Kate Stables of "The Guardian" called "Behind the Music that Sucks" a "wonderful pastiche" of "Behind the Music", and highlighted the parodies of Barbra Streisand and Billy Joel. Marc Savlov of "The Austin Chronicle" said all segments of "Behind the Music that Sucks" "are more or less guaranteed to either a) make you laff, or b) make you gag." In a review of a hip-hop DVD collection of the series, Paul Lingas of Audio Video Revolution wrote: "These spoofs capture all of the seriousness that makes "Behind the Music" such a popular program and twists it into something very amusing. Thankfully, each one of the segments is very short, preserving the novelty of the approach for each segment and sparing us when the segments simply aren't funny. In the end, this is a somewhat amusing collection of profane and obnoxious slams against hip-hop artists, though some are much better than others. Those who don’t like these people will get a kick out of the spoof segments but little more, and as for fans of these artists, I think they might enjoy them just a little bit, too."