Month: June 2019

Linkin Park’s early work was their most commercially successful period, but there’s a reason that it’s now thought of mostly as a punchline about angsty white suburban teenagers wallowing in self-pity. This doesn’t necessarily mean it was bad music per se: from a purely musical perspective they were rather interesting, with a highly unique sound that blended standard Nu-Metal influences with electronics and turntables. Unfortunately, their ridiculously melodramatic lyrics and Chester Bennington’s hysterical screaming too often make them impossible to take seriously. This song in particular is the ultimate self-parody of the Emo movement, beating out even “Untitled (How Could This Happen To Me?)” by Simple Plan in terms of sheer silliness. I actually feel a little bad for laughing at it, because it was apparently supposed to be about Bennington’s real-life molestation as a child, but I can’t help but wonder how he possibly failed to notice the fact that this song’s screaming hook of “Crawling in my skin…” is unintentionally hilarious on its face. Interestingly, there is a song on Korn’s debut album called “Daddy” that is about almost the exact same thing. Now, Korn would make their share of bad songs themselves over the course of their career, but their song deals much more explicitly with the subject than “Crawling”, and comes across as filled with genuine rage and agony rather than mere melodrama. I don’t want to take anything away from either man’s tragic experience, but there’s really no way to deny that Korn frontman Jonathan Davis did a far better job of capturing the pain and fear of that situation in a Rock song than Bennington did here.

Verdict: There’s some interesting musical ideas here, but the unintentional comedy definitely outweighs any of the potential positive qualities.

Conway Twitty had more Number One hits on the Country charts than anyone else except possibly George Strait, but there’s a reason he’s mostly considered a punchline outside of Country circles. His huge body of output did include some good work…his duets with Loretta Lynn were terrific (although it’s hard to go wrong with a goddess like Lynn as your duet partner), and he had a few good solo recordings, like “It’s Only Make Believe”, “Hello Darlin”, and “She Only Meant To Use Him”. But too much of his work had a slickness and blandness to it that helped bring about the developments of the Pop-Country era by turning Country into Adult Contemporary radio filler. On top of that, his often overtly sexual lyrics generally came across as more sleazy than erotic. This song, one of his signature hits, is a prime offender on both counts, a dull, overly polished ballad with some extremely unfortunate attempts at eroticism (‘as my trembling fingers touch forbidden places’). Twitty certainly had a strong baritone, but he wasn’t the kind of performer who could pull this kind of thing off…it’s almost like hearing your grandfather singing about sex, and the result is uncomfortable and even kind of sickening. This isn’t the worst of Twitty’s signature hits (that would be the embarrassing “Don’t Call Him a Cowboy (until you’ve seen him ride)”), but it perfectly demonstrates everything wrong with his style, and everything that made him both a destructive influence on the genre and a perceived emblem of everything wrong with Country music culture.

Verdict: Not as bad as some of its successors in the field of Pop-Country sleaze, but still pretty bad.

Plenty of reviewers have pointed out the obvious problems with this song…the lack of energy, the blatant rip-off of Drake’s style on the Rap verses, the extremely mean-spirited tone, the total disconnect in subject matter between the chorus and the verses, and just generally the fact that nothing here is interesting enough to be worth listening to. I, however, seem to be the only one who has noticed that this song’s chorus is uncannily similar, in both music and lyrics, to the song “I Hate You” from the musical If/Then. I suppose this could be a coincidence, but given the extent of the similarity, and the fact that this song is already blatantly derivative of so many other things (Drake, the Chainsmokers’ “Closer”, etc.), I don’t find it particularly unlikely that it was deliberate. If so, I commend Olivia O’Brien on her taste in musical theater, but deplore the cynical implication that she thought none of her target audience would even notice. In any case, this possible attribution is the only conceivable point of interest about this terminally dull Pop song, and you’re better off getting the If/Then cast album if you want to hear this idea done well in any case.

Verdict: Completely uninteresting.

Amazingly enough, this utterly worthless novelty track apparently gets mistakenly attributed to the great Bob Marley on a fairly regular basis, to the point where this misattribution has become a running joke on the internet. This is probably partly because of ignorant people who think every Reggae song ever written is by Bob Marley, and partly because this song bears a superficial similarity in its lyrical content to Marley’s classic “Three Little Birds (Every Little Thing Is Gonna Be All Right)”. That doesn’t make the attribution seem any less blasphemous, though. Not only is this possibly the least authentic Reggae song ever, so soulless and synthetic that it makes “Informer” by Snow sound like a Buju Banton song, but it has one of the most annoying melodies ever written, on a level with Los Del Rio’s “The Macarena” and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl”. And the lyrics, if you bother to pay attention to them, are actually an extremely insulting and condescending dismissal of the very real problems people face in life. The fact that this abomination won three Grammy awards in 1989 (including Record of the Year and Song of the Year) is a greater testament to the sad state of late Eighties/early Nineties Pop music than Milli Vanilli, Michael Bolton, and Vanilla Ice combined.

Verdict: Bad.

Tim McGraw would eventually grow into arguably the greatest Country singer of his era, but his very first hit, the extremely tasteless “Indian Outlaw”, made him seem like little more than another photogenic purveyor of Pop-Country novelty songs. This was particularly bad for his image because Country music already had an artist on the scene that fit that description…Billy Ray Cyrus…and was in the process of getting rid of him because he was intolerably awful. But with this song, which was McGraw’s second hit, he showed what he was really capable of, what would eventually make him the reigning King of the Pop-Country era. The actual sound of this song was more Adult Contemporary than Country, but like all of McGraw’s greatest work, the sensibility and emotional content were rooted in the fundamentals of the Classic Country genre. It’s a beautifully written song, with an open appeal to emotion that could reduce almost anyone to tears and a circular structure that articulates a profound wisdom about the patterns of life. The music video for this song seems to have indicated that the ‘girl’ survives the events of the third verse and chorus, but the song is all the more powerful for not answering that question either way. Granted, McGraw still sings the song in the nasal whine of his early career (something he would grow out of by his peak), but that’s about the only thing that separates this from the greatest work of his peak period. It would be another three years before everything McGraw released would be on this level (indeed, he wouldn’t really equal this song until his 1997 album Everywhere), but this was an early sign that this young up-and-comer was more than just a second Billy Ray Cyrus, and indeed was something truly special.

Verdict: An immortal Country classic.

The Proclaimers are known in this country mostly for their one hit “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”, but they are quite seriously one of the most underrated bands of all time. Their best-known song, of course, is an eloquently simple celebratory love song, but they are perfectly capable of tackling weightier subject matter when the situation calls for it. This song serves as a kind of companion to one of their biggest hits in the U.K., “Letter From America”. In that song, this quintessentially Scottish band describes the experience of the Scottish people who immigrated to other lands. This song, on the other hand, is about all the people who have immigrated to Scotland from all the other countries in the world. It speaks with admiration of how they managed to build a life there and how much they contribute to their newfound home, and ultimately concludes “They’re all Scotland’s story, and they’re all worth the same”. Given recent real-world events on both sides of the Atlantic, I thought it was an appropriate time to shine a spotlight on this relatively obscure effort by the band, since its message seems particularly important in today’s ideological climate.

Verdict: An inspirational classic whose message is more important now than ever.

This is the worst single of Justin Bieber’s early period, and there are those who would maintain that it’s still the worst thing he ever did. At any rate, it remains his most notorious effort to date, and given how widely despised he’s been for the last few years, that’s saying something. Granted, no-talent R&B joke Sean Kingston teaming up with the Antichrist of teenybopper pop wasn’t exactly a recipe for success on its face, but this song is far worse than anything either of them had previously done. The melody is quite catchy in an inane way, but the problem is in the lyrics. Simply put, the premise of the song…incorporating an ubiquitous children’s rhyme mostly associated with playground games into one of Bieber’s lascivious crooner-pop songs…is perhaps the single most misguided word choice of a year that was rather infamous for them. “Hey Soul Sister” and “Miracles” had more stupid lines in them, but even the former’s ‘so gangsta/I’m so thug’ or the latter’s ‘Fuckin’ magnets/how do they work’ would have a hard time competing with the chorus of this song for sheer idiocy (I’d also like to point out how painfully ironic it is to hear Sean Kingston singing this, given what the original words to “Eenie Meenie Miney Mo” were). The catchy tune and laughably stupid lyric mean this song has some enjoyment value as a camp item, but that doesn’t excuse the people responsible for it. The only person who could pull this kind of crap off was a very young Michael Jackson (and indeed, there is a Jackson 5 album track that is almost identical to this), and I think it’s pretty obvious that Bieber and Kingston are not Michael Jackson.

Verdict: It certainly has some camp value, but it is nonetheless insultingly bad.

Picking out which of the Black Eyed Peas’ singles qualifies as the worst is extraordinarily difficult, since they were bad in so many different ways that there will always be endless debate about which criteria to use. Do you go with their stupidest song from a lyrical perspective (probably “My Humps”)? Or their most unlistenable and abrasive (“Rock That Body” and “The Time (Dirty Bit)” being the two primary contenders)? There can be no right answer until the qualifications in question are agreed on, which doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon, but if you want to go with the “Most Annoying” category, “Imma Be” is certainly the most viable contender. There were times when the Black Eyed Peas actually made decently catchy music to set their idiotic lyrics to, but this is not one of those times. The chorus was another song riding the trend of shortcutting ear-catching choruses by simply repeatedly a single verbal fragment over and over, a trend that dates back to the early 2000s (e.g. “Hustlin’”), but really became popular during a two-and-a-half year period following Bangladesh’ production on “A Milli”. Attached to this mind-melting musical laziness is a typical Black Eyed Peas lyric mixing Glam Rap clichés with bad jokes, the high point of unintended comedy being the line “Imma be a bank/I’ll be loanin’ out semen”. This probably isn’t the Black Eyed Peas’ all-around worst song, even if you discount Will.i.am’s solo career, but it is the most musically annoying of their major hits, and while it still can’t match “My Humps” for sheer stupidity or “Rock That Body” for unpleasant noises, the fact that we’re having this discussion in the first place says very questionable things about the Black Eyed Peas as a music outfit.

Verdict: Bad.

Ah, yes, the only Crunkcore band to date to have actual hits. I’ve always believed that even the most hated genres have at least a few talented artists in them, but if that’s the case, the ones in the Crunkcore genre must be hiding. What is Crunkcore? Well, take the worst elements of bad Electronica, the worst elements of bad Hardcore Punk, and the worst elements of bad mid-2000s party rap, put in a blender, and set to “the worst goddamned music I’ve ever heard in my life”. As I said, of all the acts in the genre (which includes such fine, upstanding bands as Brokencyde, Blood on the Dance Floor and Breathe Carolina), these idiots are the only ones to really trouble the Top Forty, notching two fluke hits riding on the ’09-’10 Club music craze, plus a guest shot on Kesha’s “Blah Blah Blah”(for which she returns the favor with an overhyped but ultimately miniscule cameo here). Given that these idiots’ last hit featured a sex joke referencing Helen Keller, we pretty much knew what we were in for…two moronic frat boys basically doing a completely unintentional Beavis-and-Butthead routine…but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. They manage to top the sexism of their last hit (which, please note, featured the refrain “Don’t trust a ho”), they provide pickup lines that make Akon’s “I Wanna Fuck You” seem downright smooth by comparison, and they have no idea how tenses work, which manages to make this song confusing on top of everything else. Frankly, we already had a vastly better goofy dance-rock band in Cobra Starship, a group who were actually funny, didn’t insult our intelligence, and didn’t approach gender relations from the perspective of seven-year-olds building a “no girls allowed” treehouse while using their heads as hammers.

Verdict: Bad.