'80s Rock Songs So Corny Our Ears Are Still Burning From Embarrassment

So many possibilities come to mind when you start recalling the corny rock songs of the '80s. Most of them come in the form of power ballads that tried to fuse heavy backing tracks with romantic lyrics about love and heartbreak. While that doesn't sound like a formula for failure per se, execution is key in creating rock songs that don't veer into corniness.

Unfortunately, many bands of the era didn't have the restraint required to pull their songs out of the bin of corniness. They ended up with juvenile poetry like Bad English did with "When I See You Smile" or overly-sentimental pining like REO Speedwagon accomplished on "Can't Fight This Feeling." These songs were successful in their era, flooding the airwaves with some of the most sugary, cornpone material the decade produced.

To qualify a song as being corny, we considered the lyrical content that was either sickly-sweet, overly dramatic, or just downright silly. We also factored in the musical accompaniment, many times making the songs feel too much like Adult Contemporary music instead of rock and roll. And if the vocals were forced and added layers of embarrassing sludge to the mix, it added extra points to the song's corniness factor. Even for '80s bands that changed their fate with massive hits that went to No. 1, like "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" by Poison and "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor couldn't escape being included among the '80s corniest rock songs.

Are you kidding with this seventh-grade poetry? Poison dropped this jangly ballad on the world in 1988 and became the band's only No. 1 hit. It's an amazing feat considering the hackneyed sentiment and syrupy delivery, including the defeated sigh at the beginning. Maybe a hair metal band better known for its not-so-coded sexual messaging and partying profile couldn't conjure anything more elevated. If the best you can do is the line, "Just like every cowboy sings a sad, sad song, every rose has its thorn," you may want to refresh your thesaurus.

Poison was never known for its subtle delivery. Songs like "Nothin' but a Good Time" and "Talk Dirty to Me" may have been clownish, but they seemed to revel in their silliness. In contrast, "Every Rose Has its Thorn" feels direly sincere, as if Bret Michaels and the boys were desperate to be taken seriously as a band capable of more than tawdry tunes. It's exactly that blind earnestness that turns the song into a dopey misstep, despite its hit-single status.

Being a love song that has every Gen Xer crying into their coffee doesn't make this tune any less corny. No shade to Poison for giving its following what it was obviously craving. But there's no excusing the slurpy lyrics and overwrought vocals that border on spoof. From a band that embraced light-hearted playfulness, you could almost believe they served up this slice of cheesiness on purpose.

Back in 1982, when everyone was settling for whatever rock anthem came rolling out of the music industry, this goofy ode to summoning strength in the face of adversity gave "Rocky III" a No. 1 hit theme song. But does the idea of the eye of the tiger really apply to anyone's life? Has anyone ever written it in a high school yearbook or jotted it down as encouragement in a "You can do it!" greeting card? Of course not, because it sounds even sillier than "Keep reaching for the stars!"

Just how corny is this chugging slab of rock and roll? Revisiting the line, "Hangin' tough, stayin' hungry" describing "just a man and his will to survive" tells you everything. It's like poster tag lines from some of the most doomed-to-fail movies ever made, only in this case they were the theme song for a second sequel to one of the most iconic works in cinema history. Bear in mind, this is the Rocky film that introduced Mr. T to the world, so maybe subtlety wasn't the objective.

The band itself was called Survivor, fitting since they'd hardly made a dent in the music scene before being tapped by Sylvester Stallone to create this heavy-handed tune. But that only happened once the actor-director was denied permission to use Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." You might say this was the moment when the franchise jumped the shark — or in this case, the tiger.

Swedish hair band Europe took the idea of thermonuclear destruction to the extreme with this cheesy 1986 thumper. For metal kids looking to bang their heads to something with deeper meaning, it might have seemed like a keen fusion of sci-fi and hard rock. Listen to it now, and you'll see just how clumsy an attempt at addressing existential dread it really is, even if it did reach one billion YouTube views and go to No. 1 thanks to a Geico commercial 30 years after it was released.

Rather than pleading with nuclear powers of planet Earth to have empathy like Sting did in the superlative "Russians" from the year before, Europe envisioned the entire population of the planet taking off for safe haven ... somewhere in the solar system, or the galaxy beyond, maybe? The lyrics clearly state, "We're heading for Venus," but then seconds later declare there are "so many light years to go." It doesn't take a NASA engineer to realize that Venus isn't light years away from Earth. Sure, GPS was still years down the line, but we still knew the distance between planets in the '80s — or some of us did, at least.

The only thing the song has going for it is the opening synth riff, now used as cinema needle-drop shorthand for, "Oh snap — something big is about to go down!" And even that's about as chintzy as a rock song can get.

The keyboards that open this overwrought ballad from rockers REO Speedwagon are the height of chintzy '80s synth sounds. That may have flown back when no hair was too huge or too permed, but it's nothing but corny now. Lead singer Kevin Cronin pinches down his voice to sing in what is presumably a more tender tone. Dreadful lyrics like "It's time to bring this ship into the shore" call for nothing less.

The band was already established as a premium middle-of-the-road rock act, with solid material like "Ridin' the Storm Out" and "Take It On The Run" providing radio coverage from the '70s through the early '80s. They'd even come up with a doozy of a rock ballad in the form of "Keep on Lovin' You," which gave the Speedwagon a spiffy update while reminding the world what the band was capable of.

There was no reason to pander to an audience looking for a softer sound, even if long-time rockers were aiming at a tougher take on Adult Contemporary pop. Instead of nailing the formula, REO Speedwagon ended up making cheese of the musical kind. Pay no attention to the fact that it became a No. 1 smash. Sometimes, slurpy rock love songs are what audiences are hungry for. That doesn't make them any less corny.

Bad English, indeed. The lyrics may be grammatically correct, but the execution and sentiment of this maudlin power ballad is peak cringe. The supergroup featured Neil Schon and Jonathan Cain of Journey fame, and John Waite, who'd already proven his worth with Cain in The Babys in the '70s and forged a solid solo career with hits like "Missing You" in the '80s. All of that pedigree was distilled into this late-80s tune, a clunky attempt at a love song that wrung the cheeseball mawkishness out of every overwrought note.

The wince-inducing chorus is musical cheese at its prime: "When I see you smile, see a ray of light, oh, see it shinin' right through the rain." It seems deviously designed to get concert goers raising their lighters. If Hallmark had an AI engine that reassembled greeting card text from grade school Valentines, it could do a better job.

The song arrived in 1989 and became one of the worst No. 1 hits of the 1980s, at a time when hair bands were losing footing to more authentic alt-rock and grunge music. It's hard not to imagine the members of Bad English, with their combined pedigree covering decades of hits, holding on for dear life to a sound that was quickly slipping away. But that's no excuse for spinning the wheel of hokey nonsense to come up with cheesy work that's this blush-worthy.