World’s Worst Songs: “The Fast Food Song”

I beg of you, in the name of all that’s holy, tread carefully with the video embedded below. It will suck out your soul and kill it in front of you, leaving you to walk the earth in emptiness all the days of your life, never to be comforted by anything ever again.

The Fast Food Rockers were the brainchild of Mike Stock, one-third of the Stock/Aitken/Waterman hit machine that birthed the likes of Bananarama, Rick Astley, and Kylie Minogue. By 2003, Stock knew exactly what buttons to push, and with the Fast Food Rockers, he touched them all: pretty people and a cuddly mascot clad in bright primary colors who chirped lyrics that make the dumbest Black Eyed Peas joint sound like Proust, all set to a brain-dead dance beat.

“The Fast Food Song” made it to #2 in the UK in the summer of ’03. But just how dumb is it? Here’s the refrain:

A Pizza Hut a Pizza Hut
Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut
A Pizza Hut a Pizza Hut
Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut
McDonalds McDonalds
Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut
McDonalds McDonalds
Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut

There were rumors that the Fast Food Rockers didn’t actually sing on their record. But worrying about the artistic integrity of a production like this is like worrying whether a plastic bag is locally sourced.

“The Fast Food Song” is a highly professional production, but to what end? Writing in The Guardian in 2003, Stuart Jeffries remarked, “The real problem with our culture is not a dearth of ingenuity but a willingness to lend that ingenuity to devising things that should be beneath contempt.” He’s not talking only about the Fast Food Rockers, or our ever-spiraling “advances” in fast food—bacon sundae, anyone?—but how we go to greater and greater lengths to achieve lesser and lesser ends in every avenue of life. And in the nine years since Jeffries wrote, it’s only gotten worse. That willingness he speaks of now dominates every area of life and culture, right up to the presidential campaign we’re currently waging. So many of the things we value suck the humanity right out of us, turning us into commodities that are sold, not to the highest bidder, but to the lowest one.

SWEET FANCY MOSES, PEOPLE, IT WENT TO #2.