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Give it up to Questlove — his new documentary, Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music, is killer, especially its imaginative opening montage of musical mash-ups. But while Questlove (mostly) wanted to honor SNL’s long history of eclectic, electric performances, not every musical guest delivered the goods. I’m not talking about musicians who turned in great performances but still caused the show headaches, like Sinead O’Connor, Rage Against the Machine or Elvis Costello either. Instead, let’s check out four outright terrible performances that belong in the show’s musical Hall of Shame.

1 Ashlee Simpson

The undisputed champion, and a performance memorably bad enough to make Questlove’s documentary. Can we even call it a performance? 50 Years of SNL Music explains that Simpson’s voice was nearly shot the night Jude Law hosted, necessitating a compromise in which she’d sing one song live and lip-sync the other. By show time,...

Paul Dunlap was a prolific film composer in the 1950s and 1960s, scoring over 200 features. He was best known for providing themes and scores for numerous science fiction and horror thrillers of the decades. His music highlighted attacks by prehistoric beasts in 1951’s Lost Continent starring Cesar Romero, and an alien robot invasion in 1954’s Target Earth with Richard Denning and Kathleen Crowley. He scored Michael Landon’s transformation from man to monster in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), and provided music for such other Aip and United/Allied Artist cult classics as I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Blood of Dracula (1957), How to Make a Monster (1958), Frankenstein – 1970 (1958), Invisible Invaders (1959), The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959), Angry Red Planet (1959), Shock Corridor (1963), and Black Zoo (1963).

Dunlap was born in Springfield, Ohio, on July 19, 1919. He began working in films in the early 1950s, scoring westerns, war and action films including The Baron of Arizona...