The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 1998

 

The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 1998

Hey guys, welcome back to Fire’s Flaming Hot Takes for another year-end list. Today, we’re examining the top 10 worst hit songs of 1998!

1998...wow. This was a pretty interesting year, not necessarily in a bad way (in fact, more of a good way in this case). As Todd In The Shadows put it, “...the late '90s were a weird time. After the slow fadeout of grunge and alternative, the music world started grasping at anything to replace it. We knew we wanted it to be happy and colorful, but other than that it was ‘everything goes’. It was a great time for all sorts of weird microgenres to have their brief moment in the sun. But beyond those, there were also the songs that were so odd…”. And that is pretty fairly represented on the year-end list. We got a strong year for teen pop, a growing year for hip hop, a huge year for R&B, and some alternative rock. And I feel like most, if not all, of these genres had pretty even representation on both the worst list and the best list. And in the end, it made for possibly one of the best years for music I’ve ever looked at. One where the worst hits of this year were more boring and tedious or incompetent than offensive. And honestly, what ended up as my worst hit of 1998, there are years I’ve looked at where it wouldn’t even make my top 5 on the worst list. But arguably most notable of all, 1998 was the last year where only physical singles could chart on the Hot 100. Many of the biggest hits of 1998 were not allowed to chart on the Hot 100 since they did not have a physical release.

As such, my criteria for this list is that any song that debuted on the Hot 100 year-end for 1998 is eligible, but if the song made the list in a previous year, it had to outdo its position on this year-end to qualify UNLESS the repeat is in the top 20, where it’s eligible regardless of its position the previous year. In addition, any song that made the Hot 100 airplay year-end in 1998 and placed higher than it did the previous year plus top 20 year-end songs on that chart are eligible regardless of its position last year. I’m likely gonna use a list structure like this for any other 90s lists I do in the future. So if you want the entire pool of songs in which I’m choosing from, you can check out this Spotify playlist right here. And as a disclaimer, Hot 100 Airplay year-end lists are extremely hard to find and scarce (some of the songs’ Wikipedia pages list the year-end placements for the Hot 100 Airplay chart, some don’t and it’s kinda random which ones do and which ones don’t lol). I just did my best to exclude any ineligible airplay only songs, but I could’ve very easily missed one. So if I accidentally include an ineligible song here, uh, I’m sorry? Anyways, with an expanded pool of songs to choose from, let’s get this party started with an ever so slightly expanded list of our dishonorable mentions!

DM #1: Mase f/Puff Daddy - Lookin' At Me (YE: #59, PEAK: #8)

Most of these dishonorable mentions are more mediocre than outright bad, and this falls into that territory. Mase sounds disinterested and his flow here is not strong at all. Even Puff Daddy’s hook, maybe the “best” part of the song, is hampered by the fact that Puff Daddy is a limited at best singer. Not much else to say, let’s move on.

DM #2: Jon B. - They Don't Know (YE: #39, PEAK: #7)

There’s plenty of good and even great R&B on the year-end list for 1998, but there was also a ton of forgettable shlock, such as this. Jon B. is certainly trying his hardest to sound impassioned in his singing here, I’ll give him that much, but he’s too much of a nonpresence and as a result it winds up fading into the background. Couple that with the very generic R&B production and you get a song that right after I finish writing this entry, I’m gonna forget this exists, or if you will, I won’t know, let alone “they”.

DM #3: Mase f/Total - What You Want (YE: #31, PEAK: #6)

Another forgettable Mase song. The closest comparison I can make is that he sounds like 50 Cent at his most uninteresting. Though I cannot solely pin all the problems on him here. Because something about R&B group Total’s hook grinds my gears, they sound like a disinterested TLC. Basically everything about this song is so uninteresting. And that bit where Mase rhymes “enchilada” with “manana” with “my casa” is literally so jarring and weirdly bizarre to me that it’s the only thing that sticks out to me. That is...until I was literally writing this entry and noticed this set of lyrics:

“And I ain't gonna ask who smashed the E-Class

Pull up to the crib with the whole front crashed

Now you wanna laugh, good thing that's the past

If you ever lie again, girl, that'll be your last”

And that just feels so jarring when you look at the rest of the lyrics, which are about Mase showing a girl a good time (I think?) with luxuries. Like that above set of lyrics basically feel like he’s saying “Remember that time you crashed the car? I’m not gonna ask you about who did that, but if you lie again you son of a bitch, I WILL NEVER BUY YOU ANOTHER CAR!”. I don’t know I’m probably being too dramatic there, but it’s an odd mood killer for me. I’ll tell you what I want from you, Total, a better song. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

DM #4: Next - I Still Love You (YE: #63, PEAK: #14)

Ah, Next, the R&B trio that had the biggest song of this year with “Too Close”, a pretty great song for what it is, but one I’m fairly certain no one remembers. But anyways, onto this song, it might not be their worst hit this year, but it’s still incredibly boring. In fact, the song is so insubstantial it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page! This is a song about how even despite the disagreements and hardships the narrator goes through with his girlfriend, he still loves her so much that he’ll never leave her. It’s trying to be “The Bones” by Maren Morris over 20 years prior to that song’s existence. But here’s the thing that made “The Bones” work for me and not this: Maren sounds like she doesn’t have to try being in love with her partner. Next, whichever member is singing here sounds like he’s trying his hardest to do so, as if he doesn’t really love her but is just trying his hardest to do so. That’s not to mention the odd framing the song picks up with a line like “'Cause I realize I need you in my life”. It makes this feel like this is referring to a now ex and that the narrator is trying to do a big swing to win back, and if you look at it from that angle, the line “I'll never leave you, baby” gives this a weird stalkery vibe. But really, this is just another boring and generic R&B track that I doubt anyone remembers, let alone still loves.

DM #5: Gerald Levert - Thinkin' Bout It (YE: #98, PEAK: #12)

Well, speaking of uninteresting R&B songs that don’t have a Wikipedia page, I don’t have anything to say about this that it even does that wrong, hell I’d go as far as to say that this had potential!! It’s a song that sees the narrator lament his girl cheating on him. The main problem that hurts what could’ve been a good song though, is Gerald Levert himself. He’s really overselling this and his wails of agony are genuinely painful to listen to. Give this to someone like Usher, who can sell this sort of gut-wrenching agony without sounding like someone punched him in the stomach, this could’ve been a pretty good or maybe even a great song. But as is, this is just mediocre.

DM #6: Sugar Ray - Fly (YE: #16 ON HOT 100 AIRPLAY)

I’ll be honest, I actually kinda liked this song when I first heard it back in 2022 when I was doing the 90s polls on Pulse. But this soured on me quite a bit. The funky guitars don’t sound awful, but whoever is singing here just sounds like ass. On the chorus in particular, he sounds like his pants were lit on fire and his testicles are burning while he’s recording his take and he has to just force his way through the pain to get a passable take. And when you pair that with the reggae instruments it gives this a cod reggae vibe which is kinda a bad thing. And the bit where it jarringly shifts into the harsher guitars feels like an aborted buildup that they forgot to remove in mixing/mastering. It sounds like if Nickelback were to cover MAGIC!’s “Rude”. Yeah, this song is about wanting to fly, but it should be grounded instantly. 

DM #7: Backstreet Boys - I'll Never Break Your Heart (YE: #34 ON HOT 100 AIRPLAY)

I’ll just get this out of the way quickly. Backstreet Boys > *NSYNC...most of the time. That said, “I’ll Never Break Your Heart” is the definition of cheesy. It feels like it’s trying to be “I Want It That Way” without any of the charm that made that song so incredible to this day. Complete with a cliche cheesy key change! So it’s boring, cheesy, and reminds me exactly of why I for many years used to think the 90s was the worst decade for music.

DM #8: Aerosmith - I Don't Want To Miss A Thing (YE: #23, PEAK: #1)

...I didn’t hate this when I first heard it. I never liked it per se, but I thought it was passable enough to leave it on if it came on the radio. But then I heard this one too many times and then the unbearable corniness of it all grinded my last gear. Frontman Steve Tyler doesn’t have an unbearable voice - I actually like “Dream On” quite a lot - but it’s really not built for corny ballads like these. He sounds terrible here, when he starts screaming in his rock timbre doesn’t add any catharsis and misses the attempted romantic atmosphere, it just makes me recoil. So to sum up, it’s unbearably corny, utterly fails at trying to be romantic, and has stuck around for entirely too long on Hot AC recurrent radio. If you don’t wanna miss a thing, I can assure you you won’t lose anything from your life if you miss this.

DM #9: Edwin McCain - I'll Be (YE: #74, PEAK: #5)

This is extremely boring and generic AC-core that might be an insult to AC-core. Let me start with the fact that Edwin McCain can’t fucking sing. His enunciation when he belts is only a half-step away from Scott Stapp of Creed’s enunciation. “UUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHLLLLL BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE YOOOOOOOOUR CRYYYYYYYYYYYIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING SOLDERRRRRRRRRRRRRR”. This is so unstimulating and it’s something I imagine gets played in insane asylums to drive the inmates into psychosis. This is awful.

DM #10: Kelly Price f/R Kelly & Ronald Isley - Friend Of Mine (YE: #72, PEAK: #12)

Fuck R Kelly. I could leave it at that considering he is one of the only artists I’ve ever heard where his actions have made it physically impossible to separate the art from the artist, it’s to the point where his vocals and his name being attached to the song alone repulse me, even on his best song, “Same Girl” with Usher. But I have to assign some blame to the other feature here, Ronald Isley, whose falsetto straight up sounds like nails on a chalkboard. Kelly Price really should’ve found different guest stars here, because honestly she sounds pretty nice and her voice compliments the R&B production pretty nicely. Yeah, fuck R Kelly. Next!

Alright, now for the list proper...

10...So R&B was very huge this year, there were plenty of great R&B hits this year that we’ll see in the best list, but there was also plenty of forgettable mush. We saw several examples of that in the dishonorable mentions already. There were, however, some R&B hits in 1998 that were outright bad, such as this!....

10. Dru Hill - We're Not Making Love No More (YE: #56, PEAK: #13)

This is a breakup song where the guys in Dru Hill are lamenting on getting dumped. Who knows, maybe I’d be more forgiving of this if it weren’t for the titular lyric being “we’re not making love no more”, seeming to imply that the worst part of the breakup is that they aren’t having the hot hot sex they used to have, kinda hurts any angst you’re trying to sell to us. And none of the guys in Dru Hill are doing anything to distinguish themselves from any other male R&B singer from this time period. But literally as I was writing this entry I noticed the bridge, which seems to be trying to say that the narrator is absolutely convinced that their girl is sad because the relationship sputtered out but it’s totally not too late to make things right!! Desperate, much? Not helped by the fact that this production goes literally nowhere, it’s just a constant boring mellow that drones on and on for eternity.

9...Lemme quote what someone said on the RYM page for this song: “Easiest way to get a modicum of crossover success if you're a second-or-lower string female rapper? Thug love duet. People go crazy for that shit.” If you expect me to springboard off of that quote into some more context, then sorry, this is all you’re getting because for the life of me I couldn’t think of a good intro for this...

9. Sylk-E Fyne f/Chill - Romeo And Juliet (YE: #48, PEAK: #6)

“It's like Romeo and Juliet

Hot sex on a platta' just to get you wet”

You do know that Romeo and Juliet didn’t have sex in the book, right? Maybe the story changed magically since I was in 9th grade and read the book, but this song was destined to fail on that premise alone. Sylk-E Fyne and Chill (whoever the latter is) have so much antichemistry it’d be a miracle if they had even a millionth of the chemistry Romeo and Juliet had in the book! Compare this song to another hit song from a decade later that also was based around Romeo & Juliet, “Love Story” by Taylor Swift. In “Love Story”, it wasn’t based explicitly on the storyline either and it had a cliche “tHEy lIVed haPPiLy EVer AFter” ending, but it was clear in that song that it came from a place of innocence. This is a song that wants to be about a toxic fling that thinks it’s much deeper than it actually is but nothing about the song’s production or our two performers seem to show any self-awareness, at least “Bad Things” by MGK and Camila Cabello, a song I still love to this day, had a serene production that seemed to give it a vibe that even if MGK and Camila weren’t aware of how toxic the whole thing is, the song itself knew and was trying to give it an atmosphere of two teenagers who think they’re in a deep, meaningful relationship with each other just enjoying their life. And as for this song itself, maybe it should’ve suffered the same fate the actual characters in the book did.

8...Have you ever come across those songs where there’s, like, nothing to them?…

8. Voices of Theory - Say It (YE: #45, PEAK: #10)

I’m serious, there’s like nothing to this song, it’s so monotone and the verses and chorus just blend together into one blob of nothing. In fact when I was writing this entry, I genuinely got through the whole song and thought for a second that it was just one giant chorus. Everyone in Voices of Theory literally sounds like they recorded this one take after taking an entire bottle of melatonin and are passing out in the moment. If you want me to say it, I’ll say something alright: this song is an awful cloud of nothing. Next!

7...In 1998, there were quite a few one hit wonders, on the more memorable side, we had “Are You Jimmy Ray?” by Jimmy Ray, which I assume was Jimmy Ray’s only hit because it painted him to the general public as a cartoon character, but on the other hand you get artists who get one hit by playing directly into the trends of the time with no other distinguishing aspects or personality to speak of and as a result are forgotten by almost everyone on the planet. Probably one example I can think of for this type of one hit wonder is “Wherever You Will Go” by The Calling, as much as I love the song. If you want the far worse side of that type of one hit wonder....

7. Uncle Sam - I Don't Ever Want To See You Again (YE: #26, PEAK: #6)

The tone in this song just feels so off to me in a bizarre way. This song is lyrically about the narrator’s girlfriend cheating on him with his best friend. And you’d think to back up such a sentiment you’d get actual catharsis or anger in the delivery. But no, Uncle Sam’s delivery here just sounds so wimpy and like he does, in fact, actually want to see her again. I don’t ever wanna see this song again.

6...I don’t remember when I first heard this song but it does sound oddly familiar. But I’ll say that at the time, I didn’t remember it sounding this BAD (side note, I wrote this intro before realizing I was probably thinking of the original “All Around The World” by Lisa Stransfield)...

6. Puff Daddy & The Family f/The Notorious B.I.G. & Mase - Been Around The World (YE: #19, PEAK: #2)

Puff Daddy or Diddy or P Diddy or whatever you call him has been cited as the “mastermind” behind bad sampling in the 90s where the closest comparison is probably David Guetta in the 2020s. And yeah, this song is baaaaaaaaaaad. It’s built on a sample of “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie and an interpolation of “All Around The World” by Lisa Stransfield. And honestly, the big reason this song is this high on this list is The Notorious B.I.G.’s singing on the hook, he disgraces the original song that he interpolates, I don’t even like “All Around The World” that much, but I’ll certainly take it over this! These guys have certainly been around the world, time for an apocalypse to end this shit.

5...Earlier on this list I criticized “Say It” for being monotonous and the verses and choruses blending into each other. But guess what? It wasn’t the worst case of that on this list!...

5. LSG - My Body (YE: #34, PEAK: #4)

The only discernible part of this song is “my body all over your body” repeated ad nauseum. Granted, maybe the “Nine one one zero zero twenty-four” lyric is clever in being a code for “Emergency! Call me! I’m home alone ;)”, but regardless of how clever any of the lyrics might be, for this song to work it requires us to give a shit about any of the guys in LSG or for them to have an actual presence. Not drowning themselves in autotune and singing with their noses pinched (seriously, the aforementioned 9110024 lyric is sung in the most nasal tone imaginable)!! It’s not the worst song called “My Body” I’ve heard since Coi Leray’s...thing that I don’t know if you can call a song more than a pisstake exists, but this is still pretty bad.

4...This group is still making music today and one of the members’ names is Feloney Davis, who joined the group 3 years after guess who left the group. “Guess who” is R Kelly, coincidence? I think not...

4. Public Announcement - Body Bumpin' (Yippie-Yi-Yo) (YE: #24, PEAK: #5)

I don’t get an R Kelly allergic reaction to this (even despite one of the members sounding suspiciously like him here), but it’s still hot ass. This song doesn’t sound sexy at all, which is a big problem if you’re making a song about how you want to bump this girl’s body!! And that’s not to mention the “yippie-yi-yo”’s which wear out their welcome in record time. Yeah, yippie-yi-yo yippie-yi-yay I wanna bump this song off a cliff into a field of cacti.

3...So you know in 1998-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

3. Nu Flavor - Heaven (YE: #91, PEAK: #27)

I literally don’t have much to say about why “Heaven” placed in the top 3 other than it might be one of the most boring songs I’ve ever heard, where the guys in Nu Flavor have negative engagement in this song. I mean do you really want me to do a full in-depth analysis on why “Heaven” by Nu Flavor is a boring song? Is anyone actually gonna say “my favorite song ever is ‘Heaven’ by Nu Flavor”? Is anyone gonna be on the frontlines for “Heaven” by Nu Flavor? No. this is just a boring ass snooze of a song that could cure insomnia. Everything about this band name is a misnomer, there’s nothing “nu” here and there’s no flavor to be found.

2...Flaming hot take incoming...

2. Smash Mouth - Walkin' On The Sun (YE: #9 ON HOT 100 AIRPLAY)

I’m honestly...a bit shocked this song finished so high here. But honestly the reason I dislike this is on sound alone. Frontman Steve Harwell sounds so ugly here and the minor key production seems to only amplify that ugliness. That keyboard line sounds so grating. Awful song, but definitely not as awful as...

 

1...As I said with “Been Around The World”, “Puff Daddy or Diddy or P Diddy or whatever you call him has been cited as the ‘mastermind’ behind bad sampling in the 90s where the closest comparison is probably David Guetta in the 2020s”, and yet it’s arguably his most “competently produced” song that’s topping this list. Go figure...

1. Puff Daddy f/Jimmy Page - Come With Me (YE: #47, PEAK: #4)

Yeah, even in a year like 2022, this song would likely miss my top 5 on my worst list for that year. I don’t know what to say, this list just didn’t give me any atrocities to deal with. That said, “Come With Me” is still a terrible song. An embarrassing rap rock song where Puff Daddy is trying his hardest to sound threatening or intimidating and awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, it’s so cute! <3 But seriously, this pathetic attempt at being intimidating reminds me a lot of the outright atrocious “Watch The World Burn” by Falling In Reverse. Not helped by the generic guitar riff from Jimmy Page having no personality. Basically this song sounds like a video game trailer. “Come With Me” by Puff Daddy and Jimmy Page, the worst hit song of 1998 by far.

And that’s the worst list done!! Next article should be the best list for this year, stay tuned for that and until then, if you have predictions for that list or your own lists of the worst hit songs of 1998, please comment them below!! I’m eager to read them. And until the next list, the Spotify playlist with every song on this list is linked right here. And until the next list, remember to keep it Fire!