These Are The 5 Worst No. 1 Hits Of The '70s

Don't let the relative handful of bad songs that hit No. 1 on the American pop chart in the 1970s fool you: that decade was abundant with great music. A creatively explosive period, it's when musicians perfected and popularized arena rock, hard rock, disco, reggae, funk, and soft rock, newly minting superstars of everyone from the Bee Gees to Led Zeppelin to Elton John, and plenty of other talented '70s musicians that were completely forgotten. It was a very active time for mainstream music, which reached millions of ears because of and despite the behaviors of the messed up 1970s music industry. Recording and selling records is a business, and that can turn into a race between entities that's both cutthroat and a race to churn out as much middle-of-the-road, immediately crowd-pleasing fare as possible. The result: a constant churn of singles designed to take over radio, sell a bunch of copies, top the charts, and then disappear.

Many 1970s No. 1 hits were pretty good by rock critic and populist standards: George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," Steve Wonder's "Superstition," and Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" all joined that elite club. But so did so many other songs that are disposable at best and unlistenable at worst. Here are the five worst 1970s songs that went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

In 1976, a club DJ named Rick Dees responded to customer demand and played a lot of disco records — so many that he thought it was turning into a fad that he could parody with a song. Inspired by a buddy who could do an impression of Donald Duck, and the 1960 instructional dance record "The Duck," Dees wrote "Disco Duck" in an afternoon but didn't record it for three months — he couldn't get anybody to help him out because they didn't think the song was very good. After a record label executive's children thought it was funny, the song earned national release on RSO Records and spent a week at No. 1 in 1976.

While enough listeners enjoyed the slightly amusing record enough to buy a 45 and play it probably only a couple of times before it wasn't funny (or relevant) anymore, Dees' music industry connections were correct in that "Disco Duck" is a mediocre song. Set to a generic disco beat, a group of background singers shriek the name of the song in between verses delivered by an overexcited Dees half-sings and half-talks lyrics in a style best described as "game show host" about a duck that somehow gets some disco club very excited. And, of course, there's a guy doing an off-brand and just barely not-trademark-infringing Donald Duck impression.

Not only is it cheesy and weird, "Star Wars Theme / Cantina Band" is a brazen and lazy attempt to cash in on multiple cultural phenomena. This song is absolutely saturated with 1970s-ness — it's a two-part medley comprised of disco versions of John Williams' orchestral theme from 1977's "Star Wars: A New Hope," and that goofy alien song from the movie, heard played by a live band of exotic creatures when Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi enter a bar in the Tatooine city of Mos Eisley. It's two instrumental songs, one classical and one futuristic, shoe-horned into the very specific and stifling format of disco, with everything turned up several notches to make a frenetic, hyper, and wailing dance song that's all too much brass and too many string instruments playing the same few familiar motifs over and over.

Meco, the stage name for producer and studio musician Meco Monardo, made a whole career out of making tacky, potentially club-ready disco versions of well-known music that didn't necessarily lend itself to the genre. He released takes on the themes from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "The Wizard of Oz," "Shogun," and the next two "Star Wars" movies. Only one ever managed to make it to No. 1, though. The cultural dominance of "Star Wars" and the insatiable demand for product associated with the sci-fi movie sent "Star Wars Theme / Cantina Band" to No. 1 for a week in October 1977.

Chuck Berry was one of rock's first and foundational superstars thanks to '50s and '60s hits like "Johnny B. Goode" and "No Particular Place to Go." The only No. 1 hit of Berry's career, however: 1972's "My Ding-A-Ling." It's a novelty, or a funny song, except that it's barely funny. It's also barely even a song. Essentially a nursery rhyme, "My Ding-A-Ling" is about a child who keeps asking others if they want to check out some toy he has, his ding-a-ling; the suggestive wordplay is the whole point. Given that Berry spent time in prison and faced lawsuits for some of his untoward and illegal predilections, hearing him implore the audience over and over to examine a toy that could be confused with genitals is twisted and sick. The song is very impressed with itself for how clever and naughty it is, too; Berry sings with such a smirk that you can practically hear it.

"My Ding-A-Ling" doesn't do much, musically. Berry recorded the song live, and he relies heavily on audience participation, getting the crowd to sing back the chorus. Listeners can't really make out the words during those parts, even when Berry drops out the musical accompaniment. There isn't much instrumentation on the song besides a guitar awkwardly plucking out the occasional note from a repetitive string, and even those constantly threaten to fall out of the time signature.

"Afternoon Delight" is kind of a folk song, kind of a multi-part choral arrangement, and somehow, at the height of disco and arena rock in 1976, it was the No. 1 song in the United States for two weeks.

Perpetuated by the Starland Vocal Band, a group consisting of married couple Bill and Taffy Danoff and additional singers Jon Carroll and Margot Chapman, the song alternates harmonies with unison singing — the former a little flat and the latter unbearably shrill and sung in a high, almost incomprehensible register. Add in some lightly strummed guitar like one would hear on any 1970s John Denver song (with whom Bill Danoff was a frequent collaborator), and the result is a limp, wimpy, and irritating musical blend that bolsters the lyrics. An "Afternoon Delight" is an afternoon tryst — this is a song about a long-together couple desperately looking forward to some mid-day lovemaking, and they detail just how amazing it's all going to be. "Afternoon Delight" is a very unsexy song about sexuality that topped the charts in a decade in which music was rife with clever carnal content.

We've already declared "(You're) Having My Baby" to be the worst song of the '70s, and since many Redditors think it's possibly the worst song of all time, it's certainly going to top the list of worst No. 1 hits of its decade. Paul Anka, a teen idol in the 1950s, returned in the 1970s as a balladeer of laborious love songs. "(You're) Having My Baby," all slow and plodding with horn flourishes and delivered in a sleep-inducing croon, sounds tailor-made for one of the decade's many cheesy, old-fashioned variety shows. 

That retrograde aesthetic certainly fits with the lyrics. With emerging star Odia Coates providing vocals for the perfunctory female character, the object or subject of "(You're) Having My Baby," Anka sings from the point of view of a man really pleased that his wife is pregnant. He's especially pleased because he thinks that impregnation is her way of saying "I love you," and this song is his way of saying thanks in return — to serve as the vessel for his heir; he doesn't say "our baby," he says "my baby," after all.

Even though the song spent two weeks at No. 1 in July of 1976, Anka endured a lot of criticism at the time — feminist magazine "Ms." named Anka its Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year, while other outlets labeled the song an enemy of the equal rights movement. It's also just plain creepy, smug, and patronizing.