5 Classic Rock Hits Gen Xers Would Rather Forget

Generation X has a lot to regret when it comes to pop culture, but the biggest albatross this population carries may be the collection of rock songs that are better off forgotten, and here, we're going to revisit some of those retrospective fails. We were swept up in one of the most fertile eras for genre shifts in musical history. How were we to know that some of our go-to tunes would turn out to be errors in judgment so far down the line? We were just rocking out to the music we were given, not knowing how much we'd come to rue our foolish decisions someday. But at least we weren't the musicians who made the missteps.

There are plenty of regrettable songs that Gen X fans helped make hits, mostly because we were young and foolish and still figuring out what it meant to have good taste. Even if we banged our heads to "Cherry Pie" or chanted along with "Mr. Roboto," we're big enough to admit our mistakes and call out the forgettable disappointments we know these and other songs to be. And yes, we may be recalling them now in this round-up, but it's only so we can remember how much we, along with the whole Gen X crowd, would like to forget them.

What happened here, exactly? The sardonic Steve Miller and his trusty band of rootsy rockers — those sly masters of stoner-adjacent rock classics like "The Joker" and "Fly Like an Eagle" — veered into ill-advised Adult Contemporary territory with 1982's "Abracadabra," a nonsensical song about sexual attraction. "Abra-abra-cadabra / I wanna reach out and grab ya" has to be one of the most cringe near-rhyme lyrics to ever defile the English language; you can practically hear the alphabet groaning as the chorus plays. It sounds like some sort of placeholder that fit the rhythm at the moment, a stand-in that Miller meant to go back and shore up with something more solid, but then he hit a deadline and had to stick with this horny gibberish.

Of course, "Abracadabra" magically levitated to the No. 1 spot despite its bountiful shortcomings. Gen X was going through a bit of a musical identity crisis at the time, spinning between classic rock that was holding on for dear life and the zippy new wave and pop-rock that were freshening up the scene. So when a '70s hero like Steve Miller popped a last-ditch effort at maintaining relevance, his longtime fans latched on. But now that it's been several decades, it's easy to see what a misstep this sodden, goofy track is. It's best to let "Abracadabra" disappear from memory.

If schmaltz could generate electricity, "More Than Words," the meandering 1991 ballad by two-hit wonder Extreme, could power a small town. With its poor grammar, sappy sentiment, and grating vocal performance, it's an object lesson in pouring it on too thick on every front. No doubt, there were plenty of Gen X mixtapes and dedications that made solid use of this mawkish mess; it didn't reach No. 1 for no reason, after all. But that's likely due to the dearth of rock ballads showing any level of sincerity at the time; we latched onto whatever emotional dregs surfaced, even if they bordered on parody.

This seriously syrupy schlock wanders and rambles and overstays its welcome. And just when you think it's coming to a sensible stopping place, it fires up again for another round before ending with a jarring drop-off that doesn't make sense. Even co-writer Nuno Bettencourt admitted to the website Music Afficionado that it doesn't adhere to a traditional pop-song structure, though he finds that part of the appeal. Gen X in the 2020s begs to differ. 

"More Than Words" needed a lot of things to reach the quality it was striving for — better songwriting and a producer who could give it proper structure being chief among them — but none of that could erase the second-hand embarrassment caused by the arch, ham-fisted emotion it contained. Strike it from the Gen X greatest hits collection and add it to the grating misses collection instead.

We get it: "Money for Nothing" was Dire Straits' ironic telling of a blue-collar worker's view of how rock stars have it easy. But there couldn't have been a more irritating way of delivering the message. Simply transcribing an overheard conversation, songwriter Mark Knopfler uses the begrudging appliance store delivery guy's words against both him and Knopfler's fellow musical ilk. He even roped Sting into adding a haunting "I want my MTV" line sung to the melody of his own "Don't Stand So Close to Me" hit with the Police. Imagine the meta-ness of two acts who blew up big thanks to music videos snarking on how they're viewed by the general public ... in a song that made them tons of money and went to No. 1, with a video that helped make Dire Straits a music television institution. The mind reels.

Forget the sell-out aspect of a band begging for its own video exposure with a tune supposedly shaking a fist at the establishment (or was it ripping on the common folk who didn't dig rich rock stars and their indulgences?) The overly-simplified guitar playing from a maestro like Knopfler and the "social commentary" that fell flat permeated airwaves and TV screens. But even with the post-reality mental zigzagging intended to reveal deeper truths, the song is simply annoying. It's one the whole Gen X crew skips over when it pops up on Spotify's best-of '80s mixes, and for good reason.

When was it ever okay to refer to women as food in popular music — or anywhere, for that matter? If you said "the '90s," then you're probably thinking of "Cherry Pie," the No. 10 chartbuster from forgotten '80s hair metal band Warrant, laden with lewd imagery and loaded with electrified power chords. This was the age when hair was an unofficial member of the band and bombastic party bangers were being eaten up by the Gen X youth. Warrant leapt onto the bandwagon with this hardly-a-double-entendre rocker, supplanting the band's first chart smash, the No. 2 power ballad "Heaven," and proving these guys could do sleaze AND romance and get pretty darn far with both.

But Aquanet hair clouds and mesh shirts became sad kitsch as the '90s introduced gritty grunge as the rock format du jour, a genre that came with its own scandals. Thanks to the cynical sincerity of the new guard, this lascivious three-chorder that reduced women to objects with videos to match was rendered properly obsolete, even if Warrant carried on in the aftermath and landed a few more singles in the Billboard Hot 100. Now when Gen X-ers hear the lyrics "She's my cherry pie" come barreling through their Air Pods, their first response my be nostalgia, but it's immediately replaced with horror.

Which is more embarrassing to sing along with on Styx's "Mr. Roboto": The mechanical android voices and their synthesized Japanese greeting, or the childishly sing-song "Secret, secret / I've got a secret," or the ick-inducing "Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto" line that pops up throughout? You don't have to choose one; this entire tune is one big package of shameful creative surrender. Gen X may have sung along to it all when it first appeared, but now that music fans from the latchkey generation have come to their senses, it all seems like one of those cinematic fever dreams that you hope you can forget with time — and maybe some hypnotherapy.

Styx, the prog-rock band with the mythological name, always had a bit of a theatrical bent; songs like "The Grand Illusion" and "Paradise Theater" hinted at the group's taste for flashy showmanship and multi-section arrangements that sometimes roll out like production numbers. But the band's 1983 concept album "Kilroy Was Here" and its inescapable single that sadly turned into a No. 3 hit was a last gasp that tried so hard to be a futuristic rock opera that it ended up fritzing out on its own supply. Granted, our online feeds are filled with images of droids in development running amok and tipping over hilariously when they hit an obstacle, so Styx's vision of the future was somewhat justified. But if we never hear "Mr. Roboto" again in our tech-forward lives, it'll be too soon.