Dubious Rock Songs List

[Trexx]

A short list of songs I love that tend to get bagged on by folks that claim to be wise, music gurus.

1. Cherry Pie -Warrant. Even the songwriter winced when confronted about it's cheesiness. Yep, LOVE IT!

2: Cowboy -Kid Rock. I consider it a guilty pleasure

3: Rockstar -Nickleback. The song is awesome and I even like the video too. At this point the push-back on this band is a black comedy. Chad Kroeger is not to be underestimated. He's poised to cement his rock legacy across multiple generations.

4. True Colors -Cindy Lauper. Transcendent cheese. It's message is timeless and quite necessary, actually.

5. Freebird -Lynyrd Skynyrd. With the advent of disposable lighters, this song went into the lexicon of Americana pop culture forever. I never tire of this tired ol' goody.

6. Smells Like Teen Spirit -Nirvana. Untuned guitars, yeah. I get it, it's funky. But the dark, unsatisfied nature of this weird song make it great. I love the monotonous repeated droning rhythm and the screaming especially.

7. Music -Madonna. This song is just f'ing cool. The melody is super-simple but with ultra-smooth vocals and a lot of thump beats makes it infectious. Reminds me of partying in the city.

8. Wango Tango -Ted Nugent. The part of my brain that is madly in love with this song may easily be removed with surgery, but I will kick anybody holding a scalpel within ten miles in the teeth! Crass, fast, loud and fun.

9. Winds of Change -Scorpions. I suppose you need to be the of first generation to face thermo nuclear annihilation to fully appreciate this. It's a fucking masterpiece.

10. I Wanna Rock -Twisted Sister. Super-powered cheese bomb! Don't hate! Enjoy! Cliché gone wild. Yeah, baby!

[spacel0rd]

I like Winds of Change, True Colors and Free Bird. I think the only people who bag on Smells Like Teen Spirit are the ones who are bitter about how it changed the face of rock music at the time. I like it…but I’m so sick of it I never listen to it by my own choice. I can pretty much go the rest of my life without hearing Cowboy again as well.
Madonna has better songs than Music…but she has a lot of worse ones too. I Wanna Rock is pretty repetitive. I can’t listen to Ted Nugent anymore because of his mouth outside of the “music world”.
Rockstar, as well as all other Nickleback songs, just seem generic and formulaic to me. They have a simple blueprint they use in writing songs, and they don’t stray from it too far. Other bands do as well (AC/DC), but some formulas get stale a lot quicker than others.
Now for the biggie: I would call Cherry Pie the worst rock song of the 80s. Maybe of all time. I could get into reasons, but I’m not sure it matters when one hates a song as much as I hate this one. It’s like asking me why murder is such a bad crime. It just is…and there’s no sense in getting into the “whys” of it.

[Jesse]

Nice list! I like most of the songs on it. Not sure who "bags on" "Free Bird" but ok.

Though I hate what it did to the music world, I always did like "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Genius songwriting it is not. Killer guitar solo? No. But it IS catchy as hell.

"Cherry Pie" is ok. Not my fav by Warrant, but, yeah, I'm not sure why folks bag on it. It's at least as good as ANYTHING Def Leppard put out after "Pyromania".

"Rock Star" is one of only 3 Nickelback songs on my iPod.

[Frank]

1 Good song
2 I hate Kid Rock
3 Great catchy song
4 Not a fan
5 OVERPLAYED
6 this band ruined music - HATE THEM
7 Madonna SUCKS
8 A damn fine Uncle Ted song
9 Zzzzzzzzzzz
10 Good song MTV made me sick of it

[bucky]

Nothing wrong with the list... I actually never heard the Madonna song so I looked it up and...yeah it's a Madonna song... I never was really that crazy over Cowboy but a lot of people do like that tune. Overall I'm pretty open to all kinds of music. Back in the 80's when the whole Motley Crue, Ratt, Poison, Whitesnake, Great White...etc scene was going on I used to go see local bands that played the metal/hard rock stuff at least 2-3 nights a week. The thing was that in between sets of these bands the clubs would play dance music & the dance floor would fill up with girls. I hated that dance music but after a while I'd hate to admit it but songs like I Can't Wait by Nu Shooz, No More Lies by Michelle Le, The Breaks by Curtis Blow, & White Lines by Grand Master Flash were growing on me a bit. I really liked Smells Like Teen Spirit when it came out but at that time I didn't really think it was a new movement coming on to the scene. At that same time Enter Sandman was huge & I used to play the hell out of Smells Like Teen Spirit & the flipside of the Enter Sandman cassingle...Metallica's cover of Stone Cold Crazy.