The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 1996

 

The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 1996

You know, going into this year-end list, I didn’t really know what to expect. But it sure as hell wasn’t a year-end list this absurdly stacked. Seriously, 1996 is a year that’s easily up there with 1966 as one of the best years for pop music I’ve ever looked at. So what’s even happening this year? Well, we had a huge europop craze where artists from different parts of the world found success (look no further than the biggest song of this year that took over the entire world in force that year), a pretty strong year for rock, and singer-songwriter cuts that leaned a bit on the alternative side. And all of that leads to a year where I can’t even fill out a full dishonorable mentions list and one where I have songs in my bottom 22 of the year that I find decent!!

Many of the biggest hits of the 90s 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 the same as it was for my 1998 lists; any song that debuted on the Hot 100 year-end for 1996 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 1996 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. So if you want the full pool of songs in which I’m choosing from, you can check out this Spotify playlist right here. And with how rare and hard-to-find information regarding the Hot 100 Airplay year-end lists are, I could’ve very easily missed an eligible song or accidentally included an ineligible song. Anyways, let’s get this party started with a very short (and incomplete) list of our dishonorable mentions!

DM #1: LL Cool J - Doin' It (YE: #61, PEAK: #9)

All three of our dishonorable mentions are more mediocre than outright bad, but that doesn’t stop this song from being a complete waste of potential. LL Cool J actually has a smooth and laid-back flow that can excuse the horny lyrics but there’s no getting around it; LeShaun, whoever the fuck that is, just sounds so bored here and that makes her overly repetitive hook get grating fast. There’s a way LL Cool J could’ve been doin’ it [this song] well, but this...isn’t it.

DM #2: Jewel - Who Will Save Your Soul (YE: #25, PEAK: #11)

It’s fairly common consensus that Jewel isn’t very good as a songwriter, especially when trying to write profound societal commentary. And yes, the writing here does feel really pretentious - it feels like Jewel is jumping from topic to topic with little in the way of cohesion - but that’s not even my main problem with this song. Jewel’s constant switching from speak-singing to singing in cursive with a very forced throaty(?) delivery (and at points a twang) gets really tiresome and makes me utterly convinced that Jewel thinks that she’s saying something profound and meaningful here.

DM #3: R. Kelly - I Can't Sleep Baby (If I) (YE: #27, PEAK: #5)

Screw R Kelly. But not even gonna lie, “I Can’t Sleep Baby (If I)” is one of the few R. Kelly songs where his presence isn’t the worst part of it. In fact, the reason this is aggressively mediocre is the exact opposite problem - R. Kelly has no personality here!! He isn’t injecting any presence into this and it feels lifeless as a result. So R. Kelly injecting presence makes the song bad but him not putting enough presence into the song also makes it not good. Moral of the story? R. Kelly should never ever touch the mic again.

Well, that was really quick, now for the list proper...

10...So I mentioned in the intro that 1996 was a pretty great year for rock and alternative music, there are plenty of great rock songs we’ll get to in the best list, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t get more than a few duds....

10. Bush - Glycerine (YE: #59 ON HOT 100 AIRPLAY)

This is just a real bore that gets actively worse with frontman Gavin Rossdale’s vocals. He tries to have a raspy rock vocal timbre but for a ballad like this, that kind of vocal timbre just doesn’t work. There’s no catharsis or buildup, it just plods on and on at the same irritating mellow and it makes Rossdale out like he’s straining to hit mid-range notes. Basically, this sounds like if Lewis Capaldi sung rock music instead of piano ballads.

9...Flaming hot take incoming (I think?)...

9. Junior M.A.F.I.A. f/The Notorious B.I.G. - Get Money (YE: #89, PEAK: #17)

I’ll start by saying I actually think the production is decent. The bassline is pretty nifty. But no, where this all falls apart for me is that chorus. Lil Kim sounds really disinterested in her delivery and that makes the repetitive nature of the hook a migraine. Fuck this song, get money (idk, I wanted a pun to close off this segment and that’s the best I got).

8...Well, somewhat continuing off the last entry, here’s another song that comes crumbling down because of one bad production decision…

8. Total - No One Else (YE: #87, PEAK: #22)

I’ll give this song this much credit: the girls in Total sound really expressive and I’d go as far as to say their voices actually sound quite pretty. But the reason this just fails is because of that awful production. It no joke sounds like the musical equivalent of a clown taking one of those toy horns and bashing you over the head over and over again with it, making sure it squawks every time. Yeah, pretty bad song, not much else to say here.

7...In my 1998 worst list, I expressed that Puff Daddy was behind much of the bad sampling in the 90s. Puff Daddy obviously wasn’t the only one who sampled songs this decade. But this time, it isn’t the sampling I take issue with!!....

7. MC Lyte f/Xscape - Keep On, Keepin' On (YE: #77, PEAK: #10)

Okay, Xscape’s hook is pretty good, I can admit that. It’s slightly more lifeless than what I’d prefer, but for what it is, the girls in the group all have enough expressiveness to elevate this from being worse. The rest of this song, however, is complete ass. MC Lyte has no personality and her flow sounds really sloppy. She can’t remotely sell the fact that she can get loose and produce large amounts of...juice. And then the rest of the lyrics and I found out from Genius.com literally as I was writing this entry that this is supposedly about continuing to persevere with doing what you’re doing and not giving up, it’d probably be an admirable subject matter if the chorus didn’t redefine the term “tonal dissonance”. From the tone Xscape sing that hook in, I honestly thought this was a hookup song. Yeah, no offense, but if this is your best offering, I think it’s best you don’t keep on...keeping on.

6...So R&B was huge in the 90s. Why? Well, let me quote a Medium article: “Propelled by new jack swing’s momentum, R&B absorbed hip-hop’s gritty aesthetic into its fabric. Hard-edged beats and aggressive vocals became trademarks of the new ‘hip hop soul’ sound pioneered by Mary J. Blige and Sean “Puffy” Combs. This urban style resonated powerfully with audiences, melding seamlessly with pop instincts.”. So this meant that for every “The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy and Monica, we got one slice of forgettable mush like this...

6. Joe - All the Things (Your Man Won't Do) (YE: #55, PEAK: #11)

Joe’s vocals elevate this from being terrible, but I still think this is pretty bad. Joe does sing his ass off here and he makes you believe that he means what he’s saying. That would probably be a good thing if what he was saying wasn’t so creepily manipulative. This is a song where Joe is trying to steal pick up a girl, and he does so in a way that makes my skin crawl. He says that he will “touch all the places he would not” which...just ew. But that’s not even the creepiest lyric in the song!! No, that’d be this:

“I'll make your body cream with my sex machine

I won't stop until I hear your mother scream”

If I was a girl and a man said this to me, I’d run headlong in the opposite direction. And nowhere is Joe displaying any swagger or sense of cool. At least Taio Cruz in “Break Your Heart” had the charisma to pull off a “stealing YOUR girl”-type song. But “All The Things (Your Man Won’t Do)” is the worst kind of this song. One where the singer is proudly convinced that he’s the better option without any convincing personality to back it up. More than anything, though, this song is this high on the list because it’s aggressively boring and if you pay attention to the lyrics, it only gets worse.

5...So when one thinks of the music scene in the 90s, chances are that one of the first things that comes to mind is the boy band wars between *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys. But why are those the only boy bands from the 90s that anyone remembers? Well, when the other boy bands were making shlock like this, I don’t think you need much more reasoning...

5. Color Me Badd - The Earth, the Sun, the Rain (YE: #54, PEAK: #21)

This is just unbearably boring, lifeless, and cheesy schlock. Almost everything I’ve heard from Color Me Badd has sucked and honestly, this might be one of the better things I’ve heard from them. All the guys in Color Me Badd are such vacuums of personality and charisma. Even when *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys did their cheesy ballads, at least they put more investment into the songs!! And then the lyrics, which are about how the narrator loves their partner for all things nature, the Earth at their feet, the sun in the sky, the falling rain. If they took this metaphor even further, they’d probably say something like “I’ll love you for the wind from a tornado” or something. More than anything, though, this is so unstimulating and its only purpose is to lightly play in the background of a department store and if you actually pay attention to it, it will drive you into psychosis from how boring it is. There’s a reason that literally no one remembers this song (seriously, there’s no Wikipedia page for it and the Genius.com page for it has no annotations). “I’ll hate this for the worst list” is a more apt lyric to be honest.

4...But speaking of boring songs...

4. 3T - Anything (YE: #43, PEAK: #15)

This song reeks of nepotism. I’m fairly certain that this song was only a hit because these guys were the sons of Tito Jackson of The Jackson 5 and were mentored by their uncle, the late Michael Jackson. I sure as hell can’t see it being the nonexistent talent on display here. I’m not against nepotism on principle - everyone from the pre-Tik Tok era who wanted to make it in the music industry had at least some connection to someone in the music industry - but when your music sounds as boring as this, I don’t think you should have a music career. “Anything” is a song where the narrator is trying to win back a girl post-breakup by saying he’d do “anything” for her. Which is already a hyperbolic sentiment that if you want to work, there needs to be a sense of stakes in the production or the vocals. And even then, it’s a total crapshoot as to if that would work, even if you incorporate those things! “Grenade” by Bruno Mars had a melodramatic production and there was a sense of dramatization in the production and Bruno certainly sold that song adequately, but I still think it’s bad. So I’m not gonna buy it with this schmaltzy presentation.

3...Doing the next two songs together because I feel like both of them warrant a conversation on the concept of “separating the art from the artist”, which is a very layered, messy, and subjective conversation. For example, it might be easy to say “I’m willing to separate the art from the artist if the art is good”. Sometimes, though, the artist’s actions are so despicable it taints their art too..

3. R. Kelly - You Remind Me of Something (YE: #83, PEAK: #4)

R. Kelly’s singing on every song I’ve heard from him, even the ones I genuinely like, just makes me imagine he’s recording his take while peeing on a child. His voice has become that inherently repulsive to me. And the production being so dull doesn’t help matters, it puts Kelly’s repugnant little turd of a presence to the forefront. This song and R. Kelly certainly remind me of something, alright. And that something is that giving R Kelly a music career for many years was a mistake.

2. R. Kelly f/Ronald Isley - Down Low (Nobody Has to Know) (YE: #35, PEAK: #4)

As repulsive as “You Remind Me Of Something” is because of R. Kelly being R. Kelly, “Down Low (Nobody Has To Know)” was the song that, knowing Kelly’s despicable actions, actively made the song worse, to the point where unlike that song, if someone tried to cover this song, I’d call the police on them. Let’s just say knowing that R. Kelly allegedly peed on a 14 year-old girl and had sex with her makes him singing “keep it on the down low, nobody has to know” sound like he’s talking directly to the girl in question. Not to mention, Ronald Isley and R. Kelly sound really similar to the point where I can’t tell who’s singing what part. But yeah, this is a bad, boring track that turns into a disgusting piece of work when thinking about the singer in question’s actions. That could’ve easily justified this being the worst hit of the year. So what’s worse?

1...I’m honestly kinda questioning myself if “Down Low (Nobody Has To Know)” is really better than this. But what it circled back to is that any of the icky baggage associated with “Down Low (Nobody Has To Know)” is purely subtext that might honestly be reaching on my part. With this song, you really can only take it at face value. Which makes it really icky...

1. Az Yet - Last Night (YE: #52, PEAK: #9)

I’ll put my main issue with this song off to the side for now. Let’s deal with the overall presentation; Shawn Rivera and Marc Nelson are voids of personality here and the production is just plodding and it isn’t sexy at all. Now for what vaulted this song to the top of this list - the lyrics - this song is written as the narrator addressing his partner, talking about all the things they did while having sex. Which already begs the question - she was there. You don’t have to go into detail of how you were inside of the girl and you saw the sun, moon, and mountains while doing so. But why would he be telling the girl about this? If she didn’t know maybe? So she was unconscious or not present during the situation? And all of a sudden a song that would just be boringly gross picks up disturbing date rape undertones (I know it sounds like I just stole this point from The Social Tune but I genuinely only watched his list after I finished writing this one lol). Maybe I’m reaching here, sure, but this is an angle that really soured me on this. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but even Morgan Wallen outtalented. “Last Night” by Az Yet, easily the worst hit song of 1996 and it isn’t even particularly close.

And that’s the worst list done!! Next article should be the best list for this year, where there’s gonna be a slight twist I’ll be doing there. Stay tuned for that and until then, if you have predictions for that list or your own lists of the worst hit songs of 1996, 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!