Even the best of songs can be turned horrible by a bad cover. Maybe it's a technically demanding song being played by musicians who lack the necessary talent, or maybe it just doesn't fit the artist's style... either way, you're better off just listening to the original version.
Important Note: To ensure that the song is judged with a clear mind and the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction, as well as to allow opinions to properly form, examples should not be added until at least one month after release. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.
General
- Apple and iTunes have been releasing covers of popular anime songs in conjunction with Anisong. There are 45 albums so far, and only three of them have gotten higher than 3 stars on iTunes. Most of them aren't even anime songs - songs from Super Sentai series and Kamen Rider series are in the group, too. Some key examples:
- Lost Sunrise, who covered "Precious Time Glory Days", all sound congested.
- Kanno Yutaka and Mu-Ray provide a spiritless version of "Brand New World".
- Aya's rather generic techno version of "Koi no Mikuru Tensetsu (sic)" could possibly be forgiven, if she could sing.
- There's a collection of songs released in this group focused specifically on the Pretty Cure franchise. If a song title has "Precure" listed, it's spelled "Purecure". The most painful of the bunch are Cao's rendition of "Makasete! Splash Star" and Mami's rendition of "Tomorrow Song ~Ashita no Uta~".
- Most of the cover songs from Guitar Hero range from mediocre to pretty good, but there are a few that are downright horrible:
- The version of Lamb of God's "Laid to Rest"
in Guitar Hero 2. The singer, Marcus Henderson (not the actor), tries to imitate Randy Blythe's unique vocal style, but instead he sounds like someone yelling through cupped hands while straining on the toilet, making the song unlistenable. - The cover of Avenged Sevenfold's "Beast and the Harlot". The vocals are off-beat, and whoever sang this cover was obviously bored while making it, so they fail to sound anything like M. Shadows.
- The cover of "Police Truck" by Dead Kennedys in Rocks the 80s is censored so much that it ruins the song, destroys its original meaning, and gives it more painful rhymes than the original. For instance, the word "ass" is changed to "butt" in the line "Pull down your dress/Here's a kick in the ass", even though other songs in the series had no issue with the word.
- The cover of "Killing In the Name" by Rage Against the Machine from Guitar Hero 2 suffers from a lot of the same excessive censorship that "Police Truck" from Rocks the 80s does (the infamous "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" bridge is instead replaced by "Now you're under control, I won't do what you tell me", which is just jarring to listen to.) The vocalist is also, to be frank, terrible, with absolutely none of the power or emphasis Zach De La Rocha has, and he instead sounds like he's half-asleep. Finally, the solo is incredibly grating and poorly done.
- The cover of Iron Maiden's "Wrathchild", also from Rocks the 80s, is worth a mention too. The singer sounds nasal and appears to have asphalt in his voice box in an awful attempt at emulating Paul Di'Anno's rasp, the bass line is messed up, and the solo is almost entirely wrong.
- The Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero 2 has this cover of "The Trooper", where the guitars are in severe miscommunication with each other and the fun feel of the Maiden tune has been sucked out, making it feel almost depressing. The singer sounds like he has a severe vowel pronouncing problem in addition to sounding like he has peanut butter stuck to the roof of his mouth.
- The version of Lamb of God's "Laid to Rest"
- Rock Band, made by the same people who made the first two main Guitar Hero games and Rocks the 80s, also has some covers in its setlist. Some of them sound just like the real thing, but there are also some awful ones. The covers of Rush's "Tom Sawyer", "Limelight", and "Working Man" note The cover singer, Mark Edwards, sounds like he has peanut butter stuck to the roof of his mouth. Thankfully these, along with some of the other cover versions, have since been supplemented by the original versions as Downloadable Content.
- 99% of Rock Revolution's setlist is composed of covers, most of which are awful. For instance, in their cover of System of a Down's "Chop Suey", the guitar is completely messed up, and the lead vocals sound nothing like Serj Tankian's distinctive voice.
- The Countdown Singers, an anonymous band of musicians from Quebec who perform soundalike covers of popular tunes. They exist only as Schmuck Bait for people who think they're getting a good deal by getting 20 different songs on the same disc. These cover artists are basically personality-free jingle singers trying to sound like the original artist against a backing of drum machines and keyboards. AllMusic has given this series 1-2 stars with remarkable consistency, and the albums that have text reviews give an even better taste of how bad the covers are:"Consumers need to check the fine print on the back of these cheap-o compilations or undergo disappointment when they play it. Since all of these tracks can easily be found in their original form on other compilations, steer clear of this!"
- Jukebox Zeroes brought them up as part of their “Allmusic.com Bottom of the Barrel Roundup”... and quoted This Very Entry!
- In a similar vein to both The Countdown Singers and Hit Crew, a small record label in the Philippines called Aquarius Records & Tapes is known for having released scores of budget-priced compilation albums by uncredited session musicians in the style of popular hit tunes. The quality of these covers are more often than not hit of miss if not totally grating to one's eardrums, such as this cover of "Don't Matter" by Akon and this atrocious rendition of "Get This Party Started" by P!nk. Said albums are distributed either on cassette, audio CD or on Video CD,note and sold at the budget section of record bars in the Philippines, which, like the above mentioned Countdown Singers, serve as Schmuck Bait for the impressionable budget consumer.
- RuPaul has released multiple albums with several catchy hits... however, he had the bright idea of letting Drag Race contestants cover his music for Seasons 6 and 7, resulting in The CoverGurlz and The CoverGurlz 2. While a handful of queens were able to do the songs justice,note the rest phoned in their performances and had to be autotuned to hell and back in a doomed effort to produce something half-listenable.
Specific Examples
- The Beach Boys may have been washed up by The '80s, but they still put on good live shows. Their 1983 concert in Seattle was fine, except for their cover of John Lennon's "Imagine". Drummer Dennis Wilson was out of shape and had to be backed up by Bobby Figueroa due to drug and alcohol problems that ultimately killed him; serial offender Mike Love's singing was just as bad, with him nasally mumbling the entire song. One wonders why bassist Bruce Johnston didn't sing here, as his voice was softer and more appropriate for "Imagine".
- In 1995, Bono of U2 managed to record a wholly irredeemable cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" for a Cohen tribute album. Many artists have done different interpretations of the song with varying degrees of success, so Bono, given how powerful his voice is, ought to be able to do a decent cover, right? Nope. Instead, we get a bizarre spoken word version where he mumbles the lyrics inaudibly over an electronic beat that sounds like it's coming from a blown car speaker, occasionally interspersed with him singing the chorus in a painfully out of key and scratchy sounding falsetto. Said cover is so bad that even Bono himself ''publicly apologized for it'' in a December 2012 Mojo interview. It is often considered one of the worst Leonard Cohen covers of all time. Tim and Garrett from “Why I Hate This Album” critique it here, or endure it at your own risk here.
- While the majority of Kanye West's performance at Glastonbury 2015 got a mixed-to-positive reaction, even its most staunch defenders will not, in any way, defend his shameless butchery of "Bohemian Rhapsody". He only covers the first two minutes of the song, does it to a playback track of the original song, skips about 60% of the lyrics, and the lyrics he does sing sound out of tune and like he has problems with his throat. Watch the horror at your own risk.
- Duran Duran's horrendous cover of Public Enemy's "911 is a Joke". This specific cover came off of a critically panned album titled Thank You which featured covers of varying quality. This was the one that made even hardcore Duran Duran fans feel embarrassed. The tone and delivery of the vocals don't seem to even try to match the tone of the original, which is a Protest Song of the highest order, and it comes off as cheesy as a result. That's not even mentioning the horrendously dated beat, done on an acoustic guitar.
- Red Hot Chili Peppers did a cover of "I Found Out" by John Lennon for the tribute album Working Class Hero in 1996. The whole band sounds completely bored on it and the production is much worse than their usual output. It is the only song they have contributed to a compilation that was not released elsewhere, and the band quickly disowned it.
- Jesse McCartney covered Panic! at the Disco's "I Write Sins, Not Tragedies" as part of a radio program... that didn't ask him to cover the song. The cover was so bad that the radio station called Brendon Urie himself to hear it, and its sheer lack of melody, incorrect lyrics and general awfulness led them to only playing just a sample of it.
- Ex-gay porn actor Colton Ford did a shamelessly awful cover of "Lithium" by Nirvana in 2009. He transformed a tongue-in-cheek humorous tune into an emotionless, almost borderline-depressing dance tune. If you took a shot every time he strains his vocals, you'd die from alcohol poisoning, and the electric guitar in the chorus can barely keep up with the already butchered tempo. Approach with caution.
- Rosegun Vibe's cover of Deftones' "My Own Summer (Shove It)". Even with the instrumentation tuned lower than the original, it would have been fine... if the singer wasn't horrendously off-key. And as for the iconic shrieks of the original, they've been replaced by some of the most utterly dull and lifeless... "yells" this side of House of the Dead 2.
- The Doc G lineup of PM Dawn, featuring none of the founding members, did two re-recordings of sole #1 hit "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss." Doc G's voice is lifeless and off-tempo, especially compared to Prince Be's. On the first re-recording he couldn't clear the original sample of Spandau Ballet's "True". Todd in the Shadows tweeted that the re-recordings sounded like ass. In partnership with Genius, Spotify had a "Behind The Lyrics" feature on certain songs, and since the original recording wasn't available to stream, the text that appeared on-screen as you listened to "Set Adrift On Memory Bliss" on the app actually started out by acknowledging the fact that what you were hearing was an inferior remake. After a while, the "Behind The Lyrics" feature on that particular song mysteriously disappeared, but the remakes remained the only streaming versions.
- The New York Street Band stumbled into Columbia's recording studios one day in 1932 to record "The Sidewalks of New York" and "The Festival Polka". Why Columbia saw fit to release those two tracks on a 78, nobody knows, as the musicians have trouble keeping tempo, staying together, and are all very, very out of tune. Unsurprisingly, they seem to have recorded nothing else and said 78 has since become a strange, obscure curio for the unsuspecting record collector.
- Like many foreign dubs, the Turkish dub of Steven Universe usually leaves the songs undubbed. However, when "Jail Break" aired they tried to dub "Stronger Than You". Anything that could have gone wrong did go wrong: the translation itself is questionable, note it is frequently and painfully inconsistent from the get-go, the singer is so monotone that you wonder if they tried and failed to turn it into a rap, and for the final nail in the coffin the laziness of the show's dubbing seeps into the song. note
- Similarly, the Hindi version of "Strong in the Real Way" makes no attempt to match the singing with the music and heavily abuses reverb.
- Similarly, the Hindi version of "Strong in the Real Way"
- Polish pop duo Blog 27 did a cover of Italian singer Alexia's 1997 Europop hit "Uh La La La". It sounds like an entire bag of cats being strangled, and the rhythm of the original is completely lost. Seeing seemingly underage dancers note in their miniskirts baring their midriffs is also hard to watch. Compare Alexia's original to Blog 27's abomination.
- Katie Price and Peter Andre's shameless butchering of "A Whole New World" from Aladdin. Even though the entire album the song was released on was critically panned (and is perhaps most famous for its piss-taking Amazon reviews), it has a few fans here and there. This particular cover, however, is loathed by even fans of the album. The keyboards almost fail to keep up with the original's tempo, Peter oversings worse than you can imagine, and Katie can't pronounce her words right.
- What happens when the Giftedly Bad The Shaggs do a cover? You get this cover of the Carpenters' "Yesterday Once More". While The Shaggs's music normally falls on the opposite end of the spectrum, listening to them struggle to follow the original tune will make even the most tolerant listener shake their head.
- While Kidz Bop as a whole is spared since there are people who actually enjoy it, there are a few covers not even their fans can defend.
- Their rendition of "Feel Good Inc." is filled with poor attempts to imitate the unique sound that made Gorillaz well-loved in the first place, obvious fake laughs, and tone-deaf vocals that make it unlistenable throughout.
- Their cover of blink-182's "All The Small Things" is even worse. The instruments are not mixed right, which causes the song to sound like something you'd hear at a cheap department store. Worse, the lead singer is not a child, but rather Tom Scharpling, who defies Retroactive Recognition by singing like he lives off of cigarette smoke. The kids themselves are only in the chorus, and they sound like a bunch of monotonous Lisa Simpson clones.
- Their rendition of "Feel Good Inc."
- Falling in Reverse's cover of "Gangsta's Paradise", for the compilation album Punk Goes 90s, Vol. 2, is quite possibly the worst reimagining of a song in history. Ronnie Radke spends the song yelling the lyrics, which end up losing all credibility when you remember that they were written about the life of an African-American youth and not a middle-class white guy in his 30s. To make matters worse, there's a breakdown in the middle of the song where Radke abruptly switches to tough-guy growling, which will make fans of Coolio's original bang their heads against the wall. One really has to wonder why Coolio's label (he appears in the music video) would take issue with "Weird Al" Yankovic's Affectionate Parody of this song "Amish Paradise" and yet be completely fine with this straight-up insult of a cover.
- When Chris Cornell died in May 2017, many were quick to pay tribute to him by covering some of his most well-known tunes. Among the absolute worst of the lot was Dream Theater's wholly irredeemable cover of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" at their show in Bucharest, Romania. The band were already facing criticism during the tour due to James LaBrie's rapidly deteriorating voice, Mike Mangini's lifeless and robotic drumming, and downtuning the entire Images and Words album, but this half-assed tribute is often seen as the pinnacle of the tour's terrible quality. LaBrie is off key for the entire song and forgets the words halfway through the first verse, remarking "I forgot the fucking words" and making an already terrible and forced-sounding tribute downright disrespectful. The band caught a lot of flak on social media for the performance and not even the most staunch defenders of LaBrie, who's an extremely polarizing singer, could find anything nice to say about it.
- This painfully bad cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" certainly qualifies. The singer-songwriter, J-Rock artist Kirito, has an accent so thick it makes the lyrics (which are still sung in English) nigh-incomprehensible, the drummer is playing far too slowly & completely out of tune, and the guitar solo near the end is entirely off-melody. Unsurprisingly, it's the most watched Nirvana-related video on Nico Nico Douga due to sheer Bile Fascination.
- Actress Gal Gadot's cover of "Imagine", featuring over 20 other celebrities,specifically... was meant to raise spirits during the COVID-19 Pandemic, but instead made everyone involved look out-of-touch. For each of the few tolerable appearances, there were several apathetic (Pedro Pascal), unfunny (Kristen Wiig, Sarah Silverman), gratuitous (Eddie Benjamin), embarrassing (Ashley Benson with Kaia Gerber and Cara Delevigne), inept (Chris O'Dowd, Will Ferrell, Natalie Portman), or just plain lousy ones. It has since gone down as a prime example of celebrity slacktivism: Heather Schwedel of Slate lists everyone's segments in order from least to most annoying, Gadot herself had nothing kind to say about it in retrospect, and "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Eat It" was used as a parodic rebuttal in the exact same style, also featuring Silverman among its contributors. Avant-garde musician Lingua Ignota rebutted with "Above Us Only Sky," which sampled a snippet from the cover before turning into a wall of harsh noise, as she felt three minutes of that would be just as inspiring. Rocked also noted it as one of the worst cover songs ever in his video on his 10 worst political songs.
- While Six Feet Under's Graveyard Classics albums are very polarizing, they at least are often enjoyed as So Bad, It's Good due to Chris Barnes' terrible death growling over admittedly badass renditions of rock-n-roll classics (often christened "Death N Roll"). The worst received of the lot is Graveyard Classics IV, which is half Judas Priest covers and half Iron Maiden covers; however, even defenders of this album won't defend their cover of "The Evil That Men Do". Whereas the other covers on the album at least try as hard as they can to stay faithful, Chris does not even try to stay on beat (especially in the verses), and even the music, which is often considered the one saving grace of these covers, sound lethargic and dry (especially unforgivable on a song lauded for its fast pace and energy). Endure it, if you dare.
- Puddle of Mudd's cover of "About A Girl". Wes Scantlin does a terrible job transitioning between registers, sounding like, as one comment put it, "Krusty the Clown trying to pass a kidney stone," as well as being grossly out of key. You can even see the three guys performing with him trying not to laugh at his atrocious singing. The sad part is that things were actually looking up for the band before this performance; Scantlin had gotten his life back together after a decade of erratic behavior and brushes with the law. Then this video was released and any chance of them ever becoming respected again was shot down.
