As an accompaniment to this week’s NPR list that put forth a new canon of 150 great records made by women, our friends at Jezebel have collected the 150 worst albums made by men.
A “canon of dread,” they call it, and indeed just the sight of some of these record titles chills the blood: Pearl Jam’s No Code, Dave Matthews Band’s Before These Crowded Streets (which runs a torturous 70 minutes), Jack White’s Blunderbuss, The Cure’s acknowledged nadir Wild Mood Swings, Lou Reed & Metallica’s Lulu, Lil Wayne’s opus of recorded Guitar Center din Rebirth. And, of course, there’s plenty of grunt rock stuff we can all agree is awful, like Creed’s Human Clay (you ever just take a sec and look at this cover?) and Staind’s Break The Cycle. At number one is future senator Kid Rock’s extremely terrible Rock N Roll Jesus. Sample lyric: “You’ve got a body like the devil / And you smell like sex.” Enjoy:
But the Jezebel list kneecaps its share of sacred cows, too. For Emma, Forever Ago; Oh, Inverted World!, The Suburbs; Kid A; 311. None are safe from the thresher of reappraisal, but the coy joke of this list is that it’s not that different from any given top 250 rock list farted out in the past few decades. Same boys, different records.
[Note: Jezebel, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Univision Communications.]