Category: Bad Songs List Court

Jack Johnson is often lumped in with John Mayer and Jason Mraz, but that isn’t really fair to either of those artists. Johnson is basically everything people complain about regarding Mayer and Mraz, but without any of the qualities that actually make those two legitimate artists. Without Mayer’s songwriting and instrumental virtuosity, or Mraz’s gift for catchy melodies or warmth and sincerity, Jack Johnson’s music is exactly the kind of pointless musical filler that his peers in the acoustic Soft Rock genre are often accused of making. This song, probably his biggest hit, was the theme song to the 2006 film version of Curious George. One can assume he was trying to emulate late-career Randy Newman here, but Newman’s Pixar themes, bland as they can be at times, are at least distinctly catchy and have a good-natured, rollicking quality that fits their purpose. This is just utterly forgettable strumming and empty cliches, coupled with vaguely faux-African background instrumentation that would tiptoe right up to the line of being insensitive if anyone could be induced to care about it in the first place. Even as pure background music, there are literally hundreds of better options out there, so I honestly don’t see why this guy still has a career…and that’s speaking as one of the few critics who will unreservedly defend acts like Mayer and Mraz.

Verdict: Bad, or to be more accurate, utterly worthless and forgettable.

Of all the former members of One Direction, Liam Payne has definitely had the least interesting solo career. Harry Styles, Niall Horan, and Louis Tomlinson have all released at least one absolutely fantastic song since the band broke up. Even Zayn Malik, who released some perfectly awful material like “Pillowtalk”, also put out some gems like “It’s You”. Payne’s only real hit since the breakup, on the other hand, was this song, which doesn’t even have the distinction of being outstandingly terrible. The song was co-written by Ed Sheeran, and it’s basically a less interesting copy of “Shape of You” (which wasn’t really Sheeran’s best work to begin with). As for the lyrics, they’re all about how Payne wants to shed his boy-band image and basically become a Club Rapper. The problem is not so much that he is inherently unconvincing in the role (with the right execution, he could probably pull it off), but that the song comes across as him openly pleading with the audience to see him in this new light, which completely undermines the self-assured swagger he’s trying to project here. As I said, this isn’t exactly awful, but next to his bandmates’ “Sign of the Times”, “This Town” and “Just Hold On”, it definitely makes it seem like Payne is underperforming here.

Verdict: Mildly bad and extremely disappointing.

Charlotte Church spent her childhood and teen years recording Classical and Semiclassical pieces, and while she was very much part of the Pop-Oriented “Classical Crossover” market, she really was exceptionally good at it (they didn’t dub her “The Voice of an Angel” for nothing). Unfortunately, the moment she became old enough to make her own creative decisions, she abandoned her Classical repertoire for teen-oriented Pop music. This might not have seemed like such a step down if her new songs had been on the level of, say, Taylor Swift, but this flagrantly inane Bubblegum is the kind of thing you’d hear from Cher Lloyd, or maybe Selena Gomez on an off day. This fiercely embarrassing song, which was the lead single from the album, features idiotic lyrics that sound like a female version of Dierks Bentley’s “5-1-5-0” married to production that Justin Bieber would have rejected as too cheesy. The fact that Church went from singing Puccini arias to this schlock is mortifying, and her “change of style” might well be the saddest case of a musician ‘selling out’ in the last twenty years.

Verdict: Bad.

Given all the tempest-in-a-teapot controversy raging right now about our national anthem, I thought I’d do my part as a critic and weigh in on the artistic side of the question. The sad fact is that our current national anthem is an absolutely terrible song, the bastard offspring of a tuneless British drinking song and a hackneyed piece of overwrought patriotic poetry (Kurt Vonnegut described it as “Balderdash punctuated with question marks”). Then there’s the whole issue of the second verse, which no-one ever performs anymore now that the British are perhaps our biggest allies on the international scene (that verse is full of anti-British sentiment, some of it extremely ugly). The bizarre and ugly tune also makes this song almost impossible to perform well…the only good versions of it I know are Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock performance and Jacques Brel’s scathing parody “Amsterdam” (and I suppose its use in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, but note that Puccini was smart enough to use it only as a brief leitmotif and not in full). Our national anthem would undoubtedly have been changed years ago to the far superior “America the Beautiful”, except that that song invokes God and is therefore effectively off-limits for that purpose.

Verdict: I wouldn’t listen to this song for a billion dollars if it weren’t routinely forced on me by virtue of being my country’s national anthem.

A seemingly almost nonsensical novelty song by cheesy one-hit wonder band Mott the Hoople, this song actually makes perfect sense in its original context…it was originally written by the great David Bowie, and was intended to be part of his legendary album Rock Opera The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. People would probably have a completely different attitude about this goofy novelty song from the Seventies if they knew that the ‘young dudes’ in question are living in a world they know is going to end within five years, and that they are pretty much running wild because all the adults have simply withdrawn from reality. As Bowie once observed in an interview, this is not really the hymn to youth that it seems on the surface, but a testament to the destructive power of youth’s selfishness, shortsightedness and wastefulness. Despite the cheerful music, it’s actually quite dark and disturbing when you really pay attention to the lyrics and fit them into the Ziggy Stardust universe, although that subtext is much more evident in Bowie’s own rendition of the song than in Mott the Hoople’s cover. If this song had actually made it onto the album, it would be taken far more seriously, but as it is, most people don’t look closely enough to see its real meaning, which is a shame.

Verdict: Much more interesting than it is generally given credit for.

It has always confused me that this song, one of the most inspirational anthems ever to come out of Broadway, has gained a reputation among later generations as some kind of generic Easy Listening piece with no real relevance to them, even though it introduced an idiom that has become part of our daily language. Granted, the song has the deepest meaning in the context of the immortal musical it comes from, and the popular versions’ persistent habit of playing it at half its original speed does drain a bit of intensity from it, but the soaring ideals in the lyrics are clearly there to see in any version, so the people dismissing it as just some dull Lounge ballad are either not listening properly or just not very bright.

Verdict: This is one of the greatest songs of all time, and any jury that would find otherwise is either biased or just plain unqualified.

Oddly enough, when Dave Barry published his famous compendium of bad songs, he equated Julie London with people like William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as actors who dabbled disastrously in singing, apparently completely unaware of her large and distinguished body of work as a singer. Granted, a work like Barry’s can’t be expected to entail large amounts of research (he’s a comedian, not a critic, after all), but I’m genuinely surprised he didn’t already know about her singing career on the basis of this song alone. This is the prototypical ‘kiss-off single’, and forms the basis for every angry breakup song that came after it, from “I Will Survive” to “You Oughta Know” to “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)”; some of the most popular acts in modern music, including Beyonce, Pink and Kelly Clarkson, owe their careers to the trail this song blazed. And London’s very background as an actress is why this still remains arguably the definitive rendition of this song in spite of all the interpretations it’s received, a potent combination of withering sarcasm and deep-seated anger.

Verdict: Good, and it proves (in case it needed proving to anyone) that Julie London is a phenomenal singer.

This is another ‘respect for women’ song about a stripper, but this one is actually fairly sincere-sounding (apart from Juicy J’s disgusting rap verse, which doesn’t match the rest of the song at all, but we’ve pretty much come to expect that from him). Granted, it’s written in a macho, ‘thug’ vocabulary that doesn’t exactly match the subject matter, but at its core the sentiment itself is rather sensitive and progressive. More importantly, it has a lovely melody that serves as a sublime vehicle for Usher’s legendary voice, and like most of Usher’s weaker singles, its flaws don’t really seem to matter as much when the greatest male voice of modern pop is singing it. Granted, you could argue this same idea was done better in Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” around the same time. Fetty certainly doesn’t even approach Usher’s vocal splendor, and his lyrics aren’t really any more sensitive or progressive than those featured on this song, but something about Fetty’s endearingly unpolished sound does seem to give him a level of sincerity and warmth that this song never quite achieves. But in any case, both songs are vastly superior to the other attempt at a love song to a stripper that year, Ne-Yo’s decisively horrible “She Knows”.

Verdict: Not completely successful, and it kind of wound up being eclipsed by “Trap Queen” at the time, but it’s still pretty and well-sung enough to get at least a partial pass.

The pair of consecutive recordings of this song released during Glee‘s first reason serve as a powerful reminder that, however poor the show’s writing may have been, its musical components were strong enough to justify its breakout success at the time. To begin with, while Journey was, as a rule, a second-rank contender at best within the Arena Rock genre, this particular song is a stone-cold, genre-defining classic that more legit Arena acts like Boston or early-career Chicago would probably have killed to have written themselves. It has the same level of glorious over-the-top theatricality as the top-level classics by Queen or Meat Loaf, only with their usual undercurrent of irony being replaced by a blinding sincerity. The song doesn’t lack self-awareness…it knows exactly how cheesy it is…but its complete lack of shame at its own dopey earnestness somehow made it immensely inspiring. This, of course, made it a perfect match for the show’s overall vibe, and this was one of the rare times when a Glee performance of an actual old-school classic arguably managed to genuinely surpass the original recording. There’s a reason why this song became the show’s signature number and produced its first Top Ten hit, and why, in the depths of desperation in Season 5, one of their attempted solutions was basically “Let’s have Lea Michele record “Don’t Stop Believin’” again”. And say what you will about cheap tactics, but even that version was still an amazing performance of a great song.

Verdict: I will readily acknowledge that Glee was not good television, but it was often extremely good music, and this cover in all its forms is the definitive example of that.

21 Savage would seem to be, to all appearances, a pretty standard-issue, mediocre Trap Rapper. He raps the typical Gangsta-Rap cliches over beats that are adequate, but not especially interesting, and unlike the “Hook Artists” like Future and Young Thug, he doesn’t do anything particularly special with his vocal melodies. But there is one thing that places him above the rest of his particular subgenre…it’s just not something normally given much value in the Rap genre. Put simply, of all the Rappers that have ever threatened to kill me in a song (and there are a lot of them), this is the first one who sounds like he might actually do it. His talent lies not in his lyrics, his melodies or even his beats, but in his delivery. His voice seems to convey a nuanced, tormented insanity that is absolutely bone-chilling to listen to and gives his lyrics about violence and murder an impact they would never have in and of themselves. In this sense, he functions more like a Musical Theater actor than a conventional Rapper…after all, scores of people have had major careers on Broadway based purely on their ability to deliver the dramatic content of a song. His performance on this song, which details the apparently autobiographical story of his violently delinquent youth, actually reminds me in a strange way of Len Cariou in Sweeney Todd, which is quite a compliment.

Verdict: Average at best for the song itself, but very good indeed for the performance.