When Badasses Go Soft: The 10 Weakest Songs by Badass Bands

Like athletes, comedians and dungeon-porn actors, time takes its toll on badass musicians. And inevitably, you'll catch your favorite crew of leather-clad/whiskey-swilling/vagina-liking sons of bitches cranking out a song that' suitable for the closing montage of a Grey' Anatomy episode. Here are the 10 most disappointing examples of badass bands playing nice-and subsequently looking like douchebags.

Prior Interests: Riding the lightning, killing 'em all, not being treaded on

By the time the kings of metal reached critical mass in the years following 1991' The Black Album, they were old enough to be their fans' dads, and had developed more pressing interests, presumably involving minivans and youth soccer games. The first "hit" of their vag-tastic 1996 album, Load, sounds more like a bad Soundgarden impression than the satanic, alcoholic thrashing that America had come to know and love. Worst of all, newly short-haired lead singer James Hetfield pleads, "hold me," in the song' lyrics, ensuring that if the crowd that wore that "Metal Up Your Ass" T-shirt back in high school ran across the eye-liner-wearing stooges in the "Until It Sleeps" video, a Master of Puppets-style bloodbath would ensue.

Prior Interests: Rocking rhymes, walking that way, discarding shoelaces

When Run-D.M.C. released the 1983 album Raising Hell, they established themselves as groundbreaking musical artists, and also as three young men you might think twice about fucking with. Songs like "Proud to Be Black" and "Walk This Way" solidified their reputation and paved the way for rap artists from Tupac to the Chicago Bears. And then they went and pissed their street cred away with a song about how they saw Santa Claus one night. If that isn't enough to convince you of the song' lameness, try this: D.M.C. rhymes "yule log" with "egg nog." (Apologies for the baby in the video, but the fact that a baby fits nicely into it pretty much confirms that "Christmas in Hollis" blows.)

Prior Interests: Rocking the fuck out, going to California, squeezing lemons till the juice ran down their legs

The band that made it cool to play like disproportionately talented mental patients laid down some of the most face-punching, awesome classic rock the world' ever known-that is, until 1979, when this incoherent, saccharine, nail-in-the-coffin tune was released. Once the purveyor of seductive, grammatically incorrect threats of sexual assault ("You need coolin' / Baby, I'm not foolin' / I'm gonna send you back to schoolin'"), Zeppelin was reduced to a synthesizer-laced, ball-less love song whose chorus lazily and unimaginatively stated, "All of my love, all of my love, all of my love to you." Little known fact: After one live performance of "All of My Love," the Village People beat the living piss out of Zeppelin backstage with minimal effort.

UPDATE: Several commenters on digg have pointed out that this song was written about Robert Plant's late son. One digger implied that this mistake "makes the author a douche." We would like to issue a correction: As one of our readers notes below, this mistake in fact makes the author "a complete idiot," not a douche, and the article "in bad taste."

Prior Interests: Fighting people who don't like Alabama, drinking, fighting people who don't like drinking

Someone with a better thesaurus than us once described Skynyrd' music as, "the overdriven power of blues-rock with a rebellious, Southern image and a hard rock swagger," and that' generally the vibe they put out with songs about how they'd de-tooth anyone who talked shit about Alabama. But these rednecks took a turn to Celine Dion territory with "Gimme Three Steps," a song that explains how frontman Ronnie Van Zandt (a former boxer) shakes "like a leaf on a tree" as soon as a "lean, mean, big and bad" jealous husband sticks the barrel of a .44 in his face. Now for most of us, that' an understandable response, but for the band that made it cool to model your life after the bad guys in Deliverance, it' about as acceptable as Patrick Swayze fleeing the Double Deuce in the first five minutes of Road House.

Prior Interests: Biting bats' heads off, drinking other peoples' spit, ingesting all the drugs within one square mile

Granted, the power ballad craze overtook metal in the late '80s, but when Ozzy Osbourne fell victim to it, the result was nauseating-like, catching-your-parents-fucking nauseating. When the Prince of Darkness started singing, "You made me cry," in this 1991 turd, the first act of his career (bat-decapitating, etc.) ended, and the second act (pathetic self-parody, etc.) officially began. The first time fans saw this video, they no doubt waited anxiously for the seemingly endless intro to end and for guitarist Zakk Wylde to fly through a wall of flames and douse Ozzy in chicken blood. Alas, the never-ending intro turned out to be the whole song.