Worst Beatles song on the White Album

Apologies to people who thought it should be two polls; but you can't buy 'em separately, so you can't vote for 'em separately.

I haven't a clue how this one will pan out.

Got to be "Revolution 9". Even though "Helter Skelter", "Yer Blues" and "Why Don't We Do It In The Road" are all horrible too.

"Bungalow Bill", "Honey Pie" and "Martha My Dear" are all way better than their reputation though.

tricky. for a such a long and diverse record, the quality level is really high on this one.

either 'sexy sadie', 'don't pass me by' or, most likely, 'ob la di'.

hating 'helter skelter' is utterly incomprehensible to me.

Honey Pie, I suppose, although I never skip any on this album, not even R9. I think that this album works best when played in order from start to finish.

hating 'helter skelter' is utterly incomprehensible to me.

I hate hard rock and "Helter Skelter" is hard rock.

Pussy.

"Glass Onion", reluctantly. It rolls but doesn't rock, and breaks the killer momentum of the first two. So I vote for it mostly on sequencing grounds.

I love the ones that will dominate this, e.g. "Revolution 9" and "Honey Pie" and "Good Night" and even "Ob La Di".

Ha! I love how these polls are coming so fast. Do them ALL RIGHT NOW! Why wait?

I'm going with unhumability here and thus "Long Long Long" although McCartney is very obnoxious on this album. Not sure if being able to hum "Honey Pie" is worse but I suppose it's better than no impression at all.

Best: "Wild Honey Pie"

The mono remaster erases the accidental "down" before "I need a fix" in "Happiness is a Warm Gun" if anyone on earth cares. But those ragtags moments make it THE Beatles album to obsess over.

Revolution 9 is one you don't want to hear that often but you're very glad The Beatles tried to be that experimental and it is really pretty crucial.

The Beatles' best album. So many utterly fantastic songs, but quite a few throwaways as well. Not much fond of Ob La Di, Piggies, Honey Pie or Rocky.

My first inclination is to say Bungalo. For numerous reasons, especially the same jarring verse to chorus transitions that make me dislike Lucy in the Sky.

There are a number of contenders though, and I'm goinb to think on this one.

Has to be a McCartney track, so "Honey Pie" over "Ob La Di".

I really like Ob La Di. Honey Pie is pretty shite, though.

I love Wild Honey Pie; having always dismissed it as pointless filler, the remaster turned it into a thrilling percussion segue.

i'm a bore, 'revolution 9'

From the Wikipedia Ob La Di entry: 'According to studio engineer Geoff Emerick, John Lennon openly hated the song, calling it "Paul's granny shit"'

Think I'm with John on this one.

you and me both. an easy pick really.

so much shit on this. maybe 'piggies'.

I've really got to check if posts in these threads are by Geir before reading them, I can't stand this many WTFs.

A few irritating numbers here, I'm leaning towards Rocky Raccoon but I'll give the album another listen before voting.

Rocky Racoon is pretty teeth-grindingly awful, that accent he puts on at the beginning...

"Long Long Long" and "Don't Pass Me By" are pantheon for me--sometimes I'm just not even on the same page in these polls..."Revolution 9" should win easily, and it will deserve to. The Beatles command of melody existed in some other stratosphere, so them wanting to be John Cage or Frank Zappa for 10 minutes made about as much as sense as Albert Pujols deciding he wants to focus on stolen bases next year. It's probably the biggest waste of space on any of their albums, but on the premise that it's not really a song (and therefore can't be the worst), I'll instead vote for "Good Night."

The problem with voting in this poll is that you kind of have to open up and accept White Album as a whole, warts and all. It was by far my favourite when I first got into the band, as I was obsessed with eclecticism. The whole thing destroyed me.

SO what to pick, what to pick? Picking one is a bit like picking your worst Beatle really. I never got along too well with USSR - too sore throat Chuck Berry for me, although I can see why people like it.

Obladi was one of several Beatles songs (along with Yellow Sub, 64, Penny Lane etc) we were made to sing in primary school and I think I was conscious of it a long time before I knew of it as a Beatles song. For a long time I actually assumed it was an old West Indian religious song that the Beatles had covered. I know a lot of people hate on it, but I am really fond of it - I listened to the Anthology version last night and really enjoyed the slightly different groove. I also like the helium "la la la la la la laaaaa" backing vocals on the chorus.

I loved Bungalow Bill and Piggies as a teenager, thought they were hilarious. Blackbird was the first bit of music I learnt to play on the guitar and it's still my go-to piece if I'm trying one out.

The whole album steams merrily along until I get to two acoustic tracks - I Will and Julia. I always found those a bit meh - yeah I know Julia's about John's muvver, but it doesn't make me like it much more. Still, Julia's a lot better than I Will, which is a still just a bit slight and unintrusive to be deemed the "worst".

The opening of disc 2 is a bit wonky. "Birthday" has that memorable blues riff and I often whack it on if I'm DJing a birthday party, but it's not THAT great apart from the cool little breakdown just before "And we'd like you to dance". I find "Yer Blues" a bit of a chore "Yes I'm lonely, wanna die" - pastiche or not, it's indicative of Lennon's solo obsession with grassroots rock and blues, something I'm completely and utterly allergic to.

I can see a lot of McCartney haters voting for "Mother Nature's Son", but I've always suffered his saccharine side quite gladly, and quite enjoy the twee finger picking and flutes.

Then there's another boisterous rocker with "Monkey", the lyrics of which always make me laugh - a rousing call to arms to "take it easy" - Well, Mr McCartney, I'd like to if you weren't playing your guitar and yelling so loud. A funny song, not a fave though.

"Helter Skelter"'s often credited as being "heavy metal" - not sure about that one, but it's definitely the closest the band got to melting your face off. Sometimes I find it painful though - I haven't heard the reissue but the original is so trebly and distorted. I guess that's the point though.

Really love the George songs on White Album, especially "Long Long Long" - after all the dirty bluesrock on side 2, it's like diving into a cool blue psychedelic pool. The synthetic/melltron(?) flutes and sung-from-the-other-end-of-the-room vocals are welcome and it kind of reminds me of the Moody Blues at points, in a good way.

The lyrics of Revolution always irked me, and his stripped down version doesn't really help to make me like it much more. John Lennon at his most giveafuck self indulgent, and arguably going back to the Beatle-Tory values of "Taxman" etc.

You kind of have to let Paul do his vaudeville thing, so I'll allow "Honey Pie", even though it's not that great. Continuing with a food-related theme "Savoy Truffle" is just a plain odd attempt to equate hot'n'steamy sex with ummm... desserts. Yeah w/e.

Just when you think White Album's running out of steam, "Cry Baby Cry" comes along - really nice song that I always enjoyed, can't say much more than that, although some of the lyrics are a bit goofy "the queen was painting pictures for the children's holiday" (sic) what???

So much has been said about Revolution 9 - I just admire the Beatles' guts. I love the fact that the majority of the voices weren't samples from movies and newsreels, but the Beatles themselves. And some of the phrases "The watusi... the twist", "take this brother, may it serve you well" are now imprinted on my brain like a hot pie or a pasty.

"Goodnight" is obviously a schmaltzy genre exercise, but it was a good move to get Ringo to close the album.

I'm going to vote for "Yer Blues", just plain annoying, lumpen and everything I don't like about Lennon from this period onwards.

Rocky Racoon is pretty teeth-grindingly awful, that accent he puts on at the beginning...

It starts out pretty horrible, but because a nice ballad after that.

"Goodnight" is great, it's like a David Lynch type ending to the album or something.

You kind of have to let Paul do his vaudeville thing

what?

Then there's another boisterous rocker with "Monkey", the lyrics of which always make me laugh - a rousing call to arms to "take it easy" - Well, Mr McCartney, I'd like to if you weren't playing your guitar and yelling so loud.

what the fuck?

I like Rocky Raccoon - I always heard the mock-American accent, and the whole song, as being tongue-in-cheek. If you hear the Anthology version he adlibs in that silly voice for some time.

The two Ringo tracks would have been pretty obvious duds on most other albums, but they kind of work here, compared with John's worst moments.

I am not a fan of this album in general actually. George provided some nice stuff and quite good quality all over even though I am no fan of "Savoy Truffle". Paul's songs are better, but the ballads seem sort of unfinished and a bit too low-fi for their own best. John, as I said, was at his best until 1967, and several of his contributions here are horrible. But he did of course also manage to come up with "Julia", "Cry Baby Cry", "Dear Prudence", "Bungalow Bill" and "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" so it's not all bad, really.

Still, I stand by the feeling that this would have been better off as a single album. But then, a lot of people disagree with me what shouldn't be in there, and I guess that is the problem, that people wouldn't agree which of the tracks should have been cute. Surely I would NOT want to cut "Honey Pie" or "Martha My Dear" off it!

which of the tracks should have been CUT even :)

"Don't Pass Me By" ... didn't even have to think twice.

"Don't Pass Me By" is a fave for me :-)

Standard "the beauty of this album ..." spiel here.

My favourite Beatles album, for sure - such an all-encompassing emotional range. It's between Rocky Racoon and Honey Pie. Voted Honey Pie because it has always left me cold, but now starting to think that Rocky Racoon is actually the worse of the two.

xpost which I have to believe i as much as anyone, given I rate "Rev 9" in this album's top 5.

Oh man, couldn't you have spaced these polls out a bit? I was really enjoying having a bit of time to think about each album.

There're quite a few here I don't like. 'Glass Onion' is a smarmy. 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' preachy and ponderous, and then 'Piggies' picks up that baton but ditches its redeeming qualities for a bit of nasty sneering. 'Don't Pass Me By' and 'Birthday' have nothing to them. 'Savoy Truffle' too, but at least it's a puzzle. 'Long Long Long' I assume is good, but I can barely hear it. 'Good Night' needs a bit of subtlety and Ringo isn't the man to provide it.

Tie between 'Glass Onion' and 'Piggies'; the latter gets my vote for having a less interesting sound. I was going to say also for inspiring a murder (though that's hardly its fault) but not entirely sure that they don't both carry that burden.

'Long Long Long' I assume is good, but I can barely hear it.

Buy the remaster.

Long Long Long is so beautiful after Helter Skelter on the remaster. Genius bit of sequencing.

Apologies, Ismael, for squishing so many of these in today; I was going to just do MMT but then it struck me that Yellow Submarine was so short it seemed pointless to wait for it, and then I got carried away. I've had a very repetitive morning at work and this was my solace!

"Glass Onion" is, imo, unfuckwithable.

's ok. I've got Monday off, so suspect I'm going to have to squeeze in a lot of listening then. No bad thing!

The real answer is "Rocky Raccoon" but somehow I voted "Honey Pie". Those are the only two songs I'd even consider axing.

You made the right choice. Rocky Raccoon is a great song after the "Hills of Dakota" part.

yeah i voted for honey pie too. not really a fan of any of paul's music hall b.s. on here but martha my dear and ob-la-di have some redeeming factors

"Long Long Long" is one of the most amazing Beatles songs ever, right up there with "A Day in the Life", but nobody knows it. Over the years it has edged "Happiness" from my White Album top spot.

"while my guitar" & "yer blues" & "rev #9" are the ones i skip. "ob la di" is dumb as all hell, but something about the way it's engineered sounds really good to me.

This is far and away my favorite Beatles album, maybe my favorite album ever. But, given the constraints of the poll, I pick "Wild Honey Pie," which is so slight it's almost not there.

NO! Listen to the remaster loud!

This is tough... face off between Honey Pie and Ob-la-di. Unlike n/a the latter has no redeeming factors. I just cannot hear the song anymore.

(Voting for 'Dear Prudence' will automatically get you a life long site ban right? Because it should)

I don't agree with SB but that is kind of OTM (ditto Happiness Is A Warm Gun)

You said it

the lyrics to glass onion are kind of obnoxious tbh.

yeah, but i like the music & performance too much to care. plus it's another one where childhood devotion blinds me to the flaws. seemed so mysterious to me as a kid, this song about those other songs, like there was a riddle to be solved.

kinda dopey now though

i mean, it might have been cool in the 60s when that kind of meta-textuality was an interesting novelty in pop songs. it just seems sort of disdainful of the audience's guile in a way that is annoying, and reminds me that john lennon was not the most interesting thinker ever. i hear it as him saying "you think this means anything? idiots." maybe that's the wrong reading of the song.

sorry, i meant "gullibility" not guile above

'glass onion' awesome if only for that weird sinister tone to it esp the part w/ lennon's 'oh yeah. OH. YEAH. OH YEAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!' over the strings and that beat. love that the beatles not only could do beatles songs better than anyone else could they did beatles songs better than anyone also, as if dylan had decided to top mouse and the traps. groan at 'revolution 9' (predictably) getting that many votes, was gonna moan at 'birthday' getting votes for worst (and no votes for best in the other) until i saw ppl giving votes for worst to damn near anything. i mean 'julia' got two votes.

I think my least favorite song on this album is actually Yer Blues. It's fine and all but kind of generic british blues and hence doesn't have the 'special' factor almost every other song on the album has, where everything feels like a discrete, unique little short story composition. Seems much more suited to a Lennon solo album.

three people voted for long, long, long!

they were so rong....rong...rong...this time

i know the white album is the best ever because pretty much any song that gets voted as the worst sparks visceral outrage

'glass onion' awesome if only for that weird sinister tone to it esp the part w/ lennon's 'oh yeah. OH. YEAH. OH YEAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!' over the strings and that beat. love that the beatles not only could do beatles songs better than anyone else could they did beatles songs better than anyone also

Harry Nilsson beat them to the punch by a year - pretty sure this is where they got the idea from given John and Paul's love for this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-3IH3T1DoE

shameful fact: I got a fraternity jersey that said "GLASS ONION" on the back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MckifQZuIxE

Sound familiar? ;)

"Wild Honey Pie" is a classic interlude. Its placement in the sequencing on Side 1 helps to establishes the album's playful atmosphere.

A similar case could be made for "Honey Pie," but I just simply hate it as a song on its own. I would personally enjoy Side 4 a lot better if they had instead opted for "Not Guilty" or "What the New Mary Jane" or "Hey Bulldog" or "Junk" or "The Inner Light" or really anything.

so what all did Yoko do on this album...? It's weird how much I've listened to this music and still notice new details. For ex. it had never occurred to me that that's Yoko answering Paul's vocal in the "I would like you to dance/take a ch-ch-chance" bit of "Birthday". was wondering if some of the other high vocal harmonies on various songs are hers. I assume Lewinson's documented this somewhere...

She sings on "Bungalow Bill" too. Re-listening to this album it's kind of mindblowing once you've spent a few years getting to know "Plastic Ono Band", "Fly", etc. A shame The Beatles didn't just stick together and let Yoko join the band, they could've been the next Velvet Underground.

God, the sequence on this album that goes Piggies/Rocky Raccoon/Don't Pass Me By/Why Don't We Do It In The Road is really a slog.

I guess Patti Harrison also sings on "Birthday"...?

" A shame The Beatles didn't just stick together and let Yoko join the band, they could've been the next Velvet Underground"

not really

true say. shame Macca doesn't share the same view

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow6W7U-ccd0

My parents didn't own the White Album and my local library didn't have a copy of it so it ended up being one of the last Beatles albums that I got to hear, meaning I had spent several years reading about before I ever listened to it, and I was really disappointed by quite a few of these tracks. Everything I read about it made it sound so amazing, this sprawling mess of out-there weirdness, but it's more like an album and a half of really great stuff and then some outakes.

I think some of Yoko's albums actually have this out there weirdness thing that my imaginary White Album did.

Junk and Come And Get It shoulda been on it in place of Piggies and Rocky. IMO.

There's a few Beatles songs I'm not that interested in, but I thing Piggies and Rocky Racoon are the only ones that make me want to back in time and smack Harrison and McCartney around the head, Godfrey Bloom style.

make me want to go travel in time, even

to travel back in time, goddamnit

also you have to factor in the fact that they were partly responsible for multiple murder.

To all who don't like "Honey Pie", Lennon played the awesome pseudo-jazz guitar solo in it, which ought to make it immune to dislike. Somewhere I read that he played that off the cuff (just like the piano intro to OLDOLD), it wasn't like George's famous "thought-out" solos. Which makes it even more awesome because Lennon was a pretty rough 'n' ready guitarist.

i dunno, i think i'm just a white album believer at this point, it's all great

"Savoy Truffle" has become my favorite WA Harrisong.

I like Ob La Di Ob La Da, Honey Pie and Revolution 9 a lot, can't get my head around them being more unpopular than Piggies and Rocky Raccon.

Piggies has that rad harpsichord solo in it.

Terry Manning (engineer on Zep III & Tres Hombres) did a wild version of "Savoy Truffle" in 1969, it's what showed me the good news

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ4jeRWjQ0Y

i think the only WA track i could do without is the slow version of 'revolution,' lennon's wishy-washiness re: "you can count me out...IN!!!" always kind of irked me.

so the four best songs on this album include Martha My Dear eh

the Bee Gees song about Barry's dog is better fwiw

Martha My Dear is great. But that's not really how "worst song" polls work anyway.

I know and I can't remember if/what I voted for here but Martha always bugs me. Paul and his dopey cutesy shit.

It is how we should elect presidents maybe. (I'm think of the president as an involuntarily drafted service position a la one of those Arthur C Clarke novels).

so many animals on this album - raccoons, pigs, dogs, birds - what's up with that

monkey..

I also strongly dislike Martha My Dear, and I was surprised to see it show up in the top 70 in the big Beatles poll, just behind, like, Day Tripper and Can't Buy Me Love.

Martha My Dear. I like the way the guitars break in during the "take a good look around you" part. Depending on what day of the week it is Paul says it's inspired by a sheepdog, Jane Asher, and the voice in his head, his 'muse', that helps him write songs.

I'm not saying that when you look up the term "unreliable narrator" in the dictionary you see the term illustrated with a picture of Paul McCartney. I'm just saying that if you mentioned the term "unreliable narrator" to Paul, he'd tell you that he invented it.

Tiger + elephant in Bungalow Bill btw.

When we did the poll four years ago, I had "Martha My Dear" at #2 (looked it up). Didn't get a single vote otherwise. Haven't changed my mind.

Check that (same mistake I made at the time); I wasn't the only vote, but it missed the Top 60.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1ApYUxlw6I

so many animals on this album - raccoons, pigs, dogs, birds - what's up with that

― Οὖτις, Friday, April 17, 2015 6:02 PM (28 minutes ago)

Allegory, dude

Wow, that's amazing (xpost). Dave Hill looks like the Big Bang Theory guy.

The White Album is Noah's Flood but instead of an ark it's a psychedelic attic.

Did that harpsichord demo of "Something" ever come out? I remember reading George taped some stuff when they were SI'ing onto "Piggies".

I love that even later Slade also covered Moby Grape's "Omaha" and Fairport Conventions "It's alright ma it's only witchcraft" (up on youtube from the BBC collections)...and plenty more, they had pretty eclectic tastes