I imagine that the name "Burstered" comes from what happens to your internal organs after your car slams into a concrete divider when it failed to make a proper gear shift. That's the outcome of this song, anyways: most songs are a smooth drive down a straight path. Not Whenever You Call Me; it's a bit more like an arcade of bumper cars, with the song hitting the breaks and running into every obstacle during its running time. There's four distinct sections in this song: It starts out with a decent, if unspectacular guitar lick that immediately jumps into some crappy retread of Boy Eats World's The Middle. And then any momentum the song had is thrown headfirst through that concrete divider by doing a cut to a slow 6/8 section for the chorus in an attempt at stadium rock. Then back to that Boy Eats World section. Finally for the outro there's some inane chorus of "la la las" layered over a completely different melody. All these structural problems would be somewhat redeemable if any of those sections had a decent melody: they don't. Pretty much all of the melody in this is some thoughtlessly penned bullshit. This is basically the rock equivalent of I Got A Boy.
21. Fri.D - Want It
This song is your average mid-2000s hip-hop song, meaning it would've been pretty bad back then, but in this era of music it sounds like an absolute relic. The vocalists are way too far back in the mix for my taste, but that's probably for the best; there's a hideous T-Pain-styled autotune pitcher layered on the rapper's voice, and it's comical in contrast to the relatively effect-dry voice of the singer who also appears in this track. Not sure which one is worse: the rapper paired with the instrumental makes the song sound extremely dated, but the singer is an overindulgent masturbatory mess who thinks he can save this stinker by injecting intense inflection and warbling into every note. The song is much too long for its own good, anyways: I thought it was getting ready to end twice before they counted off days of the week. (Sadly no "This is Fri.D" pun, however.)
20. Skull, Haha ft. Kwon Jung Yeol - Beautiful Girl
This song improves of Sean Kingston's horrendous, original version titled Beautiful GirlS in a few ways:
Replaces Kingston with competent vocalists
Said competent vocalists don't sing in a ridiculous patois
The competent vocalist in the white sweater who sings the chorus is very cute and much healthier looking than Kingston
Recreates the sample from scratch, bringing it up to modern day production standards
Cuts the awkward, prominent line about considering suicide in an otherwise cheery-sounding doo-wop song
So taking a comparative net positive, it's fucking fantastic. In isolation, this is where it ends up on the Worst Songs of 2015 K-Pop list. That should tell you how fucking awful I think the source material is (Yes, both Kingston AND Ben E King's songs.). You can't polish a poop, people.
19. Jay Park ft Ugly Duck - Mommae
Getting kicked out of 2PM may have been the best thing that could've happened to Jay Park. Although 2PM is JYP's biggest earner, Jay is probably making more than the amount he could've made as part of 2PM with his solo promotions and endorsements. Even if that's not the case, he still gets the perks of freedom to do whatever he wants whenever he wants, and the freedom to release music to his tastes. However, Jay Park getting kicked out of 2PM is the worst thing that could've happened to the world as his music taste sucks cock. Jay has essentially fashioned himself into being the Chris Brown of Korea, with his music sounding every bit as ugly as Breezy's does. Ugly beat, ugly hook, Ugly Duck, those same ugly bafoons gang-chanting in the chorus. Mommae ticks off every box on the "How To Make a Shit Hip-Hop Song in 2015" checklist. At least Jay is still pretty, I guess.
You can stop looking forward to seeing Silento's Watch Me on this list: You won't find it. It was simply too competent to be legitimately bad. I offer an alternative, however: if there was ANY rap-dance craze song this year that deserves your ire and content, it's this one. Let me tell you a story:
You're a middle-aged convenience store owner in South Wales. Every day without fail, delinquent teens come and squat at the entrance to your store, smoking, drinking, and cursing at your customers. Sometimes they even enter your property and vandalize the area or steal merchandise. You've had enough, so you come up with a neat little device: A device that emits high-frequency pulses that causes teenagers to stare awkwardly at their wrists before becoming disinterested with whatever they were previously doing.
I swear that same device must've been used in Flicka Da Wrist at 0:27 because this was played at my band's end of-the-year dance with an attendance of near 300, and all that happened was people tried rolling their wrists a couple of times before completely clearing the dancefloor. And this was after not even 30 minutes of non-stop dancing (The classic party-fillers, Harlem Shake, Party Rock Anthem, Crank Dat, Cupid Shuffle, Gangnam Style, and yes, even Watch Me.). In an audience as non-discretionary as teenagers, nobody liked this shit.
Not hard to tell why, the song is obviously garbage. I've just never seen a floor clear faster in the four years I attended that banquet.
20. D.R.A.M. - Cha Cha
When I first heard this song, my reaction was along the line of "Oh shit, a Koji Kondo/Mario sample?! This song is going to be great..." And then the hip hop beat comes in and slams an inappropriate and downright dissonant minor feel over a sample in a major key. That the song really doesn't do anything more with the sample other than loop it so long that it's probably heard more times in Cha Cha than it was in the original Super Mario World is disappointing enough. Even more disheartening is that it actually still sounds good here, but is always quickly juxtaposed with that hideous hip-hop beat overlayed on it. It's the ultimate cocktease, reminding me of this one Japanese porn I saw once where this really cute actor was fellating a guy he had restrained. Every time he got to the brink of ejaculation he would back off and drip hot wax onto the poor guy's dick, and start all over again. Cha Cha is a bit like that in that there's some good in there, but it's crushed by a lot of bad, but you keep watching anyways hoping for good to eventually win out. In this case it doesn't. The actor just ends up busting his captive's balls and you learn to always look at the tags of all porn before you watch it. Too bad music doesn't have a "is ultimately a shit song" tag.
19. Rihanna - American Oxygen
Fun fact: I had never gotten around to listening to this song before I had to for this list earlier this month. I had seen Rihanna fans were very split on this song, saying something along the lines of it having bad production, didn't think too much of it. And then I heard the song.
I think we need to talk about what production is.
There are a few, universally agreed upon hallmarks of good production:
All important elements in the mix can be heard easily (For pop this is basically just the groove, the vocal, and any extra melody.)
Sound level is equal to that of your competitors'
Decent playback on a wide spread of systems, from your studio monitor, to your car radio, to your iPhone
Production is the process someone takes getting the ideal way a song sounds in their head into a fixed form in real life. That means if the original concept in the producer's mind was a nauseating, vilepiece of shit and they go out and produce a song that sounds like a nauseating, vilepiece of shit, then that's good production. If they produce a song that's not quite as vile as it could have been, then that's bad production. It doesn't matter if you actually like the production, when assessing production you're only evaluating the effectiveness of the producer to turn their vision into a real product.
Am I saying that Rihanna's American Oxygen has good production, then? Well, if the producer of American Oxygen set out to write a song with a part that sounds like a wrench was thrown into a running dryer, a song that has a dubstep bassline that sounds like it was taken from the inside of a conveyorized car wash, a song that sounds like it was recorded on the floor of a General Motors assembly plant, then yes, American Oxygen has excellent production.
Was worried this was going to be another boring ass ballad but then it immediately picks up after the piano intro, thank god. The gentleman unfortunately known as Kim Hyung Joong (He hasn't beaten his girlfriend, as far as we know.) realizes that most of the audience probably isn't too interested in looking at him for four minutes and instead wisely hires the handsome Ryohei Otani to be the protagonist for this video. Great choice, as now we have eye candy to go along with the ear candy this song serves. Kim has a great voice on him and gives a great performance, the song is very chill, and the synthesizer that goes crazy towards the end of the song is a great point of climax. Was a bit worried when I saw a Spica member was on this, but she's not very present at all and is barely noticed. Her outro where her vocally gets progressively more dominant is a great close on the song, surprisingly.
20. Big Bang - Sober
I'd like to think that Big Bang's failure to recapture the spark of Fantastic Baby with Bang Bang Bang prompted them to sit down and really think about what their next move should be. (ie what earliersong of theirs that they should rehashnext, they did it for the rest of their majorsingles this era.) Whoever suggested that they bite off of G-Dragon's Crooked is a genius, because it resulted in the best Big Bang-related chorus since 2012's Monster. Sober is a really loose and rugged song, and its vocal arrangement furthers that feeling. G-Dragon's bratty tone actually works well on the chorus here, combining with Daesang's very rough take to add to the punk-like tone of the song. Even the infectious intro synth riff is abrasive, another great sound design choice. The melody of the song already lends itself to shouting it out at the top of your lungs while you're drunk, surely it'll be a mainstay at noraebangs for years to come. Some people might say that the oversaturation of Big Bang's mostly mediocre singles this year was annoying, but if that was what they needed to get a song of this caliber out, then I don't care. Sober is easily up there with Big Bang's best singles.
19. AOA - Heart Attack
You're a female, Korean first-year high school student, and boy does life suck. You aren't particularly good at anything in school—you've got to study twice as hard just to do as well as your classmates, so you already know you won't be able to attend any of the top-tier universities. You aren't particularly good looking, either—you're average, but the boys at your school aren't interested in you; no, they're interested in them. All you ever hear the boys talking about is how hot those 8OH!8-or-whatever-they're-called girls are, debating which one has the best body, or the best face, or how great their latest single is, with its powerful, stadium-ready beats and very cool scatted bass vocals during the prechorus. You can't stand those sluts, daring to have fun, making more money than you could possibly dream of, and stealing guys from you that they've never even met. So what's a girl to do?
You come up with a devious plan. You'll create multiple social media accounts and leave negative remarks about their body sizes, accuse their company of buying articles to artificially inflate their public appeal (Even though their appealextends beyond those articles.), and call their rapper a chipmunk-voiced bitch. You cackle like a crone. "That'll teach those skanks to mess with me." Yeah, that'll teach 'em. You win, Netizen 4. [+164, -43].
Very intelligently written song, with effective arrangement of silence and verse, and call and response. The female responses are especially cool with the heavy flanger layered over them. The song picks one very solid interpolation in Mausberg's Get Nekkid, and builds on it well over the song, even pulling off an effective key change, and then returning to the home key again without a hitch. The end has to be favorite part of King Kunta: the portamento-keyed wind instrument and guitar combo at the end of the song serve well to drive everything home. All around, really cool instrumental with interesting vocal arrangement and processing.
20. Imagine Dragons - Roots
To be completely honest, Imagine Dragons never really wowed me. Demons was boring and typical radio fodder, It's Time was too cheesy, Radioactive was cool in sound, but it still employed dubstep, and I could never support dubstep. Not sure if Imagine Dragons are actually going back to wherever their roots are after their surprising underperformance with I Bet My Life, but I do know I like the sound of Roots. Tense piano, intense war snare, and pretty cool polyrhythmic, almost industrial-sounding kick drum that adds interest to this track that it would have simply not have had otherwise. Sounds more like a digital over or firecrackers than a purposeful musical decision, but I'm into these weird music choices so I don't care either way, this is a nice track. Plus it's short as hell, so thanks for not wasting my time, Imagine Dragons!
19. Phases - I'm In Love With My Life
If I had the power to do it, I would ensure no one would ever use the words "indie" or "alternative" to describe a song ever again. Terms that describe nothing because they can be applied to anything. For example: I'm In Love With My Life. I'm a DJ at my campus's radio station, and as a college station, we're encouraged to give smaller artists (And by small, I don't mean Tinashe or Tori Kelly. Logic's CD is probably the biggest record we've ever been sent. Our station was spinning Fetty Wap way before Trap Queen was even a thing, if that gives you some perspective on our scope.) spotlights by playing and reviewing their CDs. Phases's album For Life was one such CD we were sent, and this is on it. For Life was classified as an alternative album.
Bull-fucking-shit. Listen to I'm In Love With My Life. If that's alternative, then Earth, Wind and Fire were an alternative band, too. This should tell you that the alternative label is nothing more than a marketing device to sell pop-outsiders the same old pop music. There was absolutely nothing "alternative" about For Life, it was all 80s synthpop that easily could've been recorded by Taylor Swift. (Was a lot better than 1989, however.) I guess it could be "alternative" if you considered it to be an "alternative to your crappy non-chorus having, non-fun pop songs of today."
But that's just me ranting about how ridiculous labeling things "indie" and "alternative" is, I would've liked the album about the same had they called it what it is, pop music. I'm In Love With My Life was the best song on it, and I was both surprised and happy to learn than it qualified for this list. Not the best chorus of the year, though it's pretty far up there, but it definitely is the most impactful chorus, the mixers did a great job with making sure it punched you in the face. Take Me There and Vertigo are another two good cuts from this album, if you're interested in checking it out.
Also, this is another case of people with a tight budget making the most of it, the video is fantastic, and it was shot in reverse, which is ridiculously cool to me.
Bull-****ing-****. Listen to I'm In Love With My Life. If that's alternative, then Earth, Wind and Fire were an alternative band, too.
Thank you. Thank you so much for this. Phases are about as alternative as Katy Perry. I have no issue with people liking Phases or anything, but the idea of Phases being "alternative" is just freaking laughable.
"King Kunta" is really fun and cool. Red commentary in 2015 is so strong.
Thanks for the comments, hopefully getting numbers 18-16 today. Thinking I'm going to do the Top 10 one at a time. Probably not a day apart, but maybe each position revealed every 6-12 hours or so, with 2-3 updates a day
RIP the thorough lashing of Rihanna AND Beyonce in the AO review. Gather IT. Also, YAS GET THOSE STUPID ASS HARMONIZERS. They make 5H that much more unbearable.