We've covered the best... now let's look at the WORST. Same rules apply: only one song per artist, and I could only choose songs from Billboard's Year-End Hot 100. This is gonna be fun...
#10:
"Back in Time" by Pitbull
Year-End Position: #62
It's kind of impressive that this song manages to reek of both desperation and laziness at the same time. Everything about it, from the ill-used sample to the random dubstep breakdown, suggests that it was hastily slapped together in about an hour, if that.
Here's how I imagine it went down; Pitbull was asked to do a song for the new Men in Black movie (for God knows what reason), and he decided to put it off until a day before the deadline. In a panic, he grabbed a few lines from his rough draft of 'International Love' and haphazardly threw them together. Then he remembered that the song is supposed to be about Men in Black, so he threw in a few awkward references to Agent J and Agent K. Then he remembered that the movie is about time travel, so he threw in a random retro-sounding sample, saving himself the trouble of writing an actual hook. Then he remembered that dubstep is the 'in' thing nowadays, so he threw in a dubstep breakdown for good measure.
I know I just used the phrase 'threw in' several times in a row, but that's how this song sounds; it sounds like it was thrown together without any kind of effort on Pitbull's part. So, yeah, it's awkward, sloppy and horribly unpleasant to listen to. Next!
Admittedly, I'm usually not a fan of Disney pop starlets, but every now and then one of them will impress me. For instance, I really liked 'Ready or Not', the breakthrough single of Waverly Place's Bridgit Mendler. I was somewhat less impressed by... well... this.
First, I don't want to get into the quality of Selena's singing, but let's just say that it's kind of appropriate that the music video takes place in a karaoke bar. Second, isn't teen pop usually supposed to be well polished and catchy? Why was Selena given a beat that sounds like deadmau5 with a bad case of the runs?
And that's not even getting into the bafflingly inane refrain. "I love you like a love song"? What the hell does that even mean? That sentence is so vapid and meaningless I can't even begin to describe what's wrong with it. If that's the kind of sweet talk she tried to use on Justin, then it's no wonder he left her.
Here's a fun exercise for all you musicians out there: take out your instrument of choice. Play an A, then a G#, then a C#. Are you done?
You just played Rack City. That's the entire song. Not the chorus, not the main hook, the entire friggin' song is just those three notes repeated over and over again. Wakko's Two-Note Song sounded less repetitive than this! And yes, I know a simple beat isn't necessarily a bad one, but this beat is so bare-bones and minimalist that it sounds like it was composed in the Stone Age.
And that would be forgivable if Tyga was an interesting or talented rapper, but he... isn't. His flow is sluggish, his tone is monotonous, and his lyrics range from generic to outright stupid. Seriously, "I got yo grandma on my dick"? That line isn't even fun to make fun of, it's just moronic and kind of gross. If this is the best that Young Money has to offer, than G.O.O.D. Music has little to worry about.
"Somethin' bout a truck in a farmer's field"? "Somethin' bout beer, sittin' on ice, after a long hard day, makes it taste just right"? I'm sorry, but when I listen to these lyrics, this is all I hear: "country cliche country cliche country cliche country cliche country cliche..."
There's nothing about this song that feels genuine. It's so calculated and artificial that it might as well have been composed on an assembly line. It's nothing but shameless pandering to the base; in other words, it's like a Luke Bryan single without any of the dorky goofiness that makes his music tolerable.
But what I really hate about this song is the self- congratulatory tone of the whole thing. "Hey, look, everyone! I drive trucks! I drink beer! I go skinny dippin' in the lake! Ain't I just a wonderful, wholesome lil' country boy?" Even if I was part of this song's target demographic, I would find this way too patronizing to suffer through. Buck off, Kip Moore.
When this song was released, there were a few critics who compared it to Paul Simon's '50 Ways to Leave Your Lover'. And every single one of them deserves to be slapped repeatedly for tarnishing Paul Simon's good name. Why are they similar? Because they both have the number 50 in the title? '50 Ways to Leave Your Lover' was about how difficult it is to break it off with someone, even though conventional wisdom suggests that it should be easy.
Meanwhile, '50 Ways to Say Goodbye' is about the fact that Pat Monahan can't write a simple breakup song without going into full-on crazy mode. Let me explain the premise of this song: Pat Monahan's girlfriend just broke up with him and moved away, so he tries to think up a bunch of excuses he could use to explain to his friends why she isn't around. And all of them involve her dying in grisly, violent ways.
"Hey, Pat, where's your girlfriend?" "Oh, her? She was burned to death by a tanning machine."
Wha?! How the hell did Pat expect people to react to this? The whole thing is too morbid to be funny, but too cartoonish to be taken seriously (the mariachi horns really don't help in that respect). As it stands, it's just bewildering and slightly disturbing. Pat's no good at goodbyes... or songwriting, for that matter.
The first song I heard from Cher Lloyd was the infamous 'Swagger Jagger'. 'Want U Back' isn't nearly as bad, but that's kind of like saying that getting punched in the face isn't nearly as bad as getting stabbed in the balls.
This is everything I hated about high school compressed into one four-minute package. The narrator of this song is an awful, awful human being. She dumps a guy and breaks his heart to pieces, and then she feels like she's entitled to have him back just because he's giving some other girl his attention. She's a jealous, soulless harpy who doesn't care about anyone but herself. And the most insufferable thing about this song is that Cher Lloyd knows this, on some level. Listen to her smug tone of voice and the way she punctuates every verse with a massive grunt; I mean, she's just reveling in her awfulness.
In all fairness, I have plenty of songs in my library that express far more disgusting sentiments than this. A villainous character can still be entertaining, after all. However, those songs are made by people who are charming, or witty, or otherwise endearing. This... isn't. I'm sorry, but I'm way too old to be entertained by Cher's brand of obnoxious, catty adolescence. UHHH!
The write-ups are fun to read I agree with #5, #6, #9 to an extent. Fully agree with the rest.
Thanks! It's always great to hear that someone enjoys my writing. I'll be honest with you, the bad reviews are often a lot more fun to write than the good reviews, in part because they give me more opportunities to write jokes.
We had a hell of a lot of fascinating hit songs this year, too. Honestly, I looked over Billboard's Year-End Hot 100 of 2012, and there were very, very few songs that I disliked. This was, overall, a very good year for the pop charts in my humble opinion.
It's a little difficult to explain my disdain for this song. Instead of having two or three glaring problems like most of my previous entries in this list, it has a dozen itty bitty problems that all combine to make it a truly wretched listening experience.
Gavin DeGraw sings like he has a hernia, so that's problem number one. His phrasing can get really weird, too. I know it seems kind of odd that I would complain about something like that, but trust me when I say that it gets in the way. "Hope, hope there's a conversation...wherewebothadmit, we, had it good...but until then, IT'S-AAAAlienation, I know, that, muchisunderstood..."
Then there's the backing track, which sounds vaguely like a minotaur banging on a Casio keyboard. If that wasn't bad enough, it was run through this audio filter that just makes it sound like a minotaur banging on a Casio keyboard that also happens to be short-circuiting. Mix in some clumsy lyrics and garnish it with the occasional forced rhyme ("I thought you were innocent... but now I know you're magnificent") and you've got yourself an adult contemporary schlock souffle.