We have the Big 7 of writing, the top 40 of difficulty, the Holy Grails of songs, but... what are the hardest songs to sing/perform/karaoke well?

Having listened to a lot of music this past week, my votes would go to "Edge of 17" by Stevie Nicks and "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" by George Thorogood. Both get my nod for having highly irregular meter, odd to non existant rhyming and hard to nail vocals. Edge of 17 also has a ton of overlayed vocals, while the GT song is almost a spoken piece.

Anyone else have a list of songs that they consider nearly impossible to sing well?

Ant

Interestingly enough one of the Big 7 was just posted by me today as a recording

I'd like to enter "Curbside Prophet" to this list please

Killer Queen (by Queen) is hard to sing.....

"I'm An Adult Now" by The Pursuit Of Happiness is insane.

The Modern Major General's song of course!  :D

But this one, only in the Pirates of Penszance movie,  is 10x harder I think:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQGrQPZMLK8&feature=related (1:46)

Two that I would steer well away from:

"It's The End Of The World As We Know It" by R.E.M
"One Week" by Barenaked Ladies

Both have incredibly fast, dense, surreal verses where you're literally tripping over your tongue to get the words out. Eeek!

Killer Queen (by Queen) is hard to sing.....


I don't think so  I'd record it if I came up with something to do with it. 

Fast songs are things to avoid.  My hardest recording was my parody of At The Hop.  i kept getting my tongue twisted.  That was fast enough to mess me up. 

Two that I would steer well away from:

"It's The End Of The World As We Know It" by R.E.M
"One Week" by Barenaked Ladies

Both have incredibly fast, dense, surreal verses where you're literally tripping over your tongue to get the words out. Eeek!


Yeah, I tripped over some lines while doing the ITEOTWAWKI paraoke. Doing either of those two songs well means a ton of practice and memorizing: in other words, being intimately familiar with them.  Singing those songs as the lyrics come on a karaoke teleprompter means you'll be hopelessly lost about 5 lines in, lol.

Ant

Paranoid by Black Sabbath is impossible to perform.

"I'm An Adult Now" by The Pursuit Of Happiness is insane.


I haven't heard that song in while, but remember it... It does sound kinda hard, but mainly due to how the lyrics are paced in the OS.

One I think that is hard is Tom Petty's Refugee, mainly based on my experience writing a parody to it. I make a habit of singing over the OS of any song that I'm writing and while I timed the lyric count well, for some reason I couldn't easily sing in time with the verses, the choruses were fairly easy however.

The other songs mentioned on here trump Refugee in difficulty though.

Two other songs that would be hard to record to is Mope and The Bad Touch by The Bloodhound Gang, the singing is almost constant on those songs.

Anything by Mr. Bungle, but that's only to be expected. Even if you could pull that off you would look like a complete freak up on stage doing karaoke.  ;)

^  You got me thinking about that Stray Escargot thing I wrote. 

I did house of pain's jump around karaoke earlier this week.  That was challenging but I wouldn't say impossible. They had overnight celebrity be twista as one of the options...that's one of the toughest songs I can think of to perform well.

I did house of pain's jump around karaoke earlier this week.  That was challenging but I wouldn't say impossible. They had overnight celebrity be twista as one of the options...that's one of the toughest songs I can think of to perform well.


Pretty much anything of the hip hop genre I would think would be challenging, I mean I remember Crazy for Chips, and Jay-Z's part made that challenging, Jump Around. . .I should parody that, it's a fun OS

Wannabe is impossible to sing.

Hi folks, I must admit  whichever I choose is hard to sing for me, but this one from  Phil Alexander ( great parodi-man ) -  I've Got Body Hair, it's as funny as tonguetwister  ::)

Alot of songs sung in a Jamaican dialect are nearly impossible to sing.  Some good examples ...

Police Officer - Smiley Culture (1984)
Girlie Girlie - Sophia George (1985)
Informer - Snow (1993)
Get Down - Groove Armada featuring Stush (2007)


With 'Informer' though, Jim Carrey pulled it off ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Icb_tRTnA4g&feature=related

;D

Informer - Snow (1993)
;D


"Inform us
We don't really know what the hell you are sayin'
You speaka way too fast"

The Jim Carrey skit was pretty funny.

Ant

"Inform us
We don't really know what the hell you are sayin'
You speaka way too fast"

The Jim Carrey skit was pretty funny.

Ant


I never heard of that skit until now. About the watch the vid of it.

The Modern Major General's song of course!  :D




So true - and I should know - here are my two attempts at it:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bC59HErFgSM

http://youtube.com/watch?v=B5P8bKINZ3A

So true - and I should know - here are my two attempts at it:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bC59HErFgSM

http://youtube.com/watch?v=B5P8bKINZ3A




Still trying to do my parody of it.

And then, there was this guy.

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Some 10-15 years after Technical Writer, Steve Goodie absolutely nails Weird Al's Hardware Store by performing Dumbledore live. 

Technically, it's no longer impossible, but it's still very, very, improbable, so it is a sing-along...

Nicki Minaj's Super Bass seems super-hard to do solo.

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Crash Test Dummies song MMM MMM MMM MMM is very hard to parody, he has such a voice that is really hard to match, especially on those MMM's!  :o I know, I tried, and sounded like, well, I won't say it....  :-[

Just watched that Steve guy's parody of "Hardware Store" not only was it extremely well-written (I mean SOTM instant gold) but extremely well-performed to a song I don't even think that Weird Al could perform again.

Two that I would steer well away from:

"It's The End Of The World As We Know It" by R.E.M
"One Week" by Barenaked Ladies

Both have incredibly fast, dense, surreal verses where you're literally tripping over your tongue to get the words out. Eeek!


I would add "Goin' Down" by The Monkees to that list. And "Life Is a Rock" by Reunion.

Just watched that Steve guy's parody of "Hardware Store" not only was it extremely well-written (I mean SOTM instant gold) but extremely well-performed to a song I don't even think that Weird Al could perform again.


Yeah, Steve Goodie's been doing his thing for a while, but Dumbledore took it to the next level.  I don't think Weird Al has even tried to perform Hardware Store live.  It's been a while since Poodle Hat came out, but I'm pretty sure the original done only with some really good editing work.