Mick and David indulge in the seamiest of their homoerotic "Miami Vice" fantasies.

Why do bad songs happen to good songwriters? What cruel twist of fate results in the author of "The Boxer" penning an embarrassment like "You're the One?" Well, the sad truth is that nobody's perfect; and sometimes the machinery of genius just fails to function. There's nothing all that interesting about bad songs written by one-hit wonders and pre-fab pop fakers, but when a talented, vital artist births a musical monstrosity, one can't help but wonder - after all the forehead-slapping is over - what exactly went wrong. Therefore, before presenting our select list of the Worst Songs by the Best Musicians, I'd like to submit a pet theory of mine: A good writer writes a bad song for one of three reasons - (a.) they're having an off day, (b.) they're trying to do something ambitious and failing, or (c.) they're just robotically going through the motions. Of these reasons, only the last is serious and damning - artists who have given up on their craft and devoted themselves instead solely to their bank accounts should be identified as such and targeted with the burning and righteous laughter of scorn. The first two reasons, however, should give the fan no cause for fear: ambition and work-ethic, even when the creative juices aren't flowing, are the hallmarks of an artist devoted to a long and serious career. We should admire these artists who have failed in the name of devotion, and our hearty guffaws at their failures should be mirthful and affectionate.

A note: a handful of the songs below are covers. It should be noted that the artist not writing the song themselves in no way lets them off the hook. If anything, it only incriminates them further.

The Beatles: "The Long and Winding Road"
It's long and winding all right. This stinker manages to be everything the Beatles weren't: schmaltzy, trite, and bloatedly overlong. To be fair, much of the blame for this has to be put on producer Phil Spector - given the grueling task of sorting through hours and hours of mostly sub-par material for the fab four's "Get Back" sessions, it was Spector who zeroed in on Paul McCartney's sappiest and most plodding Beatles offering and bogged it down it with a string section so godawfully cheesy that a horrified McCartney later sued over it.

David Bowie and Mick Jagger: "Dancing in the Street"
What could be better than David Bowie and Mick Jagger united in rapturous white-dude R&B duet? How about having your testicles slowly gnawed off by a wild boar? Little did these two massively talented artists know, while they were slipping into their Crockett-and-Tubbs outfits for the video shoot, that they were about to unleash one of the most gratingly vacuous performances known to civilized man. Incidentally, one almost wonders if the great Martha Reeves put a curse on this song after she first recorded it, as no other artist in history has ever been able to cover "Dancing in the Street" without subjecting its audience to excruciating pain (cf. Van Halen).

The Clash: "Should I Stay or Should I Go?"
Go, go, for God's sake, go! With this tune, the Clash simultaneously outstay their welcome and make a desperate, sweaty bid for arena-rock godhood. This repetitively asinine song shows the fiery punk masters stripped of all political consciousness or incendiary punk attack and just pounding big dumb power chords into Eagles henchman Glyn Johns' tape machine. A fist-pumping classic on par with "Who Let the Dogs Out?"

Leonard Cohen: "The Jazz Police"
From the beginning, Leonard Cohen's undoing has been his musical arrangements - while the scribe was busy composing his latest immortal song-poem, some stoned producer was in the next room playing "fun with faders" on "So Long Marianne," or figuring out a way to incorporate a boing-ing Jew's Harp into every track. On I'm Your Man the master's writing skills are at their peak, but the hamfisted production is at its dated nadir, saddling Cohen with the embarrassing task of croaking his Lorca adaptations along to the plinking of a 80's casiotone samba beat. I'm Your Man's lowest point, though, is "Jazz Police." Cohen's silly and oblique lyrics on this song (who the hell are the "Jazz Police," anyway, and how come they allow Kenny G. to roam the streets?) represent the only time the artiste fails to rise above his production, and the result perfectly illustrates why the CD "skip ahead" function was created.

Michael Jackson: "Heal the World"
No artist is better at seamlessly combining overblown earnestness with utter vagueness of message. In "Heal the World," (a spiritual sequel, if not an overt retread, of "We are the World"), Jacko shatters the delicate shell of public complacency by airing the shocking and little-known truth that "there are people dying!" Jackson's goal isn't merely to break the silence surrounding human mortality, though; once he's blown our minds wide open with this startling exposé of injustice, he proposes positive and practical solutions, urging us to "start living" and to "make a better place," noting that, if "made" properly, this place could be "much brighter than tomorrow."

Tom Petty: "The Apartment Song"
Tom Petty has written lots of catchy tunes, but this little piece of Full Moon Filler is perhaps the most perfunctory song ever written. It's not even a song, really, more like a gust of air or a faint odor that disappears before you can even identify it. The song's scenario is simple, yet timeless: Tom Petty used to live in a small apartment. Now he doesn't. But that's okay with him.

The Police: "Walking in Your Footsteps"
Sting may or may not be the King of Pain, but he's indisputably the King of the absurdly forced rhyme (take "Wrapped Around Your Finger"'s "I will listen hard to your tuition / you will see it come to its fruition" - please). And, like Tom Petty, he's also been known to pad albums with songs that blatantly scream "filler." When these two bad traits combine, innocent listeners are the victims, and they must suffer abominations like the dinosaur-themed "Walking in Your Footsteps," which features howlers like "Hey there mighty Brontosaurus / don't you have a message for us?" and profound musings such as "If we drop the atom bomb / would they say that we were dumb?"

Prince: "Batdance"
It's hard to believe this was even a single. I mean, Prince is great, and even his stinkiest songs are a total blast to listen to, but "Batdance?" Did Warner Brothers really need to hire the author of "Pop Life" to fashion this lame-ass mix-tape collage of random quotes from Tim Burton's Batman? Couldn't they just have gotten a high school AV kid to dub it on his tape deck? Finally, does "Batdance" really need to drag on and on (and on) for seven joyless and insufferable minutes?

Public Enemy: "He Got Game"
This movie themesong is in a similar vein as "Batdance," except that, instead of using a generic 80's dance beat, Public Enemy chose to borrow the music to the Buffalo Springfield classic "For What it's Worth." When hip-pop poseurs like P.Diddy and Shaggy lay weak rhymes over some pilfered classic rock vamp we expect it, but it's truly pathetic to watch Public Enemy - one of rap's seminal groups - sink to such a debased level. Even more pathetic: hearing Flava Flav halfheartedly yelp "hey, yo…kick it to 'em again one more time!" at poor old Stephen Stills.

The Rolling Stones: "Start Me Up"
This phoned-in single from Tattoo You shows the Rolling Stones going through all the motions that have become automatic to them since they stopped giving a flying shit about anything but money (roughly 1975). You know the drill: repetitive blues riff, perfunctory repeated lyrics, requisite bridge. The fact that this once-important band were happy to peddle this lemon to Bill "Street Fighting Man" Gates for his Windows '95 advertising campaign clearly demonstrates that the only thing the Stones haven't lost over time is their Sympathy for the Devil.

Santana: "Smooth"
How humiliating: rock-guitar titan Carlos Santana is propped up in the corner and told to think about Metatron while the guy from Matchbox 20 growls feistily and music mogul Clive Davis stands on the sidelines counting his loot and clacking his false teeth rhythmically to the faux-"Latin" beat. It's almost unfair to blame Santana for the supernatural awfulness of this song, though; one gets the feeling he was just called in for a few takes of the solo and ushered on out again - a cog in a gigantic machine. No heart, nothing real, forget about it.

Cat Stevens: "I Want to Live in a Wigwam"
Cat Stevens was always a seeker, and, before he turned to Islam, that seeking occasionally led him in some mighty corny directions. "I Want to Live in a Wigwam," for example - which conflates gypsies, hippies, and all sorts of different kinds of noble savages and then has them prancing around totem poles, icefishing, and just generally grooving to the eternal rhythm of the universe - has got to be one of the most naïve and cringe-inducing songs ever recorded. Stevens has penned songs as delicate as gossamer, but this musical miscarriage just feels like being trapped in some interminable camping-trip monologue with a perpetually stoned flower child.

Stevie Wonder: "Saturn"
In ancient Persia, rug-weavers would include intentional flaws in their ornate hand-woven rugs, so that their perfection wouldn't offend God. Perhaps Stevie Wonder similarly intended "Saturn" to be the musical "Persian Flaw" to his near-immaculate Songs in the Key of Life. That's the most flattering way, in any case, to conjecture how such a perplexingly awful song could have found its way on to such a monumental record. Co-written by Michael Sembello (of "Maniac" fame) "Saturn" finds Wonder, backed by the blaring clarions of absurdly regal synth-horns, telling listeners he's "going back to Saturn where the eagles fly" and insisting that "on Saturn, people live to be 205." Maybe little Stevie Wonder should have taken a break from practicing harmonica long enough to learn the basics of astronomy.

Neil Young: "Everybody's Rockin'"
Neil Young is the archetypal hit-or-miss artist; he's probably written a handful of the best and worst songs ever conceived. He's penned so many groaners, in fact, that we had a hard time picking out the worst (my vote was for "Old King," with its corny old-yellerisms, but the nine-minute/seven-word "T-Bone" was also considered). In the end, we settled on the title track of Everybody's Rockin,' which documents Young's ill-starred rockabilly period. On "Everybody's Rockin,'" Young sounds so satisfied merely to have a rockabilly band behind him that he doesn't even bother to write actual lyrics, but just blurts out rock generica like "Bop bop! Rockin' to the dancin' beat!" interspersed with bizarre non sequiturs ("when Ronnie and Nancy do the bop on the lawn / they're rockin' in the White House all night long") presumably culled from Young's equally ill-starred Republican period.