The 10 Worst Rolling Stones Songs (2023)

Keith Richards once made a grand statement: "You have the sun, you have the moon, and you havedie rolling stones“. It is a proclamation that would humiliate a peacock with a rosette on its breast.

So perhaps it should give us mere mortals some reassurance that even the declared pillars of the solar system have off days. Amidst the Stones' "golden discography," however, there are a few outfits they're ashamed to brand their vaunted name on.

Paul McCartney may have recently joked that they were just "a blues cover band", but often their worst excursions come when they stray from the safety of that beloved realm. We praise the splendor of your comfort zone enough to decide that it's okay to assess the weaker side of things. God knows the world doesn't need more cynicism right now, but there are certain songs in their back catalog that deserve to be questioned.

We've rounded up these champagne swimmers below. From a mushy mess that makes you feel like you've just walked into the sonic equivalent of Morrissey's bachelorette party to an absolutely disgusting mess, these are the ten worst songs the band has ever produced - the opposite of "Gimme Shelter". and other wonders.

The 10 Worst Rolling Stones Songs:

"Cherry Oh Baby"

Reggae is a bygone world for rock 'n' bands. It's such a distinctive style that it's hard to match the riff patterns of common blues songs. So the Rolling Stones decided to go for it, they went a little too far. Mick Jagger singing in A Concerned Jamaican implies that they may, in fact, have jumped so far that they missed the pool entirely and caused temporary brain damage.

Elegant singing can be annoying enough at the best of times, but a Dartford man doing a cocky voice like he's from downtown Kingston is just plain obscene. The band may have really loved reggae, but it's arrogance to think, "well, we'll do it ourselves", which definitely backfires here. It causes the kind of David Brent spasm that could break a weak jaw.

"It's Just Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It)"

Paul McCartney's critics didn't just call their rivals a blues cover band. He ended his joke by saying that the Beatles' network was more distant than theirs. If he's hinting at something deeper, it's songs like "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It)" that certainly help his argument. Granted, when it comes to rock 'n' roll, not every song has to have the bottomless depth of 'Blowin' in the Wind' or some other timeless piece of folk poetry, this song constantly hints at that but brings it up. out in the firecracker process itself.

"Start Me Up" is a song that shows the good side of flat rock 'n' roll: it's an infectious fun that's as involuntary as Reflex. It's as deep as a puddle in the Sahara desert, but somewhere biologically interferes with the human genome. "It's Just Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It)" is exactly the same, except it triggers a migraine gene with prolonged exposure.

"Crazy to Cry"

Backed by the rather lush string synth sound that runs through the 1976sblack and blue, the band rekindled that heartwarming tone over gag-inducing Hallmark sentimentality with this stunning B-movie pastiche of a sad working-class dad. To resonate with their now aging fanbase, they paint a picture of a father coming home late from work, cradling his daughter in his lap and crying.

As it turns out, that poor bastard gave birth to a sort of four-year-old Albert Camus who whispers sweetly, "Oh, Dad, you're such a fool for crying." to the creepy And it only gets worse when he ventures into the "poor part of town" to see "his wife" and she makes the exact same comment to him as he cries across town for no apparent reason other than that he might be from a spirit. Cornish haunts the riffs and cheesy production.

Also, you can cry. The best sentimental songs have made that point of empowerment charmingly, but it's not right to angrily sing "Fool" with stretched vowels 24 times in the same song. "Memory Motel" may be masterful, but "Fool to Cry" showed where you can go wrong when you suddenly trade rock riffs for dark musings.

"I want to hold you"

If this were a band's first single, you'd dismiss it as going straight to the ash heap of history. They're nothing but clichés, made-up vulgarity and the world's simplest riff, which hints that the song was invented during a short bathroom break in the studio and should certainly have been removed.

It's a song that reeks of the laziness of a band writing by the pool. For some reason, in 1983, aged 40, with a ton of money at his command, he decided to write from the perspective of a broke guy begging a replacement "baby" to love him "for free". And then there's absolutely no development beyond that. It's a track that perfectly matches Super Hans' famous joke "Bullshitters transform wank into cash".

"Sing this song everybody (let's see what happens)"

Keith Richards once said thatwear: "When you're the Beatles in the 60s, you just get carried away, forget what you wanted to do. You start doingSargento Pfeffer. Some people think it's a brilliant album, but I think it's a rubbish mix, something like that.satanic majesties– “Ah, if you can do a lot of shit, so can we.”

I'm not even sure if this is properly called a song. It's just a collection of carnivalesque sounds that sailed the pretentious seas on the Democratic Republic's HMS Clownshoe of Faecal Flingers to spoil the glittering era with an Achilles' heel of overcooked nonsense. It's like being choked on the spittle of the brass-playing factualist. A weird kind of self-indulgence where you can't even imagine who's being pampered.

'indian girl'

In this song, Jagger evangelically travels to a devastated country on a private jet to tell the only girl alive in her town that life is getting harder. This sage lesson was taught Jagger the hard way during his own middle-class upbringing in sleepy Dartford, where neighborhood bullies threatened to cut him out of paper or steal his quince sandwiches, a harsh lesson reinforced during his time at London Academy. School of Economics.

Coupled with an Eagles-style soft rock sound, it all feels so casually insincere that condemning the war somehow feels extremely offensive. It also lacks the same punk sass used to save "Brown Sugar": it's a smooth, comforting tale of a misguided white savior bringing more bad news out of nowhere for a struggling poor boy. With proper mariachi horns inexplicably thrown into the mix, I think to inject some bland local talent, it's all dogged and uncontested, with equally reckless musicology following Jagger's strangely flowery vocals.

'Dirty work'

Fifty Shades of Galle album cover fordirty workit was a warning sign that the damned '80s production might have overrun the Stones. They didn't let bookies down and they let everyone down with what is probably their worst ever record. I mean, if the title track is one of the worst songs you've ever written, what's the hope of the album then?

The irony is that there's nothing particularly hideous or offensive about the song. It just has absolutely nothing to do with it, and that's one of the worst things to say about anything. It's messy and messy like the top shelf of a small fridge. Jagger's blindly sustained enthusiasm simply lends credence to Bob Dylan's critique when he reasoned, "To see [Jagger] jumping around doing that, I don't give a shit about age, from Altamont to RFK Stadium, you don't have to do that." . , man."

"Schwanzlutscher-Blues"

As the band approached the height of their waning success, they wanted to leave to start their own label to secure a larger share of their royalties. The problem was that they were still signed to Decca and had one more single to go along with the end of their contract. However, things got stormy. So, out of contempt for Decca, the band decided their best plan for Vogelflippen was to write them a single so offensive it would never make it to radio.

The song is about a lonely student who gets lost and meets a police officer and "fucks me with his club". So they certainly kept their end of the bargain. But, as any sane person would ask, why did they have to do it this way? If it was about delivering something Decca would never play, they could have offered a smorgasbord of fart sounds. Why did they have to indulgently mock child abuse? It's not something that gives them freedom, "well, at least you should never play." It is a sad mistake that deserves condemnation.

"sexual desire"

David Bowie once joked: "I think Mick Jagger would be surprised and surprised if he realized that for many people he is not a sex symbol, he is the picture of a mother." Reef Jagger, who flaunts his libido over smooth rock music.

It's a teenager's idea of ​​sexiness. The sultry tones you might think look hot, but that's an addiction soon enough, and this isn't an image to get anyone excited. It's all a harrowing experience, and strangely, the mix refuses to match the lyrics to the beat, leaving them uneasy to boot. Ironically, this is the song's unintentional postmodern climax, highlighting the bad place for Jagger's unbridled stomp, which feels a little too hard even for a broken shoe.

"The Alley Cat Blues"

The Stones knew better than to put a song about a bullied student on an official album, but when it came to high schoolers, they saw it as rock 'n' roll iconography at best. Stray Cat Blues' irritating sheet music reads: "I see you're fifteen / No, I don't want your ID / You seem so restless and so far from home / But he's not addicted, never mind / It's not a capital offence" .

Of course, these are complicated lyrics, but when the Rolling Stones toured America in 1969, they got even more complicated when Jagger lowered the age to 13. "I can see you're only 13," the song went, "I bet your mama don't know you scratch like that / I bet she don't know you can bite like that." The argument that it was written to test the provocative limits of rock 'n' roll is morally wrong. The music is an embarrassment, and no amount of banal blues riff repurposed from the past over a soulful drum beat can save it from the problem where it obviously indulges in a hateful, melancholy childhood.