I’ve been wanting to post this for a while. The Onion AV Club voted for James Taylor’s How Sweet it Is, but I still think We Built This City should count double because “Rock and Roll” is actually in the chorus (see also: Funkytown, the least funky song ever). Ballads don’t count. Go!
Sailing by Christopher Cross
“Having My Baby”.
Yeah, as soon as I saw this thread title, I immediately thought “Obviously it’s We Built This City.”
I Write the Songs by Barry Manilow. I was a child in the 70s and my music teacher forced us to sing this in class. PERMANENT. SCARRING.
The Limp Bizket cover of Behind Blue Eyes has gotta be on there somewhere.
Visions, by Abnormality.
Probably something by Yes.
I’ll see your Yes and raise you John Denver.
Also, I want to say Bob Dylan songs, just to spite my roommate who won’t even ever read this thread. He’s just constantly giving me a hard time about how little appreciation I have for Dylan as I constantly point out how fanatical he is. We go back and forth about it enough that I’m letting my Dylan-hatin’ creep into discussions with other people, so I might as well tick you guys off too!
I nominate “If You Could Read My Mind” by Gordon Lightfoot.
I thought that song couldn’t get any less rocking, but then for one of the Senior Class Variety Shows in high school, they redid it as “We Built This City on Heart and Soul.”
No mention of Billy Joel yet? So much of his catalog qualifies – uptown girl being the most obvious, but I’d put “we didn’t start the fire” in there just easily.
I have to nominate my favorite horrible cock rock band of all time, Bad English. It was hard to find a song that fit the “no ballads” criterion, but here you go.
Here is a by-no-means-comprehensive list of awesome things in that video:
Dude with a keytar
The little hop that the dude with the keytar does partway through
Guitar solo played in the dark, in the rain, in front of cars
Frontman who looks like a cross between Zaphod Beeblebrox and Geddy Lee
Heart of Rock and Roll by Huey Lewis and the News
Justification:
This song sucks like a black hole. It has a fucking event horizon.
Fictional Mass Murderers like to kill to it.
It is so completely devoid of soul that even Satan is uninterested in it.
Pachelbel Canon in D.
Yeah but the heart of rock and roll is Topeka!
The only halfway decent thing Huey Lewis did was give Bruce Hornsby a record contract, and that was mostly justified because Tupac sampled
“The Way It Is” for his awesome ghetto ode to the…uh, ghetto.
At one or another time in my life I have liked:
Barry Manilow (I was 5!)
Tiffany
New Kids on the Block
Vanilla Ice
Kriss Kross
Various 80s hair bands long after hair band rock was remotely cool
But I have never, will never, have anything but utter revulsion for Huey Lewis. God I hate his music. “Yeah man but that song from Back to the Future was kind g-” SHUT YOUR BURGERHOLE.
Any rock song so wimpy it can’t even say the word “ass” should be stamped with the caution sticker:
WARNING: PRODUCT CONTAINS NO TESTICLES