- or at least one of the singers has. In the 1980s, Jefferson Airplane had morphed into the pathetic excuse for a band called Starship and released this dreck:


It is such a bad song that GQ put together an oral history of the song discussing how it came to be. Basically, about everything in the song came together in stages and was written by an assembly line of songwriters. As Grace Slick said in "Vanity Fair" in June of 2012, 
I was such an asshole for a while, I was trying to make up for it by being sober, which I was all during the '80s, which is a bizarre decade to be sober in. So I was trying to make it up to the band by being a good girl. Here, we're going to sing this song "We Built This City on Rock & Roll." Oh, you're shitting me, that the worst song ever.
Yes, Grace, it's pretty damn awful.

So, why all this about the worst songs ever? 

I struck out badly in the "Big Fun Game" that ran on All Trade Bait, All the Time. I had two different lots stolen from me -- the 1960s lot and the 1950s lot. Rather than getting those -- both of which would have been excellent -- I ended up instead with a bunch of random stuff that I really could not use.

Such as?


Red Sox.

Lots of Red Sox.


Even Gypsy Queen Red Sox. With the luck I had in that game, of course, I got Rookie Star Andrew Benintendi at just the point when Benintendi disappeared from consciousness and Aaron Judge became the star outshining everyone on the planet and the only player in Major League Baseball, according to the MLB Network and Topps Now.

Complicating matters -- making them better or worse, depending on your position on weird oddballs -- was the main item on which the lot was focused:


For the Rangers fan who always thought Nolan Ryan should hang on their Christmas tree, I have just the item for you! A Nolan Ryan ornament!

It's not Oscar's fault, of course, that I happened to have the luck of picking two good lots only to see them stolen away from me. It's the luck of the draw. And I just had Bad Bad Luck.

Right, boys?


My thanks go out to Oscar for running the game, and my curses go out to my bad luck. At least Social Distortion doesn't suck like Starship or the Fast Food Rockers.

19 comments:

  1. Yeah.. I think I have basketball cards coming from a different thing. lol

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  2. I actually like We Built this City.

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    1. If you really hate your coworker, there's always Florida-Georgia Line!

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    2. FGL would be a good selection. Even my wife the country music fan is tired of them.

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  3. That fast food song is something else. Sounds like something that belongs on a kids show. Yeesh.

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  4. Just rented a house on Cape Cod for a week. It had a Sonos system. Loved it linked my playlist to it and never turned it off,

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    1. Sonos playlists are how I spend a lot of my alone time when I want some -- flip on the music and dig in.

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  5. On the bright side, you're due to totally win my next contest. Maybe?

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    1. You're just lucky that my bad luck led to Social Distortion!

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  6. If it makes you feel any better, the lot that I stole from you, was then stolen from me... so, there's that!

    Oh, and Social D does kind of suck too :)

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    1. Your take on Social Distortion isn't helping your case with me at all.

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  7. Ah the fast food rockers. A record company cashing in on a playground rhyme. It was a joke but a lot of very little kids liked it so mums and dads had to buy it...

    If you want British terrible number 1s look up "Mr Blobby".

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  8. I realize We Built This City is kinda cheesy... but there's no way it's in the same league as that first song. Wow. That Fast Food song sucks. It sucks real bad. Real, real bad. Glad you wrapped things up with some Social D.

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    1. I'm with you. I was a bit surprised at how much disdain and dislike there is for that Starship song. It's harmless, where as the Fast Food Song is like an indoctrination plan to fatten kids up from an early age.

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  9. I ended up with an NBA lot in Oscar's game......At least Billy Kingsley collects basketball so I'll probably just send it his way.

    I went through a big Social Distortion phase back in college.

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  10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBjrbVoBF9c

    This family had an infomercial back in the day hawking their CD's. Twenty years later this song is an inside joke among family/friends.

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  11. I think the hate for "We Built This City" is over the top. Granted, the song is pretty vacant, but there is so, so, so much out there that is worse. I think Built This City gets piled on by younger people who never experienced the '70s, a decade that featured even worse examples of music than the '80s.

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  12. I'll quote Dennis Eckersley on your card haul, "Yuk." The Nolan Ryan ornament though is #priceless.

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