5 Flop Songs From The '70s That Sound Even Cringier Today

Not all flop songs from the 1970s deserve their status as commercial failures. They may have been too ahead of their time, or may have fallen victim to one unfortunate circumstance or another. Then there are those flops that earned their musical infamy because of how they make present-day music connoisseurs cringe. What may have been only slightly questionable (or even acceptable) back then may be totally revolting to more modern sets of ears.

When choosing "flop" songs, we prioritized songs that missed the top 40 of the Billboard pop charts, though songs that peaked between No. 21 and No. 40 were considered for artists with multiple bigger hits at the time of the flop. That means undoubtedly cringey material like Paul Anka's "You're Having My Baby" — easily one of the worst songs of the 1970s — doesn't qualify because it went to No. 1. We did, however, make a bit of an exception by including a song that flopped in the '70s but became a huge hit in the 1980s; in this case, we're putting more weight on the decade of the song's original recording and release when qualifying it as a flop. As for the cringe factor, we're mostly going by lyrical content and how poorly the lyrics have aged since the songs were released. 

Now that we've laid down the criteria, let's dive in and see why these 1970s flop songs can make modern listeners cringe.

Nearly two decades before Winger turned the cringe dial up to 11 with "Seventeen" and released a rock anthem that aged like milk under the hot sun, Paul Revere & the Raiders (simply credited as "the Raiders" at the time) did practically the same with the almost identically titled "Just Seventeen," which peaked at No. 82 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970. Even the lyrics tell a similar story — man meets teenage girl who says she's 17 years old, and sparks fly between the two. But instead of the girl's father saying she's too young in the Winger song, it's an officer of the law who tells the protagonist of the Raiders' track that he was doing something he shouldn't.

Granted, the lyrics of "Just Seventeen" aren't as brazen as those of Kid Rock's 2001 single "Cool, Daddy Cool," where he brags about liking underage girls and scoffs at the age of consent. But considering the backlash he faced in early 2026 when those old lyrics were dredged up amid the controversy surrounding his appearance at Turning Point USA's "alternative" Super Bowl halftime show, it's easy to see why songs like "Just Seventeen" can give a present-day music fan the ick. Sure, it's got some great hooks, but great hooks can't take away the cringe from a tune where the protagonist willingly entertains the advances of a young woman who isn't yet of legal age.

John Lennon was no stranger to controversial lyrics during the early years of his post-Beatles career. With the Fab Four, he wrote a classic example of a 1960s song that aged poorly, with the misogynistic and ornery "Run for Your Life" appearing on the "Rubber Soul" album. And while his heart was certainly in the right place, his word choice left a lot to be desired when he wrote "Woman is the N***** of the World" several years later for his 1972 double album with Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band, "Some Time in New York City." For that very reason, it's hard to call it a hidden gem from an otherwise middling album.

We couldn't stress it enough — Lennon was trying to make a powerful and valid point with the lyrics by singing about how women are often treated like second-class citizens and seen as nothing more but subservient mothers and wives. But his use of the "hard R," as it's called these days, is downright off, especially in today's environment, where it isn't uncommon for famous people to get canceled for racially insensitive comments or social media posts, even ones they made when they were much younger. It was not acceptable for many either when the single was released, as several radio stations refused to play the song, leading to its commercial failure — a mere No. 57 peak position on the pop charts.

Jackson Browne's "Red Neck Friend" is another one of those songs with a catchy melody and very, very questionable lyrics. The first two verses already raise some alarm bells with the repeated mentions of "little one," but other than that, it's mainly the protagonist asking a woman out while her parents are preoccupied with everyday stuff. But then the chorus hits, and Browne sings one double entendre after another, culminating with a cheeky (and creepy) little invitation in the last line — "Honey, let me introduce you to my red neck friend." 

If you had any doubts about what Browne was referring to, he confirmed to The Guardian in 2003 that he was indeed singing about his genitalia. "No, no, that's wrong!" he said, correcting the interpretation of "Red Neck Friend" as a song about self-gratification. "It's anatomically correct, but not in terms of the particular activity. It's clearly a song about wanting to introduce this girl to my red neck friend."

Despite a cameo from Elton John (credited as "Rockaday Johnnie") on piano, "Red Neck Friend" was nowhere near as successful as Browne's first hit, the top 10 single "Doctor My Eyes" — the song could only go as high as No. 85 on the pop charts in 1973. We'd like to think the lyrics might have played a part in the single's failure; it was far from the only song about sex on the radio in the 1970s, but lyrically, it feels far more boorish than romantic. That's especially true when considering today's dating culture, where crude lines like the ones in the chorus could warrant far more than a drink thrown in one's face.

While hitting No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 isn't too shabby at all for most artists, KISS had cracked the top 20 four times prior to the release of "Christine Sixteen" in 1977 and was one of the biggest rock bands in the world, so we're calling this one a minor flop. We're also calling it creepy because the song's writer, co-frontman Gene Simmons, was a grown man at the time of the song's release, and was singing to a schoolgirl named Christine. Who's 16. That's cringey enough as it is, but think about all the times KISS played the song in concert in the years, no, decades that followed. Even with KISS in its physical form now retired and "performing" as digital versions of themselves, "Christine Sixteen" remains a mainstay of their set lists.

Would this song have worked if its titular character were a legal adult or if the members of KISS were a bunch of high school kids when they recorded it? Maybe — the band had a gift for writing hooky melodies and sing-along choruses. But it's hard to get past lines such as "She's been around / But she's young and clean" when they were written and recorded by a man in his late 20s, one who's long had a history of making crude and sexist comments about women and keeps doing so even in his 70s.

Charlene's "I've Never Been to Me" technically falls under the "'70s flop" umbrella, as it originally scraped the bottom of the pop charts in late 1977 before dropping out and only becoming a mega hit five years later. So what makes it so cringey when, unlike the other songs in this list, there aren't any outwardly unwholesome lyrics?

For starters, there's the painfully schmaltzy arrangement that was so common in 1970s ballads, though the lyrics are once again the main culprit. On the surface, there's nothing wrong about a jaded former jet-setter telling another woman that her past life is nothing to envy because of how empty it was at the end of the day. But listen to the first verse where Charlene refers to the person she's singing to as a "discontented mother" and a "regimented wife," and the spoken interlude, where she begs the woman to stay in what seems to be an unhappy relationship. Yes, a spoken interlude in a song first released in 1977.

Spoken-word segments in the ad lib were already hopelessly dated in the late '70s (thus adding to the cringe), but more importantly, the protagonist's advice ignores so many possibilities that the woman can explore, such as, you know, marriage counseling. Or leaving the guy altogether. And what about the final verse, where the protagonist admits to crying for the "unborn children / That might have made [her] complete?" These days, many people would rather remain child-free by choice, and that makes for yet another reason why "I've Never Been to Me" — already a regular on worst-songs-of-all-time lists — sounds even more unpleasant to the ears of modern listeners.