Give thanks if you never hear these songs again

While you’re sitting at the table next week about to chow down and you’re taking a moment to give thanks, don’t forget about music. Without music, our lives would be empty and unfulfilling. If there were no music, what would we listen to? Podcasts of sitcoms? Books on tape? Talk radio? It’s almost too upsetting to imagine.

On Thanksgiving, keep music in your thoughts.

Of course, not all music is equal. You should probably give thanks that certain music isn’t on the airwaves much, if at all. That’s more a form of negative giving thanks – being grateful that something isn’t in your life. Bad music is akin to e coli – the less we encounter it, the better off we are.

With that in mind, here are “10 Songs To Be Thankful They Don’t Play Much Anymore.” These are songs that have done more harm than good to music and its aficionados. These are songs that may have even been popular at one time, but have over the years generated mostly scorn.

These are not good songs.

Obviously, this is a giant category with thousands upon thousands of worthy nominees. So the following is simply a representative sample. If you want to give thanks that other songs that are not on this list are no longer being played on the radio or covered by other artists, feel free, because indeed this is the season to give thanks:

“MACARTHUR PARK” – Actor Richard Harris died in 2002. He had a long and distinguished career in films like “Camelot” and “Unforgiven.” Hopefully he’ll be remembered for those high points and not for mouthing the words to “MacArthur Park,” a Jimmy Webb composition released in 1968 that was voted worst song ever by Miami Herald readers in 1992. (Donna Summer covered it in 1978, but that was disco, and therefore its sheer awfulness was disguised by a pulsating beat.) The melody and arrangement are saccharin enough, but the lyrics really give it that extra oomph of gooeyness. The part of the chorus that goes, “Someone left the cake out in the rain; I don’t think that I can take it, ‘cause it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again. Oh no!” might be the single worst combination of words in the history of music. CIA interrogators reportedly play this when waterboarding fails.

“TIE A YELLOW RIBBON” – It’s difficult to chart exactly when the practice of tying a ribbon around a tree to remember those who are away began. Some form of it has been around for decades. But Tony Orlando and Dawn immortalized the habit with their 1973 single, which reached No. 1 on both the U.S. and UK charts. It contains a toxic blend of bouncy pop rhythm and sappy lyrics guaranteed to burrow into one’s brain and produce insanity if played often enough. Orlando and Dawn had also recorded another mind-numbing single, “Knock Three Times” three years before, which itself was enough to cause listeners to tie yellow ribbons around oak trees in the hope that real songwriters with talent would once again return to the music business.

“SYLVIA’S MOTHER” – The late Shel Silverstein was a very talented man. In addition to being a writer and cartoonist for Playboy, he was a best-selling creator of poems for kids. And he wrote other popular songs, including “A Boy Named Sue” for Johnny Cash. “Sylvia’s Mother” was Silverstein’s sense of humor at work. It was a parody of teenage love songs, but unfortunately radio stations and listeners took it way too seriously. Recorded by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, it vaulted to No. 5 in the U.S. and No. 2 in the UK (nudged out only by “Puppy Love” by Donny Osmond; go figure) back in 1971. It’s about a lovesick guy trying to contact Sylvia, but her mother won’t let him talk to her because Sylvia’s ready to marry someone else. The line, “And the operator says 40 cents more for the next three minutes” drips with strained and artificial emotion. If you want to hear this but have trouble finding it, just stick a knife in your head. It’s almost the same sensation.

“EBONY AND IVORY” – Sir Paul McCartney is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant songwriters to ever walk the earth. Stevie Wonder is right there with him. So a collaboration between two members of music royalty theoretically should have produced something that was at least within the category of “listenable.” But this 1982 No. 1 single that uses piano keys to illustrate the need for racial harmony is so unbearably preachy that it’s a wonder it didn’t provoke mass riots. “We all know that people are the same wherever you go, there’s good and bad in everyone; we learn to live, we learn to give each other what we need to survive, together alive.” If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been alive in ’82 and heard this song, he’d probably deliver a speech called, “I Have Another Dream Because The First One Obviously Isn’t Coming True.”

“ACHY BREAKY HEART” – Billy Ray Cyrus became a trailer-park household name with this 1992 country crossover. The song, which reached No. 4 on the U.S. charts, divided the nation: country music traditionalists hated it, but it appealed to younger listeners who were more pop-oriented but also liked the country flavor. At its core, however, it’s simple and grates on the ears. Cyrus deserves to be lambasted for two reasons: the song sucks, and it also spawned a line-dancing craze in bars across the country, where people who couldn’t dance before still couldn’t dance, but at least now they had lots of company on the dance floor. Like he does with many songs, Weird Al Yankovic did a spoof of it. This one was called “Achy Breaky Song,” with lyrics that include: “But Mr. D.J. please, I’m beggin’ on my knees, I just can’t take no more of Billy Ray.” This is one of the rare times when the original is actually more ridiculous than Weird Al’s version.

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