Bad Songs List Court

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.

This song is quite a bit better than most of the posthumous Michael Jackson releases (which might explain why it was the only one to attain significant success on the charts), probably because it was made from an unfinished demo of a song that actually got released during Jackson’s life, albeit on a Johnny Mathis album and not under Jackson’s own name. That said, this kind of virtual duet with a dead singer is notoriously hard to pull off unless you have a close personal connection with said singer, and the fact that the song itself is decent isn’t enough to make it convincing here.

Verdict: Better than most of the posthumous Jackson songs, but still not very good.

This attempt to combine modern club music with minimalist technique is…misguided, to say the least. Granted, Minimalist Techno has a respectable legacy, having produced some fascinating artists like Ricardo Villalobos, but it is a genre that relies on subtlety and sophistication for its appeal, and does not lend itself to being watered down into a pop-friendly form. This incredibly repetitive brainslug of an instrumental gets tedious within the first few seconds, and becomes downright intolerable by end of its five minute running time.

Verdict: Bad.

Here, One Direction attempt a medley cover of two Punk/New-Wave songs. It was intended as a charity single, so I’m sure their intentions were good. But Blondie’s “One Way Or Another” is a stalker song and the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks” is about underage sex, and it’s clear that One Direction has completely failed to grasp either of these facts, electing to perform the songs in exactly the same way they performed the vapid teenybopper pop that was their stock-in-trade at the time. They would start improving significantly almost immediately after this, ironically with a retro-Classic Rock sound theoretically not that different from this, but this stands as one last relic of their embarrassing early period. It is also another addition, along with the “We Are the World” remake and the X-Factor versions of “Heroes” and “Wishing On a Star”, to the growing list of 2010s charity singles that are complete and utter disasters.

Verdict: Bad.

This song has an unconvincing lyric full of awkward rhymes and Miley Cyrus’ terribly shrill vocals working against it, but it also has a terrifically catchy pop-music blast of a tune (thanks mostly to the contribution of the talented Jessica Cornish, better known to audiences these days as Jessie J). It’s far less interesting than the strikingly similar song released by Demi Lovato the same year, “La La Land”, but it’s still probably Cyrus’ best single to date…I mean, what exactly is going to compete with it? And it did become the basis for a beloved Weird Al parody. Sometimes one of the functions of Weird Al’s works is simply to give us better lyrics and vocals so we can enjoy an already-great tune, and “Party In the CIA” is one of those times.

Verdict: Not perfect, but still better than just about anything else Cyrus ever released.

This song was one of the first of a wave of Indie Rock crossover hits that has lasted close to two years, and while it’s definitely one of the weaker songs to ride that wave, I suppose it’s decent enough. The fact that it’s comparatively lightweight for Indie Rock isn’t really the problem…so were its two most immediate peers in that field, Owl City’s “Fireflies” and Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks”, and they’ve both aged quite well. The real problem is that it’s just not that interesting a song, especially when you compare it to the Indie crossover classics from the next few years like “We Are Young”, “Somebody That I Used To Know”, “Pompeii”, or “Shut Up and Dance”. It’s really just a fairly typical sex jam of the era, only set to Killers-style retro-New-Wave instead of processed club beats—pleasant, but it doesn’t have a lot of actual content.

Verdict: Okay, but not interesting enough to really stand out in the Indie Rock crossover field.

As a piece of music, this is superb. Unfortunately, the lyric is a lame comedic novelty, rather reminiscent of some of the weaker Weird Al “food” songs (like “Grapefruit Diet”)…the ones that don’t really tell any jokes, but just name-drop a bunch of foods. Given that Timberlake was involved in the biggest and best novelty hit of the previous decade, “Dick In a Box”, I can see what he was thinking with this one, and while it isn’t funny (I mean, at all), the superb beat goes a long way toward making it tolerable.

Verdict: Stupid but catchy, and you could do a lot worse than that for a Pop song circa 2010.

Like its fellow contender for the title of quintessential stalker song of all time, “Every Breath You Take”, this song is often oddly misinterpreted as a love song, but in this case that is almost entirely due to the fact that cover versions almost invariably soften the original recording’s sound. In what is possibly the most terrifying Blues performance ever, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins delivers this song in a grotesque yowl that could never be mistaken for anything but an expression of twisted obsession. Granted, there have been some pretty good cover versions of the song over the years (like the one by the Animals), but there’s no replacing the original, so it’s worth seeking out as the definitive version of this classic song.

Verdict: Some of the cover versions have watered it down, but the original is still as potent as ever, and could never be confused with a love song by anyone who’d actually heard it.

When it comes to the children of great musicians having embarrassingly bad music careers, Nancy Sinatra is right down there with David Cassidy; and frankly, at least David Cassidy could sing. In addition to being extremely poorly written (sample line: ‘You keep lyin’ when you outta be truthin’), this song has a spectacularly uninteresting melody. In the days before auto-tune, they compensated for singers with tin ears or nonexistent ranges by writing two-note wonders like this one, and while a few of them have held up (e.g. “Just In Time”, written for Sydney Chaplin), most of them sound pretty uninteresting to the modern ear.

Verdict: Bad