Anything by one of those nameless, faceless, soul-less, sterile "rock" bands of the late '70s and early '80s. They all sound the same - they distilled all of the rock out of rock and just left the heavy chords and awful pop. I know a lot of people loved them, considered them the soundtrack to their lives, but I couldn't stand 'em. Hated 'em with a passion. When ANY of them come on the radio now, which they still do with alarming regularity, it makes many parts of my anatomy look for a nice soft warm place to hide.
You know who I'm talking about - Journey, Kansas, Styx, Supertramp, Little River Band, the Starship (once fully divorced from the Jefferson wing of the family), Foreigner, Boston - there are no doubt others I've mercifully managed to forget, but these are the best of them, and thus the worst of them. I make exceptions for the very very early Journey, when they were a mildly interesting offshoot of Santana's band, and the first Boston album, which did have a sort of interesting new set of guitar effects that stayed interesting for about one album. REO started off OK but sort of drifted in that direction too. That stuff in general was the most puerile, terrible form of pop music I've ever encountered. I'll take disco in a heartbeat - at least you could dance to it. And I pretty much hated disco...
I remember once getting free front row tickets to a Little River Band concert, which I went to because I liked the opening act, who I can't remember any more. My date and I rocked and danced and had a great time to the opener while everyone else sat on their hands waiting for LRB. I was determined to TRY to stay for that band since we'd been given GREAT tickets. But after managing to live miserably through about three songs, we tried not to boo loud enough to be heard over the adoring masses, and finally left and found a good Norteno dance band in a dive bar for the rest of the evening. Then I made it up to her by getting equally great seats to the Kinks a few weeks later...
Head East kind of started the whole mess and I kind of liked them, but hated what they spawned. Sort of like Zepplin was the genius band that led to a generation of horrible metal.
-Ray