What is the Most Boring Album of All Time?
Not this one -- which is actually a classic.
In Jonathan Sanders’ post regarding Peter Gabriel, commenter RKae stated, “That (Scratch My Back) was one of the most boring damned albums I’ve ever heard!” Which got me to thinking – what IS the most boring album of all time? And then I went back in time, to high school years…
You rush home from the record store. Back in the safety of your bedroom sanctuary you can barely contain the excitement as you tear the cellophane wrapper off the latest album from one of your favorite artists. You pop it on the turntable (yes, ”turntable”), the needle lowers to the wax and… a half hour later you realize you’ve been ripped off for $12!
For me, the most boring album of all time is Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal? Classic.
Metal Machine Music? Crap.
It didn’t take a half hour before I wished I had my money back, it only took two minutes – because the first two minutes was the same ‘noise’ as the next two, and the next two and the whole damned record!
Listen to the clip above, if you dare.
Well, I assume we have to qualify this as something that actually has quite a bit of attention or by an otherwise popular artist, otherwise it might be bird calls and singing bottles.
Most disappointing then? It’d have to be something by Leonard Cohen. People absolutely love this guy but to me his work is like the droning of a super-cool, hep and snazzy insect. I could drag more heartfelt emotion out of a robot version of a toaster.
Next would be anything by the Banana Splits/Addams Family/Dogpatch do heroin: Guns and Roses, and that high-pitched whine that could solve any hostage crisis in a matter of hours or supplant water-boarding. A Disney animatronic show of them would possess more improvisation and soul.
However top of the list would probably be any rap album. Amplify the sound a train makes over tracks, plus an air conditioner, curse and grunt a lot in between almost completely moronic rhyming slang like J.J. Walker doing the dozens while shouting ‘dyno-mite!’ Put some weird sounds that go ‘weeeeeiiiii-oooouuuuuu’ and police sirens and then shamble around a stage like one of H.P. Lovecraft’s batrachian fish-people from R’lyeh who’ve forgotten where their nuts are. Don’t forget to surround yourself with 4 chicks in golden hotpants with Mickey Mouse-ears afros who pretend they’re men jack-hammering a nail into a stage with the previously mentioned fish-nuts they don’t have.
I repeat what I said in a post the other day when PJM felt the need to laud G&R for their induction in the hall of fame. (Sheesh, PJM!) G&R are the cliche of cliches. They are like a band that would be created by an untalented screenwriter for a cheesy movie about a band. Everything they did – song writing, onstage moves, drug use, break-up – was paint-by-numbers and done to death before they even got there.
Totally agree with your take on rap. The wife and I were out for a walk and a car went by with the “boom, thump, boom, thump” going on; typical man-child at the wheel with his “Don’t f*ck with me” face. I said to the wife, “It’s not even anyone PLAYING a bass! It’s just a programmed noise! That idiot with the backward baseball cap is getting off on a loop sound effect!”
My vote for most boring: Anything by U2. Chunga-chunga-chunga-chunga-chunga… Wow. Great guitar playing there, Mr. Edge!
What can one say about a culture endlessly fascinated by the sound a record makes when you scratch it backwards. I’m trying to imagine Einstein sitting there in his patent office and doing the same, feeling that if he only did it enough, the secrets of the universe would reveal themselves. If only he’d read “Through the Looking Glass,” where records play themselves forward.
“All mimsy were the borogoves, yo. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”
Don’t mince words, Fail, tell us exactly what you think! Oh, and please don’t ever change. Really. I agree, Leonard Cohen can’t sing, not even his own material, which only shines on the lips of others.
On Mr. Palermo’s point: Metal Machine Music is believed in some quarters to be a deliberate put-on by Lou Reed, in an attempt to fulfill a recording contract he resented. Plus, it leads in most published lists of Worst (not just Dullest) Album Ever.
But the author of the book “The 50 Worst Rock-and-Roll Records of All Time” found, yes, a worse one: Having Fun with Elvis Onstage, 40 minutes of The King’s between-song patter. I joke not. Fortunately, no one will admit to ever having bought/listened to it.
Cohen’s best LP was “Songs for the Clinically Depressed”
A one octave range isn’t singing – that’s droning. If “The Sound of Music” had been like that, people would’ve been rooting for the Nazis.
RK – Thank you for the inspiration for the conversation.
I play bass, so I have no use for machine-made notes.
Re:U2 – I like ‘One” (not something I usually admit, even to myself)
Fail – the Banana’s theme song: La-la-la, la-la-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la-la.
(I think I have the right # of la’s there, if I remember the melody correctly.)
Recently heard Axl butchering Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”, has to be one of the worst covers ever (Worst Cover Version Ever – a future post?)
When he started with his “hey, hey, hey-hey-hey” nonsense, why didn’t someone in the studio – band mate, producer, engineer, janitor passing through – tell him to shut-up?
Werewife – ‘Sonny’, please, thankx. What silver-bullets me is they actually RE-RELEASED this garbage on CD!! (And actually, I might choose Elvis’ between-song patter over his songs; not a fan of the King)
Thanks for the comments . . .
Needs one more la… It depresses me that I know that.
What was an early lesson taught in school? NEVER change your initial answer.
I HAD that extra ‘la’ in there and changed it.
Thanks for the correction jsallison (and thanks for providing me company in not being the only one who remembers it)
Most boring album?
For me is was Rick Wakeman doing Journey To The Center Of The Earth.
He was a Moog pioneer and I was excited to get this recording from an early member of Yes. Try and listen to the whole thing.
It has sold 12mil copies. I should be so boring.
I’m an enormous Wakeman fan! …And that is my least favorite album of his. It’s so poorly done, what with being live. There are some clunker notes in it. I can’t believe it was as popular as it was.
He did a studio recording of it on a thing called “Classic Tracks” (with some musicians that he hated!). It’s good, with no narration, and whittled down to a mere 32 minutes. But the singer screwed up and got some the lyrics in the wrong place, and oddly no one fixed it.
Maybe it’s just cursed and there will never be a good recording.
“Jesus’ Blood Has Never Failed Me Yet” by Gavin Bryars with a special guest appearance by Tom Waits. I’ve yet to hear all of it, as the first time I played it, I fell asleep after ten minutes; and the next and only other time I tried to listen to the CD, I gave up after five. Read the title and repeat it over and over for an hour and you get an idea what the record is like.
Oh, my God! Someone else who’s heard that!
I’ve heard some absolutely excellent works by Gavin Bryars… but that ain’t one of ‘em!
Sheepishly admitting I own that CD.
Now there are three of us who have listened to it!
Kansas. What was that album title? They whined the same tune over and over with different words for the whole thing, and it didn’t make sense in the first place.
OK, I made it through 1:15 of Metal Machine Music.
That album was clearly way ahead of its time.
In the 1970s, there was still a lot of music that wasn’t crap.
The ’70s were utterly incredible! “Close To The Edge.” “Relayer.” “Brain Salad Surgery.” “Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy.” “Past, Present & Future.” “I Robot.” “Selling England By The Pound.” “A Passion Play.” Anything by Gentle Giant…
I could go on all day. I’ll stand by the ’70s as the best damned decade for music ever. Everyone equates it with disco, but that was a mere bump in the road. It was actually damned awesome.
I actually like tape loops and don’t mind electronically generated noise……..
That said, the most disappointing album in my experience came sometime after I dropped sixteen buxx on don Van Vliet and company’s Trout Mask Replica. I brought home Bluejeans and Moonbeams and expected, if not the same experience, at least something worthy of the imprint of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band. After the entire first side and three cuts into the second, I had a reaction similar to one of the famous internet meme guys. I’ll let you guess which one…..’>………
I have one John Lennon + Yoko Ono LP with a long track with only silence.
You ignore the power of calamitous political LPs. In Moscow in 1991 when communism collapsed a friend bought a boxed set of Stalin’s speeches in Russian – one side was nothing but applause. I am the proud owner of an LP of speeches by Verwoerd and other founders of apartheid, all in Afrikaans. Don’t play it often.
There is a Brian Eno LP, Ambient: Music for Airports. Each track consists of only a few notes played repetitively, occasionally varying the order and the interval between pauses. Each track is named with a number (1/1, 1/2, 2/1, …) which correspond to the side of the album (yes I am old) and the track number of the side. While recognizing that it is “boring”, it is still one of my favorites.
Prog rockers did produce some amazingly bad solo albums. Eno’s frequent collaborator Robert Fripp has produced some great albums but “The Lady and the Tiger” was one I never even played through the first side.
King Crimson – In the wake of Poseidon. Boorish and pretentious.
the artist the memory hole was thankfully created for: Rod McKuen listen to the warm
too pap to even solicit antipathy = more boring
Don’t forget the Beatles’ White Album.
Right on, it contained enough material for about 60% of an album, not the 2 disc disaster is was.
Anything from the Disco era. I,m convinced after a decade of good music people went mad in the 70s. Its reflected in the Disco drummed up music, by The Record industry. To create ab “new” era.The real freaks who loved it there are endless satires to be seen or read. The Punksters of the time where the sane ones.
Just goes to show you can make people eat dung & love it, if you have the power of total control of an industry.
Let’s have a thoughtful moment of silent in regard to “Free Form Guitar” from Chicago’s first album.
Glad to see I wasn’t the only one suckered into Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Never bought anything of his ever again
Any album by the toy boys with cowboy hats now masquerading as country stars. None of them is good enough to wash Johnny Cash’s shorts…
No one’s mentioned Tales from Topographic Oceans, Yes’s four-song double album.
All the posts and polls I’ve seen over the years and still no mention of David Bowie’s “Bertolt Brecht’s Baal”. Keep your Metal Music Machine, your G & R and rap, five minutes into that waste of wax and you’ll want to lock yourself in a room with a loaded gun and a Leonard Cohen album. I didn’t mind if Bowie was weird or queer but that album was the last nail in the coffin.
Now, up front: if I had to purge my CD collection of shrill leftists, moronic druggies and assorted deviants, I wouldn’t have much left. I mean, Jimmy Page is a pedophilic coke-head, but I’m not going to toss any of my Led Zeppelin albums.
But if it’s BORING you want, well… the most boring albums I’ve ever heard are:
1) Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska.” God, what a snooze- which meant, naturally, that it made every critic’s Ten Best list. This album is, essentially, the musical embodiment of Stalinesque Socialist Realism.
2) The Clash’s “Sandinista.” I’d heard bad albums before. I’d heard bad double albums before. But ONLY the Clash could have made a TRIPLE record album without a single good song on it. And that’s noit easy to do! Just by sheer dumb luck, they should have been able to come up with ONE song that didn’t suck.
3) Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Love Beach.” Now, in the Seventies, I was a nerdy prog-rock fan (okay, truthfully, I still am one). But to show you just HOW bad this album was… in 1979, I bought it from the discount bin at my local record store. I paid just 99 cents for it. And to this day, I STILL swear that if I ever meet Keith Emerson, I’m going to demand a refund.