The Onion’s AV Club has a feature called “HateSong,” where they’ll ask an artist what song they absolutely hate. Usually, it’s novelty songs like “Mambo No. 5,” or oversentimental tracks like “Tears In Heaven.” However, when they asked Anthrax’s Scott Ian what song he couldn’t stand, he didn’t pick a song so much as he did a person: former Smiths vocalist and current solo artist Morrissey. He arbitrarily chose the song “Suedehead” because he knew it was one of the singer’s “bigger songs,” but really, it’s just his voice that gets on Ian’s last nerve:
It has nothing to do with him as a person. I don’t know the guy. He could be a wonderful human being. I just don’t like the sound of his voice. I know plenty of guys in bands where I’m not a fan of their band, but I’m friends with them. It has nothing to do with Morrissey. I just can’t stand the actual tone, the pitch, the timbre, whatever other adjectives there are to describe it; it’s completely unappealing to me.
He also says that he’s always hated the crooner’s voice from the first time he heard it, and that Morrissey’s voice instantly makes him turn off whatever device it’s emanating from. In fact, he’s actually debated the worst singers, songs and sounds with members of Metallica and Death Angel:
I’ve spent hours and hours talking about this with my friends and, literally, sitting at a table with Kirk Hammett [of Metallica] in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago and Mark [Osegueda] from Death Angel. I brought this up and we all tried to come up with what we liked to listen to the least, our most hated song or artist or sound, and Kirk and I actually agreed on Morrissey. Mark didn’t. Mark liked Morrissey. We had some stiff competition. I actually brought up ’80s Peter Cetera, and I would still rather listen to that than Morrissey.
Wow, that’s pretty intense, but perhaps one of the biggest revelations in the piece is that Ian’s sometime guitarist in The Damned Things, Fall Out Boy’s Joe Trohman, actually has a Morrissey tattoo. You can read the whole piece here.
