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You all know what this is like. At some point in any acquaintance, people are going to have to size you up using that holy hip-o-meter, <strong>your musical tastes</strong>. They might run into you at work while carefully selected tunes play over your stereo. If the person is really special, perhaps you have invited him to your house and created an especially cool playlist just for the occasion. Unfortunately, you don't always get such stringent control over the musical facade you present to the world. For every person that reads that perfect mixture of the slightly obscure and more mainstream genius you posted under "favorite music" in your Facebook or MySpace profile, there is another that wants to (gasp!) look through your entire CD collection or (faint!) bypasses all of your MP3 playlists and happens to access that horror-among-horrors... the iTunes "Play All" button..

From :

As Rob Gordon says in High Fidelity, "It's not what you're like... it's what you like. Movies, books, music-- these things matter." For whatever reason, the constitution of intellectual snobbery says that ye are to be judged by the music you listen to. If you are about to flip through a friend's CD case and he prefaces it by saying, "This is only one of my old CD cases! I loaned the others to my brother for the weekend," it is because, in his panicked state, he can't figure out a way to remove his Jessica Simpson mix CD and hide it in his back pocket before you find it. If people scrutinizing your collection don't know you well enough, the betrayal they feel when they find the <em>Twister</em> soundtrack or Mariah Carey's "Dreamlover" could end friendships before they start, even though your friend no doubt has similar skeletons in his closet.

I want to know what songs, for whatever reason, you would be praying didn't play if someone hit the "Randomize" button on your computer or iPod. I know you are exposing yourself to potential humiliation here, so I went on a search for the most embarrassing songs in my own collection. My sense of self-preservation is strong enough that nothing on my iPod or laptop fit the bill of "Utter Mortification", so I searched the deep, dust-covered recessed of my desktop to bring you these gems (I want to hide these behind an LJ-cut, but in the interests of group therapy, I won't.):


-Fun Factory "I Wanna B With U"
-Scotty D "Drop the Bomb
-Warrant "Sweet Cherry Pie"
-Tweet ft. Fabulous "Oops Oh My"
-Unloco "Facedown"
-Tony Braxton "Unbreak My Heart"
-Sugar Ray "Fly"
-Chad Kroeger "Hero"
-Simon and Milo "www.nevergetoveryou.com" (If you don't know what this is... spare yourself and don't find out)
-Ricky Martin "She Bangs"
-Saliva "Click Click Boom"
-Nelly "Country Grammar"
-Nickelback "Someday"
-Lifehouse "Hanging by a Moment"
-Ace of Base... <em>entire albums</em>
-Luca Turilli "The Ancient Forest of Elves"
-Kaci "Paradise"
-Jessica Simpson "I Wanna Love You Forever"
-Jackie Wilson "Higher and Higher"
-Ginuwine "Ride My Pony"
-Fat Joe ft. Ashanti & Ja Rule "What's Love (Got to Do With It)"
-Firehouse "Love of a Lifetime"
-Enya "Angels"
-Evanescence "Bring Me To Life"
-Drowning Pool "Bodies"
-Destiny's Child "Bugaboo"
-Joe Diffy "Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox"
-Brooks & Dunn "She's Not the Cheatin' Kind"
-Bob Seger "Old Time Rock & Roll"
-Alice Cooper "Feed My Frankenstein"
-A-Teens "Mama Mia (Dance Remix)
-3 Doors Down "Duck and Run"

I had plenty of embarrassing songs, but it was really difficult to decide which ones would provoke a gut reaction to commit suicide if someone discovered them. Most booty music, 80s dance hits, and trashy pop icons like Brittany Spears are disqualified because they can be adopted as fashionably kitsch, your own declaration of quirkiness in a sea of snobbery. My test: I imagined that I had finally succeed in getting this beautiful man-- one I imagine is the epitome of taste and cool-- to my house. What songs were there that he could not possibly excuse me for, under any circumstances? The answer was, overwhelmingly, horrid late 1990s-2001 angst radio rock. It is too current to be explained away by the bad tastes of youth and even its generic power-choruses are no excuse to sing along with it.

So I want to see your worst of the worst, no excuses needed*. Don't pick songs that are just silly, kind-of stupid, or don't fit the unified front of "taste" your try to present. What songs could truly humiliate you, and why?



*Yes yes, we all know you only have it because your brother downloaded it onto your computer when you weren't there to enforce quality control, or you couldn't help becoming addicted to it when they played it at the water park you worked at over the summer, or (insert excuse here)