The Top 10 Worst Beatles Songs

How did everything get so bad? Maybe because a panty-wetting UK boy band was allowed to become the corporate ideal for all artistic expression to come

This article originally appeared in a heavily abbreviated form at Vice on Nov 13, 2014. I can’t imagine why they wanted to cut it down so heavily. Perhaps they were just trying to protect me from the death threats I would end up receiving. Alas, at last, it has been restored to its full glory.

I’ve always pretty much despised the Beatles, though I’ve never been sure precisely why. I mean, sure, they are basically the Backstreet Boys of the 50’s, who later decided to do drugs and become artists, somehow fooling millions in the meantime to take them seriously in a way we never could if, say, one of the New Kids put out a shoegaze album. I’ve certainly given them several chances over the years, trying to trick myself into sitting down with Abbey Road, for instance, and listening to it until I came around. Some of my favorite music has always been stuff I hated at first, even for a long time, though with the Beatles the more I tried, the more each song seemed to become somehow even more cheesy, or in some cases, like a form of torture.

Still, this music is rather hard to avoid. Like it or not, you’ll hear these songs in malls, in movies and commercials, at a party, anywhere, so that even not liking the Beatles, you know their music, can sing along. I realized pretty quickly once I sat down to try to make a list of the Beatles songs that barf the hardest in my brain that I could probably make a top 30 or top 100, so for me these are the blowholes that blow the most, and why. Think of it as an opening of a discussion, the inauguration of a Hall of Anguish in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. For a complete list of the worst songs by the Beatles, gather their discography into one long queue and press play.

10. “Here Comes The Sun”

The introduction melody to this song reminds me of waking up in a coffee commercial. The young man wakes, stretches, puts on his slippers and robe, comes downstairs to find a steaming cup of cocoa waiting for him on the counter, made by a magic elf. He laughs and shrugs at no one, takes the cup and goes to stand at the window sipping gently, watching robins frolic in the snow, because for some reason is it Christmas again. It’s always seeming like Christmas in Beatles land to me for some reason, I guess because if Jesus existed and came down to earth he would probably listen to cheeky pop-dad bullshit like the Beatles. I feel like if you aren’t getting your hair combed by an old man while drinking free hot cocoa in your PJs when you listen to this song you aren’t doing it right, and therefore I hate this song.

9. “Please Please Me”

AGH, WHY DOES THIS SONG SOUND LIKE IT IS CHRISTMAS AGAIN? Sorry, I didn’t mean to type-yell. But for some reason within seconds of hearing most any Beatles song my blood goes cold and skin starts screaming, like there is something on fire behind my face. Maybe in this case it’s the horrible shrill harmonica harmony at the beginning, which basically sounds like someone made an instrument out of a screeching malfunctioning hard drive. Then more Christmas cards open in front of your face over and over in continuous flashback as these guys sing more lyrics about hanging out with “my girl.” Ten thousand Macaulay Culkin references abound, reigning in the endless lyrical spray of nursery rhyme emotion, patriarchal babbling about relationships, and insufferable repetitions of fart-boy rock’n’roll clichés like “Come on, Come On, Come On,” because there’s nothing else to fill the space with but baby-talk prattle. Why does this guy’s “girl” have to “please (him) like (he) please(s) (her)”? I don’t feel pleased at all right now, Mr. Assumption. Are the Beatles lyrics the origins of date rape mindset? I vote yes.

8. “Blackbird”

First it was Christmas, now it’s nighty-night time. We have a little lullaby going on here, though for some reason there’s a guy lightly tapping a little hammer against a wood block in the background, as if to count down how long you’ve spent listening to this poop fest in the small amount of time you have left before you die. A song about a bird, how Portlandia; I guess, the Beatles did influence the future. A hundred thousand bros probably would have never been inspired to go buy an acoustic and sit out at the coffee shop covering Dave Matthews Band if it weren’t for this song. Also, this would be a great track to be buried alive to. Thank you for including the sample of the bird chirruping so at least there’s something to distract me from the rest. This song is so calm, and yet I feel I’m about to have a brain hemorrhage right after I go out and buy a brand new Volkswagen and crash it head on into the Hallmark headquarters.

7. “Good Day Sunshine”

The first nine seconds of this song are tolerable because it’s just a steady drum beat and piano beating in monotone. I wish it’d stayed that way, but then the singing starts, and I can’t help but thinking of hippies sharing loaves of bread with one another in large grass fields while listening to iPods. There’s something so Apple commercial about whenever the Beatles do vocal harmonies. I can kind of see Paul McCartney doing his natural baby-pooping-in-its-diaper face while bumping with the bass line, tagging his butt against the floor of the recording studio in time. It’s not that I can’t get down the overly optimistic and good-natured theme of the lyrics centered around having a good day, it’s that hearing people singing about having a good day usually starts making me have a bad day. You shouldn’t be able to listen to this song unless you are sucking on a popsicle in a rain storm, or at least sucking on something.

6. “Ticket To Ride”

I’ve always really hated most any song that talks about a subject in third person, with lyrics like “he does what he needs / because he needs to / because he’s a drifter” or something. That’s not what this song says, but it might as well in my mind, because it’s just as hokey, and it makes just as little actual sense. Nonsensical lyrics are great when they are actually nonsensical, but lyrics that pretend to be telling a story when they really are just repeating themselves in a universally-aimed fashion, so as to appeal to anybody in the correct connect, are the aural equivalent of a blowjob, without anybody actually ejaculating. Also, why is it that in so many of their group photos, all of the Beatles are making faces like somebody is doing a magic trick in front of them for the second time in a row. They already know the trick but just want to see it happen. The trick, in the occasion of this song, is that you four white boys are somehow basic as fuck while at the same time blow at writing anything remotely believably emotional.

5. “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”

I know it isn’t fair to hold an era’s slang against an artist, but I can’t help wishing the subtitle of this song meant it was a love song for a big girl. Instead it just like means again that bro wants to do sex. Surprise! The guitar line that opens this song sounds like what dozens of my friends in high school would play while trying to figure out how to play some Smashing Pumpkins song, which maybe could be cool or interesting in an ironic way, until the verse part arrives, and we get J-Lells here performing his version of a blues soliloquy breakdown, which comes off about as white boy as it gets, and has all the validity of your dad’s favorite bar band. Sorry, I just don’t believe the faux earnestness of timeless rock lyrics like “I want you” in any context, and saying, “Well, John was a genius, so this in some way was a commentary” doesn’t change the fact this sounds like a Creedence Clearwater cover as performed by deaf middle schoolers. Actually, wait, that would be way better than this song.

4. “Yellow Submarine”

Of all the Beatles songs I don’t like (almost all of them), this one actually stands out as so bad it’s almost good depending on your mood, the same sometimes there are foods you can’t stop eating precisely because of how specifically unpleasant they taste. “Yellow Submarine” is one that even a lot of massive Beatles fans hate for its childish goober sing-sing style, which almost makes me want to like it just on principle; the enemy of your enemy is your ally and so on. But no, this track has as much or more of everything I can’t stand as any other, including perhaps one of the most obnoxious choruses of all time, the kind of chant I imagine they make child molesters sing as penance in order to get supper delivered to their cell. Probably what most people don’t like about this one is that who the fuck knows what “we all live in a yellow submarine” means, which again for me is a mark in its favor, if only it didn’t sound like a work song of the Munchkins. This song should either become the national anthem or be deleted forever.

3. “The Fool On The Hill”

What happens when a heartthrob boy band does a shitload of drugs and become hippies and start really trying to get creative? Poop on tape. I’m pretty sure this song has a kazoo solo in it. I’m also pretty sure this is what horses hear when they are killed.

2. “Let It Be”

Let it be what? Corny? As much as there might be for me to mention about why I find this song repellant, trite, and snoozy, I’d like to instead defer to a comment left on the song’s YouTube page by user Ninjastyle124: “Da fact dat all kindsa muthafuckin books still name tha Beatlez ‘the top billin or most dope or most influential’ rock crew eva only drops some lyrics ta you how tha fuck far rock noize still is from becomin a straight-up art. Jazz muthafuckas have long recognized dat tha top billin jazz musical muthafuckaz of all times is Dude Ellington n' Jizzy Coltrane, whoz ass was not da most thugged-out hyped or richest or dopest sellaz of they times, let ridin' solo of all times. Classical muthafuckas rank tha highly controversial Beethoven over old-ass musical muthafuckas whoz ass was highly ghettofab up in courts round Europe. Rock muthafuckas is still blinded by commercial success: tha Beatlez sold mo' than any suckas (not true, by tha way), therefore they must done been tha top billin. Jazz muthafuckas grow up listenin ta a shitload of jazz noize of tha past, old-ass muthafuckas grow up listenin ta a shitload of old-ass noize of tha past. Rock muthafuckas is often straight-up all salty ta tha rock noize of tha past, they barely know tha dopest sellers. No wonder they is ghon be thinkin dat tha Beatlez did anythang worth of bein saved. Y'all KNOW dat shit, muthafucka!”

1. “Hey Jude”

No non-instrumental song ever should be more than seven minutes long unless it is black metal. This fact is even more true when half of the words are do do wah wah language, more filler blubber for the toddlers in the house. Even if this song were one minute long though, I would still prefer to listen to a chorus of sickly babies crying on a plane without AC in Arizona in the midst of summer than be subjected to this doo-doo anthem-for-Dads Starbucks cryhole ever again.