4 Lead Singers That Sound Shockingly Bad Without the Band

If you've ever wondered what the guy from the Strokes would sound like if he were performing while something in his body was rupturing, well, here's the isolated vocal track from "Reptilia":

If that's Julian Casablancas without the "man shouting while trapped in a treasure chest" effect they put on his voice in the original song, even he wouldn't have received a passing score singing his own song in Rock Band. He'd be stuck on his own song forever, then he'd get pissed and return the whole rig to GameStop for eight bucks.

MTV Games/Electronic Arts

In the unmixed track, he wavers between being the third runner-up in a Dean Martin sound-alike competition held in a small village in India where no one has heard of Dean Martin and being in the midst of a post-breakup whiskey-fueled mental breakdown. In the fully produced version on the album, all of this is cleverly masked by the state-of-the-art Pringles can he sings through. The producers took some fairly ear-grating vocals, then added some distortion effects to make them sound worse, thus tricking us into thinking the purposefully bad vocals were a stylistic choice. They raised the bar by lowering it. Clever.

The song is all about being a regular dude who likes his friends and the sun and whatever else was in Mr. Riptide's eye line as he soaked in a Jacuzzi filled with Corona. If spiky hair with frosted tips could sing, it would sound like this:

With music, Smash Mouth songs sound like a Kidz Bop cover of a Smash Mouth song. Without the music, it's just a cartoon dog with a backward baseball cap yelling at you about contentment. This track is made even more wonderfully bad by the fact that this is the only version that exists. There's no track with the vocals and instrumental together that it can be compared to. All we have is what appears to be the result of someone secretly recording the idly sung tune of a SoCal surfer bro as he shat in a public toilet along Venice Beach.

Photos.com

It's almost awkward; it feels private. This was probably a thing Bodacious sang out loud in his car with the windows rolled up after a particularly chill afternoon where all of his success suddenly hit him. "Holy shit," he probably thought. "I've had number one singles and I'm financially secure for life. Life is good. Hey, now that no one's around, let me sing a song about it."

Songs sung in private should never see the light of day. It's like looking through your childhood notebooks and seeing a picture essay about how you wanted to be a dinosaur when you grew up. Cute, but that shit's getting tucked under a mattress for eternity.

The vocal track is pretty much what you'd expect it to be for most of the song. But for the final minute of the track, the band decided to forgo their antipsychotics so they could realistically portray what it would be like if there were such a thing as a haunted insane asylum for fish.

First off, B-52s, I'm not sure those animals make any sounds at all. They live in the water. They go "bloop" and make me go "Mmm" when I eat them and "Grrr" when I poop them. Secondly, without music, "Rock Lobster" goes from an odd but fun pop tune to the reason lithium was invented. It's fucking bonkers. It becomes the kind of thing a children's band would sing if they dropped acid before performing at a birthday party at the aquarium. Thankfully, it's only really with this one B-52s song. The vocal track for "Love Shack" -- which is probably their biggest hit (I guess. I don't know. I know nothing about the B-52s. No one does) -- might actually be better than the original.

That's a party filled with people too cool for Pandora. They're having a ball. I want to be at that party. I want to clap when the B-52s spontaneously sing at gatherings and flee from them when they proclaim that squids make the same sound as a butthole during a seizure.

When I was a kid, I played the X-Men arcade game a lot. My favorite character to play as was Colossus, a mutant who could turn his skin into metal and, only in the game, release some kind of energy blast as a power move. I'm 100 percent certain David Lee Roth's "Oooh yes!" at the beginning of that video was the basis for Colossus' scream when he does his power move. I made this video to prove it:

Point proven.

After that, things go smoothly for a bit ... until David Lee Roth breaks open the crazy with what might be the greatest mashed jumble of words ever committed to tape, which is bookended by two patented David Lee Roth howls.

There are a lot of things I don't understand about the world. Chief among them is: Why aren't we all wearing T-shirts with "GoddamnitbabyyouknowIain'tlyin'toyaI'monlygon'tellyouonetimeAhhhyaaaa!" on them? Why isn't "GoddamnitbabyyouknowIain'tlyin'toyaI'monlygon'tellyouonetimeAhhhyaaaa!" a phrase so ubiquitous in modern speech that we had to boil it down to G.D.I.B.Y.K.I.A.L.T.Y.I.O.G.T.Y. O.T.A.Y. so we can quickly text it when someone doesn't believe what you're saying? Why isn't it the default sound on all alarm clocks? And why the fuck haven't I used this as my outgoing voice mail message followed by me saying "... to leave a message" in a monotone voice? All of those questions are mysteries to me. Same goes for what David Lee Roth was thinking when he incorporates some kind of kazoo thing into his performance about 30 seconds later.

You can hear the kazoo thing at the 2:04 mark of the original song, but when it's not being greatly overshadowed by the iconic guitar riff in the chorus, it's like a goddamn circus has broken out in the recording booth. This makes me rethink every Van Halen song I've ever heard. What other silly instruments has David Lee Roth sneaked into songs? Is there a moonshine jug blowing on "Jump"? Is there a didgeridoo on "Hot for Teacher"?

All of these tracks are terrible, but thankfully, no one was stupid enough to combine a couple of them into one turbo-awful track.

No ... NO! GODDAMN YOU, NO:

Luis Prada sounds better when backed by "Yakety Sax." Follow him on Twitter and Tumblr.

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