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Was Ke$ha's SNL Performance the Worst Ever?

Mon., Apr. 19, 2010 8:30 PM PDT by Leslie Gornstein

Ke$ha was really bad on Saturday Night Live. Has any SNL musical guest been this disastrous?
—Dara, via the Answer B!tch inbox

Are you sure you're not just jealous of Ke$ha because some boys tryin' to touch her junk? Maybe you are the alien, Dara. Yes, for the record Ke$ha's SNL appearance does generally fall under the category of There Are No Words. Some things you just can't unsee once you've watched them.

But is it the worst singing the comedy show has ever seen? Not when you compare it to...

... Ashlee Simpson, or how quickly do we forget?

Back in October, 2004, when she had her old nose and her old job—singer—Simpson appeared on SNL to warble "Pieces of Me." That song came out all right—unlike her second number, "Autobiography," which peeled back the ugly curtain on lip-syncing and the industry's heavy reliance on backing tracks. When the wrong lip-sync track started playing, Simpson idled and occasionally danced for what may qualify as the most awkward 30 seconds in TV history before finally exiting stage right. "I didn't know what to do," Simpson later explained, "so I thought I'd do a hoedown."

Then there was Sinead O'Connor, who triggered an uproar by tearing up a picture of the pope after singing on SNL back in 1992. O'Connor's image never really recovered after that, and for the record, the singing that night wasn't so great, either.

Finally, we need to remember Kanye West. Fans ripped into West after his SNL appearance in December 2008: weak singing, malfunctioning autotune and accusations of lip-syncing haunted the rapper long after he left the stage at 30 Rock.

Was that appearance worse than Ke$ha's? That's a toss-up, but at least neither Ke$ha nor Kanye treated us to a "hoedown."

_________

Check out the weekend's other big musical moment, Coachella!