Important Note: To ensure that the soundtrack 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.
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Anime
- While it is debatable which version of "Dragon Soul" is better (between Sean Schemmel and Vic Mignogna, and sometimes Takayoshi Tanimoto), practically everyone would argue that they're at least better than the version
sung by Justin Cook. He's a brilliant voice actor but a mediocre singer, and seems to be doing a bad impersonation of Jakob Dylan. - The opening theme song for Master of Martial Hearts was clearly sung by someone who can't sing for the life of her. She sounds like a really bored person trying to sing a fast-paced song. And that long note she holds near the end is a huge Brown Note. If your ears can take it, here's a link for it here.
- "Ghost Busterz" by ULTRA BRAiNnote , the theme for Musashi Gundoh, is truly awful. With an annoying beeping melody (seemingly made by a cheap keyboard), poorly written (if they were even written at all) and meandering Word Salad Lyrics—seriously, the most coherent and understandable line is "WE'RE GHOST-A BUSTERZ OH OH OH"—that wouldn't be relevant to the show even if they did make sense, and horrible singing that serves only to exacerbate the lyrics' incoherence, it's just as incompetent as the animation of the show. One commenter "complimented" the show for the innovation of using something other than music as its theme, and a couple of others theorized that the song was the result of a mental breakdown that involved the artist recording himself abusing his instruments while incoherently shouting random nonsense.
Film
- While for the most part, Aquaman (2018) was one of 2018's most anticipated blockbusters, Pitbull and Rhea's official song for it, "Ocean to Ocean", was not one of the most anticipated parts about it, putting it mildly. The song is a major disaster that interpolates Toto's iconic song "Africa"note in an extremely haphazard way: the beat and Pitbull's rapping sound as if they're two independent songs of each other altogether, and Rhea's guest spot, where she oversings the chorus of "Africa", only helps to make the experience even more painful. Within a day of its release it got tons of slamming from critics and people online, rivaling "YouTube Rewind 2018" as one of the most disliked videos on the site not even 24 hours after its release. In the context of the movie itself, the song is used as Arthur and Mera arrive in the Sahara desert. Adam Johnston pointed out in his review that using the original song would have worked just fine. Anthony Fantano would name it the 6th worst single of 2018.
- Dingo Pictures are already infamous for their extremely low-budget animated movies. They're already not going to have the best soundtracks, but some of their English dubs fall into this category by playing brief loops of music over the entire movie.
- Aladin has "Marching", a silly bit of trumpet music... or rather, a brief snippet of it, mixed with some people shouting, looped poorly over the entire movie, even over other music.
- Wabuu (the standalone DVD version, not the excerpt that's part of the PlayStation 2 multimedia disc The Countryside Bears), apart from Wabuu's theme song at the beginning and end, has "Didgeridoo", an irritating Creepy Circus Music loop throughout the film on top of the normal music tracks heard in the original German version and other dubs. In one scene it plays on top of itself, and out of sync to boot. Wabuu's theme itself is little better, having the English lyrics played on top of the German ones.
- Aladin has "Marching
- The "score" to the So Bad, It's Good slasher flick Don't Go in the Woods (1981) was evidently supposed to sound creepy and atonal, but the composer seemingly had no idea how to mix it properly. The results sound like a bunch of random electronic noises horribly mushed together, and it gets quite grating really quickly. Considering that the same composer also did the infamously awkward (albeit catchy) Captain Novolin soundtrack, this is not at all surprising. The sole bright spot may as well be the credits song, with its goofy lyrics sung to the tune of "The Teddy Bear's Picnic".
- Highlander: The Source notoriously features a cover version of Queen's "Princes of the Universe" for a montage sequence near the start of the third act. To say the least, it isn't a good cover, with both the vocals and instrumentals coming across as incredibly half-hearted compared to the Queen original. However, it's still a masterpiece compared to the cover of another Queen song, "Who Wants to Live Forever?", which plays over the movie's end credits. This version can only be described as an attempt to re-imagine Queen through the lens of Country and Western, and ends up completely massacring the song. An oddly fitting way to end the movie that proved the Franchise Killer for Highlander.
- Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is widely agreed to be the lowpoint of the Friday the 13th saga, and its score is no exception. The normally-competent Harry Manfredini was seemingly either having a bad day or was baked out of his mind while composing the score, as the end result, especially the main theme, sounds like someone hitting random notes on a synthesizer while in the throes of a grand mal seizure. It's possible he was aiming for the mix of "Psycho" Strings and synthesized Scare Chords that characterized his work on the previous films, but if that was the case then he failed horribly. The sole bright spot is generally agreed to be the opening track that plays before and during the FBI scene due to it capturing the old-school charm of the series' previous installments, and even then it's not nearly enough to redeem this mess. While Manfredini would regain his brilliance in the following film Jason X, considered by many to feature some of his best work in the series, the music in Jason Goes to Hell is widely brought up by Friday the 13th fans as a disgrace.
- Monster a-Go Go already has an entry in the film category, but the score they gave it is just the icing on the cake. To elaborate, it consists mainly of sparse, jangly Scare Chords played on a Fender Rhodes electric piano and amplified to distortion; it's atonal, harsh, and probably meant to be creepy, but it just gets annoying after a while. And as if that weren't bad enough, the film's theme song suffers from bizarre, repetitive lyrics, and is recorded in such poor quality that it's often hard to make out what said lyrics even are. The composer/musician responsible is not listed in the credits, perhaps out of shame.
Live-Action TV
- The soundtrack to the Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade. Gone were the beautiful orchestral renditions by Christopher Franke, instead replaced by a series of repetitive and annoying tracks with any sense of harmony or melody lost in what sounded like someone hitting random notes on a keyboard until something resembling music came out. Any and all attempts at sounding exotic and otherworldly fall flat and instead serve as a test of patience. The soundtrack would be more at home with the low-rate video games made in the '90s than a spinoff to one of the most popular sci-fi TV shows in recent history. And if you think the music sounds better when heard within the context of the show, it doesn't. You can listen to it in its entirety here.
- When Netflix bought the rights to stream the American version of Queer as Folk (US), Showtime had already lost the rights to the majority of the soundtrack, which resulted in Netflix having to replace them with either mockbuster versions of the songs or different songs altogether, to an extremely mixed effect. A good deal were So Okay, It's Average at worst and a few instances had fans even claiming Netflix's replacement was even better than the original, but a great number of them were downright irredeemable. A few examples include (but are not limited to):
- The Dyke Nite scene in 1x16, where Geri Halliwell's cover of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" was replaced with an absolutely pathetic mockbuster tune with a singer completely off-singing the line "You got caught red-handed/reaching into someone else's little cookie jar". Pain ensued.
- 3x12 originally had Muse's cover of "Feeling Good". In its place came an absolutely pathetic knockoff with the same riffs and some guy trying and failing hilariously to sound like Matt Bellamy while whining some angsty lyrics.
- Another Season 3 example was the beginning of Ted's decline into drug-addled sex (chemsex), which was soundtracked to "Touched" by VAST in the original version. Said scene in the Netflix version is soundtracked to a song that doesn't even try to sound like "Touched"; replacing the simple eastern-tinged choirs and alt-metal riff that made the original scene disturbing was some mid-tempo U2 ripoff that didn't even match the tone of the scene in any way. Similarly, at the end of the season, Ted's checking himself into rehab is soundtracked to "Where Do I Begin" by The Chemical Brothers in the original version, which makes his moment of hitting rock bottom more emotionally poignant. Netflix? Some off-key woman sings a generic acoustic song about needing to get better, not just making said scene on the nose but almost laughable.
- Considering that Hawaii Five-O received multiple Emmy nominations for its music and has one of the most iconic theme tunes ever, Fred Steiner's score for Season 11's "The Bark and the Bite" is just inexcusable. The would-be comic nature of the episode is underlined by "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" being repeatedly incorporated into the music. It makes an already hard-to-take episode an excruciating experience.
- WKRP in Cincinnati was one of only a few shows at the time to use popular music from several different artists and bands. While the show did have some of the music replaced in its first run in syndication, problems arose when the show went into syndication a second time. Now, most of the music had been replaced with some truly bad muzak.
- “For Love or For Money: Part 1” had Robert Palmer’s “Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor Doctor)” replaced with a horribly slow song with a tempo that in no way matches the fast tempo of the original. The song also has lyrics of its own. Said lyrics are sung by a man who sounds slightly hungover and lacking in energy. They also sound strange and generic.
- “Bailey’s Show” had “Jailhouse Rock” replaced with a terrible, speedy two-note song on a loop that didn’t compare to the popular Elvis hit.
Western Animation
- The theme song for The Brothers Flub is speculated to be at least a contributing factor to the cartoon's failure, if not the reason, simply because the vocals are awful. They feature the shrillest tenor imaginable singing absolute gibberish as counterpoint to a Simpleton Voiced baritone chanting "flub", plus the odd random noise here and there. The instrumental version played over the end credits is perfectly fine, so it's another example of how vocals can ruin a song. RebelTaxi and The Mysterious Mr. Enter have both included it high in their respective lists of worst cartoon theme songs.
- The 1970s De Patie Freleng Enterprises theatrical short series The Dogfather is generally regarded as just being average and unmemorable — once you look past the number of Recycled Scripts it features from Friz Freleng's previous works — but the theme tune is just horrendous. For all his skill as a voice actor, leading man Bob Holt never had a reputation for his singing chops, and his awkward Marlon Brando impression (to say nothing of such clunky lines as "I'll sign a contract/That's an offer you can't refuse") didn't improve things any. Even worse is the original version, in which he spoke the lines instead, with the "I'll sign a contract" line originally being "I'll cut your heart out"; all the while, Holt sounds either drunk or half-asleep.
- Most fans agree that the original run of Looney Tunes ended on a very sour note when the shorts were produced by Warner Bros.-Seven Arts' revived cartoon studio in the late 1960s, and perhaps it was no better shown than with these harsh, off-key versions of the already oddball re-arrangements that were done to "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" in 1963 and 1967. While the aforementioned versions of the intro were already considered blatantly inferior to the classic versions (but were at the very least tolerable), the instrumentation for these takes on the theme is executed so badly, with extremely loud and discordant trumpets and annoyingly tinny music, that it makes you want to change the channel if it comes on. It's almost as though composer William Lava knew how poor the cartoons produced during this era were, and discreetly tried to dissuade audiences from watching them. Tellingly, only two cartoonsnote used the first rendition, and only "Fistic Mystic" used the second rendition.
- Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa is already considered one of the worst pieces of animation in history, but it can at least boast that it has a solid cast and features singing from Paige O' Hara and Jodi Benson (Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Ariel from The Little Mermaid respectively). However, an early version of Benson's song exists in a demo reel that was originally performed by none other than Nancy Cartwright, best known for her role as Bart Simpson. However, this performance suggests that she should just stick to voice acting as her singing here is simply awful. She sounds like a toddler who's trying desperately not to run out of breath as she attempts to sing but instead just sounds like she's yelling the lyrics along with the music and the backing vocals aren't helping as the horrible reverb effect used on them makes them sound like a bunch of ghosts moaning in a haunted house. What makes this worse as she has sang in her other works like My Little Pony 'n Friends and The Simpsons and she sounds fine. The song was split into two parts in the demo, find them here and here.
Advertising
- The notorious Cryptoland soundtrack (hawking a special resort for cryptocurrency investors) features a badly sung, badly written, and mostly outright stolen soundtrack, below the standards of even industrial stage plays. But the low point of it all is smack dab in the middle, with rambled lyrics trying to explain some of the island's features (Most memorable line: "Crypto is in my chromosome") over cheap imitations of "You're The One I Want" and "Prince Ali." If the "singing" isn't just more talking (mainly when trying to be original), it's poorly mixed to where you can barely make out what they're trying to sing to the viewer, with their actual singing mainly being lousy references to the material they stole wholesale.
Professional Wrestling
- Despite having the looks and the talent to be a future top heel in WWE, Rob Conway never made it big... and his horrendous entrance music, which sounds nothing like a wrestling theme, probably played a huge part in that. It's sung by someone who sounds like an off-key Randy Newman sick with a cold, and the lyrics about Conway's gimmick are about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face. While the theme would have been fine in something like an off-Broadway musical or a Blue's Clues episode, it completely failed as a wrestler's entrance music. Rather than getting fans excited for the wrestler about to come out, it instead bored them to death. You can watch Brian Zane call this the absolute worst theme in the history of wrestling here.
- The 2001 opening to WCW Monday Nitro sounds more like nails on a chalkboard than an actual intro, as it's quite literally just noise with weird glitch-like sound effects mixed in over a seizure-inducing video. It was universally loathed by audiences, and only serves as just another example of how dire WCW's quality was by this point.
Web Original
- The Nostalgia Critic's The Wall, a so-called "love letter" to the subject matter that comes off as more of a Shallow Parody. Rob Scallon's immense talent is wasted on flat, uninspired arrangements meant to imitate the original. Meanwhile, Doug Walker's scenery-chewing, overexerted vocals are well beyond his range and garbled at points by a bad mix. The lyrics mostly consist of uninformed, surface-level and at times self-contradictory jabs at The Wall and Roger Waters, intercut with random forced attempts at Walker's usual humor. The exception (and low point) is a two-track segment which reworks Pink's dictatorial hallucinations into an Author Tract about the fallout from the Not So Awesome leaks. The least offensive number is "Fennah's The Trial," if only because Doug had no say in it. The album was on Scallon's Bandcamp for only a couple of days. SputnikMusic rates it 1.0, and Albumoftheyear.org puts it at 3 points out of 100, based on over a thousand reviews. JAR Media and Ralph The Movie Maker rip the review itself apart here, and here respectively, with Dan Olson also digging deep into the review as well. Anthony Fantano not only gave the album proper a “NOT GOOD” review, but made it his worst album of the year, as well as the third-worst of the decade.note Crash Thompson not only named it the worst album of 2019 and gave it his first ever ZERO rating, but dropped his previous Rock Critic gimmick as a direct response. Jukebox Zeroes also tore it to pieces here, with co-host Lilz Martin straight-up naming it the worst album they'd ever covered up to that point — which is saying something, considering that includes certain entries on the albums page — and giving both it and Walker himself an utterly scathing closing statement. To this day, it is the lowest-rated album on Rate Your Music, and while Walker has since moved on from it, the album and accompanying review are still considered joint-candidates for the absolute rock bottom of his career.
