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In an attempt to draw a distinction between songs I merely dislike and songs which are actively, aggressively terrible and clearly out to do their listeners some permanent harm, I am eschewing the easy choices. It would be simple to name a song I didn't like much and declare the job done, but that would be to leave the question fundamentally unanswered, 'I don't like this' being a horse of a very different color to 'this is an offense against God and Man'.

Yes, there's Take on Me by A-ha, a song that was played to death by the vile, power-mad bully-boss at my Saturday job and which I consequently can no longer listen to without remembering that shitty, shitty job and all the crap he had me take before I finally quit after he insisted that next week if I wanted to keep my job I would clean his motherfucking car for him. Yes, there's pretty much anything that came out of the mouth of a member of Steps. Yes, there's the painful papier-mache blandness of Seventeen and Crazy for You by British boy band Let Loose, a group of close-harmony torture-by-tedium artists my brother liked for some ungodly reason, and forced us all to listen to while trapped in the family Volvo on interminable drives down back roads. All of which are songs that I personally would consider to be beyond the pale, but all of which I dislike for personal reasons. As songs, they're bland rather than bad.

And then there's Surfin' Bird by the aptly-named Trashmen.

Surfin' Bird is belligerently bad. It's the kind of terrible song that could never be merely bland, the kind you simply can't produce by accident. The song is annoying, it's loud, it's grating, it's repetitive (good God is it repetitive), the singer seems to be trying to sound as immediately and entirely obnoxious as he humanly can... It's as if, to borrow a phrase, the Trashmen deliberately set out to record the worst song humanly possible: they deliberately tried to produce music which was not merely bland or repetitive or grating, but which was actively offensive, and clearly hostile to its audience.

I tried to listen to this song all the way through once. It was the longest three minutes of my life. The horror begins thusly:

A-well-a, everybody's heard about the bird
Bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a, bird, bird, bird, the bird is the word
A-well-a, bird, bird, bird, well, the bird is the word
A-well-a, bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a, bird, bird, bird, well, the bird is the word
A-well-a, bird, bird, b-bird's the word

And goes on and on and on in that ilk for what feels like the next thousand years.

Once everyone you know and love has passed beyond the pale, civilizations have risen and fallen and you have begun to believe that everything true and good in the world has been forever extinguished, the song changes as the singer achieves Nirvana or just perhaps suffers a complete mental breakdown. After once again informing us that yes, Virgina, there is a Surfin' Bird, he begins to make strange noises with his mouth, flapping his lips and, no doubt, flailing his limbs as he desperately attempts to articulate a concept that he fears must be utterly beyond the understanding of mortal men, and indeed even he himself fears trying to define.

Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb, aaah

Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa
Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow

Papa-ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow

It continues. You can tell he's trying to communicate, but what? Has he achieved transcendence or is he trying to call for help? Did the poor man suffer some terrible, life-ending seizure right there in the studio, his cries for aid that never came immortalized for all time on vinyl, cassette, CD and finally streaming audio? Nothing sounds impossible listening to the hideous, repetitive babbling noises this man is making with his mouth. On and on the terrible sound comes, crashing over the listener in a cacophonous tsunami of jarring, rubbish noise until finally, finally, just as its hapless victim is contemplating ripping their own ears off and ending their suffering that way, with one last cryptic Papa-ooma-mow-mow the song comes to a close, leaving the listener shattered and exhausted in its wake, a mere three minutes older and yet forever changed, daring to speak of the nightmare that is Surfin' Bird only in broken whispers.

You don't have to take my word for it. Full lyrics for this travesty can be found here - or for the truly brave, there's the song itself.



Surfin' Bird is as near as music has so far come to the mythical Brown Note. It is, in all possibility, the song that ends the earth. Repeated exposure could easily drive a strong man insane. No amount of money could possibly compensate for the damage that twenty-four hours of Surfin' Bird could inflict on the psyche. You'd go mad, or deafen yourself to end the torment early, and even that would not be enough. You'd still be hearing it. You'd hear it in your nightmares. It would haunt your days, like the sound of distant drums, and lead you to commit terrible atrocities to yourself or to others in a desperate attempt to drown out the strains of Surfin' Bird with the sound of tortured screams.

Surely they would be music by comparison.