The AV Club runs a feature called HateSong, in which (quasi-) celebrities talk about why they hate a certain song.

It’s good feature. You can actually feel the burden of torment lifting from these people’s shoulders as they rail against the instrument of their torture.

I yearn, desperately, to share in their collective catharsis.

Many worthy songs have been chosen… but one has not.

Somehow, none of the subjects interviewed by the AV Club have hated on the song that’s tortured me (and all of us really) for more than a decade.

Well, that changes right now.

Today, I usurp the AV Club’s feature and tell the world why “Kryptonite,” by 3 Doors Down, is the worst song ever made.

I’ll get to that in a minute but first off, just look at the assholes in that picture up top.

I mean really LOOK at them.

Gaze upon their faux-hawks, their chain wallets, and their thrift-store chic. Look deep into their dead-eye gazes and tell me if you see anything resembling a soul.

That one guy is wearing not one, but two cross necklaces. He’s like fundamentalist version of Mr. T.

This is the band “3 Doors Down.” And yes, that’s 3 Doors Down, not Three Doors Down, even though EVERYONE in the universe knows we spell out numbers under 10.

And guess what, I looked up how they came up with that dud of a band name on Wikipedia:

“When the three men were walking through the town, they saw a building where some letters had fallen off its sign, and it read ‘Doors Down.’ Since at the time they consisted of three people, they added the ‘3’ to create 3 Doors Down.’”

Amazing. You can name your band anything. You can pull words out of a hat.

You could call your band: Slippery Onion, the Hospital Bombers, the Jolly Green Giants, the Doormen, Midgets Ride at Sunset, Peabrain and the Mulefuckers… Literally anything.

But these jags put maximum effort in exerting no effort whatsoever. There couldn’t possibly be a less inspired way to name your band. They might as well have gone with “Guitar. Bass. Drums.”

So right from the outset, these guys are an uninspired farce.

But then there’s this dickpunch of a song…

As many of you no doubt remember, Kryptonite came out in January 2000, which is fitting, because it put an exclaimation point on the greatest period of regression in the history of music.

Indeed, the decade of the 90s began with innovative and awesome bands like R.E.M. and Guns N’ Roses, passing the baton to Nirvana and Pearl Jam. At the same time, hip-hop truly evolved with Run DMC and the Beastie Boys giving way to 2Pac, Biggie, and NWA.

Yet, somehow we closed out the decade with rap acts like Puff Daddy and Sisquo on the one hand and “rock” bands Nickleback and Creed on the other.

And so in 2000, we’re left with this shit-ass band, 3 Doors Down, which is really just a generic, souless, cacaphonic fuckwagon.

This band is the equivalent of this…

It’s a hydrogenated mush that offends your palette with its banality. It tastes so much like cardboard that it tastes like shit.

And it’s emblematic of everything that went wrong with music in the 90s. We went from anti-corp grunge and indie rock – bands who idolized the DIY, hardcore punk bands of the 80s – to an inauthentic, commercialized derivative.

And Kryptonite is the end product. It’s an imitation of an imitation.

It’s not even a motel painting; it’s the painting of a motel painting, of a motel painting.

And this unforgivable piece of shit has followed me around for a decade and a half. It hit No. 3 on the the billboard Top 100 chart. The album sold 6 million copies. It was No. 1 on the Modern Rock chart for 11 weeks. That’s three months, an entire summer!

This thing was played ad nauseum, and each time it killed a tiny little part of me. It’s a succubous, a leech that feeds off the cringes of its hapless listeners.

And sadly, for that reason, it will be immortal.

At some point in their lives, my kids will hear this song. It will play in the background of a movie about the 90s. They proabably won’t even notice. Only I will notice, and no matter how quietly it plays it will reach a level of unspeakable loudness in my head. I will get a headache from it.

That shitty guitar riff will kick up and this human tampon of a singer will call out his hellish refrain:

“If I go crazy then will you still call me Superman…”

The song’s lyrics don’t even makes sense; they’re completely contradictory to one another.

Look them up for yourself, because I’m not going to reprint them here. They should never be reprinted anywhere… at all… ever. They should be abolished and forgotten like some ancient druid chant that summons the dead.

Fuck this stupid ass song. And fuck 3 Doors Down.

Note: If there’s a song that gnaws at your soul the way this one chews on mine, by all means write me an e-mail about it and I will post it. (Or if you’re too lazy, just tell me what song it is, and if I hate it too, I’ll shit on it for you.)