Well, Rolling Stone Magazine seems to think so. (Does Mattel own Rolling Stone?) Here’s their list of the worst:
There were a lot of songs in the 1990s I absolutely hated, and none of them are on this commercial piece of shit’s list (surprise!). They left off Sugar Ray (If I were Sugar Ray Leonard, my favorite boxer, I would hunt these fuckers down and kick their asses for soiling my name!), and a bunch of other crap from the same period, including all that intolerable shit with the mumbling singers trying to rip off Eddie Vedder. (I hate Eddie Vedder’s voice, plus his whole schtick of the wounded rich boy whose parents misunderstood him, et. al., but he put Zeke on the radio, which is how I found out about them, so I’ll always love him for that. Plus, whatever I think of his singing, Eddie Vedder is an original! He created a whole style of singing that was never done before. You can’t say that about all the jerks & losers who made their living by copying his style, like Matchbox 20, and everyone else for a while there. Oh my God: I thought it would never end!)
“Barbie Girl” is just another cutesy dance-pop song. It’s no more annoying than millions of other carbon-copies of that style we’ve seen for decades now, and it’s certainly no worse than Madonna’s stuff from the 80s. (In fact, all that in between verse & chorus female vocal stuff, like the “Oo-oh-oo, oo-oh-oo” is straight out of Madonna’s songs.) But I will give it this: it’s catchy, and the idea of the Barbie Doll thing made into a song was great. There was also a dance song about Speed Racer from around the same time, where they had a middle part where they combined all the “ah’s” and “oh’s” from Trixie and Speed (from the TV show) to make it sound like they were having sex, and then they ended it with the line from the TV show theme song: “Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer!” That was kinda silly and fun, but there was a lot of stuff like that from that time period, so it’s funny to pick some stuff over others (out of this category of stuff) as good or bad; it just seems so arbitrary. Maybe the guy who did this list was just annoyed by the song like I was by that HP Touchpad ad: who knows? Taste is so subjective.
I actually like “Barbie Girl”, which I know is odd, as I’m a punk rocker and metalhead. But I’ve always also liked some disco, and this is what my friends from the dance club scene would have called “Happy House”: music that can’t help putting you in a good mood, since it’s so bouncy and positive (unless you hate disco). It was funny: during the late 1990s, there was a brief attempt to meld disco dance music and searing metal with two groups: The Prodigy, and Prong (2 groups starting with the letter “P”: go figure. Hey: maybe it was sponsored by Sesame Street to promote the letter “P”!), and neither of these attempts lasted for very long (although they were both great, if you appreciate dance music and also like metal: not the biggest demographic). But there was a lot of dance stuff happening in the 1990s, and some of it was lame, but I hardly think “Barbie Girl” was the worst of it. Hey, it’s catchy, and its lyrics are fun; that’s more than I can say for most of the music from that decade! But you know, being a fan of punk and metal, maybe I like the stuff that really attacks and polarizes people, and “Barbie Girl” sure does that all right! (People usually either love it or they hate it.)
Now, I have to admit, I’m not up on all the music from the 1990s, but something tells me that the best song according to Rolling Stone Magazine would be “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Weird Al, um, I mean Nirvana. (I loved that song until it was overplayed to death.) That was really big. In fact, I’d have to say it was the biggest song of the 1990s, without question, at least as far as making people wear torn jeans and flannel shirts overnight is concerned (which happened a lot in the New York music scene, but not to me). I spent most of that decade playing in bands and listening to stuff most people have never heard of, like The Flower Leperds, as well as lots of American hardcore punk, Zeke and Fu Manchu, and good thrash metal like Slayer and early Metallica. When there’s stuff like that, there’s no reason to make yourself put up with excrement like “One Headlight”. (I hate that song! It’s the one and only time I found myself hoping a cop would pull someone over for having only one headlight, if only to make the song end sooner! Then I could have said: “Ha! There: You couldn’t make it home with one headlight after all! Nyah, nyah!”)
But it’s funny, there are magazines and websites that make “best songs of blah blah”, and “worst songs of blah blah”, and they’re always just designed to get attention, because we’re all really opinionated about music, so they’re bound to get everyone talking, especially if they do it wrong. Taste in music is so subjective, and it’s so passionate, they’re bound to get a response. (Hey, they got one from me!) But remember: Rolling Stone is the same rag that gave Kurt Cobain one of the “top 50 guitar solos of all time” for simply playing the vocal melody on the guitar in the solo for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” because he wasn’t good enough to play a real solo. No criticism from me for him doing that; I liked it, but it doesn’t deserve to be judged as one of the top 50 guitar solos of all time: that’s just ridiculous, and insulting to everyone who played really great guitar solos! I’m surprised they didn’t give one of the top 50 guitar solos to Johnny Ramone for playing one note over and over again as the solo on “I Wanna Be Sedated”. (Another perfectly done solo for the song, but still: it doesn’t belong on the top 50 solos of all time! But hey: maybe they put that one on that list too! I can’t remember. But Johnny Ramone gets on the top guitarists of all time list a lot, and I’d agree with that for sure, as he created a whole new style and was great!)
But back to the topic here, I just don’t see how anyone can hate the song “Barbie Girl”: it’s like hating lollipops, kittens and puppies. But I guess if you work for Rolling Stone Magazine, you have to be one of those hipsters who says everything sucks and wears T-shirts of crappy things ironically. And I think we all know what they’re like.
But if you really want to hear some bad songs, you should teleport yourself back to 1990, when all the white boys wanted to be just like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, playing crappy wannabe funk-rock shit: unendurable! Oh, thank God that’s over! (Not even the Red Hot Chili Peppers would play that style of music after 1990! It really had “jumped the shark”. But at least the Chili Peppers could do it well! Imagine if you will, a bunch of wanting-to-be soundalike bands, but that couldn’t play well or write songs either: awesome! I’m telling you: for the top of this “worst songs of the 90’s” list, they all got robbed!)
Anyway, here’s the Wikipedia page on “Barbie Girl”: it’s really funny to read the part about Mattel suing them, and then ending up using the song to advertise Barbie dolls when their suit was thrown out of court again and again (I guess if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!):
And for people who like the song, the video is really silly and fun; if you haven’t seen it, here it is:
There are a couple of problems with this video. The guy who plays Ken is bald except for a silly curl thingy Ken doesn’t have; he should be wearing a wig or something. WTF? And the singer sings about how she’s blonde, but she’s got dark hair (!); is she insane, and everyone is just playing along for therapy purposes? It’s hard to tell. But maybe they did it so people like me would wonder about it, and talk about it in their blogs, so the song could annoy a whole new generations of listeners! Hey, you never know! Oh, but blogs didn’t exist yet then, did they? Well, maybe they were thinking ahead!
Oh, and to punkers and metalheads who still say “disco sucks”: listen to “Le Freak”, “Boogie Oogie Oogie”, “Shake Your Groove Thing”, etc., and tell me that’s not good! It’s really good!
Oh, and just so I don’t forget, here’s that Speed Racer song I was talking about (By Alpha Team); I heard it once in like 1998 and I never forgot it:
And here’s just the sex part of the song, for all you pervs out there:
