WORSTSONG

Highlighting the worst songs in the world.

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Yes "Owner of a Lonely Heart (Extended Remix)" I've been wary, here on Worst Song, of including either remixes or extended versions, seeing as they are rarely the most representative examples of any given artist's work. Many times, extended versions are jam-session curios, studio fuckery, fully realized narrative suites, or bonuses for the true fans tired of simply hitting replay. Notable examples include Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," which has a 2:52 single edit and a 17:05 extended ("real") version (or even longer live versions), and The Gap Band's "You Dropped a Bomb on Me"--the 4:05 version most people know is fluffed out to a stultifying 13:07 extended version, which seems never to end, and may in fact not end (no one has ever finished listening to it). Remixes, similarly, can improve the original song or take it in any number of bizarre directions. The remix is never a known quantity, and comes bearing its own disclaimster. Expectations are lower; clemency is more readily given. All of which amplifies why Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart (Extended Remix)" is included here, being as, even after all that qualifying, it is still so bad, so offputting, and such a sullying of a classic song. Let me be clear: "Owner of a Lonely Heart" is a good/great song--even the extended version of it--EVEN THE REMIX OF IT! But the extended remix is a true horror, a jaw-droppingly awful concoction that cackles in the face of any given listener. What's uncanny is that, while the party or parties responsible for this monstrosity do not appear in any credits listing, it seems the remix is the work of the band itself. So, let's dig in. Right from the get-go we're being toyed with, as the very first note is subjected to cartoonish pitch-shifting (pitch-shitting, you might say), which is about as perfect a harbinger for what's to come as the remixer could manage. It almost plays as a nonthematic, sonic parody of the original, something maybe Dr. Demento might produce, or DJ Detweiler, or Vic Berger. But we quickly find there's no upshot here, no satiric endgame or reason for such prankery. It's not fun. It's not funny. It's not sonically interesting. It's not enjoyable. It just sounds wrong, and it is wrong. Very wrong! Not that there's a whole lot of content here to parse. This could have easily been a 90-second interlude reprise thing, but nope, it's twice as long as the original song. After that first disturbance...nothing happens. The remix settles into its long, long, long, long, long-ass groove. Sit back, get comfortable, and relax, because for the next seven minutes, you'll be subjected to an unbroken stream of the song's five notes, over and over and over. About a minute into this closed loop, the interruptions start, with bursts of arrhythmic tinny drum fills, arrhythmic dissonant keyboard stabs, and arrhythmic vocal samples, pitched into atonality. The remix is technically instrumental, but it uses multiple instruments at their worst capacity in order to bridge the gap between disinterest and white-hot aggravation. What's most clear here is that this is a first take, that there is no actual editing or review or thought behind this remix. And so, that being the case, the question remains: Why release it at all, on any platform? Why does it exist? Is there any more disrespectful gift to fans, who, upon shelling out extra money for the deluxe album version, put on their headphones to hear...the band dicking around in the sound booth? Ruining one of their best songs? What's the message here? What's the intent? Above and beyond being merely inconvenient and unkind to the loyal fan, this verges on the cruel, for the fan now has to not only suffer through this, but, as a fan, try to find some angle to it, to puzzle it out, to, ultimately, like it. Meanwhile, the bandmembers of Yes, having recorded, mastered, and released this crap-hell for some reason, will never listen to it again, the fans being the only ones doing so out of a misbegotten sense of completism or loyalty. And this, finally, is why this song deserves to be a Worst: it's mean to the only ones who would ever hear it. Yes might as well have called the song "Me Fans Are Stupid Pigs." To the band I say: No.

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Björk - The Gate Come on, do something. Or get the fuck off the stage!

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Not a WorstSong because it's not a bad song, but a notable mention goes out to Kathy Perry's "Chained to the Rhythm," simply because it should so, so, SO obviously be "Chained to the Melody" instead. "Melody" rhymes with the previous line ("Drink! This one's on me"), it fits the rhythm much better, and more easily segues into her hook-ending vocal flourishes. That hook features very slapdash lyrics overall, performed in a stilted, jarring cadence--the opposite of rhythm--but the biggest flaw is the fact that the songs screams to be "Melody." The song's most important word is the wrong word. (The song's exceptionally vague, nonexistent "political" message remains unaffected by this change.) Shame to see Sia cowrote this song seeing as she has such an ear for melody. The move suggests either exhaustion on Sia's part, releasing scads of her own music as well as writing scads more for other artists, or just classic crabs-in-a-basket sabotage, Sia realizing she can give away her worst material, or even purposefully ruin what would have been a decent pop song by sullying the integral word. Kathy meanwhile does what she's told, as she always has, since she was Kathy Hudson, pretend Christian pop artist, and gamely sings what is very clearly the wrong word.

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WorstSongs of the Year 2016 Countdown #1. Kendrick Lamar "untitled 07 | 2014 - 2016" Kendrick Lamar has always been his own worst enemy. While many see him as one of the most essential, searing, powerful voices in hip hop today, he’s forever had someone holding him back, keeping him from being truly great, limiting his true potential, and that person’s name is Kendrick Lamar. Lamar's penchant to include everything on his albums, and throw away nothing, to never ever kill a darling, has always given his music a perplexing quality, because while much of it is good, all of it suffers from the question of how good it could have been, if only he’d had a lighter touch, if only he’d done even a tiny amount of paring. Any form of art, be it music, book, or film, cannot suffer under the weight of all its ideas—in writing, a piece of work that’s nothing but ideas is called a “vomit draft,” where everything is gotten out before the best bits are chosen, the rest jettisoned, the art all the better for its control, for its brevity, for it being the best expression of itself. Kendrick stops himself from ever achieving this. On his album good kid, m.A.A.d city, he killed his own momentum every song, by putting completely nonintegral, nonmusical, uninteresting, unrevealing, pointless “cinematic” interludes after every song. From lurking creepers to rowdy bangers, every song came to a screeching halt with these mood-killers, and severely reduced the album’s replay value. Why bother including them? What do they actually reveal? What do they add? Why are they on every track? Why didn’t someone—anyone!—tell Kendrick no, for the sake of your own album, for the sake of your own art, cut this shit out. Slack stitches weaken the overall tapestry, making what could have been a great album into an experience that resembles traffic-jam driving, those few moments you think you’re out of it and accelerate forward doomed by the brake lights ahead. Lamar did a similar self-sabotage on his third album, To Pimp a Butterfly. Again, gigantic album, full of ideas, many of them good, many of them that should have been cut. But…again, none of them were cut. Everything is in full, the entire vision, and the entire vision is a mess. There’s good art in the mess, absolutely, so why hide it? And why is the artist himself ruining his own best material? It’s especially obnoxious on this LP, as he repeats himself, the same poem used as a coda once, twice, three times, more… He’s living ADHD, splashing India ink on his oil paintings and carrying on, making beauty then smirching it, repeat ad infinitum. This is not a good thing, and it murders replay value. Worst of all on To Pimp a Butterfly is his treatment of “i,” the clear standout track and first single. It’s a spectacular song, but instead of letting it just be, he interrupts it halfway to give a tired, hackneyed speech on race relations. Good god, man—play the fucking song! The speech is fine, that’s not the point—the point is it interrupts a great song! Stop interrupting yourself, Kendrick! The speech is like a lesion on a dimepiece, like the word “Shutterstock” on a lovely image. He’s a DJ who won’t stop interrupting the music with his hypetalk crowdwork, only while he’s playing his own music! Again, Kendrick Lamar is Kendrick Lamar’s worst enemy. He infects himself. Imagine if Usain Bolt decided to stop running towards the finish line and ran to the crowds. You get the idea: It’s a self-defeating prerogative. So this year Kendrick released untitled unmastered, a collection of extra songs, other songs, B sides as so forth, but much like Radiohead with Amnesiac, Kendrick released the thing as an album. Yes, this is an album, being championed by many as one of the best albums of the year, being heralded and fellated and heaped with garlands and accolades. Like all of his albums, much of untitled unmastered finds Kendrick at his best, with fusillade rhymes, head raps, switch-ups, doubletime, and overall, just interesting wordplay, notable, like all the best art, for being an earnest exploration of his psyche. And most of the album’s songs are fine; some work better than others, sure, but none stand out too much above the pack. There is, however, another song on untitled unmastered. A song that sticks out the other way, lying in a big gelatinous puddle below the rest of the songs. And that is “untitled 07 | 2014 – 2016” (henceforth “07”). First and foremost, and most importantly, “07” instantly disqualifies Lamar from any year-end best-of list, because with it as part of the album, the album must be judged accordingly, and the curve of the entire project goes way down. One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch, especially if it’s the largest apple. In attempting to find an illustrative YouTube video for “07” to include with this post, I was stymied again and again by videos that only wanted to show the “Levitate” single edit, the first two minutes of an eight-minute song. No one had posted the full version of the song—the true, real, unabridged, unadulterated, untitled unmastered version—the version Kendrick intended. Imagine! A major artist, who many call the greatest living rapper and treat as the Second Coming of Hip Hop, with a song that can’t be Googled! If the song is so essential, why isn’t it available to anyone, instantly?! Why isn’t it the first possible search result, and the second, and the third, and so forth? It’s none of these and this is all the vindication I need, inherent commiseration from the Internet itself that not a soul is actually suffering through this whole blah. Who could? No one, that’s who. You shouldn’t. Go ahead and fast-forward through the latter half of the song. Does the one-minute outtake after “Levitate” come to anything? Does anything ever happen beyond tedious guitar plucking and soundcheck studio murmurs? Is there anything else than an unedited recording of dicking around in the soundbooth? Nope. Try to scrub ahead to the bit where anything happens. There isn’t one. Yes, everyone treats “07” like a dirty secret, best left undiscussed. Unfortunately, it’s a very big part of a very small album. I’ll give Kendrick this: If “07” was the last track, I’d forgive it, though it’s still fraught with needlessness and makes untitled unmastered a tiny, throwaway EP. But! It is not the last track. Hell, Frank Ocean released a big, dumb, needlessly long crapsong on this year’s Blonde. But he had the decency and the foresight to place it at the very end of the album, after the music had finished, with a pause between, more or less recommending that you turn off the record. It was the aural equivalent of the credits reel, only there for those who really, really want to know who the best boy is. Or think back to, say, The Polyphonic Spree’s first album The Beginning Stages of…, which they ended with a 36-minute drone called “A Long Day” (the UK version wisely and hilariously cuts this down to a minute and 45 seconds). “A Long Day” was long, it was very long, it was 36 minutes long, and it was a drone. Probably no one, Tim DeLaughter included, has listened to the whole thing in its entirety once. But I’ll tell you what: He put that motherfucker at the end. He didn’t put a song after it. Could you imagine? Or going back to Frank, what if “Futura Free” (the full version with the end interviews) was thrown right in the middle, the way his nine-minute “Pyramids” was on Channel Orange? It’d be unthinkable. Unfortunately, nothing is unthinkable for Kendrick Lamar. Everything is thinkable, everything is admissible. He’s like a five-year-old prince everyone has to humor because he has the power to execute people. The way Lamar places “07” on the album, he intends there to be more to come, meaning that this utter mess is meant to be listened to in full in order to have the truest album experience. And who would ever want to dilute Kendrick’s vision? In a just world, an editor would have stepped in either in preproduction, production, or postproduction, and happily trimmed “07” down to a tidy two minutes of murky mood-rapping. Instead, with full creative control, we get eight minutes and sixteen seconds of pure endurance. untitled unmastered has a third adjective, and that’s unedited. Oh, how it needs an edit! Full creative control, without any editors, is often championed as the only path to true artistry, the only way to earnestly reach an artistic catharsis. But in reality, it’s rarely a good thing, and more often the undoing of an otherwise promising artist: Thomas Pynchon enjoyed a total lack of creative control for years, and it led him to produce the widely, correctly despised Against the Day. It’s an 1100-page slog, and shows the sign of no editor at any point. And even among those who liked The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky’s least edited movie, few denied that the scale of ambition exceeded the capacity of the film. How many people felt that Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac needed to be split into two two-hour movies? Kendrick’s albums are also infamously long long long, but the others are at least (over)packed with ideas. The problem with untitled unmastered, released, again, as an album and not a fan-club-only grab-bag of drawing-room scrapings, is that it’s actually less concentrated than its longer counterparts. This is why "07" is #1, the worst of the Worst. No one is putting The Taylor Girlz on their year-end best-of lists. No one really gives a shit about The Federal Empire, though they suck a dick the size of two dicks. No, the world is watching Kendrick’s every move, and this is a move they want to ignore and forget. But there it is, the big, glaring, eight-minute mistake on the middle of the throwaway odds-and-sods he chose to call an album and release this year. This is the WorstSong. It’s an injustice, mostly to Lamar himself, at the hands of Lamar himself. In the spirit of the song, I've left this review unedited. I've included every sentence without cutting down the unnecessary or redundant ones. Don't you get tired of hearing me repeat myself? Doesn't it make your skin crawl to read and re-read the same passages? Wouldn't it have been so much better if someone would have [EDIT]

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WorstSongs of the Year 2016 Countdown #2. Lizzo "Phone" While it lacks some of the abominable traits of the other entries on this year's list, Lizzo's "Phone" is certainly the most punishing of the songs here. Forget about brutalizing terrorist insurgents at Guatánamo Bay by playing Metallica, Eminem, Marilyn Manson, or even The Bee Gees on endless repeat, inducing musical torture: Lizzo's "Phone" is torture to listen to ONCE, much less on an infinite loop. It's an absolutely unconscionable song, created in darkness by those incapable of feeling empathy for their fellow man. Yes, "Phone" is a migraine, and it's indefensible, far from being sassy, cute, or empowering. It doesn't matter that Lizzo is shattering stereotypes of female sex appeal: she may be; she may not be. It doesn't matter that Lizzo is a refereshing, proudly plus-sized woman who doesn't have time for your tired mansplaining: she may; she may not. Lizzo's story doesn't matter, Lizzo's cultural significance doesn't matter--none of that matters in the quality vacuum that is "Phone." If the resurrected ghost of Prince Bowie Cohen exhumed itself and released "Phone," it would be in the exact same place: right here on WorstSong. The same lines. The same lines. The same lines again and again and again. The merest minimalist stutter beat. The same lines. The same lines. The same lines. The same lines. The same lines. The same lines. THE SAME LINES. THE SAME LINES. THE SAME LINES.

Forget the three minutes this song stretches out to: it can be condensed down to maybe 12 seconds of real, actual music. The rest is all filler, referencing itself on a fixed circuit. Like The Taylor Girlz, this year's batch of WorstSongs does an astounding job of making very short songs seem never-ending. There's nothing left to add: There is zero artistry here. There is zero creativity. There is zero thought, intention, or effort. There is less than nothing. It's miserable. It's despicable. It's needless. It's an audio prank with no one laughing. It's Lizzo's "Phone."

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WorstSongs of the Year 2016 Countdown #3. The Federal Empire "The American Dream" This one does it all wrong. It borrows (pronounced "steals") from all manner of highly discouraged sources, creating an amalgam of Exactly What Not to Do Right Now. It's an extremely self-conscious song, wanting to hit every "correct" note and be the omnirock song of the moment, but in herniating itself to exactly ape every wrongheaded idea of the zeitgeist and dumbing those ideas down to deep dumb-dumb levels, it comes across not just as a mistake, but as a reproach of pop culture. It does too much, and it does far too little. When you color with all of the crayons on top of each other, the result comes out a shit-stain brown.

The Federal Empire are the newest trio of Los Angeles beards doing the genre of music that's triangulated between alternative rock, pop, and folk, that's best called The Lumineers. They follow in the Toms-clad footsteps of Mumford & Sons & Monsters & Men & Head & Heart & Imagine Dragons & OneRepublic & Twenty-One Pilots & Bastille & X Ambassadors & Milky Chance, right into the same well-trod territory, territory so trod it can't really be called territory, as the treading has long ago worn it to dust. But they don't try to be one of these bands. No no: they try to be all of them. "The American Dream" (an immediately foreboding title) begins with a hackneyed, disingenuous acoustic pizzicato with handclaps, as if to suggest dudes hanging out on a back porch. They're not dudes hanging out on a back porch, though, they're a heavily filtered Instagram photo of dudes hanging out on a back porch. Lead singer Chad Wolf comes in, sneering with all the profundity of a college Freshman who's just been told the gist of Howard Zinn. He namechecks Netflix and Super Size Me, suggesting that America is hypocritical, that our desires are our undoing, that, that it's our ability to have every desire instantaneously gratified that has led us to being secretly, deeply unhappy! If The Federal Empire isn't the first to express these irreverent shockers and pithy witticisms, then their name is The Federal Empire.

Yes, the lyrics are very dumb. Very very dumb. Especially in the second verse when the proper nouning gets out of control, showing that they didn't even have idea enough to last through one whole song, instead resorting to "G4," "Lambo," and "Botox."Yeeugh. Knock it off, boys. But it's not just the lyrics. No, what's going on here is much more insidious. For underneath those lyrics are dumbhumming (dumming?), a goddamn banjo (comes in at 0:33), and group-chanted choruses. The "all right, go up" at 1:16, a fresh blast of extemporizing, is anything but, as coldly calculated as a salesman's sympathy. The chorus is meant to sound liberating and bold, and it might if it weren't every lead single's chorus of all the bands mentioned above. The band, sharklike and trend-obsessed, even mimics the current batch of Kygo-led tropical house, banjo trilling with a "PlayfulTM" countermelody luckily buried in all the shouting. Then there's the bridge, attempting provocation and coming off as not only empty but derivative, joylessly mimicking Daft Punk with a practiced snarl. This whole band is a haircut carefully dissheveled in a 20-minute ritual. Worst of all, "The American Dream" is the latest example of the Millennial Whoop, fallback of every creatively bankrupt indie folkster:

But why should I go on and on, when all you need to read is The Federal Empire itself describing the song:

"The song is a cynical look at society and culture in America. Don’t get us wrong, we love our country and the freedoms we have here. The song is really a joke from the first line saying: ‘I smoke weed in the city of a Netflix nation.’ It’s the essence of our culture now, but at the same time we want it all. We want it bigger, faster, stronger, louder, harder. It’s a small commentary on instant gratification as human beings."

So, clearly, they don't know what they're doing, and this jumbled, self-plagiarized shambles of an explanation only highlights what a shitcollage this song is. But worst of worsts is the realization that these poor sods aren't even copying the music of today. No, the most analogous cultural touchpoint comes not from 2016 but a full decade earlier, and not from a currently celebrated band but a band as mercilessly mocked today as they were in their own day. Yes, this is Nickelback, with their song "Rockstar," the aural equivalent of "The American Dream":

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WorstSongs of the Year 2016 Countdown #4. My Chemical Romance "Welcome to the Black Parade (Steve Aoki 10th Anniversary Remix) Sometimes WorstSongs, like the last entry, can grate the listener, while others can annoy, whereas still others can infuriate. Then there are songs like dance music copycat Steve Aoki's 10th Anniversary Remix of psychorock theatre band My Chemical Romance's "Welcome to the Black Parade," which is so bad it's hilarious. I'd like to here thank both vocalist Gerard Way and "remix" "artist" Steve Aoki for sending me to the floor convulsing in laughter. Yes, this remix is an unwitting parody of both mid-aught post-emo alternative rock and the current batch of unkillable EDM. EDM is the Steven Seagal of music, that just will not die and still persists in carrying on despite his own and his audience's best interests. The 10th Anniversary Remix of "Welcome to the Black Parade" is reminiscent of the era when raprock came of age, Korn and Limp Bizkit embarrassing their way across the airwaves. I'll say this, though: most of their songs "worked" to their stated goals, and despite being lunkheaded, the elements they contained linked up with one another. Not so this remix: It's a dissonant, cacophonous jumble of its parts, the sonic equivalent of an entire puzzle of jammed pieces. The song is a few bad lyrics away from a Lonely Island song--in fact, before we go any further, it's important we visit the parody song that parodied this remix before it was even created! Much in the way that This Is Spinal Tap parodied '80s hair metal before it occurred, so does"Owen's Song" parody this mess. Please, click the link and listen to it now. The same reason that "Owen's Song" is funny is the same reason Steve Aoki's remix of My Chemical Romance is funny: Maudlin, idiotic lyrics screamed over the top of skittering, stadium electro klaxons. The synthesizers belch and bleat as the singer shrieks nonsensical self-pity: "Earth, wind, and birds / They fill my heart / Up with darkness, so colllllld!" The beat goes arrhythmic as it builds into an EDM mess, with no relation to anything that came before it. Generously, "Owen's Song" is only a minute and a half. The Aoki remix goes takes over twice as long to make the same joke. Unfortunately, in the hands of Aoki/Romance, it's not a joke. Yes, My Chemical Romance were the most humorless of the My Chemical Fall Out! at the Disco triad, all of them trying to resurrect glamrock in the mid-aughts, all of them outdone by one man, of Montreal's Kevin Barnes. Too much pouting, not enough funk, but that's another story for another WorstSong. What we're focusing on here is these two artists (I'm going to go ahead and reduce My Chemical Romance to Gerard Way, and I'm going to reduce Steve Aoki to Steve Aoki's equipment). The song doesn't start too bad, in its first twelve seconds. But then second 13 hits, and a DumbSynth squelches in the background like a bad dinosaur, suggesting horrors to come. Thirty seconds in and the inappopriate drums start, the lyrics spoiling like holiday nog. It goes on like this for a little while, but it isn't long until we get to the 50-second mark, and Gerard Way starts hoarsely screaming those same lyrics (I crack up every time here), a story about a father and son watching a parade for God's sake, while suspenseful synths crescendo upward. It isn't to be, though, for they get switched up--on themselves!--as well, before some headslappingly predictable stadium EDM takes over. Like all EDM breaks, it sounds exactly like all EDM breaks, and drops out then redoubles back onto itself immediately, repeating itself for over a full minute, before emerging back into the warbling of Gerard Way. He squawks a refrain before the drums fall apart again at 2:37, then we get some more insane asylum synths. The song is A BIG GODDAMNED MESS. It's mixed media at its worst, like Monet's Water Lilies splattered with actual stinking, pondscummed water lillies. It's two lovers dancing together to two entirely different songs. The final insult is that Aoki bullies the original song into an interchangeable EDM nothing, attenuating Gerard Way's [bad] contribution to a bare minimum. Bless their hearts, though, these boys. They've created the funniest WorstSong to date. The song doesn't work, at all, but it is an absolute treasure in its failure. And that's not something everyone can say--isn't that right, Taylor Girlz?

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WorstSongs of the Year 2016 Countdown #5. Taylor Girlz featuring Trinity Taylor "Wedgie" There are a variety of WorstSongs. Some WorstSongs are Worst due to failed concepts, others for their execrable lyrics, still others for being so obnoxious their makers should be fined. Still other songs overstay their welcomes to the point where they have to be violently removed, and others seem so apathetically created it's an act of harassment to release them. And then there are the true overachievers, like Taylor Girlz, who manage to commit all of these sins and more in the space of a single track. "Wedgie" has been created, apparently, to act as its own meme. It comes with a hashtag, #WedgieInBootyChallenge, meant to encourage dancing as if your panties are, indeed, wedged within your booty. And yes, this is what the song is about: wedgies. The wedgie in question is not about, say, a figurative life choice dilemma, an obnoxious (boy)friend, or large asses. No, there is no second entendre here. This entire song is about pulling fabric from your fundament. This is delivered without humor or tact, overrelying on the pygophilic relatability last seen in Everyone Poops. What really galls is that there's no instructive dance maneuver here either. There is no Wedgie dance--there's nothing! The #WedgieInBooty challenge, admirable only for its dropped definite article, gives no directions or rewards, and is apparently just a vehicle that people can spread "Wedgie" like some awful germ. A quick glance at the lyrics lets you in on the full story: Yes, this is a song about underwear shoved deep in a bottom, and the removal thereof, the entire bridge given over to digging that wedgie out, mostly via stinkfinger. Musically, the song is similar to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." or Bone Crusher's "Never Scared" in that it's almost entirely chorus, with tiny verses that plagiarize the chorus's words and rhythm and provide the paltriest intervals before the chorus comes in yet again. Add this to the list of WorstSong offenses above: the refusal to make a song that's not just a chorus. So let's talk about that chorus. It's shat out by the flintiest-voiced of the Taylor Girlz, who manages to shriek something derivative and bargain-bin, a ripoff that actively reminds you of the better songs this song is aping, and then punctuates it with an annoying "Hi-yah!" It's immediately headache-inducing, an earworm in the sense of a heartworm. The tinny, treble-heavy production doesn't do it any favors either, even buried as it is under the Girlz' redundant caterwauling. For a song that's less than three minutes long, this one goes on and on and on. Famous drag queen Trinity Taylor is somewhere on here, failing somehow to improve the result. Is she related to the Taylor Girlz? Does anyone care? I would also like to take a moment to comment on the album art, which also perfectly encapsulates the song, being as it's a) bad, b) thrown together (is the squiggle meant to be the nose or the mouth?), c) an eyesore mishmash of its parts, and d) actually, and only, about fabric in a bottom. According to their biography, the Taylor Girlz "hold high aspirations of achieving greatness," a line stolen from one of their 500-word-count high-school term papers. "They see their talent as an entity that will soar as a household brand," they go on, in an inane garble of mixed metaphor and hokum. This is a fair summary of their musical output as well, as they combine musical elements much like pranksters at summer camp combining Worcestershire sauce, Fresca, and NyQuil cough syrup, concocting the most disgusting drink imaginable the inevitable fall guy has to drink. Given their callous disregard of any potential listenership, the Taylor Girlz are best seen as bullies pranking the world with their concoctions. Gladly, we can take that figurative drink and throw it on the ground. Postscript: a note from the author: Normally when reviewing the WorstSongs, I have to listen to them many times in order to truly bask in their Worstness. This often incurs a desensitization, where I eventually get used to the WorstSong, though by no means do I like it or find it endearing. I just learn to suffer it. With "Wedgie," I couldn't do that. The song is so openly antagonistic to listening I struggled to get through it once, and then had to do the rest of my listening in brief piecemeal. This is truly a rotten, rotten egg.

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Design the Skyline "Surrounded by Silence" I hesitate to nominate "Surrounded by Silence" for WorstSong because it's not even really a song. Instead, it's just a big, dumb, disorganized, discordant landfill of sound, the absolute difference of its parts. It's difficult to tell if the bandmembers in Design the Skyline are aware they're playing the same song. This one is purely about the experience--"Surrounded by Silence" hoists itself by its own petard to such an extent that I might as well just narrate it: After a pleasant electronic introduction, we launch into the boilerplate hammer-drumming, keening chords, and unintelligible lyrics of hardcore. Two (!) vocalists trade shrieked barbs with one another, while the guitarists and drummer flail around. This is the first minute, and if the song (because as yet it's still a song) continued in this vein, it'd be a fine, faceless, forgettable hardcore song. But then at the minute mark you'll notice the drummer fumbles and stammers, unsure of what to do, reminiscent of high-school bands bowdlerizing rock hits in talent shows. Then, something happens. An organ squeezes its way in there, the tempo changes abruptly, and the bandmembers all launch off on their own vectors, with whatever they're playing competing with one another. Then comes the chorus, which doesn't match anything heretofore. It's a big Auto-Tuned slop. Nothing coheres; nowhere is there the hint of harmony, melody, or even the suggestion that the band has practiced this song before. Instead, they scream under their identical haircuts as fake snow falls on their instruments. Then minute two begins, and we're back to another verse, seemingly. It may be a bridge. It doesn't match anything that came before it or after it, and it itself quickly devolves into discordant, arrhythmic musical clutter. Every band member is playing a different song! The song speeds up, it slows down, it lurches like Frankenstein's monster, false-starting two or three more songs before abandoning them. It finally all gets pitch-shifted down into a gurgling trash compactor. We never see that chorus again. And just how many people are in this damn band anyway?! Wuzzit, SEVEN?! What are they all doing?!?!?! There's little to add except for the sound of no hands clapping. I compare Design the Skyline to other WorstSong alumni brokeNCYDE, but I'll give brokeNCYDE this: They have discernible melodies, lyrics, and structure. Those elements may be awful, but they are there. Design the Skyline can't even manage structure, patterns, or rhythm--the band can't even agree with one another on the song they're playing! The song they (possibly) wrote! The final joke is the name of the song. Silence would be the exact opposite of this cacophony, and it provides an irony the band certainly didn't intend. I'd like to think it was the suggestion of a wily, overworked producer sick of having to record the talentless badsounds of punk brats. Because intent just does not factor into Design the Skyline's m.o. at all; instead, there's only bedlam spliced together like Thierry Guetta's Life Remote Control. A mess is a mess is a mess is a mess, and this is one big cold mess.

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Everclear "The Joker" I've always been slightly skeptical of covers, or at least released covers. Paying homage to one of your favorite artists during the encore of a concert--there's nothing wrong with that. Those in the audience who recognize the cover can thrill at that recognition, and even those who don't know the original can get a window into a favorite artist's personal tastes. Some covers even improve on the source material, like Johnny Cash's "Hurt", The Clash's "I Fought the Law", or Okkervil River's "It Is So Nice to Get Stoned". And then you have odd/fun covers like Jonathan Coulton's "Baby Got Back", Dynamite Hack's "Boyz 'n the Hood", and prettinear anything from The Moog Cookbook. In any case, covers typically have to do one thing or another: a. Act as a conduit of the source material, adding the singer's own vocal flourishes and tones. For singer/songwriters with very evocative voices, this can be a worthwhile experience. b. Use the source material as a base to add variation to. These tracks function similarly to remixes, where the source material provides the structure to which the embellishments are added. Everclear takes the latter tack with its horrendous cover of the Steve Miller Band's "The Joker," by taking the original's lyrics and doing a coffeehouse interpretive read-through of them. It's a five-minute primer on exactly how not to do a cover. Lead singer of Everclear Art Alexakis is no stranger to covers. Three of his four last albums have been cover albums, from The Vegas Years, with boring covers of other artists' songs, to In a Different Light, with boring covers of Everclear's own songs, AND THEN Return to Santa Monica, featuring even more covers, including some covers of Everclear songs he'd already covered! AAAAGH!! Included on Return to Santa Monica is this cover of "The Joker," which is just so misguided. Art has been flailing ever since Everclear's late-'90s success, doing everything he can to sully his listeners' warm memories of "Santa Monica". His lineup has changed several times, with Art embarrassing himself elsewhere as a children's and gay rights activist, born-again Christian, failed actor on Nickelodeon, and a rejected guest on Space Ghost Coast to Coast. He's 51 years old, on his fourth marriage, and insists on continuing to make music. Collective Soul is still making music, but you don't hear them going on and on about it. So, to this cover: It's bad, and it's bad all because of Alexakis. It's hard to fathom what would make a man do something like this. I'm guessing Art likes "The Joker," which means he's being very disrespectful to Steve Miller and his band. Even if he hated the song, though, he's still attaching his band's name to this wretchedness, and all the irony in the world couldn't keep him from owning up to that. Yes, it's all Art's fault. The other band members, those three stooges grimacing and posing correctly in the blurry background of the album cover, they do the chorus just fine, and let me say: there's nothing wrong with the chorus here. Instead, it's Art's dumbass running commentary. I might as well just print all these damned lyrics. As a vocoder reads out the lyrics, Art responds to those lyrics with side commentary. He doesn't know why people call him these things! He mispronounces the name Maurice, and then veers off track with “They say I’m doing you, which is cool, but then they say I’m doing you wrong, which ain’t too cool.” And here's where the Art we know shines. He uses one of the biggest classic-rock staples of all time to launch into his own moronic stream-of-consciousness, still nursing high-school wounds and calling out judgmental namecallers and haters. There he goes, up on his rotten soapbox to overstate the stalest persecution complex fables. Also, if Art's life now is the alternative to being a Hooters waitress, sign me up for selling some wings. With the second verse, he just gets derailed immediately, talking about food and sex the way only a clueless 51-year-old dad can talk about food and sex. "I must love you more than I love food, and I really love food." Is this a joke? Is this a statement? Or is it just, as I suspect, nothing at all? The vocoder carries on heroically, trying to sing this song, trying to keep Art on pace. But Art would rather talk about how his fourth wife's sex is like a science fiction movie, which may or may not be a compliment. "I'm not sayin' you look like Yoder or anythin'," he mumbles as the 27th iteration of Everclear drowns him out on the way to the chorus. And then we have a merciful instrumental break! Oh, thank God! What mercy is this! How sweet it sounds! Right up until 2:53, when Art comes back. :( "I'm getting tired of people talking about me all the time," Art complains hopefully. If only they would! The good news is that if he keeps this crap up, they may start talking about him again, as the Internet's jestingstock of the day. He ends by humbling himself, casting himself as an everyman, reiterating his two loves of food and sex (and not, as one might guess, music). He's the opposite of funny, and the opposite of clueful. The Steve Miller Band just resang the second verse at this point in their song; you get the impression that Art could on like this for days, murmuring foul nothings to himself, the choruses intervally drowning him out. Even in the end, as the rest of the band faithfully covers the song, Art sounds like a birthday boy brought on stage to do a special karaoke with the actually hired musicians. At the end, his career dies as he makes Joke Mention #4 of food. Let this cover be Everclear's eulogy.

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Babymetal "Gimme Chocolate!!" This is the age of the mashup. With acts like Girl Talk, The White Panda, and The Hood Internet riding off Soulwax's example that everything must be mixed, Gorillaz turning the musical blender approach into pop gold, and all acts in between mixing rock with electronica, rap with synths, and Gregorian chants with gangsta rap with rave with IDM with punk with funk, it seems the worst thing an artist can be is limited to one genre. Or maybe not the Worst thing. That is, some genres mix so poorly the artists would do better sticking to one or the other. It's like food: You wouldn't dip a pizza in a pot of phở, you wouldn't put a crab leg in chocolate fondue, you wouldn't eat nuts and gum, and you wouldn't eat anything from Jack in the Box. Similarly, you wouldn't mix heavy metal and shrill Japanese pop. But here's Babymetal, who do just that. Babymetal are a trio of Japanese popstars who call what they're doing "kawaii metal"--according to the band's own bio, none of its three members even knew what metal music was before starting the band. Its three members are named Su-metal, Yuimetal, and Moametal, and their entire bandly duties are limited to "screams" and "dance." Besides "Gimme Chocolate!!," they also have songs called "Astral Dogma," "It's Good!," "Babymetal Death," "Cheerful Midnight," and "Headbangeeeeerrrrr!!!!!." So it's pretty easy to see what's going on here. The crass commodification of attaching Japanese schoolgirls to existing media to make those media unique or cute or something is an old trend, as expertly documented by Wired's Japanese Schoolgirl Watch. Babymetal is the latest in this line, flailing Japsploitation as cruelly engineered as the Three Gorges Dam. Simply adding some young Japanese girls doing anything will be popular among greasy weeaboos masturbating indoors (with Babymetal, you have live upskirt shots!). and it has a built-in protection of irony: even if you don't "like" it, it's still "fun"! It's just "silly" after all! It's cuuute. But really, it's none of these things. Really, it's just bad. Very bad. Very very bad. And this is the most important takeaway from Babymetal: Regardless of its broader existential merit, this shit is UNLISTENABLE. At least some of the WorstSongs can be suffered through once--Babymetal enters a whole new category of a band who makes songs you can't listen to even a single time. Everything here is frenetic, the audio equivalent of an epileptic fit. It's a pure headache, combining the squeakiest playground vocals with keening guitars. This is what it sounds like when everything's actually turned up to 11, and it's why most amps only go to 10. Because obviously it's very stupid. Obviously this is just some girls singing in front of their mirrors in their bedrooms writ large as their handler "Kobametal" scrambles to manufacture a fad. You can see it in their "please like me!" smiles and Charlie's Angels poses. Obviously they have no idea what they're doing. But this can't even be the inept joke it could be because it's so painful to listen to. It's like the worst of TIm and Eric, where the antihumor goes so far off-course it just becomes miserable. There's no laughter in headaches. Travel writer A. A. Gill said, "Japan is the only country that wants tourists not to understand what they are looking at.". What would he think of this? It all begs the question, Who is this for? Notoriously picky metal fans aren't going to trifle with this. Video-game-music aficionados generally prefer their music more melodic. Is Kobametal hoping for the undiscerning adulation of J-Pop fans, the smiles of pedophiles? Can any of these groups even stomach one Babymetal song, much less a whole concert? If so, I'll guess Babymetal will seem them in the mosh'sh pit. Props to Jenny Lederer on the find.

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brokenCYDE "FreaXXX" There's so little to say about this WorstSong that the song doesn't scream itself. Sometimes WorstSongs creep up on you, starting questionable and plummeting into hopelessness. Others start off awry and go awrier, pinballing around the toilet. But this...this stinker is Worst on every level imaginable right from the first chord. This is the absolute nadir of music. I mean, just listen to it! This would be a tedious bad joke if it were self-parody; in fact, a claim to self-parody would be the wisest angle for brokeNCYDE, like a sociopath scrambling for an insanity defense. Unfortunately, they've put their meager hearts and souls into this. Maybe in order to understand brokeNCYDE, we have to look at the word itself. brokeNCYDE. Basically, it's made up of two words: broken and side. What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is brokeNCYDE. Broken Side gets everything wrong. From the band's bio: "The group's lineup consists of David Gallegos (vocals), Michael Shea (vocals) and Anthony Trujillo (backing vocals)." So they've got the vocals covered. And I can't let it go: That name. Misspelling and all caps? What's next, three Xs at the end of a song called "Freaks"? The only way it could be better is if it was written "fReAxXx :P." The Side is trying to capitalize on several bad trends at once, and botching all of them. There's the most obvious architectural hair and skinny jeans of the screamo movement. To be fair, there were hundreds of dreadful teenage bands sporting haircuts and poses and making horrendous music in the last decade--there still are a few. But these bands never used Auto-Tune. brokenCYDE calls its genre "crunkcore." Crunkcore attempts to blend hardcore and crunk hip-hop music, without the slightest idea of what either is--I'm not convinced brokeNCYDE has even heard a hip-hop song. Nevertheless, they assume the mantle of crunkcore with the aplomb of the completely naive. They scream and rap their way through the atrocious "FreaXXX" as some high-school girls dance unconvincingly. So far as I can tell, Michael ("Mikl") is on the left, with David ("Se7en") on the right. Here are the song and video's top issues: 1. brokeNCYDE would never be able to get into the club, as they're teenaged. Hoisted by their own petard by Line One. 2. The uncertainty of looking "kinda sexy" speaks volumes. "Will someone please sleep with me please? I'm kind of sexy." See also "Let's get drunk tonight / Baby, we don't have to fuck." Imagine Mikl's relief at not having to perform sexually! He'd be on cloud nine! 3. It is impossible or at least unrecommended to pull your panties down before taking your pants off. If either of these were done at the club or anywhere public, the ladies would be escorted away by security posthaste. 4. What uncle did they have to hassle to use his Range Rover for the day? 5. "And bring your friend along, maybe we can have S'FUN." #FirstTake 6. Wait, wait: Who's that doofus at 1:16? Is this a fourth vocalist? Is that the famed Phat J? 7. "Mom and Dad, you made me so uptight / Gonna cuss on the mic tonight / ... Y'all don't know what it's like / Being male, middle class, and white / It gets me real pissed off / It makes me wanna say / FUUUUCK!" 8. I like the way Se7en breaks into his Gay European voice for "Let's get messy, girls / Come on, let's go get messy, girls." 9. The never-opened bottle of Olde English! "I got some bottles in the Caddy we can open up" -- No! You! Don't! What's the deal with bottles in the Caddy? No Caddy, no bottles. 10. Listen to this flock of pubescent masturbators talk about bitches trying to sex them. Imagine their absolute terror should any bitch truly try to sex them! 11. "If you want me, baby, fill me in"? Fill me in? Who's inside whom here? Or is he saying "fill me in" like an old dad fumbling slang? Which is worse? 12. Odd that these guys don't like lesbians, especially considering they invited the girls to bring their friends. What are the friends going to do? Politely wait to be dinked one at a time? brokeNCYDE just hasn't thought this through! 13. Most of this is just all bad karaoke, the CYDE boys boyz playacting roles they can't even pretend at, much less maintain. If you're going to plagiarize, don't make a bunch of typos. You don't ask a gambler for investment advice, you don't ask a nun about sex tips, and you don't ask a vegan for steakhouse recommendations. Similarly, you don't ask brokeNCYDE how to get (fucking) freaky now. 14. Looks like, judging from the "Liar (LIAR!)" ending to the song, the boyz' attempts at seducing some high-school video hoes failed. Hopefully none of those bitches got stitches. Knowing brokeNCYDE, I'm sure they didn't. 14a. On that note, what is "BITCHES GET STITCHES"? It's hard to tell if this is an outright mistake or a mangled attempt at humor. Why would bitches get stitches? Is it endorsing garden-variety female homicide? Is it trying to make a sexual reference that doesn't make sense? Is it talking about Cesarean sections? Whatever it is, I would love Se7en to explain the T-shirt to me, as articulately as he's able. 15. You may never make it to the end of the song, which is very understandable, but I will say that there is a long ambient bridge there. It says, as if the point hasn't been underlined to this point, We Have No Idea What We're Doing. The band just sets the preset Casio and tiptoes away, no vocals, no vocals, no backing vocals, nothing. 16. But no! They come back to shriek that chorus one more time! Here're some more F bombs for the sake of F bombs! Here's the biggest point, though: With the previous entries on WorstSong, the songs may be utterly terrible, but most of them have a conceivable audience: Britney Spears is still beloved even in her late-career shambles, Uffie may attract a certain type of pouting party bitch, certain morons will chuckle at Your Favorite Martian's mere statement that alcohol makes women more attractive, boozy bargoers can accept some calculated secondhand nostalgia from Kid Rock, '90s kids can at least remember liking Rusted Root before they acquired taste, Corey Smith's fans can feel comfort in sharing an experience no matter how Pavlovian it is, and I guess Coco could commiserate with women who really like high heels and have no other song to express that feeling. But with brokeNCYDE, WHO IS THE AUDIENCE?!?!?! I can't think of ANYONE who would voluntarily listen to this music, not even the surliest goth in the identity crisis of pubescence. I'll sign off by inviting you to the "Critical Reception" section of the band's Wikipedia page. Big ups to Josh "Baby" Urban and Adam "Mispronouncer" Drent for help finding and contributing.

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Coco "Shoe Freak" Nicole Natalie "Coco" Austin has spent most of her life as an examplar of the noncelebrity. Bad bad actress, Playboy barnacle, breast and ass depository, cartoon whooty, and "body model," Coco has been a swimsuit, lingerie, leotard, onesie, and underpants model. Her most notable role, however, has been as Ice T's wife. Ice T was apparently looking for a RealDoll that giggles. So Coco's a noncelebrity. In an of itself, this fact is fine--what causes problems here is when you combine a talentless trophy wife with the boredom of plastic surgery convalescence and the propensity to surround oneself with fawning handlers. These elements, much like nitrogen, oxygen, and methane, can form TNT. And usually when it does, it blows up in your face. What blows up here is "Shoe Freak." In the song, Coco spends the longest five minutes you'll ever hear detailing her love of shoes, listing off the brands she enjoys like an arrhythmic price check clerk praying for shift end. A flamboyant, silky voice kicks things off by asking Coco what she wants the most for a variety of holidays. In all cases, the answer is shoes. Now, dear listener, you may be thinking, Well, this is tedious, but you should be happy, because this is the best part of the song. The beat is a thump beat, and there's nothing wrong with that; Coco, merely answering these redundant queries, does sound kittenish; even the interrogator hasn't shown the full scope of his obnoxiousness yet. Hell, If I was famished for sex I just might buy Coco a pair of these damn shoes! But then the mid-'90s beat comes in, and boy is it a bad one. This is the kind of beat I'd hoped the world had left behind forever. It sounds simultaneously too bassy and too tinny, poorly recorded, unmastered, like a preset Casio beat taped off the radio onto a cassette. It's a big barf, that beat. And then Coco starts talking. Not singing, not rapping, but talking. Or rather: reading. Reading, reading, reading like a middle-school thespian! Hear how she reads! I could list every single line here, but it's important merely to note that the lines Coco reads don't rhyme, don't flow, and are delivered with the stiltedness of a language transcription robot. And she just lists various shoe brands. It's not even product placement anymore when the products REPLACE the song they're being placed in! This is an advertisement with awful music. (Make sure not to miss the pitch shift at 1:50.) Then Coco lists some more type of shoes, exclaiming unpersuasively over them, even lapsing into some sub-porn sexual moaning. At least the producer had the good sense to edit out the sounds of Coco's script rustling. But we're not even halfway through, are we? No, then the interrogator returns for a guest--what, verse? Bridge? He adds nothing! The song has no structure! It just soldiers on, possibly made up as it goes on. Even the beat seems confused, like, "Just tell me what you want me to do already." This...interlude...does at least give Coco the chance to utter her lousiest lines in the song, and I will quote those hereto: "A size 9? I wear a size 6, bitch! Are you crazy? I love my shoes, I love my shoes, mmm, I love my shoes, I wanna fuck um!" And then we get some more listing! More names and types of shoes! Forevermore! THIS SONG WILL NOT END! Once it hits the four-minute mark, the listener is left wondering what is going on, if anything is even real anymore. The interrogator comes back for some reason then, himself even sounding bored by the end. Make sure to catch his bizarre "honey" at 4:44. When the melody comes back at 4:53, it all seems like the cruelest joke, or a definition of hell, Coco telling us about some more shoe manufacturers while we suffer and suffer. In Guatánamo Bay, prison guards famously tortured prisoners by playing Metallica and AC/DC at extreme volumes for hours and hours on end. A much worse punishment would be right here: Coco's "Shoe Freak," on an eternal repeat.

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Rusted Root "Send Me On My Way" Let's talk about the nineties. The nineties are such an odd decade musically. They're scantly remembered, and with good reason--looking back, we see how little they had to offer: overly serious buttrock, plodding self-pity competitions, whiny coffee-shoppe caterwauling, Korn, soporific murk rock, the ungodly specter of raprock, plain awful R 'n' B, and Christian equivalents of all of the above--even grunge sounds less substantial every year further we get away from it. There's a reason the nineties haven't been as giddily rhapsodized as the eighties: The eighties may have been a lot sillier, a lot more filled with pomp and haircuts, but at least the musicians were having some goddamned fun. Where did all those nineties musicians' pouting get them? Rock enjoyed its headiest heyday in the nineties. People were still adhering bumper stickers that said "Drum machines have no soul" and the idea of fusing genres hadn't been explored to a great degree. Music was stuck between rock and rock. And from that rock came the budding neohippie movement. Welcome to Rusted Root. You may remember Rusted Root from ninth-graders' T-shirts spotted in high school, though almost no one ever actually listened to them (see also Toad the Wet Sprocket). The Root had an almost hit with "Send Me On My Way," along with an alarming video, a primer on Stuff White People Like. Christian Lander may have written his whole book just from following this band around. Most of the song's sins are self-evident, but let's give them a list! 1. Lead singer Michael Glabicki's cult-leader permagrin, his rubbery neck, his Mask-like face stretching. 2. The fact that there's anywhere from three to seven bandmembers who do nothing at all. 3. Percussionist Liz Berlin playing the not-nearly-phallic-enough güiro, who’s obviously only in the band because she’s banging some bandmate. 4. The pisspoor attempt to lend some kind of commodified depth and fake spirituality with the inclusion of the Old Indian who for his participation probably got ten bucks and a ride to the liquor store. "Welp, looks like another batch of these kids wants to shoot a video again. I'll see you tonight." 5. The calculatedly messy hair. 6. That fucking bassist. 7. The gibberish lyrics. 8a. The kid “opening the door.” 8b. The kid wearing angel wings (which narrowly edges out "Kid wearing American flag" for ridiculous attempt at iconic imagery). 9. The fact that this band is the dictionary definition of both "naïf" and "fraud." They're the dumb, dumb, dumb stoner palm-slapping a bongo drum outside a dormitory, bidding you a wassup, extolling sweet dro. This is the full-on band form of that manchild, with a drummer named Preach Freedom. They're co-opting ideas and cultures they have no idea about, whole creeds that they can't speak for or to. They're herniating themselves to be offended on behalf of the cultures Rusted Root themselves denigrate by bowdlerizing those cultures' culture! Aieee! They're hopeless scamps who hide their bastardizations behind big dopey smiles. You'll notice the Native American does not participate in the vision circle at the end. These stinkers continue to make music, coasting off royalties and long-faded memories. "I'm from Rusted Root. You remember that song from the nineties? No? You sure? No? 'Send me on my way, om a way'? No? Nothing?" What's worst is that they've now progressed from being merely bad neohippie wannabes to full-on noodlers. At this point, they've become none other than Bad Phish. They have now become trustafarians WHO ARE IN THEIR FORTIES! Wherever they go, though, whoever they become, they'll always have this embarrassment to follow them into whatever next embarrassment they bring upon themselves, until they go to that sweet be-in in the sky. Props to Gavid Dilbert for the suggestion and guest writing!

[worstsong]

Corey Smith "Carolina" There’s nothing inherently wrong with the placedrop. A placedrop is a namedrop of a specific place, and it’s spoken to garner a specific reaction. At a live show, the placedrop is a simple but effective way for a performer to connect with his listeners—“Hey, Murfreesboro! How you doing tonight?!” You may have just moved to Tennessee last week, but if you’re enjoying the performer’s show, you really should hoot. More dubious is when artists use the placedrop in studio recordings. Many artists do it: Johnny Cash. Pitbull and J.Lo. Lady GaGa’s “Yoü and I” features the lyric “So put up your drinks for Nebraska, / Nebraska, Nebraska, I love you!” After the song was released, the word “Nebraska” was changed locally to reflect wherever the listener lived just so that listener could give an appropriate whoop: “New Jersey, New Jersey, I love you!” Petey Pablo drops several places in “Raise Up (All Cities Remix).” Petey is from North Carolina, fair enough—there’s nothing wrong with repping your state or cit’—and had originally written the song for his home state. But then he was pressured to create an “All Cities” remix, with Pablo herniating himself to get all the cities in there. These placedrops exist to get a canned reaction from a club crowd, an easy Pavlovian response: If a) He said "The Bay Area," and b) I’m from The Bay Area, ergo c) Woooo! Corey Smith is the placedrop’s lowest common denominator. He makes the placedrop his one and only weapon, and he wields it like a nude knight. Smith is the Dave Matthews of the South, who looks like the white Pitbull, and he wants you to know he’s from the South as much as he can. He’s a very simple man, who’s never one to reject turning a face-palming or obvious sentiment into a whole tedious song (weeping on behalf of Cherokee Indians, “crunk[ing] up the radio”, stating the fact that technology exists). His songs sound like they've been written by a robotic lyric generator (cf. "Where's the Love" opens with "Poor man is beggin' on a crowded street / Doesn't have a dime with which his children to feed"). His writing m.o. seems to be 1) Take the most obvious topics and 2) Write about them in the most obvious way. He comes off as a confused man assiduously mimicking country music—he’d be a fraud if he actually knew what he was doing. I also have to share this gem with you: “Yeah, he looked so cool and clean / But he gave her the worst case of Herpes that she’d ever seen. / Now they call her the STD Queen.” (from “Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover”) Though Smith is originally from Georgia, he really likes South Carolina. Smith mentions South Carolina’s towns and cities throughout "Carolina," each name falling like birdshit from his mouth. He uses the placedrop as naked baiting: I say a name, you cheer it, or else (see also "Every Dawg," "Twenty-One," "If I Could Do It Again," and "In Love with a Memory"). Watching a Corey Smith concert is like watching a behavioral study with no control group, or a dictator’s military training academy. His eyes widen in knowing expectation whenever he drops one of his places: Yes, cheer that word. That’s correct. Thinking there’s a correct reaction to any song is the root of all evil. This might be ignorable—might!—if Corey had anything else going on here. But just as white noise might be used in the behavior study, or patriotic trumpets might be used to punctuate the dictator’s speech, musically Smith is nothing. Or rather, he’s a eunuch and a thief, with the habit of stealing lite-rock melodies (best heard on Columbia’s home for lite rock, WORG 100.3!) and making them even more harmless, with choruses that are just empty and bare (like the land between Georgetown and Summerville). The tossed-off quality of Smith's songs reveals them for what they really are: vain, thrown-together excuses for saying a bunch of proper nouns in order to win the adoration of a predictable, doltish audience (let me hear you, Myrtle Beach!). Because really, all the blame can’t be placed on Bad Ol’ Mr. Smith. The audience plays its role in this symbiotic hellgame too. Corey Smith could be playing guitar in his parents’ basement (in CHARLESTON) if it weren’t for his audience. If Smith is the prostitute proffering easy tricks, the audience is the slavering john paying for the privilege, responding to all the pro’s time-honored techniques and by-the-script pillow talk. These two shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near each other (concert tonight at Hilton Head!!!). Luckily, Smith’s geographic obsession keeps him mostly quarantined in the South, though an outbreak occasionally leaks across the Mason-Dixon. Given that, he’s easy enough to avoid—the next time you’re invited to the Charleston County Pig Fair, Boot Scootch, and Roller Dollop, just say no.

[worstsong]

Kid Rock "All Summer Long" Kid Rock is the Jordan Belfort of the music world, ready at a moment’s notice to cash in off the latest fad, wearing whatever shoe fits to bilk unsuspecting audiences out of their money. He’s a flim-flam man in a cowboy hat and pubic goatee. He was there during the rap-rock heyday of the late ’90s, pretending to rap, pretending to rock; then during pop country’s resurgence, pretending to be a trailer-park crooner; finally just taking up the mantle of toothless Top 40 popstar (and always dragging his Oompa Loompa fatboy fratboy Uncle Kracker along with him). But like a ghost in robes, if you peel away enough protective layers, eventually there’s nothing there at all: no heart, no core, no concept. These days, Kid has his own Chillin’ the Most cruise line, where he performs a few hits in between getting drunk with the other passengers—he’ll be well into greatest-hits-rerelease retirement anytime soon. But for now he remains, 25 years into his career, still kind of making music. He’s the rare musician who actually started out manqué. Most musicians at least burst from the gates with creativity; some run out of ideas a few albums down the road, others develop better ideas with time, but Kod Rick is one who didn’t have an original idea from the get-go. From the early ’90s until today, he followed trends until those trends led him to the dead end of “All Summer Long.” If this song were a particularly meta Weird Al parody, it’d be one thing, but instead it’s entirely sincere: Rick, out of ideas to imitate anymore, just decides to steal a song outright! And not just any song, but thee most overplayed song in the history of the world! This is like stealing a painting from the MoMA in the daytime during a new Picasso exhibit, with cameras clicking everywhere, or racing out onto a basketball court and trying to steal a championship trophy from Lebron James’ hands just after he's won an NBA Finals (please take a moment to imagine Rid Kock’s gangly, mantis-like body doing either of these activities). Because Kock doesn’t have the grace to do a mere cover song, the kind of curio that would be fine on a live collection sold at concert tents. No, he decides to take “Sweet Home Alabama” and turn it into his own studio recording, a dupery not dissimilar from independent authors trying to trick people with books like The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo. Kick Rod does this by pretending homage: He’s just honoring an old favorite, after all! But what he’s really up to is far slimier: He’s trying to associate himself with the song, to grasp at its worn coattails. For no matter how many times we’ve all heard “Sweet Home Alabama,” when those first chords strike, there’s a feeling there, a feeling of summer revelry, wild nights in dive bars, walking around cool lawns with a new love—you can make a friend out of an enemy just by singing along to “Sweet Home Alabama.” And Dick Kore, since he simply cannot create evocative music himself (the only time he’s come close is by attaching himself to Sheryl Crow on “Picture”), just steals it wholesale from Lynyrd Skynyrd: If “All Summer Long” ever came on in a bar, the best response it could get would be, “This sounds like ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’” Other, fairer reactions would be, “What is this copycat garbage?” or “Turn this shit off and put the Skynyrd on.” Or maybe you’re tired of “Sweet Home Alabama.” Either way, what’s baffling here is the sheer nerve of making a new song out of, again, the most played song in the world, like trying to weave a king-size quilt from gossamer. Everyone all over the world knows “Sweet Home Alabama”; the last thing we need is to hear a counterfeit version of it that uses its exact same melody. If you can’t earn $100 bills, you can always print them with a machine. It is brazen, what he’s doing here, but it’s also completely unnecessary. If it existed in a vacuum, the song wouldn't be bad, but there is no reality where this song reflects well on Kir Dock. All it does it spotlight him for who he is: a snake-oil musician diluting good medicine with so much water.

[worstsong]

Mike Posner featuring Your Favorite Martian “Looks Like Sex (Remix)” Everyone involved in this song is a poor man’s version of a poor man’s version of a poor man. Let’s start with Mike Posner, who might be Justin Timberlake’s tagalong younger brother, an artist with Innocuous written all over him. Posner’s songs are diet pop lite, time-honored traditions of pop music photocopied so often you can’t even read the original anymore. Posner's a young lecher, a tepid whiteboy version of already derivative artists like Jason Derülo and Taio Cruz. His few hits “Cooler than Me,” “Please Don’t Go,” and “Bow Chicka Wow Wow” capitalize on his elfin voice, meant to be listened to by sorority sisters before going out. Either that or fourteen-year-olds. But Mike Posner is the much lesser evil here. He released “Looks Like Sex” in December 2011, and while the Belgians loved it, no one else paid it much attention. His handlers probably angled it to be played on the background of an MTV show or teen sex romp, to be used when a hot girl enters a room. For what it’s worth, it’s a Just Fine pop song, and sure, its video has some hot backup dancers. But that’s it: The song did its good deed so it could fade away, never to be heard again. But no! For instead, bottom-of-the-barrel nerdrap vlogger Your Favorite Martian had to come along and “remix” the song! The remix functions in the Puff Daddy definition of remix, i.e. “change nothing in the original mix, just add some unwanted rapping.” The original song has already done all it can do, and so it can only go down from here. Which it does. Because of stinking Your Favorite Martian (Ray William Johnson), who’s a derivative of plain-terrible candy rappers like MC 900 Ft Jesus and MC Paul Barman. But even those lousies had a little variation in their lines. In Martian’s two tiny, tiny verses, every line says the exact same thing! A paraphrase of the song: Chorus (Mike Posner): “She is attractive” Verse 1 (Your Favorite Martian): “[Girls look better when you’re drunk]” “[Girls look better when you’re drunk]” “[Girls look better when you’re drunk]” “[Girls look better when you’re drunk]” “[Girls look better when you’re drunk]” “[Girls look better when you’re drunk]” Repeat Now, you can go onto UrbanDictionary and look up “beer goggles” if you really need to, and doing so will be funnier and more succinct than listening to this song. But this remix functions as a Mere Fact Wit Substitute (MFWS), just like the comment “Oh man, I got so drunk last night.” This is a declarative statement often confused as a joke—the fact of being drunk is not funny. The stories of getting and being drunk very well may be, but merely being drunk is not funny. It's just a dead statement of fact. And that's all this song is. No story, no variation, just repetition. Indeed, all these similar lines are neither clever, witty, funny, nor even rhythmic. Instead, they’re the kind of kindergarten rhymetime lyrics that mangle any line to fit a pattern. The entirety of Martian’s verse repeatedly forces square pegs into round holes until both are ruined. The first couplet, for example: “She looks like sex, maybe not yet but don’t fret I bet if you get drunk sumly you’ll be dead set” It’s like a British schoolbook’s idea of hip hop, or the kind of rap a fat dad might freestyle in a Kmart parking lot. It is not funny. What’s especially galling here is how outdated Martian’s similes are. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jenna Jameson are namedropped (the Jameson line, which rhymes “Jameson” with “Jameson,” has so many syllables in it Martian just mushes the whole thing into a verbal landfill). When this “remix” was released in January 2012, Zeta-Jones was already well past her prime, and Jameson had been completely botched by plastic surgery, her face stretched to ugly putty. But I guess “Jones” and “Jameson” are just more rhymable than “Upton,” “Johansson,” “Lawrence,” or “Fox” (maybe rhymed with, for instance, “fox”?). After Martian’s verses, Posner steps in to sing his chorus interminably, which is another layer of bad here: not only are Martian’s rhymes anti-humorous and redundant, but Martian himself is ashamed of them! Why else would he stumble in, mumble his lines, and then trip over himself handing the mic back to Posner? He can’t get out of there fast enough! If you’re going to do an idiotic nerdrap parody remix, Your Favorite Martian, at least fucking do it! After the third chorus, when you think it couldn’t get any worse, Your Favorite Martian makes it worse. Not knowing what else to do, his total contribution totaling 30 seconds, Posner’s chorus worn into the dirt, Martian does what anyone without any ideas would do: lapse into dubstep. And there it is: the most derivative part of the song saved till the end, the dubstep wobbling which might as well be copy and pasted wholesale. The best part here is that even the cartoon Mike Posner has no idea what to do. I previously lived in Englewood, Colorado, and in Englewood there’s an Army/Navy surplus store whose marquis features seasonal poems. Like the Burma Shave highway ads, these marquis poems take common sentiments (“wear warm clothes when it’s cold out,” “we have good deals”) and form them into herky-jerky slogans: Your Favorite Martian’s lyrics are like this. On a smalltown secondhand store, this is forgivable and even quaint. For anyone else, not at all. Any claims by Your Favorite Martian that the song is just meant to be fun or funny are overruled by the fact that it’s neither fun nor funny. When you’re not funny and you can’t rap, “joke rapper” may not be the best vocation. Your Favorite Martian is otherwise known for his songs that ride the coattails of stale memes (“Tig Ol’ Bitties,” “Zombie Love Song,” or the out-and-out South Park-plagiarizing “My Balls”). This is a man who doesn’t even understand what humor is. I guess we should be happy he only rapped such tiny verses: He could have gone on longer, which only would have been that much worse.