The Garbage Music of 'Star Wars,' Ranked

The music of Star Wars is legendary, its John Williams-composed score objectively the greatest of all time. But Star Wars does not live in mediocrity. When it's good, it's exceptional; when it's bad, it's god awful.

Like the Sith, the music of Star Wars deals only in absolutes. For every gooseflesh-inducing trumpet lead and contemplative string suite, there's a pew-pew! disco remix and cartoon Ewoks inspiring cringes and second-hand embarassment in an attempt to capitalitze on the franchise's popularity. Fun fact: Did you know the style of music the cantina band plays is called "Jizz"?

So while we're happy to confirm that the score for The Force Awakens, featuring both Williams and Lin-Manuel Miranda, is a total banger, let us not forget the mistakes of our past.We’ve traveled to the darkest corners of the galaxy to bring you the Star Wars musical moments best left forgotten. In honor of the franchise's return to glory with The Force Awakens, we've ranked the worst musical moments of the Star Wars universe.

Songs are ranked out of five Death Stars, on a scale of bantha fodder to noooooo!

'Tis the season for picking low-hanging fruit, so we’ll start with the much-maligned Star Wars Holiday Special:

In the lull between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas and his team greenlit the concept for a holiday-themed Star Wars television variety show. The resulting program was so disastrous that to this day, Lucas “would be happy if every copy could be tracked down and burned,” and the special itself has not been released in any format since its sole airing in 1978. A standout in a show with a Bea Arthur solo, Jefferson Starship’s “Light the Sky on Fire” is a gloriously awful song where the chessiness of its melody is exceeded only by the shittiness of its lyrics. The chorus ends with, “We’ll vanish without a trace / in a cigar-shaped object” which is…what? Is this cigar-shaped object a spaceship? Or is it the lead singer’s glowing dildo microphone? Did we mention they are a hologram? The bassist bears more than a passing resemblance to Spinal Tap’s—fun fact, Derek Smalls took a break from the Shark Sandwich sessions just to record “Light the Sky on Fire.” If the goal of the characters in the Star Wars Holiday Special was to distract a Stormtrooper, mission accomplished with flying colors; the purple circles and keytar solos of Jefferson Starship bewilder us all.
Score: 4/5 Death Stars

After what may be the longest hour and a half in recorded history, the Holiday Special concludes by rounding up the rest of the contractually-obligated Star Wars cast for the “Life Day Song.” The grand finale is the most confounding musical number of the program (and, if you'll recall, this is a program that features a hologram of Jefferson Starship). First of all, for a celebration of life everyone, sure looks like they want to die. Well, ok, not everyone; As usual, Harrison Ford does not give a fuck. According to deep Star Wars lore, Ford had only three fucks to give when he was cast in A New Hope and used the last one on the Millennium Falcon/TIE fighter dogfighting sequence. The only one smiling on Life Day is Carrie Fisher, and even then it’s the smile of a saint being crucified. We should have left this buried beneath the sands of time and Tatooine.
Score: 5/5 Death Stars

While most Star Wars fans complain (and rightfully so) about the edits made to the Original Trilogy in 1997, they often fail to credit Lucas with improving on the wholly unsatisfying ending of Return of the Jedi. In the original, viewers had waited six long years for an epic, satisfying conclusion to the world’s greatest space saga. What they received for their patience was an Ewok campfire song. Gone were the sweeping strings and the gravitas of the rest of John Williams’s score; in their place were a xylophone and a goddamn Ewok chorus. It's not like "Yub Nub," the main chant repeated ad nauseam, is some victorious Ewok war cry; It translates to, “Come on and celebrate!” Unlike Kool & The Gang, thanks to the Special Edition remasters, we at least won’t be forced to listen to this celebration song for decades to come. So next time you want to whine about Greedo shooting first, remember the blaster bolt you dodged in “Yub Nub.”
Score: 4/5 Death Stars

When Star Wars was released on May 25, 1977, no one expected it to succeed; yet it became a worldwide phenomenon in a matter of weeks. Lucas already had outlines for a sequel, but the public's appetite for all things Star Wars proved to be insatiable. One such hungry Star Wars fan was Meco, a session musician and producer who was so enamored of the film he saw it five times within two days of its release. He pitched the idea of a disco cover of John Williams’s score to Casablanca Records and three weeks later, a disco hit was born. “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band” was released as a single from the Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk album and by October 1, 1977 was at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Yes, people were dancing to the Star Wars theme in real life (source: my disco-loving mother). But what pushes an otherwise delightful walk down disco memory lane into a gaping chasm is the inclusion of sound effects: There are approximately 137 blaster “pew-pew!”s, seven Chewbacca groans, and a good deal of bleeping protest from R2-D2. However, many years later we were given this, so perhaps the legacy of Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk can live on as long as the movies.
Score: 3/5 Death Stars

After the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983, George Lucas looked for ways to grow the franchise while he plotted the long-term future of the franchise. Enter the 1985-1986 animated television cartoon Star Wars: Ewoks. The idea was to hook a younger generation on Star Wars, and it's a miracle that any of the children who were subjected to the series and its theme song went on to like anything Star Wars-related at all. The intro of the second season is a Care Bear nightmare, a squealing horror that makes you want to go full Dark Side and torch every Berenstain-looking treehouse on Endor. Only fire could cleanse this song from our consciousness. There are even a few stray "Yub Nub"s in the song as a special fuck-you to every fan (i.e. most fans) who hated the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Needless to say, Star Wars: Ewoks was not renewed for a third season.
Score: 5/5 Death Stars

A companion to Star Wars: Ewoks, the cartoon Star Wars: Droids followed the pre-A New Hope adventures of C-3PO and R2-D2. Appropriately, it also had a cringeworthy introduction song. For those who wonder what happened to the other members of The Police after Sting left in 1983, one answer is that drummer Stewart Copeland went on to compose songs for television and film—including the theme for Star Wars: Droids, “In Trouble Again.” Unlike the Ewoks theme, which mentions Ewoks no fewer than nine times in one minute, “In Trouble Again” makes no reference at all to anything Star Wars-related, let alone droids. It sounds more like a New Wave soundtrack for a fitness VHS tape than the theme to a Star Wars show. However, the lyrics do contain the phrase “danger zone,” perhaps inspiring Kenny Loggins. Which would be the only thing worthwhile about “In Trouble Again.”
Score: 3/5 Death Stars

The Empire Strikes Back ends on a huge cliffhanger: Can Luke and the gang rescue a frozen Han Solo from the clutches of the fearsome Jabba the Hutt? Return of the Jedi begins with a rescue mission to what should be a horrible hive of scum and villainy. Instead, the most horrifying feature of Jabba’s lair is mediocre dinner theater. In the original 1983 release, viewers endured “Lapti Nek,” a confusingly funky musical number bookended by droid torture and execution by Rancor beast. Evidently this wasn’t incongruous enough for George Lucas, who replaced “Lapti Nek” with the CGI shitshow “Jedi Rocks” in the 1997 Special Edition. As with most changes to the Original Trilogy, “Jedi Rocks” raises more questions than answers. Why make the already-grating vocals even worse? Why add CGI if it’s not only unconvincing, but downright distracting in its poor execution? Why add a casually racist jazz stereotype and why force us to watch as CGI spittle dangles from his mouth? Plus, a member of the Cantina Band in Episode IV is shoved onstage as if to say, “Hey, remember that one time you liked jazzy background music in Star Wars? Let’s ruin that for you.” At least that one guy on the cymbals is having fun. He has to be the only creature, fictional or otherwise, who enjoys “Jedi Rocks.”
Score: 4/5 Death Stars

At the end of The Phantom Menace, the human citizens of Naboo and the Jedi Council honor the victory of the Gungans with a parade. As with almost everything Gungan, the parade song is a truly unique form of torture for the average moviegoer. It begins with the blowing of the shofar, the sounding of the Gungan warhorn, and quickly devolves into a college marching band performance during halftime commercial break where most of the band has already gone home for Thanksgiving. The childlike la-la-las fit in perfectly with the sophomoric humor of Jar-Jar Binks and Lil’ Jedi Ani. Speaking of which, Obi-Wan is throwing some serious shade at a squirming Skywalker as if to say, "You farted, didn’t you?" This would track in a film that features Jar-Jar Binks stepping in poop as an attempt at humor. The humans and Jedi onstage look as pained as the audience feels until, mercifully, the credits roll and the main theme fanfare starts up again. Side note: the Gungans really got hosed on their victory present, as plasma balls are currently on sale at Wal-Mart for $21.29. The Queen of Naboo couldn’t even afford an upgrade to a lava lamp?
Score: 3/5 Death Stars

In Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker returns from battle with some serious problems: His secret wife is knocked up, he has bad dreams, and he just can’t seem to land that promotion at work because of shitty upper-level management. To unwind, he meets up with the totally-not-evil Chancellor Palpatine at the opera. The height of sophistication for a 25,034-year-old civilization that’s mastered intergalactic space travel is apparently… an extended didgeridoo solo. Palpatine begins his Dark Side seduction of Anakin while a series of aquatic eggs are fertilized by squiggling sperm. This, uh, important visual metaphor about the creation of life is set to more ominous tones than a sweeps-week episode of Law and Order: SVU. The audience just wants to focus on the world’s least subtle attempt at manipulation, but instead we’re distracted by the bubbles and that unending didgeridoo. While it’s nice to see some musical experimentation this late in the Star Wars scoring game, in this round we all lose.
Score: 2/5 Death Stars