The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 2015

The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 2015

In the following few paragraphs, I take a look at one of the better years of the 2010s for the Hot 100 and look at the songs that hold it back from being up with the best.

(this list was originally created on July 15, 2021)

Hey guys, welcoming back to Fire's Flaming Hot Takes. This is a bit later than usual mostly because I was starting to hit a burn-out stage and I wanted to keep this as fun for me as possible. Also because I’d already gone through the year-end lists for 2016, 2014, 2011, and 2020 before typing up the documents themselves, so I already had a general idea of how those lists would go, but I hadn’t done so for this year, so that’s what I’ve been doing. But now, it’s time for another top 10 list, today we’re looking at the top 10 worst hit songs of 2015!

So it seems that the general consensus is that 2015 was one of the best, if not the best, years of the 2010s for the Hot 100. This year has been so highly praised by many critics I’ve seen. So that said, having gone through this year-end list, I was able to see if it does in fact live up to its title, and...

Well, I’d say that those assertions are quite valid, because 2015 was quite an amazing year for the Hot 100 - although I’d still give the edge to 2011 and 2017. It was the beginning of trap’s rise to dominance in the mainstream, which...yeah, gave us pretty mixed results. Country also struggled a bit - bro-country did collapse as fast as it did dominate in 2014, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t get a single sliver of it left on the Hot 100. Really, I think the pop is what really pulled their weight this year. Instead of the bland annoyance that pop was in 2014, it started taking on tropical sounds. Which, kinda confuses me to be honest, as 2015’s pop was in its tropical house trend and this year is praised...whereas 2016 also had that trend yet it’s constantly panned. Don’t get me wrong, 2016 did have more bad songs than this year, but still, I wouldn’t say these two years are so different that one is among the best of the decade and the other is among the worst.

But anyway, assembling this list was actually rather easy, there was only one song that I needed to cut and most of the dishonorable mentions are more mediocre than outright bad - so it’s similar to 2011 in that way, however the difference is there were more bad songs here. Overall, there were 23 songs - including 2014 repeats - that fell into “mediocre tier” or lower for me, so it’s a pretty good showing all things considered. As a rule, the song had to debut on the year-end Hot 100 for 2015 to qualify, so congrats “Don’t”, “Shake It Off”, “Bang Bang”, and “Stay With Me”, you all managed to avoid making any worst list of mine purely because the year-end list you debuted on was ridiculously weak, trust me all four of these songs would’ve made this list had they debuted on the 2015 year-end. Anyway, time to look at the songs that hold this year back from being among the best years of the 2010s for the Hot 100, starting with our dishonorable mentions!

DM #1: Meghan Trainor - Lips Are Movin (YE: #22, PEAK: #4)

People usually point to “Marvin Gaye” and “Dear Future Husband” when they want a Meghan Trainor song to put on a “worst of 2015” list. But I’ll be honest, I actually like both of those songs. Sure, “Marvin Gaye” does not work as a sex song and “Dear Future Husband” has extraordinarily problematic lyrics, but the production on both of them was able to save them for me. This, on the other hand, I mean, you could just say this is “All About That Bass” but faster and end it there. Granted, this song is better than that atrocity, but this is still pretty mediocre. Why is Meghan Trainor rapping? It even has the same subject matter as “All About That Bass”, only better - and missing the list proper - because the production is very minimally catchy.

DM #2: Alessia Cara - Here (YE: #94, PEAK: #5)

I’m startled that this song managed to get so much critical acclaim. This is definitely up there as one of the most overrated songs of the 2010s. It reminds me of “Royals” by Lorde, which is also up there as one of the most overrated songs of the 2010s. Alessia Cara’s voice isn’t anxious here like the song is supposed to convey, and the song just drones on. It’s mind-numbing, it’s not good at all.

DM #3: Taylor Swift f/Kendrick Lamar - Bad Blood (YE: #15, PEAK: #1)

I’ll just say it - Kendrick saved this song from the list proper, his flows sound really great on this song. It’s a shame the rest of the song seriously sucks, like my god. The heavy drums are anticlimactic and it features Taylor Swift’s vocals at their most obnoxious across an otherwise very generic and unremarkable production. Comfortably the worst song on 1989, it’s aged pretty badly, and I don’t feel like many people are returning to this song anymore. Good.

DM #4: Sia - Elastic Heart (YE: #52, PEAK: #17)

The electropop and trap sounds in this song don’t mesh well at all. The chorus is so overcompressed and it drowns Sia out. Really, I don’t have much to say about this at all, it’s very forgettable and whenever I listen to it it’s just unpleasant as hell, which, in a year as strong as 2015, is quite enough to land here.

DM #5: ILoveMakonnen f/Drake - Tuesday (YE: #82, PEAK: #12)

Why is ILoveMakonnen singing in his upper register? It sounds awful, and the production is a generic trap production that doesn’t go anywhere, doesn’t help its case. And Drake just steals the entire show, with more personality than ILoveMakonnen - very ironic considering some of his recent work. This is a slog, boring and unremarkable, next!

DM #6: Elle King - Ex’s And Oh’s (YE: #73, PEAK: #10)

And going back to songs that have aged very badly, we’re now up to the point where I’d actually call these songs bad. My god, the amount of radio overplay this song received is beyond insane, I cannot listen to this song anymore. Elle King’s vocals are really bad, especially when she tries to sing higher notes, they get so scratchy and after a while it seriously grates on you - the rasp doesn’t add anything cool, it’s just annoying. And the production is ugly too, the fuzzed out guitar line mainly. It sounds so horrible. And then you want to give that a solo!? Bleh, I don’t care how much praise this song has gotten, this did not age well at all.

DM #7: Sam Smith - I’m Not The Only One (YE: #26, PEAK: #5)

Oh don’t worry Sam Smith, “Stay With Me” might’ve dodged my worst list simply because 2014 sucked ass for the Hot 100, but that doesn’t mean you’re safe from all my worst lists, because “I’m Not The Only One” might be even worse than “Stay With Me”! Sam can sing in their lower register pretty well, but when they go into their upper register in the chorus, it gets super irritating. And the production just drones on, the piano melody doesn’t go anywhere, the percussion gets annoying, and the song is just an utter bore. Sam, you might be able to make a good ballad like “Too Good At Goodbyes” once in a while, but please, stick to making upbeat dance songs like “Latch” and “Dancing With A Stranger”, you do so well on those tracks!

Okay, onto the list proper!

10...So a small anecdote, I originally found this song sometime in, say, 2016 or so by accident. I was trying to search for Calvin Harris’s song of the same name, and then I ended up stumbling across this. Let’s just say that it wasn’t a pleasant listen, and all these years later, when I rediscovered it for this list...yeah, it hasn’t changed one bit...

10. Fetty Wap f/Monty - My Way (YE: #44, PEAK: #7)

I’ll admit, as much as I disliked “Trap Queen” at the time, I’ve had a change of heart towards the song, and I think it’s aged better than I would’ve expected. And I think “679” was pretty decent as well. But this was easily the worst of his 3 year-end hits. What made me like Fetty Wap’s other hits on this year-end was the pure fun in them. This one, on the other hand, is so lethargic, so boring, it’s pretty damn bad. Fetty Wap trying to warble across this slow-tempo trap beat is very unpleasant to the ears and Monty does not sound good here either. And I swear they manage to go off the beat a lot - it’s so distracting. It’s the same exact flow for the entire song, it gets very repetitive and annoying. Yeah, this isn’t good at all.

9...2015 was definitely the year artists managed to break through onto the Hot 100 via Vine. Quite a few of the songs on this year-end list are dance challenge songs, including this one, which for some reason was a top 50 hit of the year...

9. T-Wayne - Nasty Freestyle (YE: #50, PEAK: #9)

How the hell does one dance to this? The song is simply just freestyle rapping over the production of “Nasty” by Bandit Gang Marco - a song that sounds very unremarkable on its own. So T-Wayne freestyle rapping over this song somehow makes it even worse! The song is literally one verse long, it’s so unfinished! And I get it, it’s a freestyle, but still I can’t help but feel that this doesn’t have enough in it. The production is a generic and lethargic trap beat that I absolutely don’t get how people can make a dance challenge out of...no this song is a disaster, Drake’s freestyle that made the year-end “Back To Back” is so much better, let’s move on.

8...So one big thing from this year was the movie Fifty Shades of Grey, where two songs from the soundtrack got big enough to make the top 20 on the year-end list. One of them is fantastic, the other, well...

8. The Weeknd - Earned It (YE: #9, PEAK: #3)

Part of my dislike of this is that compared to most of the rest of The Weeknd’s discography, this is significantly lamer and weaker. But I still think it’s aged really badly. The Weeknd is able to showcase his impressive vocals, but good god in the prechorus he drags out those notes to the point of less impressiveness and more irritation. The strings arrangement and the percussion try to create some sort of buildup, but it just slogs on and on. It’s an absolute bore, and considering he now has songs in his discography like “Blinding Lights”, “False Alarm”, “I Feel It Coming”, and much more, yeah this is extremely lame.

7...I swear, I like the modern Maroon 5 more than most people, and even I hate this song!

7. Maroon 5 - Sugar (YE: #5, PEAK: #2)

Objectively, this is probably the best song from Maroon 5 from the 2010s. It slightly calls back to their Songs About Jane era. But regardless I’ve always found this song terrible. On a production level, the funky groove and the guitar isn’t that bad, but Adam Levine tries to sing in his falsetto in the chorus which sounds so painfully thin. It's just so painfully generic that received entirely too much overplay on the radio, I hate this shit.

6...If you’re gonna make a song that’s 5 minutes long, do something interesting to keep me hooked. This song didn’t do that. It instead decided to lean into its worst aspects, and, well let’s just get this dreck over with quickly...

6. Nicki Minaj f/Lil Wayne, Drake, & Chris Brown - Only (YE: #51, PEAK: #12)

“Eat my ass like a cupcake” - yeah that’s where the song should end. It’s a bad sign when Chris Brown is the best part of a terrible song. Nicki Minaj, I guess is the next best performance on this song? Outside that one line, there isn’t anything I’d complain about. But Lil Wayne and Drake’s performances are utterly terrible, but let me deal with the production quickly. The production is literally just a four-note synth line that is just icky as hell, and the light percussion doesn’t match it at all. Drake also drags out his bars too long, he sounds utterly delirious, and he goes off the beat multiple times. Lil Wayne slurs through all his bars. No one here has any power behind their rapping, there’s no fire, there’s no energy, it’s an utter dreck that lasts for 5 minutes - yeah this is trash.

5...So I don’t think “House Party” or “Body Like A Back Road” are the worst things of all time. This other song from Sam Hunt, on the other hand...

5. Sam Hunt - Take Your Time (YE: #45, PEAK: #20)

As I said, just because bro-country significantly declined after 2014 doesn’t mean there weren’t a few last spurts of it coming in every now and then - hell we still get a few spurts now in 2021. And “Take Your Time” is just terrible, where Sam Hunt half-raps and half-talks through his verses where he sounds utterly checked out. He then proceeds to go into the chorus where he sings lines like “I don’t have to take your heart, I just wanna take your time”. Yes because this girl is gonna fall in love with you and marry you just like that, Sam Hunt. And there are lines where this girl’s friend is trying to save her from toxic relationships, and am I the only one who thinks that her friend is in the right here? Because these lines are condescending as hell - especially in the chorus. “I don’t wanna steal your freedom”, “I don’t wanna blow your phone up”, are you implying that you would do this to any other girl, Sam Hunt!? This is manipulative, putrid, disgusting, and it makes Sam Hunt look like a fucking creep, this is complete garbage.

4…I’ll admit, “Black Beatles” has aged better for me than I expected it to, but Rae Sremmurd is not gonna be safe from my worst list just because of that...

4. Rae Sremmurd - No Type (YE: #70, PEAK: #16)

The album this song was on apparently made many year-end lists because “it’s fun” and “it’s not supposed to be taken seriously”. And maybe this would work for, say, any song from the club boom - biggest examples I can think of being “Tonight Tonight” by Hot Chelle Rae or “Good Time” by Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen - but it doesn’t work here at all. This isn’t fun at all, it’s dreadful. Mainly because of the bassline drowning out literally everything else, but Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi try rapping in their upper register where they start squeaking and it sounds so awful. And then the stupidest bar in this entire song is in the chorus - “I ain’t got no type, bad bitches is the only thing I like” - I guess “bad bitches” aren’t a type anymore? Look, I have better things to say about “Black Beatles” and “Powerglide” - but I’m fine with leaving this song behind in 2015.

3...And let’s go back to bro-country for a moment!

3. Luke Bryan - Kick The Dust Up (YE: #87, PEAK: #26)

If you make a song that reportedly even your fans don’t like, you’ve screwed up big time. And that’s when we get to “Kick The Dust Up” arguably the worst song Luke Bryan has ever made. As many have pointed out, this is just a rehash of “That’s My Kind Of Night” - which I don’t even like to begin with. The guitars are ugly and the chorus is so overproduced. And the lyrics are asinine and ridiculous! I’m looking at you “knock, knock, knock goes the diesel” - what the fuck are you talking about!?!? It’s another slow-tempo song that tries to be one to blast at a party, but you know what I think this is what will make the party leave. And if I play this at a party, I’ll be even more lonely than I was before.

2...At this point, I feel that I’m picking easy targets...

2. Silento - Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae) (YE: #8, PEAK: #3)

Maybe I should have a soft spot for this because of good memories of me and my friends dancing to this...but this has only grated on me so much over time. The keyboard line is so limp, the bass is so limp, everything here is so limp. And this entire song is basically just Silento just stealing dances from other popular dance tracks. And it’s clear Silento never intended for this song to become a big hit, it’s so repetitive and ridiculously annoying. Silento also tries to harmonize over the 2nd and 3rd choruses which doesn’t fit at all and also sounds just terrible overall. So what’s worse?

1...I’m pretty surprised that this song ended up at the top of my worst list for 2015. On the surface, it’s just a novelty song not meant to be taken seriously. It hasn’t inflicted any cultural damage. It’s pretty easy to ignore and is pretty much a joke. But, as you know, that’s not how I choose my picks. Cultural damage can make a bad song significantly worse but has little impact on a good song. And I don’t measure cultural damage from a song unless I already utterly despise it. So when it comes to this pick, I chose the one with the least redeeming qualities. And I think this song quite perfectly describes that...

1. O.T. Genasis - CoCo (YE: #79, PEAK: #20)

I like my fair share of stupid and dumb songs. This is not one of them. The trap beat is stunningly generic, the organs backing it up try to add swell but when added to a song as ridiculously stupid as this it just falls flat. The lyrics are super thin, but my real problem is in O.T. Genasis’s delivery. He raps with the exact same flow the entire song, where he starts to go into his upper register around halfway through the bar, and he sounds utterly fucking horrible every damn time. And I’ve tried my hardest to find a good quality in this song, and outside of this being possibly serviceable to people who enjoy songs that don’t take themselves seriously at all - which even I doubt that because I’m yet to find someone who actually likes this, whether ironically or unironically - this is so incompetent and migraine inducing that it’s absolutely unlistenable for me. There isn’t a time or a place where this would be able to click for me. And unlike “Watch Me” or “Nasty Freestyle” which I understand that they both have an audience for this kind of music - whether they are danceable or not I just covered - but my point, I don’t see the appeal in this song at all. This isn’t funny, it’s annoying as shit. And with that, yeah “CoCo” by O.T. Genasis is the worst hit song of 2015. And I don’t think anyone’s missing O.T. Genasis either, considering that after “Cut It” in 2016 he hasn’t had another charting single on the Hot 100.

So yeah, I’ve torn into the worst of this year. But that said, 2015 was still one of the better years of the 2010s for the Hot 100 and was quite a glorious time for the charts. The best songs of this year will be up in a bit, and there were some pretty damn painful cuts.