4 Lead Singers That Sound Shockingly Bad Without the Band

4 Julian Casablancas from the Strokes Singing "Reptilia"

If you've ever wondered what the guy from the Strokes would sound like if he were performing while something in his body was rupturing, well, here's the isolated vocal track from "Reptilia":

If that's Julian Casablancas without the "man shouting while trapped in a treasure chest" effect they put on his voice in the original song, even he wouldn't have received a passing score singing his own song in Rock Band. He'd be stuck on his own song forever, then he'd get pissed and return the whole rig to GameStop for eight bucks.

In the unmixed track, he wavers between being the third runner-up in a Dean Martin sound-alike competition held in a small village in India where no one has heard of Dean Martin and being in the midst of a post-breakup whiskey-fueled mental breakdown. In the fully produced version on the album, all of this is cleverly masked by the state-of-the-art Pringles can he sings through. The producers took some fairly ear-grating vocals, then added some distortion effects to make them sound worse, thus tricking us into thinking the purposefully bad vocals were a stylistic choice. They raised the bar by lowering it. Clever.

3 Steve Harwell from Smash Mouth Singing "Days Like These"

For a short time in the early 2000s, we politely listened to Smash Mouth's few hit singles, but then as a species we decided we'd had enough new Smash Mouth songs for one millennium, so we stopped. There are probably a bunch of fully released Smash Mouth songs you've never heard, but there's one you've never heard because the band never released it, and it didn't become public until it was leaked onto YouTube. It was called "Days Like These," and in it, lead singer Steve Harwell (yes, his name really is Steve and not Bodacious Riptide or '67 Chevy Sunburn, as he should be named) recorded the vocal track and, well, that's pretty much as far as they got, I guess.

The song is all about being a regular dude who likes his friends and the sun and whatever else was in Mr. Riptide's eye line as he soaked in a Jacuzzi filled with Corona. If spiky hair with frosted tips could sing, it would sound like this:

With music, Smash Mouth songs sound like a Kidz Bop cover of a Smash Mouth song. Without the music, it's just a cartoon dog with a backward baseball cap yelling at you about contentment. This track is made even more wonderfully bad by the fact that this is the only version that exists. There's no track with the vocals and instrumental together that it can be compared to. All we have is what appears to be the result of someone secretly recording the idly sung tune of a SoCal surfer bro as he shat in a public toilet along Venice Beach.

It's almost awkward; it feels private. This was probably a thing Bodacious sang out loud in his car with the windows rolled up after a particularly chill afternoon where all of his success suddenly hit him. "Holy shit," he probably thought. "I've had number one singles and I'm financially secure for life. Life is good. Hey, now that no one's around, let me sing a song about it."

Songs sung in private should never see the light of day. It's like looking through your childhood notebooks and seeing a picture essay about how you wanted to be a dinosaur when you grew up. Cute, but that shit's getting tucked under a mattress for eternity.

2 Everyone from the B-52s Singing "Rock Lobster"

In its original state, "Rock Lobster" by the B-52s seems to be a 1960s B-horror movie and 1960s beach party movie mashed together and remolded into music. Tweak it a little by removing the kitschy surf rock-inspired instrumental and you get what sounds an awful lot like a demonically possessed See 'N Say toy.

The vocal track is pretty much what you'd expect it to be for most of the song. But for the final minute of the track, the band decided to forgo their antipsychotics so they could realistically portray what it would be like if there were such a thing as a haunted insane asylum for fish.

First off, B-52s, I'm not sure those animals make any sounds at all. They live in the water. They go "bloop" and make me go "Mmm" when I eat them and "Grrr" when I poop them. Secondly, without music, "Rock Lobster" goes from an odd but fun pop tune to the reason lithium was invented. It's fucking bonkers. It becomes the kind of thing a children's band would sing if they dropped acid before performing at a birthday party at the aquarium. Thankfully, it's only really with this one B-52s song. The vocal track for "Love Shack" -- which is probably their biggest hit (I guess. I don't know. I know nothing about the B-52s. No one does) -- might actually be better than the original.

That's a party filled with people too cool for Pandora. They're having a ball. I want to be at that party. I want to clap when the B-52s spontaneously sing at gatherings and flee from them when they proclaim that squids make the same sound as a butthole during a seizure.

1 David Lee Roth from Van Halen Singing "Running With the Devil"

Finally, we have the gold standard of laughably bad isolated vocal tracks: David Lee Roth singing "Running With the Devil." David Lee Roth makes so many crazy-as-shit sounds that I never really paid attention to in the full song that it's hard to know where to start. So let's do it chronologically, starting with seconds one through five of this isolated vocal track:

When I was a kid, I played the X-Men arcade game a lot. My favorite character to play as was Colossus, a mutant who could turn his skin into metal and, only in the game, release some kind of energy blast as a power move. I'm 100 percent certain David Lee Roth's "Oooh yes!" at the beginning of that video was the basis for Colossus' scream when he does his power move. I made this video to prove it:

Point proven.

After that, things go smoothly for a bit ... until David Lee Roth breaks open the crazy with what might be the greatest mashed jumble of words ever committed to tape, which is bookended by two patented David Lee Roth howls.

There are a lot of things I don't understand about the world. Chief among them is: Why aren't we all wearing T-shirts with "GoddamnitbabyyouknowIain'tlyin'toyaI'monlygon'tellyouonetimeAhhhyaaaa!" on them? Why isn't "GoddamnitbabyyouknowIain'tlyin'toyaI'monlygon'tellyouonetimeAhhhyaaaa!" a phrase so ubiquitous in modern speech that we had to boil it down to G.D.I.B.Y.K.I.A.L.T.Y.I.O.G.T.Y. O.T.A.Y. so we can quickly text it when someone doesn't believe what you're saying? Why isn't it the default sound on all alarm clocks? And why the fuck haven't I used this as my outgoing voice mail message followed by me saying "... to leave a message" in a monotone voice? All of those questions are mysteries to me. Same goes for what David Lee Roth was thinking when he incorporates some kind of kazoo thing into his performance about 30 seconds later.

You can hear the kazoo thing at the 2:04 mark of the original song, but when it's not being greatly overshadowed by the iconic guitar riff in the chorus, it's like a goddamn circus has broken out in the recording booth. This makes me rethink every Van Halen song I've ever heard. What other silly instruments has David Lee Roth sneaked into songs? Is there a moonshine jug blowing on "Jump"? Is there a didgeridoo on "Hot for Teacher"?

All of these tracks are terrible, but thankfully, no one was stupid enough to combine a couple of them into one turbo-awful track.

No ... NO! GODDAMN YOU, NO:

Luis Prada sounds better when backed by "Yakety Sax." Follow him on Twitter and Tumblr.

Always on the go but can't get enough of Cracked? We have an Android app and iOS reader for you to pick from so you never miss another article.

For more truth, check out Cracked's You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News: Shocking but Utterly True Facts!