No. 1 Love Songs That Are Total Flops In Our Book

Love, for all its alleged virtues, has also inspired some of the worst music ever heard. (Admittedly, also some of the best music, but we're being haters today.) Mistaking enthusiasm for quality, musicians across every genre (and skill level) imaginable have given us songs about that special person that sent listeners scrambling for the "skip" button. Some of these songs, remarkably, have even hit the top spot on the charts: Cupid's rapid-fire technology means that at any point, a large number of people will be in love and thus temporarily unable to think clearly or evaluate music coherently.

Since all these songs were chart successes, reaching No. 1 on the U.K. or U.S. charts for at least one week and sometimes much longer, we're free to use personal metrics to label these cheesy flops. Taste will always vary, but the worst of the worst have a combination of trite or inane lyrics with over-dramatic melodies and deliveries. Fundamentally, if the thought of being serenaded by one of these songs made us cringe, it made it onto the list.

The four crooners who make up R&B group All-4-One have good voices and work together very well on an objective level, modernizing the male-voice harmonies Americans came to appreciate with the classic barbershop quartet. Unfortunately, All-4-One chose to use their impressive gifts to deliver "I Swear," a corntacular ode to nothing in particular. Almost every lyric is an empty-calorie nothingburger, with the worst possibly being "I'll build your dreams with these two hands / We'll hang some memories on the walls." We'll hang memories on the walls of these handmade dreams? Dress it up with a couple of key changes, and there you go! Instant romance.

But with the money All-4-One presumably made from this song, they could absolutely afford to hire licensed and bonded contractors to build these dreams. Audiences melted for this vague collection of platitudes and sent the track to No. 1 on the American charts for 11 weeks, giving it the juice it needed to be recognized as one of the best-selling tracks of 1994.

Hesitate before taking love advice from much-divorced Phil Collins. Not only has the Genesis alum done the church-to-courthouse loop with three wives, but he's also responsible for the clunker "A Groovy Kind of Love." The song was recorded by Phil Collins for ... a movie starring Phil Collins, "Buster," a sort-of-true story about an armed robber who turned himself in because he realized, while on the lam, how much he missed his wife. 

That's cute! What's not cute is rhyming "blue," "you," do," and again "blue," which happens in the first two lines of the song. And while the Collins version is a cover of a 1966 song, releasing a song with "Groovy" in the title in 1988 feels awfully dated. By this logic, we can look forward to "My Cheugy Baby" and "Rizz Me by the Light of the Moon" in about 2040. The whole shebang is delivered in a trembly, earnest register that can only have annoyed Collins' vocal coach.

The listening public, however, thought Collins' tune was the bee's knees, the cat's ankle, totally tubular. It spent two excruciating weeks at No 1.

There are a lot of good reasons to hate Gary Glitter, and while his single "I Love You Love Me Love" may not be the worst of his sins, it is certainly among his most egregious crimes against music. Glitter praises himself over a trudging, borderline bump-and-grind rhythm, pausing his self-adulation only to repeat a word-salad chorus of the word "love" stirred up with a pawful of pronouns. Glitter's appeal was never that he had an especially good singing voice, and that's certainly apparent throughout this three-minute ordeal. Bonus demerits for rhyming "lies" with "eyes," an even more grievous transgression than rhyming "true" with "blue."

Listeners didn't care. "I Love You Love Me Love" hit No. 1 in the United Kingdom and was the best-selling song on that unhappy island in 1973. Over the following decades, the grimy little track sold comfortably over a million copies, ensuring it an (undeserved) place in the history of British pop music.

Parentheses are a warning sign. If even the title of the song requires an explanatory note, take it back to the drawing board and stay there until it's good. Unfortunately, no one yelled this in Bryan Adams' face in 1991, and we wound up with the six-and-a-half-minute schmaltz-fest "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You." (For reference, the notoriously long "Bohemian Rhapsody" is six minutes on the button.) In the process of rasping his way over overwrought keyboard accompaniment, Adams rhymes "love" with "love" and repeatedly tells his addressee to look into her soul. At least twice, the song seems like it's about to end, only for Adams to freestyle chunks of previous lyrics and generally ululate over instrumental passages. The song is an ordeal. We'd rather take a ring across Middle Earth; it would feel shorter.

"(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" was allegedly written in 45 minutes (so, about seven times the time you need to sing it). The U.K. listening public rewarded that effort with 16 weeks at No. 1 on the charts, an as-yet unbeaten record. The marginally calmer U.S. only gave it seven weeks of glory.

Inexplicably, one of the most flaccid of Elvis Presley's tracks popped onto the charts in 1993, courtesy of a disco-ska-reggae-elevator cover by the band UB40. If the saving grace of the original "(I Can't Help) Falling in Love with You," was that Elvis' voice, even on a drowsy song, was among the greatest of the century, UB40, bless their uncategorizable souls, cannot make the same claim. The instrumentals are at least energetic, but then the vocals nearly match Elvis' lugubrious pace, missing the opportunity to energize the track. It reads as a novelty song more than anything else, along the lines of punk covers of country songs.

Audiences loved the whatever-it-was of the UB40 version, which many of them found courtesy of its inclusion on the soundtrack to the forgotten Sharon Stone vehicle "Sliver." The track ruled the charts for seven weeks, and the album it was on, "Promises and Lies," went platinum. It's hard to begrudge an obscure-ish band like UB40 such success, but we'll find a way.