Queen – "Fat Bottomed Girls" (1978)

Left alone with big fat Fanny

She was such a naughty nanny

Heap big woman, you made a bad boy out of me

Most of the recording artists who I have classified as overrated have released a few good records.  The problem is that there is way too much dross relative to the amount of gold in their music.

Elvis Presley, the Grateful Dead, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen . . . all of them pumped out a lot of crap.  But every once in a while, they produced a gem. 

Queen is different.  Every single one of their records is plain old unlistenable.

Leonard Pinth-Garnell would have agreed:

Dan Aykroyd as Leonard Pinth-Garnell

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Queen’s 1981 Greatest Hits album is the biggest-selling album of all time in the UK, with 6.3 million albums sold as of December 2018. 

Think about that. 

The songs on that album include “Killer Queen,” “You’re My Best Friend,” “Somebody to Love,” “We Are the Champions,” “We Will Rock You,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “Bicycle Race,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” and – last but not least – “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Respondents to an informal poll conducted by humorist Dave Barry in 1992 chose Richard Harris’s recording of “MacArthur Park” is the worst song of all time.  I assume that “MacArthur Park” won only because there are so many bad Queen singles that the anti-Queen vote was split among them.

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Which of the Queen singles listed above is the worst?  

I would say “Bohemian Rhapsody” because it clocks in at almost six minutes, which makes it the longest cut on the Greatest Hits album.  (Six minutes doesn’t sound that long until you spend six minutes listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody” from start to finish.)

How would I rank the other songs on that album?   They’re all tied for second worst.

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Queen’s Greatest Hits doesn’t appear on the list of the 100 best-selling albums in the United States.

I’d like to think that’s because Americans have better taste when it comes to pop music than Brits do.  But I was quickly disabused of that notion when I looked at the list of the albums that have sold the most copies in the U.S.

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“Fat Bottomed Girls” is a one-trick pony of a song, and utterly tasteless to boot.  But it’s probably my favorite Queen song . . . which says a lot about their oeuvre as a whole.

Click here to listen to “Fat Bottomed Girls.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: