Readers' Poll: The Worst Songs of the Sixties

Admit it. This is the one song you always skip when listening to The White Album. There's no shame in that. At eight minutes and 22 seconds, it's the single longest Beatles song – and probably their strangest one, too.

The work is, essentially, a sound collage created by John Lennon with Yoko Ono and George Harrison in the summer of 1968. The piece samples various bits of classical music, a sound effects LP, violins from "A Day in the Life" and an old tape that Lennon found at Abbey Road of somebody saying "number nine." For many Beatles fans, it was way too avant-garde and a waste of precious space on an otherwise brilliant album.