Worse Music

As I said in my Bad Music entry, when I first unveiled the mix to my coworkers for our communal CD player, I kind of expected to be laughed into the stone age. However, much to my surprise, it went over huge, and thus I learned a valuable thing about music. There aren’t many things that bring people together and put them in a good mood as well as a string of great cheesy songs (well, not many legal things). Due to being a success both with its creator and his coworkers, a sequel became necessary. Well not just one, but even two. A Bad Music Trilogy. So I created the second installment, Worse Music:

If the Bad Music mixes were a hot girl, I’d say Bad Music is the one where you catch her across the room and start chatting her up. However, Worse Music is the one where you suddenly realize you want marry her, get a big house and fill it to the rafters with rugrats. Simply put, Worse Music is one of my favorite mixes I’ve ever made, and quite possibly the finest installment in the entire series.

While Bad Music established the concept and the rules, Worse Music is the one that really starts taking the idea for a spin. Unlike its 80’s-heavy predecessor, Worse Music traverses across many different eras and styles. Not only that, but in terms of pacing it’s some of my finest mix sequencing. It opens with a solitary guitar (Jesus Jones’ "Right Here, Right Now", which may or may not have ripped off Big Star’s "Feel") and just keeps getting bigger and bigger until it builds to its truly epic climax 80 minutes later. Most of my mixes shoot for a rollercoaster, tour-de-force aesthetic, but few of them exemplify this as well as Worse Music does.

It’s also a barrel of monkeys. More than its predecessor, Worse Music establishes the theme through the series of spontaneous fun where you never know where the next track might take you, but when it does it will make perfect sense. It has quick bursts of silly fun (Aqua’s "Barbie Girl" or BeForU’s "BRE∀K DOWN!", pulled from DDR Max 2) and more serious or emotional tunes ("Total Eclipse of The Heart" , "I’ll Stand By You"), and it all works seamlessly together.

And there’s that aforementioned climax, which is where Worse Music truly earns its mojo for me. From "I’ll Stand By You" to "Knowing Me, Knowing You", to probably everybody’s favorite slice of Bad Music "I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)" to the grand finale of "Shadows of The Night", it’s a sequence that stands among my finest in all of mixing.

All of this made Worse Music a pretty difficult act to follow in subsequent installments, and with many of its successors I had to really work hard and be creative to outdo myself, as you will see.

It may be cheesy as hell, but mixes like Worse Music are the reason I obsess as much as I do over mixes in the first place. Enjoy.