Month: June 2019

I wouldn’t recommend everything David Guetta has ever done, but he is undeniably an exceptional producing talent, with titles like “When Love Takes Over”, “I Gotta Feeling”, “Club Can’t Handle Me”, “Without You”, and “Titanium” under his belt. That said, during the Club boom of 2009-2011, he did make a handful of attempts to match the trashy, noisy style of Club-Pop associated with acts like LMFAO and early-career Kesha, and this is easily the most notorious of them. The music is migraine-inducing, the lyrics are idiotic, and it falls squarely into Akon’s trademark “sexual harassment single” genre, but so did pretty much all of Akon’s singles, and he took it a lot farther on some of them (“I Wanna Fuck You” being the most obvious example), so the fact that it basically ended his career is hard to attribute to that. (And, no, it wasn’t because people were getting sick of this kind of song; that wouldn’t happen until the next year, with Enrique Iglesias’ “Tonight I’m Fucking You” fiasco.) I honestly don’t know if it was the bad music or the bad lyrics that made this single so damaging to the singer’s career, but if it truly ended Akon’s reign of terror, that is the only good thing about it—this is one of the most genuinely unpleasant songs of the last ten years, and it doesn’t even have the appeal of being particularly interesting in its awfulness.

Verdict: Bad.

I don’t honestly care that much that Chris Brown is a domestic abuser—I’ve grown some pretty impressive callouses when it comes to entertainers who are terrible people. That said, I do care that Chris Brown is, on the whole, an appallingly terrible musician. This song features the repellent personality he generally brings to his self-penned lyrics, which may or may not say something about him as a person but is bad writing either way, and it offers some even worse lyrics on the part of guest rapper Kevin McCall, who is so flippantly inappropriate you wonder if he was raised by animals and just doesn’t get human civilization. But more importantly, it perfectly highlights the Number One problem with Chris Brown’s songwriting…his utter ineptitude as a composer of music, displayed here in the dreary tunelessness of this utterly lifeless and unpleasant song. This song at least actually sounds like a piece of music rather than a malfunctioning machine, in contrast to his last hit, “I Can Transform Ya”, but that’s about all you can say about it. The beat and melody are so terrible in themselves that I’m more amazed that anyone liked this song based on them than on Brown’s personal scandal or the ugliness of the lyrical content, and I cannot for the life of me understand why this of all Chris Brown’s singles gave him his career back.

Verdict: Bad.

One of the reasons I’m skeptical about Katy Perry’s claims to be a singer-songwriter is that the people writing her singles (at least on her early albums) were obviously not the same people writing her album tracks. This is basically a piece of incredibly lazy album filler, seemingly just like any of the schlock ‘singles artists’ fill out their albums with after the singles are finished…it’s just that this one somehow turned out to be so mesmerizingly bad that, like the Youtube meme songs, it became notorious and even legendary without any kind of deliberate promotion, simply because everyone was showing it to their friends to give them a good laugh at how awful it was. At least Perry’s last notorious album track prior to this, “Ur So Gay”, had gotten its reputation from some actual controversy, which is still probably more respectable than just being a world-class laughingstock. This song somehow managed to get legally played on the radio, despite being so blunt in its sexual innuendos that it actually explicitly says and repeats the offending word (‘cock’, for those who are wondering) that it’s supposed to merely allude to. It never got any success to speak of on the mainstream charts, but it was one of the many bizarre things to make Number One on the Club Dance charts, otherwise known as the musical Kingdom of the Damned.

Verdict: Bad.

This is a song by the most cartoonishly violent rap act of the Nineties…about all the little miracles in life that we don’t notice every day. It is, in all honesty, the funniest thing you’ll ever hear in your life, which is why it became one of the first Youtube camp sensations and produced a particularly pervasive meme with the ‘Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work’ line. Granted, this kind of bizarre attempt at religious commentary isn’t really a new thing for this legendary pair of idiots, as one of their members is a weirdly devout Christian and they’ve been mixing messages between songs about ax-murderers and songs about God and the afterlife throughout their career, even proclaiming on one of their albums that the entire ‘Dark Carnival’ mythos that formed the basis for their first seven albums was a metaphor for Christianity. Still, most of those songs at least retained an appropriately belligerent tone, as opposed to the saccharinely inspirational effect they’re going for here. This is easily the most enjoyable of the idiotic viral camp ‘hits’ of the 2010s (“Gangnam Style” doesn’t count, since it became an actual hit as a song), but being unintentionally hilarious doesn’t let it off the hook for being so unbelievably stupid. That said, it’s probably the only one of those songs I’d recommend listening to—seriously, if you haven’t heard it, seek it out. Even if you have no idea who these guys are, I guarantee you will laugh your ass off.

Verdict: Enjoyably bad, but I’m reasonably sure that wasn’t the intent here.

Roughly circa 2009-2010, there was a particularly horrible trend (launched by producer Bangledesh) to create a memorable hook without actually bothering to write catchy music by repeating a simple fragmented verbal phrase ad infinitum. This produced such mind-numbing garbage as Beyonce’s “Diva” and the Black Eyed Peas’ “Imma Be”, and it took this universally hated song, easily the worst and most annoying to ever ride the trend, to effectively kill it. I suppose I should be grateful for that, but I just feel sorry for little Willow Smith. I mean, she didn’t write this song, she presumably didn’t pick it out, but she’s currently largely associated in people’s minds with singing one of the most annoying songs in history, and she’ll probably stay that way until she manages to do something else noteworthy, which could take a while. I blame her father, Hollywood legend Will Smith—he presumably didn’t intend this pop-singer gig to wind up serving as a smear campaign for his own daughter, but with his background in the entertainment industry, he has no excuse for not knowing better when he actually heard this song. He’s released his own share of bad music back in the day, granted, but there’s stupid novelty crap like “Gettin’ Jiggy With It”, and then there’s stuff that can actually wreck someone’s career. This song wasn’t even a hit of any real magnitude…it peaked at no. 11 on the charts, but it never made a Year-End 100 for either of the years it straddled, and it gained far more attention as a focal point for widespread hatred than as any kind of actual success. And people haven’t forgotten it, either…none of the horrible songs from 2010 except “Hey Soul Sister” are on the radio much these days, but many are remembered essentially as memes and stock quotations, as legends of how bad a song can get, and this one is particularly persistent. I guess that’s what you get when you create a hook that is so purely painful as noise, yet so repetitive and simplistic that it achieves a perverse kind of catchiness that never lets anyone who’s heard it completely escape from it. This whole endeavor was just cruel…cruel for the largely innocent nine-year-old girl who had to be associated with it, but even more, cruel to every poor human being who ever had the misfortune to listen to it.

Verdict: Bad.

David Bowie’s Outside is another of those albums where whether it was a masterpiece or a disaster seems to depend entirely on who you’re asking. This particular song was the album’s first single, and gained a particular degree of notoriety after being used as the credits theme in a cult movie, so it seems a good choice to represent the album as a whole. Bowie’s touring partners when he was promoting this album were Trent Reznor’s Industrial Metal project Nine Inch Nails, and that seems an appropriate choice given that for this album, Bowie let his genre roulette wheel land on a variation on Reznor’s Industrial-based sound. But Bowie’s depth as a musician and the producing contributions of his old collaborator Brian Eno led to a far more complex mix of genres, combining Nine Inch Nails-style Industrial Metal with the Ambient sounds of Bowie and Eno’s classic ‘Berlin Trilogy’ into a kind of ‘Ambient Industrial’ sound. This song doesn’t rock as hard or as loud as Nine Inch Nails’ stuff, but it’s a far deeper and subtler piece of music, as well as vastly more sophisticated, and Bowie’s lyrics certainly put Reznor’s usual melodramatic shock-value whining to shame. One might think of it as Nine Inch Nails for grown-ups, and it would make a particularly good listening choice for anyone who finds Nine Inch Nails’ Industrial sound interesting but has less patience with their sophomoric and adolescent lyrical and dramatic content. In short, once again Bowie proved he could step into almost any genre and do it better than the people who had devoted their careers to it.

Verdict: Good, and in fact much better than most of the more popular acts in the same genre.