The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 1992

 

The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 1992

Hey guys, it’s Fire and welcome back to Fire’s Flaming Hot Takes for another retro year-end list!! Today, we’re continuing our 90s dive with the top 10 WORST hit songs of 1992!!

From what I can tell, 1992 seems to be generally agreed upon as one of the greatest and most revolutionary years ever for pop music. And having gone through this YE list, can I say that I don’t really agree? Not that I don’t see why this year is so pivotal for popular music or that I even think it’s a bad year—far from it, I think this was a very good year for the Hot 100, with many well-remembered, iconic, and critically acclaimed songs being hits this year. But okay, why exactly are those critically acclaimed songs still so widely beloved?

You have to take in the context—1990 and 1991 were flat out awful years for the Hot 100—I already talked about them in more detail in those lists but to summarize, everything was in transition, leaving a complete void for a big trend. Then at the very end of 1991, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” debuted on the Hot 100. By January of 1992, it was in the top 10. That song was effectively a sucker punch to the music industry to get their shit together. The grunge boom that that song spawned wiped away much of the 80s hair metal backwash—thank god. Hip hop was starting to take more hold on the music scene, and while much of it was still rather goofy, for the most part, it was goofy in a bit of a respectable way.

But why am I cooler on this year then? Here’s the thing—”Smells Like Teen Spirit” felt like a sucker punch because the music scene of 1990 and 91 was so dull. Just because that song completely revolutionized the music scene going forward doesn’t mean that the dull shit that was still charting was completely absent from the YE, the difference between the charts in late 1991/early 1992 and late 1992 is truly whiplash-inducing. I imagine that those who are old enough to remember the early 90s might feel the same way towards 1992’s pop music that I do towards that of 2020—fascination at a YE list that captures two eras that are so vastly different that the YE list feels like a mess. But considering I wasn’t even conceived until after 9/11, I don’t really have that same fascination towards this year. Thus, from my baby brain POV, the dull AC ballads and hair metal backwash really drag this year down from potentially being among the greatest years in history for popular music.

So now it’s time to get started on this list!! The songs eligible for this list must have met one of these rules:

• They debuted on the 1992 Hot 100 YE

• Repeating songs must have beat or matched their previous standings on this YE

• Songs in the YE top 20 are eligible regardless of the first two rules

• The same rules apply for the Hot 100 airplay YE

If you want the full list of songs I considered for this list, you can check out this Spotify playlist here.

So with that, let’s dig through the dumpster of this iconic year in pop music history with our dishonorable mentions!!

DM #1: Billy Ray Cyrus - Achy Breaky Heart (YE: #15, PEAK: #4)

I gotta be honest, I really didn’t know how I felt about this song for years. It was just this...singularly bizarre novelty that I had a hard time feeling positive or negative about. But listening to the song when going through the 1992 YE solidified my opinion—this shit just fucking sucks. Sure, the instrumentation is fine, the groove is undeniably strong and it makes for really good line dancing music. But then you pay even the slightest attention to the lyrics and it just all falls apart. The song has one gimmick—you can tell Billy Ray Cyrus’s various body parts they can do all sorts of things, but if you tell his heart that his girl is leaving, it’ll kill Billy Ray. I mean, you can tell his arms...that they can go back to the farm? And you can tell his lips to tell his fingertips they won’t be reaching out for her no more. It’s clear that Billy Ray was just finding words that rhyme without much of a care for whether they make sense. I can see how this nonsensical songwriting can come off as charmingly corny in that classic country way, but Billy Ray’s delivery is so forcibly goofy that it comes off as obnoxious. Not to mention, “achy breaky heart” is just a stupid phrase. Thank god “Old Town Road” rendered this guy as not a one-hit wonder anymore, because this song being your biggest hit is more devastating news to your achy braky heart than your girl leaving you.  You can tell my barf to land in Billy’s scarf, you can tell my ears to run and hide in fear.

DM #2: Def Leppard - Let's Get Rocked (YE: #98, PEAK: #15)

Yeah, this is the metal of the 80s really curdling. I will concede though that this is probably one of the better glam metal songs I’ve heard thanks to some actual energy and anthemic swell. I can genuinely see why someone might like this song. But just like “Achy Breaky Heart”, this song falls flat because it’s goofy without being endearingly so. It’s a dumb party song where Def Leppard are demanding everyone to get...rocked. It’s so dumb and repetitive, to the point where every “let’s get” starts to sound more and more like “LEXICON LEXICON LEXICON ROCKED”. And in terms of awful metal dregs from 1992, I’m stuck between this and Guns n’ Roses’ overrated slog “November Rain” that’ll just miss this list. Lord help us all, before someone gets hammered. But speaking of Def Leppard...

DM #3: Def Leppard - Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad (YE: #80, PEAK: #12)

But if the alternative is this cheesy mush, I’ll take “Let’s Get Rocked” any damn day of the week. At least “Let’s Get Rocked” was trying to be a fun time, “Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad” is Def Leppard entering cliche glam metal AC ballad territory. The song is so overdramatic and plodding, there’s no groove to be found anywhere—the tempo is way too slow, and frontman Joe Elliott’s straining sounds awful. Yes, I have needed someone so bad before. I, and likely the entire listening public in the early 90s, needed Nirvana to crash through and reshape the music scene so we no longer got boring shlock like this.

DM #4: Michael Bolton - Missing You Now (YE: #77, PEAK: #12)

Michael Bolton still sucks. He had 3 hits this year for some reason, and while I will fully concede that “Steel Bars” is genuinely a good, if not great, song, his other hits were total duds. And yes, this won’t be the last time we’ll be seeing him on this list. What “Steel Bars” proved was that if Michael Bolton is given production that can actually flatter his big voice, like something with real tempo, and he keeps his oversinging to a minimum, he actually has talent. But “Missing You Now” doesn’t flatter any of his strengths. He might not be oversinging here, which does keep this from being among his absolute worst, but his voice still feels too big to pull off a more restrained delivery. And otherwise, this song is really boring. The sax solo from Kenny G somehow blends into the rest of this generic as hell instrumentation. This missed the list proper because Michael Bolton is capable of far worse—stay tuned, but this is still painfully uninteresting.

DM #5: Hi-Five - She's Playing Hard To Get (YE: #50, PEAK: #5)

Can I just say that the title of the song writes my critique for me and move on? But seriously, this feels really pushy and no one in Hi-Five has any credible attitude to make this sentiment work. The New Jack Swing production doesn’t come with any of the powerful grooves that are synonymous with the genre, it’s way too understated. To be fair, such an understated production is probably the only thing that the guys in Hi-Five could even begin to fit against, they have all the presence of a wet dish towel. They say that they don’t think she (or I guess multiple girls?) can feel their crush on her/them but the guys in Hi-Five can feel her/their crush on them. Yeah, keep telling yourselves that. Because that’s the only confirmation you’ll ever get at this point.

DM #6: Mr. Big - To Be With You (YE: #12, PEAK: #1)

Apparently this was the last song by a hair metal band to ever go to #1. It’s sure fitting, then, that the honor goes to a song that’s not hair metal, any way you slice it. It’s more of a campfire song. But frontman Eric Martin still has too much hair metal snarl in his vocals that even when he tries for something more stripped back, he sounds awful. The singalong chorus falls really flat—the backing vocals sound so...bored. I’m sure if this were played in a jam that I participate in, the vibe will click, but as is, this tries to be a big singalong campfire song, but Mr. Big only come out sounding smaller.

DM #7: The Heights - How Do You Talk To An Angel (YE: #59, PEAK: #1)

Do I really have to analyze this? Frontman Jamie Walters sounds like John Mayer at his drooliest and the production is cliche and boring—none of the instruments stand out from each other in this mix. I might as well just go to sleep right now-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I don’t know how you talk to an angel, but it probably would be using less boring and cliche music than this!

DM #8: Patty Smyth & Don Henley - Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough (YE: #22, PEAK: #2)

I’m so tempted to fill this review with a long string of Z’s again. But I already used that joke in the previous entry, so I’ll try to say something substantial about this snooze. Patty Smyth and Don Henley have little chemistry to speak of and the instrumentation is soft and pillowy in the same way that the most dreadfully boring AC ballads are. And lyrically, this is about two partners realizing that their love for each other just isn’t enough of a sturdy foundation for their relationship. I’ve seen arguments that Patty Smyth and Don Henley’s age gives this a sort of wisdom that elevates the sentiment, and I’d buy it if Patty Smyth and Don Henley had ANY notable chemistry to speak of!! This song was so boring that when I first heard this lyric:

“Yes, I may have hurt you

But I did not desert you”

My brain immediately jumped to the conjecture that this song was about an abusive relationship that both partners are trapped in. Yes, it was a reach, but the fact that my brain made that reach just highlights the lack of anything interesting going on in this song! You both are right, sometimes love just ain’t enough, and it wasn’t enough to save this song from this list.

DM #9: Hammer - Addams Groove (YE: #76, PEAK: #7)

Between this and “Addams Family Whoomp” by Tag Team, what was it with acts in the 90s doing borderline (or maybe outright? idk) sponsored tie-ins with the Addams Family? Hammer’s flow sounds super jerky outside of the chorus being a rapid-fire three-bar bit (is he doing a triplet flow?). The production sounds cheap—there’s no groove. It’s littered with Addams Family references, which makes it sound like a leftover from the novelty era of hip hop. In other words, this sounds like Offset trying to make a 2004 Eminem song. I’ll give it this much—the song got half the title right, it’s just missing the, you know, groove.

DM #10: Mr. Big - Just Take My Heart (YE: #95, PEAK: #16)

Glam metal AC ballad nothingburger. That’s an effective one-line summary of this song. It has the glam metal problem of defaulting to a stodgy tempo instead of anything with a strong groove. As I said with “To Be With You”, frontman Eric Martin cannot sell restraint and when he starts belting, the production gives him nothing to work with. And coupled with the cheesiest guitar solos and weakest key change of the year, this was literally the final cut from this list. So you can take my heart too, as in physically rip it out of my chest so I actually pass away because that’d be preferable to listening to more of this shitty generic schlock.

And now onto the list proper!...

10...So the 90s boybands as we think of them today—your Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, etc—didn’t really take much hold until the late 90s. They obviously still existed before Lou Pearlman became the mastermind puppeteer of the boyband wars, but they mostly filled a niche as R&B groups. I mean, Boyz II Men are considered a boyband, which is wild for me to think about. Unfortunately, one of the biggest boybands of the early 90s was Color Me Badd, and without much competition to replace them at the time, we got this....

10. Color Me Badd - Slow Motion (YE: #87, PEAK: #18)

For an R&B boyband song, why does this sound like cod reggae? The rhythms feel very reggae-inspired and the guys in Color Me Badd crank their nasal whine to an extreme so bad that they sound like fucking UB40!! And yeah...that was kinda what pushed this song over the edge and onto the list proper—this just sounds like UB40 trying to make a sex song. And that already paints the most unpleasant picture in your head that makes you retch in the pit of your stomach. This sounds like the whitest song about sex I’ve heard since Charlie Puth and Meghan Trainor tried turning Marvin Gaye’s name into a verb in 2015!! And what makes this so awful is that the guys in Color Me Badd don’t have any presence—they sound so disinterested and passionless, making their “aaaaaaaaaaaaaall night”’s sound grating. If this is how going in slow motion tonight feels...I’ll just pass.

9...So as I said in the intro and in my lists for 1990 and 91, part of why the early 90s were so fucking dire for music was that it was a weird transition period. When everything is in transition, every genre tends to default to the safest, most directionless slop possible. Remember, in 1992, some leftover early 90s blandness still seeped through the cracks. Ergo, in the early 90s, 80s glam metal was still dominant. So what happens when glam metal tries to be bland and safe?...

9. FireHouse - When I Look Into Your Eyes (YE: #82, PEAK: #8)

Cheese. That’s all I could say, really. Frontman C.J. Snare has too much snarl in his voice to sound good against a song with such an achingly slow tempo. And that’s before the dumb-ass key change where the snarl mixes with straining for an utterly unbearable sound. Every individual note played on this song sounds generic and schmaltzy—the intro with the worst and most saccharine wedding-coded keyboard tone, the electric guitars that don’t have any intensity and just blur into mush, and especially the fact that you can’t even hear the bass guitar! Yeah, I’m sure this is a beautiful wedding song for some happy couple out there, but if this plays at my wedding, I’m signing a prenup and filing for divorce.

8...But back to Color Me Badd…

8. Color Me Badd - Forever Love (YE: #71 ON HOT 100 AIRPLAY)

Color Me Badd are faceless and passionless. They’re music for people intimidated by the raw sexuality of Vanilla Ice, and it’s no different on “Forever Love”, which might be more of an R&B song than the cod reggae cosplay they attempted on “Slow Motion”, but it still feels like straight up amateur hour. I don’t buy that the guys in Color Me Badd sound lovestruck. They sound more like they’re enjoying their McDonald’s Happy Meal that mommy bought them. I’ve always thought that spoken-word interludes in R&B songs kill the mood rather than setting it. If maybe the spoken word bits were out of the way at the very start of the song, that’d effectively set the mood. But the random insertions of it in the middle of the track sound so jarring. It’s the kind of thing that can only be done well by exceedingly talented artists (and even then that’s kinda a crapshoot)—it reads like you had writer’s block and just needed to fill an empty space with something. And I’m certainly not gonna find it any better coming from these lifeless voices from Color Me Badd. This isn’t slam poetry, if you have empty space in the song, either rework the production or leave the empty space be! Forget forever, this love probably won’t even last a bathroom break.

7...So Bryan Adams had one of the absolute worst ever YE #1’s in 1991 with “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)”. That song made my worst list for that year for being a bloated, badly-sung slog full of cliches. Did you know that Bryan Adams actually had a hit the following year that was even worse? Did you wanna know?...

7. Bryan Adams - Do I Have To Say The Words? (YE: #70, PEAK: #11)

“Do I Have To Say The Words?” might not be as punishingly long as “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)”, but it’s considerably worse sung and less memorable. Say what you will about “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)”, as terrible as that song is, you will remember it, if only as a pile of banal cliches. But “Do I Have To Say The Words?” has nothing notable about it. Bryan Adams sounds even raspier here and the melody feels so aimless—there are moments in the verses where it genuinely sounds like he’s realized that he’s about to fall behind the song and is rushing to catch up! Lyrically, the song is about Adams asking his girl if he has to say “the words”, likely “I love you”, to prove that they’re perfect for each other. It’s trying to do the whole “‘I love you’ is cliche” trope that’s been so overused that it itself has become cliche. But the way it’s written, it sounds like Adams is just annoyed that he HAS to say “I love you”, like come on! I’ve almost beaten this level! This is reinforced by the lyric “Do I have to tell the truth?”. And he also asks his girl if he has to shout it out. You don’t need to ask her for that, you’re ALREADY DOING THIS ALL OVER THE SONG! You don’t have to say any words, Bryan, but I have some words to say to you: You’re. A. Sellout. Hack.

6...Adult contemporary just straight up needs to be abolished...

6. Atlantic Starr - Masterpiece (YE: #27, PEAK: #3)

This is just another infuriatingly generic and sappy AC ballad that’s more lullaby than love song. The members of Atlantic Starr sound even MORE faceless than Color Me Badd and it makes the song cross the event horizon of dullness into being straight up terrible. The song is about how the narrator found a masterpiece—their partner. There aren’t even any notably funny or cringey lyrics to pick apart!! It’s just so cliche! Nothing about this song is even remotely noteworthy or endearing. The melody is forgettable and you cannot make out any individual instruments. I know I repeated a bunch of criticisms I threw at other songs on this list, but that just underscores how useless this song is!! It’s not even unique in its awfulness! If you consider this a masterpiece, for the love of god, listen to more music. But you know what, while we’re talking about Color Me Badd...

5...So as I mentioned, Color Me Badd was one of the biggest boybands of the early 90s because there was so little competition there to replace them. And if their past few entries on this list and any of their entries on my other 90s worst lists didn’t make it abundantly clear, I can’t fucking stand them. They aren’t the worst boyband of the 90s when 98 Degrees exists, but if that’s the floor of quality that you only barely clear, you gotta do more. I think I made it obvious that this next song is a Color Me Badd song, but you know, they seemed to actually be trying more for this one, but in the end, it all falls apart...

5. Color Me Badd - Thinkin' Back (YE: #89, PEAK: #16)

I saw a best list for 1992 where the author briefly touched on this song as being among the worst of this year (he didn’t do a worst list for this year) where he called Color Me Badd “really, really lame. They’re a much whiter version of Boyz II Men, even though only one of them is actually white.”. Well uh...I retire. Because there’s no way anything I say will come close to topping that. But seriously, “Thinkin’ Back” is terrible in a special way—if ONLY it was boring. If ONLY the guys in Color Me Badd still sounded faceless and passionless. Unfortunately for me, though, they sound very much engaged. That would be a good thing normally, but the song gives me the absolute creeps. Because the entire presentation of the song’s lyrics makes it feel unintentionally sinister. Listen to the minor key melody with the slow tempo—it sounds like a literal monster is trudging through dystopian streets. The bassline is strong, but all it does is make the song feel brooding, emphasizing the “monster trudging” imagery I mentioned. The music key and the BPM are relevant to my argument—the song is in F# minor and has a tempo of 91 BPM. So what we have is a typically dark and gloomy music key paired with a slow stalking tempo, it already gives off really scary vibes. Let’s pair that with the delivery and the lyrics. The delivery still cranks the boyband nasal whine really high. And the lyrics go:

“Thinkin' back on you and me

Remembering how it used to be

Those times are precious

I cherish every moment we spent, yeah”

There is a very prominent nasal whine here, which doesn’t make sense for a song this slow and brooding. It makes the guys in Color Me Badd sound like they are evil villains reflecting on a breakup as if it’s an emotionally scarring backstory. Then comes:

“Sometimes I cry at night

'Cause I feel so all alone

I need your love right here with me

To keep me safe and warm”

And then you add the moaning everywhere...and now I think I need to call 911 because there was a kidnapping and/or sexual assault. I’d normally call this kind of attitude cartoonish and move on with an eyeroll. But the presentation doesn’t make this feel cartoony, it feels legitimately unsettling. I know it reads like I’m reaching here, but this is a big example of how even seemingly simple mechanics of a song like its music key or tempo can really alter how a song reads, oftentimes for the worse. Let me clarify that the guys in Color Me Badd seem like perfectly decent human beings IRL and I’m not making any accusations here, I’m just critiquing the art and explaining how it sounds to me. And how it sounds to me made my brain jump to the absolute worst possible conclusion. And even if you don’t give a shit about any of what I just described, the song clashes with its own mood. This doesn’t sound like someone reeling from a breakup, it sounds like a look into the darkest impulses of someone not over a breakup thinking about doing harm. This is the type of music that SZA should be singing about “Kill Bill”-ing someone over! Literally any other music key or even a faster tempo could’ve made this song decent or maybe even good. But a fundamental misunderstanding of prosody sinks this down to being terrible. The only reason this didn’t top this list is that I know I’m really reaching with my interpretation.

4...But on the topic of unsettling vibes radiating from a song...

4. Boyz II Men - Uhh Ahh (YE: #84, PEAK: #16)

Unlike with “Thinkin’ Back”, I’m fairly certain that the reasoning I feel creeped out by this is pretty self-evident. The guys in Boyz II Men just spend the entire song moaning like a teenager watching porn in his room who doesn’t realize that he’s moaning loud enough for his parents to hear him. I don’t think I can recall a single song where moaning is a prominent element of the song that I’ve outright liked. I guess there’s Megan Thee Stallion’s “Body” from 2021, but in that song, the moaning wasn’t your primary focus. The flow steamrolled over everything else and the moaning kinda faded into the background. With “Uhh Ahh”, the moaning is just there...naked in the mix, with the most minimal of instrumentation. There’s nothing to distract you from it. And I think the song was supposed to have the moaning be the focus of the song—and no, I just reject this premise on principle. The production isn’t even sexy to justify it—just creepy minor-key keyboards with the glassiest tone. And the percussion sounds...metallic, like it sounds like the guys in Boyz II Men are getting it on on an anvil. Hot...? Yeah, no. This is terrible, and I need a shower.

3...So one of my biggest regrets from when I first started blogging back in 2021 that lasted a good few years is that I’d often be too harsh on songs just because they were stupid without taking into account the intentional comedic value (see when I reviewed “Coco” by OT Genasis and “I Love College” by Asher Roth). I’d like to think that I’ve matured a lot in the 5 years since I started making these lists, and now for me, it comes down to execution more than anything—does the joke land effectively? Is it musically pleasant? Is the joke funny to begin with? So when I’m putting this song in my top 3 on this list, I swear it’s not just because it’s stupid, it’s just terrible as a piece of music...

3. Genesis - I Can't Dance (YE: #55, PEAK: #7)

The joke in this song is that Genesis are mocking themselves for being “un-hip”. So frontman Phil Collins is being self-deprecating in singing that “he can’t dance or sing or talk”. And uh...I can tell that you can’t sing bro. Why do you sound like someone lit your dick on fire? It sounds terrible and it doesn’t make the humor land. Not to mention, this song has got the stiffest guitar riff I’ve heard in ages. It makes the awful vocals stick out all the more in this mix. There’s no groove anywhere. I’m with Phil Collins here—I can’t dance to this grooveless beat either, no one can! If the joke is that he can’t dance to this song, it’s not funny because not even Michael Jackson could dance to this. This is just amateur hour disguising itself as self-deprecation. I can’t dance, I can’t sing, and I can’t even find a decent joke to end this entry on.

2...I was having a Discord conversation with a Pulse member when I was going through the 1992 YE. One of my favorite remarks I made during my listen was this: “sleaze rock is the type of music for folks who were in dc on jan 6 2021”. I think that’s an effective one-line summary of this song, really...

2.  Ugly Kid Joe - Everything About You (YE: #72, PEAK: #9)

I was only half-joking when I said that, by the way. Whenever I hear sleaze rock, I just can’t help but think “yeah, there’s probably a patriotic dad somewhere in the US who was blasting this in Washington DC during the January 6 insurrection”. And “Everything About You” is a solid representation of how trash the genre can be. I will concede that the last minute or so of this song has a decent percussion breakdown with real momentum, but every time I get close to appreciating this song, the sour ugliness of the whole song just hits me again. The entire track is frontman Whitfield Crane being a negative Nancy and wallowing in emo whinging. He lists off a bunch of things he hates, culminating in him hating everything about his ex. And this could possibly be excused if the production was more energetic and the song felt anthemic to hit with more catharsis. But instead we get Whitfield Crane putting on irritatingly cartoonish voices in what I can only imagine is an attempt to wave this off as “satire”. In other words, Simple Plan probably listened to this and giggled at how whiny this is. I hate everything about this song, quite literally. Trash. So what’s worse?

1...So here’s a fun fact—I was actually already planning on doing a 90s dive as early as 2022 after I finished up my lists for the 2000s. A Pulse member was doing a 90s YE tourney so I had already been familiarizing myself with the hits. I just couldn’t do it back then because in the middle of doing those polls, I had my AVM rupture. I was able to reach this far in that tourney though. The instant I heard this song, I was utterly repulsed by it and I knew that it would be a strong contender to top my worst list for 1992. And 4 years later, my feelings on it have not softened...

1. Michael Bolton - When a Man Loves A Woman (YE: #54, PEAK: #1)

Let’s get the obvious out of the way—this is a cover of the Percy Sledge 1966 hit, a good song, even if it’s not really among my favorite hits of that year. What Michael Bolton does is take Percy Sledge’s deeply impassioned delivery and replace it with his unlistenable straining. And not for nothing, he takes the textured soul production and replaces it with this whitewashed generic AC sludge. And I honestly have too many insults to throw at Michael Bolton’s delivery—the AI that made “We Are Charlie Kirk” was probably trained on his voice. He sounds like Lewis Capaldi if he was gargling water while singing. The lovechild of Scott Stapp of Creed and John Mayer. The way he sings “WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN A MRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRN LOVES A WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMAN” is utterly skin-crawling. I could go on and on, but I think I’ve made my point. The delivery pushes this from just being dull into one of the most punishing listening experiences I’ve ever had. To quote Todd In The Shadows, “There was a time when calling Michael Bolton a no-talent ass-clown was the least controversial statement in history”. I’ve seen plenty of people try to defend Michael Bolton in a backlash to the backlash because in recent years he’s tried to come off as charming. But when I listen to him agonizing to hit the high notes here, I give you guys a glare because you weren’t harsh enough on him. Because if you were, you wouldn’t have made this atrocious cover a hit!! Being a likeable guy can only do so much to cover for the fact that you’re a bad artist. And this is exhibit A. “When A Man Loves A Woman” by Michael Bolton: without fucking question the worst hit song of 1992.

And that’s the worst list done!! Next article should be the best list for this year! Stay tuned for that and until then, if you have predictions for my best list or your own lists of the worst hit songs of 1992, please comment them below!! I’m eager to read them. And until the next article, remember to keep it Fire!