Odd Future's R&B crooner Frank Ocean will take the SNL stage for the show's premiere episode of the season. And this week, it was revealed that guitar dude John Mayer will join Ocean onstage with his guitar solo face. This is possibly because Mayer has a guest spot on Ocean's song "White" off of Channel Orange.
Now, as far as SNL's comedic consistency goes, every week, it's a gamble. Same goes for musical performances. While singing R&B live already seems kinda hard, we're sure Ocean and Mayer will do fine. Our favorite late night weekend show has a history of some shitty, awkward, and just plain weird-as-fuck musical moments. Here's a couple we're just generally not sure about, as in, they sucked.
(Side note: This list purposefully excluded the obvious Sinead O'Connor performance.)
6. Ashlee Simpson
Yo, this was just ridiculous. Nothing touches our internal asshole
nerve more than watching musicians fuck up their lip syncing. It entertains in the same vein as watching musicians fuck up during
interviews. This, though, made us wanna lie down and rinse our mouths out
with Scope. So weird.
5. Spice Girls
Feels a little unfair to put Spice Girls on here for some reason. This
performance pretty much sounds exactly like their music -- that sorta
chatty and sing-songy format Spice Girls are so well known for. The
problem with this though, in general, is that they're kinda
treating it like a music video with invisible Spice Girls motifs flying
everywhere. But instead of it being something like the video for
"Wannabe," it feels more like the graduation scene from Ghost World.
4. TV On the Radio
Good luck finding this performance on YouTube. SNL has notoriously
shitty sound issues, and combine that with TV on the Radio --
it was devastating. Technically not a strange performance, just sad to
watch. It's always awesome to hear some of your favorite underground
bands get recognized and booked on national television shows. It sucks to see them, well, suck.
3. Kesha
Who's SNL's booking agent?
2. Kanye West
Got love for Kanye. Always. But this performance was unfortunate as fuck. We guess due to vocoder issues, this rendition of "Love Lockdown" almost sounded like Wolf Parade. Good for Kanye, though -- staying on stage acting like it was nothing (looking at you, Ashlee Simpson).
1. Lana Del Rey
Del Rey is probably the most divisive act in the game right now who really doesn't
need more publicity. But this performance was some The Voice Round One
shit. Really tragic and unfortunate, but for some reason we live in a country of Cee-Los who see value in this.
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