The Worst Songs To Top The Charts

[BUTT]

White people doing ironic rap covers started a long time ago and got old a long time ago.

 

[kkktookmybabyaway]

I was at a wedding last night and almost got roped into--as it were--dancing to "Cotton-Eyed Joe" by Rednex. The fact that almost every wedding reception ostensibly requires this song is probably the #2 reason that I'm never getting married, one spot ahead of "no girl worth marrying would marry me," incidentally.

Actually, when you're the groom, you can oftentimes get out of doing shit like this by spending time thanking guests for coming, etc. The only thing I was a part of at my wedding was the girdle toss and some stupid southwestern PA ritual I can't begin to describe.

 

[Jingus]

Another weird thing about that Spice Girls song which perplexed me. They pronounced the letter Z like "zee", as Americans do it, not "zed" like Brits do. Seems like such an arbitrary bit of dumbing down the lyrics for American customers in a song that was all about zigazig-uh.

I was at a wedding last night and almost got roped into--as it were--dancing to "Cotton-Eyed Joe" by Rednex. The fact that almost every wedding reception ostensibly requires this song is probably the #2 reason that I'm never getting married, one spot ahead of "no girl worth marrying would marry me," incidentally.

I never understood the inexplicable popularity of that particular species of gangrenous earworm. Living in Nashville, you heard that song everywhere, nonstop, for what felt like about ninety years straight. Our lazy gym teacher in high school even made us learn the goddamn dance for it.

While there are some real stinkers on that list, I can't believe they hated on songs like "Final Countdown", "Sounds of Silence", "Two Princes" and "Broken Wings" while leaving out true pieces of turd that actually went to #1 on Billboard like "Informer" by Snow, "Macarena" (which pissed me off a good 2 years before it hit the US), "Living la Vida Loca", "Believe" by Cher (actually a Year-End #1!!), and whatever songs Enrique Iglesias managed to place at the top.

That pretty much sums it up. Hey, was a certain Armond White involved in this list?

 

[Czech]

It's popular because it fuses two considerably disparate musical styles in a catchy manner, theoretically making it acceptable for white trash, Eurotrash, and everyone in between in some weird self-aware ironic way. Did you know that Rednex are Swedes?

 

[Jingus]

I never knew a thing about the band. Neither did all the people who loved the song and Would! Not! Stop! Playing It!!! These weren't folks that liked it in anything resembling a self-aware ironic way. This was Tennessee. Garth Brooks was commonly played half a dozen times per night at the school dances in the early-mid 90s. They really loved Cottoneyed Joe sincerely.

 

[KOAB]

The fact that my brother got really hammered about a month ago and paid the DJ $30 to play Cotton-Eyed Joe is still causing confusion. Plus there's the fact that the DJ actually had Cotton-Eyed Joe in his playlist. I mean fuck it's 2009 and this was in Orange County... WHY ???

 

[Big Papa Paegan]

Because there is no kind or loving God, that's why.

 

[griffinmills]

Blender was created by the folks behind Maxim, only they added faux Pitchfork style writing to their scheme.

Holy crap, really? I remember getting a Blender CD like 15 years ago and never quiiiite putting it in the drive. Kinda wish I did now, lol.

 

[BUTT]

I'd like to nominate "I'm Real" by J. Lo and Ja Rule, which I have just discovered was our nation's #1 single on 9/11.

 

[The Coat Is My Father]

I think that Whatever You Like is a pretty good song...

 

[KOAB]

I'd like to nominate "I'm Real" by J. Lo and Ja Rule, which I have just discovered was our nation's #1 single on 9/11.

So that's why people were asking how Ja felt about it.

 

[dx1997]

I think at that time wasn't America in love with J-Lo's butt, so everything she did was in the spotlight.

Remember the #1 song and #1 movie in America? Wasn't it her at that time?

 

[Skywarp!]

I know it's the "bad song" cliche, but we can't not mention "My Heart Will Go On."

What about "My Humps"? Did that ever hit number 1?

 

[Black Lushus]

For their genre, it's not like "My Heart Will Go On" or even Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love of All" are terrible songs, they're just victims over overexposure more than anything.

 

[BUTT]

What about "My Humps"?

http://www.slate.com/id/2131640/

Notes on "Humps"
A song so awful it hurts the mind.
By Hua Hsu
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005, at 12:53 PM ET

"Taste has no system and no proofs"—this much we know. But some 40 years after the critic Susan Sontag made this and other observations on the good, the bad, and the in-between, the times have a-changed: Irony and camp have recast taste as an ethical shell game and we feel no guilt celebrating things that are, in the parlance of VH1, Awesomely Bad. But are there still songs that qualify as "bad"? Consider the Los Angeles hip-hop quartet the Black Eyed Peas. Their current single, "My Humps," is one of the most popular hit singles in history. It is also proof that a song can be so bad as to veer toward evil.

The Black Eyed Peas story begins in the early 1990s, when the rappers Will.I.am and Apl.de.ap met as members of a Los Angeles break-dancing crew called Tribal Nation. After a contract with Ruthless Records went nowhere, the duo regrouped with a third member, Taboo, and renamed themselves the Black Eyed Peas. The trio's earthy, post-Benetton aesthetic resulted in two moderately successful but unspectacular albums: 1998's Bridging the Gap and 2000's Behind the Front. In 2003 they added a fourth member, the singer Fergie. Propelled by a more upbeat frat-party vibe, their songs went platinum.

For all the brow-furrowing about the precise, Pavlovian engineering of hit singles, pop music is a wholly unpredictable, unstable enterprise. Lazy artists catch lightning in a bottle, bizarre throwaway jingles are greeted as bursts of quirky ingenuity, and puffy bits of melodrama accidentally become the catchiest thing ever. This is the weird appeal of the radio (or however you get your populist fix): Anything—good, bad, or otherwise—can sound genuinely perfect for a summer. If an Awesomely Bad pop song survives a few years and enlivens a party sometime down the line, so much the better.

This is what makes "My Humps" such an inscrutable pop moment. It's not Awesomely Bad; it's Horrifically Bad. The Peas receive no bonus points for a noble missing-of-the-mark or misguided ambition (some of the offended have responded with parody videos and snickering anecdotes about how the group uses Hitler-approved microphones). "My Humps" is a moment that reminds us that categories such as "good" and "bad" still matter. Relativism be damned! There are bad songs that offend our sensibilities but can still be enjoyed, and then there are the songs that are just really bad—transcendentally bad, objectively bad.

As a piece of music, "My Humps" is a stunning assemblage of awful ideas. The song's playful pogo and coke-thin, ring-tone synth line interpolate Sexual Harassment's 1982 left-field electro hit, "I Need A Freak". But where the original trafficked in something icky, sinister, and darkly sexual, the Peas' call-and-response courtship fails to titillate—in fact, it's enough to convince one to never, ever ogle again. The "humps" in question belong to Fergie, who brandishes her "lovely lady lumps" for the purpose of procuring various gifts from men who, one would assume, find the prospect of "lumps" very exciting—one lump begetting another lump, if you will.

"What you gon' do with all that ass/ All that ass inside them jeans? … What you gon' do wit all that breast?/ All that breast inside that shirt?" rapper Will.I.Am teases in response, rendering literal what had heretofore been pretty much literal. It's a song that tries to evoke a coquettish nudge and wink, but head-BUTTs and bloodies the target instead. It isolates sectors of the female anatomy that obsessive young men have been inventing language for since their skulls fused, and yet it emerges only with "humps" and "lumps"—at least "Milkshake" sounded delicious.

The most fascinating aspect of "My Humps" is that it is widely believed to be the most successful unsolicited single in history, and, as of this writing, it is the most-downloaded song in the country. The Peas achieved all this without releasing a single. Instead, file sharers and intrepid radio programmers were the ones who more or less discovered the song and pushed it toward hit status, eventually forcing the label to respond with a proper single release. (Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me" is another recent example of a song that hit because of radio programmers rather than label strategy.) For now, "My Humps," has become the standard-bearer for the direct-democracy cultural possibilities of the Internet. It will certainly be supplanted. Soon, hopefully.

 

[foleyfanforever88]

"My Humps" is definitely in my top 10 (probably top 5) least favorite songs of all time. I hate that shit.

 

[Jingus]

Anyone ever see Alanis Morisette's cover video of that song? It's her dressed in white gangsta costume, gettin' jiggy with it in slow motion while singing the most ponderous quarter-speed monotone version of the song. She claims she loved the original and it's a tribute, but I dunno, it looks more like satire verging on character assassination to me.

A friend of mine also said that My Humps sounded like it was trying to fetishize breast cancer, with the references to lovely lady lumps and whatnot. Never quite looked at the song the same way again after that.

 

[MFer]

The article above sounds like something Czech would write. But yeah, I heard that song way too many times in dirty basements at college parties with obnoxious skanks dancing all around.

 

[Gary]

When I started college, there was a fat chick who played that song non stop, and tried to sing it. I have plenty of reasons to hate it.

 

[Byron The Bulb]

http://www.slate.com/id/2131640/

As far as sweeping condemnations of "My Humps" go, I've always liked this one, from cokemachineglow.

But there comes a time when we must slip from our comfortable musical niche back into the overstuffed shopping mall that is popular music, if only for a moment. There occasionally comes a track, the awesome force of which requires not so much that it be reviewed as simply reacted to. A track of colossal proportions, something that shakes the foundations of the musical idiom and forces us to reevaluate everything that has come before and after it, a single track that resounds through all spheres of music, art, and, indeed, the way we live our lives. There is just such a song on the airwaves right now, and its awesome force is violating the fabric of reality. I'm speaking, of course, about the Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps."

To simply note that this track (I'll not call it a song, for reasons elaborated later) is a soulless fucking godawful piss-chugging fetus-eating abomination is too little, too late. I could write a song review of it, sure, and I could use all the big mean words I know, but that wouldn't do this tyrannous life-destroyer justice. The Black Eyed Peas are, obviously, an easy target-it would be journalistically unsound for me to expound on why the band is loathsome, because you already know what a website like CMG is going to say about a group like the Black Eyed Peas, and if you're reading the site then you probably already feel the same way. Still, having heard this song, I must address it, if only to exorcise the demons it has imbedded within me. I write, then, as an act of expulsion, but I urge you to continue reading these words, despite their admittedly self-serving impetus.

Because this thing must be stopped.

We must stop its forward progress and bash in its skull, repeatedly and viciously, and once the last of its life has twitched out of its torn corpus we must continue to thrash it until the sun has gone long down and our arms are sore and nothing remains but gristle, clumped to the sand and picked at by the basest cur. This is not a "song," readers; it is the antithesis of music. It lacks chorus, verse, or progression, and, while this was the old guard's original complaint against hip hop, that culture was birthed out of the repressed urge to create. "My Humps" represents a total abandonment of meaning in pop music. I could criticize its lazy rhymes, ("junk" and "trunk," "sex me" and "sexy," "drama" and, um, "drama drama") or its nonexistent beat (haphazard synth bursts, manically ticking faux-congas, etc.), but the musical core of this song is such a sparsely populated din that it transcends evaluation by being, essentially, too simple to be picked apart.

This isn't to say that musical minimalism is, in and of itself, a bad thing; witness the Clipse's no-frills juggernaut "Grindin" for proof, or, shit, the Ramones' entire oeuvre. But the Black Eyed Peas have filled this track with more than its spare components would suggest, and it is this that I must react to, not the way the track "sounds." Indeed, the Black Eyed Peas deserve credit for hiding such monumentally lascivious motive within this petty framework.

For within this simple "pop song" (as many would defend this) there lies the very subversion of pop music, a depraved attempt to destroy our common cultural heritage. Think of this song's meaninglessness as a vacuum, a black hole. And, just like a black hole, it sucks: it sucks in the notion of "logical" pop music; it sucks in our need for melody, for dynamism and for form; it sucks in our taste for lyricism, elegance and nuance; it sucks in our innate thirst for motion, for rhythm, for dance. It sucks. It sucks. It sucks it sucks it sucks. It sucks in everything that we hold dear, it sucks in the very things that hold us together, it sucks it sucks it sucks. It sucks and sucks and sucks in the most pervasive of all art forms, and in the process it attempts to destroy our way of life. I'll not dare suggest that the Black Eyed Peas are actually terrorists, I'll only point out that the two enemies seem to share common motives. The possible ultimate ramifications of this line of questioning are so immense that I must leave their exposition to abler pens.

Where did these Black Eyed Peas come from? It seems just a few years ago that I, a fresh-faced scamp, was watching them at the Vans Warped Tour, bouncing invitingly to their minor hit "Joint and Jams." What happened to those people? Where did this "Fergie" and "Will.I.Am" come from? Can this possibly be the same group of people? Why would they create something like "My Humps"? These are questions I don't know the answers to, and they must also remain paths not traveled, lines of questioning not followed. It is late, after all, and I have listened to "My Humps" a lot tonight. I am only one person; I can only take so much.

But don't pity me. I have chosen to do this, and I am thankfully cognizant of the potentially devastating effects of this track. Save your pity for the gas station workers that must hear this over the radio, for the gym attendees innocently attempting fitness, for those stuck in cars without many radio options, for those that lack the ability or willingness to stop this beast from wrapping its tentacles around them, from pumping its thick, viscous hate into the veins of pop culture. Save your pity mostly for the children, the group to whom this abomination would most obviously appeal, and pray that they may resist it. The rest of us must fumble toward the light and begin the long task of discovering what it means to live in a post-"My Humps" world. We must come together with those we love and take hammer and nail to reconstruct all the things that have been destroyed. Wolf Parade may be able to help. So might all the canonical greats, from the Beatles and Dylan to Wu-Tang and Radiohead. In the face of everything "My Humps" has destroyed, we must relisten, reassess, relearn.

And then, we must rebuild.

 

[KOAB]

My Humps also influenced Lil Wayne to make "Lollipop"

 

[Byron The Bulb]

We have a new contender!

Owl City - "Fireflies" (Album Version) w/ Download! - BVTV First Listen!

This is the most saccharine cloying piece of shit I've ever heard.

 

[atticus Chaos]

Gareth Gates topped the European charts with his version of unchained melody.

I swear to God, as you hear him sing it, you can almost hear him sucking the life of out this classic ballad. It was then that I knew all this reality television stuff was going ruin the music industry. Even the really bad songs (like Barry Manilow ballads or Barbie Girl) have some sort of soul in them, but this was the most flat, lifeless version of anything I've ever heard.

Looking back, Gates wasn't the first pop act to be completely artifical and manufactured, but he may have been the first act where he and his mangement didn't even feel like pretending it was about anything other than making money.

The sad thing was, he is, by any normal standard, a good singer (like most of the people that win these contests.) But sung with such a lack of passion he was terrible.

 

[BUTT]

We have a new contender!

Owl City - "Fireflies" (Album Version) w/ Download! - BVTV First Listen!

This is the most saccharine cloying piece of shit I've ever heard.

I get a thousand hugs
From ten thousand lightning bugs
As they tried to teach me how to dance
A foxtrot above my head
A sockhop beneath my bed
A disco ball is just hanging by a thread

 

[ZGangsta]

We have a new contender!

Owl City - "Fireflies" (Album Version) w/ Download! - BVTV First Listen!

This is the most saccharine cloying piece of shit I've ever heard.

I get a thousand hugs
From ten thousand lightning bugs
As they tried to teach me how to dance
A foxtrot above my head
A sockhop beneath my bed
A disco ball is just hanging by a thread

This is exactly the type of shitty song that indie hipster douchebags would be praising. They'd go on about how it's "pure pop perfection" and "electronica-tinged but still tender" and some bullshit about "childlike wonder."

Except for it made the billboard charts and thus must be destroyed (http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/11613-fireflies/).

 

[Cackling Co Pilot Kamala]

We have a new contender!

Owl City - "Fireflies" (Album Version) w/ Download! - BVTV First Listen!

This is the most saccharine cloying piece of shit I've ever heard.

I get a thousand hugs
From ten thousand lightning bugs
As they tried to teach me how to dance
A foxtrot above my head
A sockhop beneath my bed
A disco ball is just hanging by a thread

This is exactly the type of shitty song that Byron The Bulb would be praising. They'd go on about how it's "pure pop perfection" and "electronica-tinged but still tender" and some bullshit about "childlike wonder."

Except for it made the billboard charts and thus must be destroyed (http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/11613-fireflies/).

I'm Stoned LOL

 

[Black Lushus]

My 7 year old daughter likes that song.

 

[Skywarp!]

It's not really a commercial song, but what about the theme song/video for Sunday Night Football? It's like a distillation of everything wrong with this country in two minutes.

 

[BUTT]

God I can't tell you how hard I LOLed when that guy said he gets a thousand hugs from lightning bugs.

 

[Incandenza]

Speaking of this song, when I was in Starbucks the other day, "Such Great Heights" came on. Oh my, it was as if I had been transported back to 2003 and I was shaking it with an adorable indie girl at the Art Bar.*

* Jax-based indie club that closed its doors about four years ago. Don't worry, though; two indie clubs have appeared on the Jacksonville scene since. Our hipsters aren't lacking for places to go on Saturday night.