Month: May 2019

This song is mildly amusing as minor Weird Al goes, but I can’t help but feel it’s ultimately redundant, because Al did a far more insightful, and far more disturbing, look into this solipsistic mindset with “Why Does This Always Happen To Me?” back in 2003. This song doesn’t really say anything that “Why Does This Always Happen to Me?” hadn’t already said, and frankly it feels kind of phoned-in by Weird Al standards, almost as if he knew he was repeating himself but felt obligated to make a song about this particular meme. Yankovich’s albums are admittedly very effective Pop-culture time capsules, so I see why he felt the need to make this reference, but that doesn’t change the fact that this song isn’t really his best work.

Verdict: Not exactly bad, just unnecessary.

I have no idea why an obviously talented guy like Dierks Bentley keeps releasing absolutely putrid songs like this one. In spite of being one of the songs that originally introduced an undercurrent of heartbreak and desperation to the ‘Bro-Country’ genre (something that would ultimately be responsible for most of the genre’s few tolerable songs/albums), this is one of the very worst ‘Bro-Country’ hits of 2014, and if you know anything about the state of Country Music in that year, I think you’ll appreciate the weight of that statement. Lady Antebellum’s “Bartender” had managed to make the same basic concept genuinely heartbreaking, but any attempts at pathos here are lost when the singer recounts how he ‘Got a little mile-high flight attention’ from a stewardess. Also, the reference to “Like a G6” was just uncalled-for…we were just starting to forget that five-year-old abomination at that point, thank you very much. We know from items like the song “Home” and his Bluegrass album Up on the Ridge that Bentley has genuine talent, so there’s really no excuse for why he keeps putting out such utterly appalling songs as “5-1-5-0”, “Say You Do”, “Somewhere on a Beach”, and this piece of smug, meatheaded garbage.

Verdict: Bad.

With this song, Nicki Minaj drew on the kind of downtempo Indie R&B that her labelmate Drake was experimenting with around that time. It’s a rather perfunctory attempt at that style, with a somewhat uninspired and repetitive chorus and lyrics that amount to little more than empty grand standing, but it was still a vast improvement on the absolutely horrific material she had released from her previous album, and could at least be described as a step in the right direction.

Verdict: Not particularly great, but still better than anything on the Roman Reloaded album (or her next two singles after this, “Anaconda” and “Only”, for that matter).

Like “Roar”, this song was a return to the upbeat sound of Perry’s early work, and after her dreary attempts as ‘seriousness’ on songs like “Dark Horse”, “Unconditionally”, and “By the Grace of God”, that certainly came as something of a relief at the time. But the fact remains that this is an incredibly stupid song (it’s basically a distaff version of Jeremih’s infamous “Birthday Sex”). Granted, some of the songs from Perry’s early career were equally stupid (“Hot N Cold” being one obvious example), but those songs were also extraordinary catchy, which helped elevate their idiocy into the realm of the enjoyably bad. By contrast, the melody of “Birthday” is only moderately catchy, and not really enough to compensate for its gaping flaws.

Verdict: Perry had done worse around this time (and has certainly done worse since), but this is still pretty bad.

Demi Lovato was basically given the impossible task of outdoing Idina Menzel on her own signature showstopper, and while she is clearly trying her best here, she still comes off as severely underpowered in comparison. Worse, the song loses a lot of its impact when it’s delivered as a pop tune rather than the dramatic number it was in the movie. This certainly isn’t a disaster on the level of Lovato’s previous hit, “Heart Attack”, and it’s not really Lovato’s fault (as stated, no-one could have pulled this off), but it does represent another career disappointment from her 2012-2014 “slump” period.

Verdict: Not awful, just disappointing and kind of redundant.

At this point, it genuinely looked like Enrique Iglesias was going to be as successful at club dance-pop as he was as a Latin balladeer. For the record, I’m a fan of his: there’s a reason he outsold every other Latin pop star in the Nineties, and there’s a reason he’s the only one who still had a career when the Latin craze passed. Unfortunately, the next year he would release an absolutely horrible single that he would never really recover from, but “I Like It” is one of the best club anthems of 2010: Enrique is surprisingly well-suited to this style, and his falsetto vocals give the song a sound reminiscent of the Saturday Night Fever-era Bee Gees. As for Pitbull, his lyrics here aren’t any better than his usual work, but he certainly fits the style and spirit of the song, and provides additional Latin color to give this otherwise fairly straightforward Club track a hint of exotic flavor.

Verdict: Good.

I’ve encountered a lot of scorn from Rock snobs and casual listeners alike directed at Paul McCartney’s later career, and while some of his late-career songs do have some problems, especially in the lyrics department, this vitriol is still largely unearned. This song is particular has drawn untoward venom from his detractors, probably because he wrote it specifically to jeer at them. It may be softer in sound and lighter in subject matter than “Eleanor Rigby” or “Helter Skelter”, but this is still Paul McCartney, one of the greatest composers of the Twentieth Century, and this song finds him in close to peak form. I’ve heard Classical art songs that have been around for hundreds of years that don’t have melodies this good, and I guarantee that future generations will view this song’s detractors the same way they now view people like Eduard Hanslick and Virgil Thompson…as idiots who missed history-making genius when it was right in front of their eyes.

Verdict: Good, if you couldn’t already tell.

I wondered what it would take for Will.i.am to come up with a halfway tolerable song by this point in his career, and the answer is basically, steal one. This song is pretty much stolen wholecloth from an A.R. Rahman composition called “Urvasi, Urvasi”, with a couple of Jamaican samples thrown in there for good measure. I know he went through all the proper channels and had A.R. Rahman’s permission and everything, but there’s something inherently lazy about this kind of sampling-as-plagiarism. On top of that, the beat is Will.i.am’s usual tinny, artistically sterile late-career work, guest singer Cody Wise is basically a B-list Justin Bieber, and his lyrics are, as always, idiotic. Because the source of the sample was in fact a wonderful song, this is still better than “Scream and Shout” or “#Thatpower”, but he can hardly take any real credit for its redeeming qualities, and it’s still bad enough to make the other birthday-related hit at the time, Katy Perry’s moronic but catchy “Birthday”, look like a masterpiece by comparison.

Verdict: Bad, and without the stolen melody it would be completely irredeemable.

This is much better than Lambert’s other hit from the Platinum album, “Somethin’ Bad”, but it’s oddly sentimental and inoffensive for the edgy, daring Country firebrand whose nickname is ‘The Pink Pistol’. I mean, when you see a Miranda Lambert song titled “Automatic”, the first place your mind goes is not a soft, nostalgic ballad about the downside of technological progress. And unlike “The House That Built Me” or most of the material on her next album, The Weight of These Wings, it doesn’t really capture the naked emotional honesty that characterizes her work either. And while it’s certainly a pretty song, the lyrics are a kind of neo-Luddite yearning for a return to the exact level of technological sophistication that Lambert grew up with, such as cassette tapes and stick shifts, which when you think about it is kind of arbitrary, even hypocritical. By the standards of the Country scene at the time, which was dominated by meatheaded party anthems, I suppose it qualified as somewhat above average, but I can’t help but feel Lambert was capable of better than this.

Verdict: All right, I guess, but still somewhat disappointing.

This song sounded like a godsend on paper…a legit country artist famous for her songwriting prowess working with a powerhouse voice with a tendency to be let down by her usual material, in an era of Country Music so soaked in testosterone that a duet between two of its best-known female performers seemed like an antidote to all its woes. But the actual result was an embarrassing catastrophe that sounded more like a bad imitation of mediocre Eighties hard rock styles than a country song (which,, as a number people pointed out at the time, made it sound quite a bit like a standard-issue Bro-Country song that just happened to be delivered by women). This was Lambert’s first truly awful single up to that point (and thankfully, apart from this song’s unsuccessful follow-up “Little Red Wagon”, it would pretty much prove to be her last), but frankly, even Underwood’s usual stuff at that time was generally better than this.

Verdict: Bad.