The 13 Worst Songs to Listen to While High

​In the world of random audio hallucination, there's the shit and then there's, well, shit. While I own some terrible stoner tunes, mere good taste, as everyone knows, goes for little in a world of thin walls, car audio, American Idol, and an ongoing '90s revival. Drunk or sober, bent or straight, light or loaded, you will encounter lousy music like that listed below, and the benignly sensitizing influence of marijuana makes the experience about 40 times worse. Why the stuff should divert attention from every pain but the purely aesthetic is a karmic conundrum fit for a 420 mystic's extended navel-gaze. For the rest of us, the following is a reasonable guide on what's too overbearing while under the influence.

13. Anything by Billy Joel

Over a long and cheerless catalog, Mr. New York State of Meh is at once too pompous to bear and too bland to laugh at. BJ's glee ("Big Shot") is as sad as his melancholia ("I Love You Just the Way You Are") is sidesplitting, and those richly applauded populist gestures ("Allentown," "Goodnight Saigon") are Face the Nation-phony enough to drive the most stalwart 99-percent-er straight to the skeletal arms of the John Birch Society. Given all that's happened since 1989, the piano man's Big Statement "We Didn't Start the Fire" is a breathtaking piece of sociopolitical buck-passing unsurpassed until Obama didn't close Gitmo.

12. The Marshall Mathers LP, by Eminem.
This is Dark Side of the Moon for mall boys.

11. "Mambo No. 5," by Lou Bega

That this smug, bent-stupid version of a classic Perez Prado tune made it to No. 3 shows how undemanding dance-pop fans were in the Day of the Macarena. I can't hear this one without imagining Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, and the rest chasing Bega up in the street in hot outrage over the oft-stated littleness of what he gave them.

10. "Blue (Da Ba De)," by Eiffel 65
This cretinous wad of Eurothump managed to shift over a million U.S. units back in 1999, which means you still stand a better-than-even chance of encountering it while wandering outside in a spliffiliated condition.