The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 2021 REDUX
The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 2021 REDUX
Hey y’all!! It’s Fire back with another list redux!! Today we’re reexamining the top 10 worst hit songs of 2021!!
So with this year and 2020, there was an underlying reason why I wanted to redo my best and worst lists for those years beyond just the fact that my opinions have evolved substantially since making those original lists or that I wanted an updated list that fits my new crteria. In 2020, it was that the biggest hits of the year have always fascinated me and I wanted to revisit that artifact of a year-end list. With 2021, it’s pretty simple as to the main reason why I want to redo my lists for this year: I’ll be blunt, my original 2021 lists are some of my least favorite articles I’ve ever written. Mainly because of the intros, where either (or maybe a bit of both) I painted myself in my first few articles so much as a whiny teen who can’t handle the smallest of problems and/or I somehow wrote my intro in such a negative tone that even when I said that the year was good for me personally, the commenters still said “Sorry that the year was so tough for you” (to be clear I don’t blame you guys for making that assumption, I read through those intros and I probably would’ve said the same thing lol) and I think some of that also deluded me into thinking the year sucked for me. And more than anything the negative tone in that intro was very indicative of a very bad mindset I used to have that I’m only now starting to break out of (you’ll get a little more detail in my 2024 lists at the end of the year) and even though I said that I cherished the great times I had that year way more, I honestly feel like I didn’t do it enough, because 2021 in hindsight was genuinely one of the happiest years of my life and it literally fucking kills me that I was so negative to a great year for me in my original articles. It’s a year where even thinking of the “problems” I faced at the time, they are so minor and I’m ashamed of myself for letting them feel like they defined my year. There’s also a good chance 2021 will be the last year I do list reduxes for, I don’t think any of my opinions for my 2022 lists have changed substantially enough to warrant redoing those articles. But in case you were curious for what my worst list for 2022 would’ve looked like with my new criteria, here you go:
DMs:
GAYLE - abcdefu
Jason Aldean - Trouble With A Heartbreak
Sam Smith & Kim Petras - Unholy
OneRepublic - I Ain’t Worried
Drake f/ 21 Savage - Jimmy Cooks
Kane Brown - Like I Love Country Music
Doja Cat - Woman
10. Adele - Oh My God
9. Kodak Black - Super Gremlin
8. Imagine Dragons & JID - Enemy
7. Glass Animals - Heat Waves
6. Dove Cameron - Boyfriend
5. Elton John & Dua Lipa - Cold Heart (PNAU Remix)
4. Morgan Wallen - You Proof
3. Russell Dickerson & Jake Scott - She Likes It
2. Lil Durk f/Morgan Wallen - Broadway Girls
1. Walker Hayes - AA
Anyways, on with the actual music trends and insights I got relistening to this year-end. Despite all the nostalgia I feel towards my personal life in 2021, I didn’t really feel much nostalgia towards the biggest hits of this year. I mean, my 2021 was literally defined by “Tonight Tonight” by Hot Chelle Rae (my 2011 best list redux should probably explain why lol), so I suppose this isn’t too big of a surprise. That’s not to say there were no songs on this list I felt a sense of nostalgia for, but it’s a bit less than you’d probably expect. In terms of actual genre trends, well, TikTok was still a major driving force in propelling indie artists to stardom, or in some cases one hit before vanishing off the face of the Earth. Pop punk had a very brief resurgence that kinda went the same way the saxophone comeback in 2011 did - which is nowhere outside of the one year - accompanied by a brief rock revival that didn’t fully crystalize until 2023. And it felt like every genre had real gems, even the ones that struggled this year, most notably country music. For as awful as the worst country songs were, the best songs were fantastic and you’ll see some of that in the best list redux. Additionally, R&B had one of its biggest years ever to mostly great quality. And all that leads to a year that even if at the time I considered it a step back from 2020’s hit music, I’d argue 2021’s hit music has overall aged better.
So now it’s time to get started on this list. To be eligible for this list, the songs had to land on the year-end Hot 100 list for 2021 with any and all Christmas songs being swapped out of the eligibility pool by the songs that finished just below the year-end list and if the songs were on 2020’s year-end, they had to finish higher than they did in 2020 unless the repeat is in the top 20, where it’s eligible regardless of year-end position compared to last year. With all that, let’s take a look at what my old worst list looked like...
DMs:
Ritt Momney - Put Your Records On
Justin Bieber f/Chance The Rapper - Holy
Drake f/Future & Young Thug - Way 2 Sexy
Megan Thee Stallion f/DaBaby - Cry Baby
Coi Leray f/Lil Durk - No More Parties
Dua Lipa - We’re Good
Maneskin - Beggin’
10. Cole Swindell - Single Saturday Night
9. Niko Moon - Good Time
8. BRS Kash - Throat Baby (Go Baby)
7. Yung Bleu f/Drake - You’re Mines Still
6. SPOTEMGOTTEM - Beat Box
5. Drake - What’s Next
4. Chase Rice f/Florida Georgia Line - Drinkin’ Beer. Talkin’ God. Amen.
3. Walker Hayes - Fancy Like
2. Nelly f/Florida Georgia Line - Lil Bit
1. AJR - BANG!
Yeah, there are probably a few surprising changes you’ll see when we get to the updated list, for better or for worse. I’ll let you all decide which side of that coin the changes I make are. But anyways, let’s get things started with our dishonorable mentions!!
DM #1: Dan + Shay - Glad You Exist (YE: #64, PEAK: #21)
Dan + Shay make a song as good as “Tequila” challenge: impossible apparently. Okay but seriously, it’s felt like after “Tequila” became a big crossover hit in 2018, Dan + Shay have tried to repeatedly chase down that boyfriend country formula until something works. And while “Speechless” was fine and “10,000 Hours” with Justin Bieber was pretty mediocre, “Glad You Exist” is easily the worst of their Hot 100 hits and it fails in the most mystifying and strangely uncanny way possible. Sonically, this sounds super wimpy. Their inflections on the “never let me go”’s and “don’t you ever go”’s and the “oh yeah yeah yeah”’s just drive me up the wall. But then the lyrics, which are about how the narrator is grateful that their girl....exists. And it would be hilarious if the song wasn’t sold so sincerely. A line like “I’m glad you exist” sounds so sarcastic and lacking in any real weight. Yeah, I’m glad the fucking toilet exists, but that doesn’t mean I'm in love with it. The lyrics make it seem like the girl is no more than an appliance. So this is a failure in the most confusing way possible. This sucks and we all would be very glad if it didn’t exist.
DM #2: Maneskin - Beggin’ (YE: #66, PEAK: #13)
Even my dad, who grew up on classic rock and utterly loves a lot of rock, hates this. That should say it all, shouldn’t it? If my options for the mechanism in which we bring back rock music into the mainstream are either this or fucking Jelly Roll, maybe rock is best left dead. But there’s not much to why I dislike “Beggin’”, does anyone actually think that frontman Damiano David’s vocals sound good here? They sound atrocious! That’s really all to it, the production might be pretty good courtesy of the funky guitars and the solid groove from the percussion, but good production can only carry you so far when your vocals are front and center and sound like a frog getting tased while puking out a witch. I have heard several of Maneskin’s other songs and “Zitti e buoni” and “The Loneliest” are both pretty good, but this cover is a real dud. And with Eurovision hits in 2021, I’m stuck between this and “Arcade” by Duncan Laurence and as for covers in 2021, I’m stuck between this and Ritt Momney’s “Put Your Records On” cover. Both of those songs were some of the last cuts from the dishonorable mentions, FYI. I’m beggin’ for some better rock songs to become hits!!
DM #3: Maroon 5 f/Megan Thee Stallion - Beautiful Mistakes (YE: #34, PEAK: #13)
...I didn’t hate this when it dropped, which I suppose isn’t that much of a surprise considering I’m more often than not a Maroon 5 apologist. But even at the time I considered Megan the only reason I even remotely liked this song. Her flow is rather tight and her singing, while not her strongest suit, is still much better than the lifeless animatronic voice that is Adam Levine. And I honestly think the production had potential to be in a good song. I like the hazy and vibey yet summery synths. Give this to say, Bazzi, this honestly might’ve been a good song!! But no, Adam Levine jacks blackbear’s flow (I know blackbear has a writing credit on this song but I know what really happened here) and sings like he’s lost all passion for music. And with repeated listens, even Megan’s verse feels weirdly clumsy!! The awkward forced rhyming of “beneficial” with “let you” or “without you” with club couches” feels so flagrant here, probably because Megan is literally the only standout element of this. This song is a mistake, surely not a beautiful one though.
DM #4: Mooski - Track Star (YE: #75, PEAK: #31)
This is painfully amateurish. Mooski cannot sing at all and his vocals combined with the messy afrobeat percussion makes it feel all the more slapdash in a bad way. But let’s be real, there isn’t anything notable to this song, you’ve probably forgotten this exists if you ever knew it to begin with. I think that says more than I ever could. If you’re trying to be known as a track star, being a disposable piece of trash doesn’t really help your case.
DM #5: Yung Bleu f/Drake - You’re Mines Still (YE: #58, PEAK: #18)
No, Yung (puke noise), you cannot use this sample this badly. Juice WRLD already had an incredible song with this very sample and you have nowhere near his skillset. Yung Bleu’s delivery sounds like the audio equivalent of having a hangover while drowning. If this was a solo Drake song, it might not have been as bad. Not lying, his more lowkey vocals really fit this sample well, and yet it feels like he has virtually no part on this song. He has an entire verse and yet it just goes in one ear and out the other. Yeah, that’s pretty much all to it. This is just a bad song that I hope no one wants to claim is theirs still.
DM #6: Keith Urban & Pink - One Too Many (YE: #81, PEAK: #52)
Oh god, I know I’m usually pretty negative on Pink post-sellout, but this is shitty even for post-sellout Pink standards!! Keith Urban and Pink team up to create a song that was only a hit on country radio because of the names attached and it’s barely even a country song. Quite frankly, this is soulless even for the unevolvable mess that is Hot AC music. You could’ve told me that this song was released back in 2010 and I wouldn’t bat an eye. You team up Keith Urban, a boyfriend country artist and Pink, a singer that became big in the 2000s for her pop rock sound with each other in a year where both of those genres saw their resurgences and yet you get a song that doesn’t even have a genre, it’s not pop, it’s not country, it’s not adult contemporary, and it’s certainly not rock. I’ve heard this song one too many times. Fuck this song.
DM #7: Justin Bieber f/Chance The Rapper - Holy (YE: #35, PEAK: #3)
For someone who had a better 2021 than 2020, Justin Bieber’s 2021 stinkers were also quite bad. With “Holy”, it feels like it’s trying to establish Justin Bieber as a respectable Christian man after the shambling disasters that were “Yummy” and “Intentions”, so Bieber tries his hand at CCM and while it’s not the worst CCM song I’ve ever heard since sadly “Real Men Love Jesus” by Michael Ray somehow exists, it’s still pretty bad. Sure, the song starts off promising enough with the piano keys, but then the choir kicks in and doesn’t compliment Bieber’s voice at all. Speaking of which, Bieber’s voice sounds like he’s clearly out of his depth singing this, he isn’t even trying to project emotion in this song. Especially when he says he’s “runnin’ to the altar like a track star!” But I think the production and Chance The Rapper might actually be the bigger problems here. The bass sounds so clunky, like it’s about to fall off the beat. And Chance is a limited at best singer and when he starts rapping, his flow is sloppy. If this is Bieber’s attempt to be holy, he should be sent to the 7th circle of hell. This is embarrassing in every way.
DM #8: Megan Thee Stallion f/DaBaby - Cry Baby (YE: #77, PEAK: #28)
In 2021, it’s safe to say that DaBaby had the worst year out of any artist, from a homophobic incident at one of his shows that got him essentially blacklisted from pop radio which seemed to coincide with his music taking a nosedive in quality and his formula getting stale. And this was probably his worst contribution to pop music in 2021. A sex song that relies on a heavy use of a crying baby sample and nonexistent chemistry between Megan Thee Stallion and DaBaby. And this primarily made the list because of that crying baby sample. It’s pitched in a way that sounds like it was jacked from a horror movie and even if the sample wasn’t pitched, why, just WHY would you grab a baby noise for a SEX song!!?? This is creepy and it sucks. Move on.
DM #9: Dua Lipa - We’re Good (YE: #90, PEAK: #31)
This might not be Dua Lipa’s worst hit since “Cold Heart (PNAU Remix)” and “IDGAF” exist, but “We’re Good” is still just as painfully underwhelming as it was back in 2021. Dua, you realized your strengths were in making nu-disco in 2020!! Why make this pop-trap-R&B fusion with no sense of groove or expressiveness? Everything about the production here sounds super clunky, it’s not a ballad, not an upbeat party jam. It feels like it’s trying to be both somehow and winds up sounding like absolutely nothing, that bossa nova rhythm doesn’t have any grace or anything, it just...exists. Thankfully, Dua has gone back to making truly great nu-disco and stuff that actually flatters her strengths as a performer since this, but if Dua is thinking about recycling this sound for another song, I think, well...we’re good.
DM #10: Cole Swindell - Single Saturday Night (YE: #95, PEAK: #26)
I know that in 2022 Cole Swindell had a shockingly great year in quality, but “Single Saturday Night” is still crap and only just barely missed making the worst list proper again. And the fault here is the guitar which sounds so excruciatingly generic and soulless. Not to mention Cole Swindell’s voice sounds vacant here. I’d say this song is very vaguely bro country, but none of the classic signifiers of bro country are here. No partying lyrics, no rapping, if anything this has the lyrics of a boyfriend country song but the production of a bro country song. It’s trying to be its own genre - brofriend country, I guess - and it's a soulless trainwreck as a result. Cole Swindell may have had a genuinely incredible hit in 2022 with “She Had Me At Heads Carolina”, but if Nashville radio wasn’t such a sausage-fest, this song would’ve left him with way more single Saturday nights to last a lifetime.
Let’s get our two ineligible dishonorable mentions out of the way now!!...
IDM #1: Aaron Lewis - Am I The Only One (YE: N/A, PEAK: #14)
This is just pathetic and revealing of the kind of person Aaron Lewis is. The acoustic guitar instrumentation is basic as piss and Aaron Lewis’s screaming is painful and honestly kinda funny. What’s most revealing though is this line:
“Another statue comin' down in a town near you
Watchin' the threads of Old Glory come undone”
The “statues” in question are confederate monuments. I don’t think I should have to explain why in 2021 people wanted to take down those particular statues. Aaron Lewis isn't even southern so he doesn’t have the excuse of “oh it’s my heritage” or whatever. This man just revealed that he’s a racist and cranky old man screaming at his TV. The truly sad thing here is that Aaron Lewis really isn’t the only one here (well, maybe he’s the only one who refuses to listen to Bruce Springsteen lol), and that’s what made conservatives buy this song in force and propel this into the top 20 2 decades after Aaron Lewis’s band had any shred of relevance. I would put Tom Macdonald’s 2021 shit here and the “Let’s Go Brandon”’s here too, but honestly, who cares? And yes, this would’ve easily topped this list if it made the year-end and it wouldn’t have even been particularly close. But on the topic of pathetic songs...
IDM #2: Sabrina Carpenter - Skin (YE: N/A, PEAK: #48)
Even in the context of 2024, when Sabrina Carpenter is arguably reaching A-list status with some of the best material of her career (she’ll be on my best list for this year most likely), “Skin” is still a pathetic failure of a diss track to Olivia Rodrigo for the “blonde girl” lyric in “drivers license”. And 3 years away from this stupid beef, it feels incredibly manufactured by the Disney corporation. It feels like this was a deliberate plot to kickstart both of the girls’ musical careers, but in the process likely nearly killed Sabrina’s career. And “Skin” is a song that’s so pathetic yet petty and mean that even one of her fans on Pulse was actively rooting against this song. If Sabrina wants to write a song to Olivia’s fans harassing her saying they can’t get under her skin, sure. The harassment she received in the wake of “drivers license” was definitely undeserved. But the problem is that in the process, Carpenter belittles Olivia. She basically says “your ex is mine now!!! In your face!!!”. And I hate the way Carpenter frames this as if Rodrigo was the one who incited her fans to attack her, saying that “maybe blonde was the only rhyme”. Not only is the word “blonde” not used to rhyme with anything in “drivers license”, in that song, Rodrigo was praising Carpenter more than belittling her. So Carpenter releasing this song as a diss track to Rodrigo just feels like bullying. And that, more than anything, is why I think “Skin” is an atrocity. I could point out how the production has no edge or darkness to make it an effective diss track, but at this point, that’s just irrelevant. But sure, I’ll briefly touch on it; the clean pop production, when combined with Sabrina’s very pleading vocals nakedly cribbing from Camila Cabello make her out to be this in the song:
Sabrina, you say that Olivia can’t get under your skin no matter how hard she tries, but then you write this song, which paradoxically proves you wrong. I can’t say this song would’ve exactly topped this list if it made the year-end, but it would’ve come VERY close. Sabrina, as 2024 has proved, you’re so much better than this.
Alright, now it’s time to take out the garbage...
10...This was a song that made the top 5 on my original worst list on sound alone. And yeah, it’s still bad but I think I at least get some of its appeal. That said, just because I get it doesn’t mean that I don’t dislike it...
10. C
If there’s one thing I can say about this, Drake’s flow is actually pretty sharp here and he sounds genuinely triumphant here and like he earned the victory lap here. As a basic flexing song, this could’ve worked. But no, this made the list proper because of that grating and obnoxious beat. It just keeps hitting the same grating and abrasive 2 synth chords and it wears out its welcome in record time. You wanna know what happens next to Drake? If “next” is in 2024, Drake gets called a pedophile in one of the biggest hits of the year and the summer thus far. I think that should say it all.
9...As mentioned at the start of this article, country music had a really bad year in 2021. But let’s ask a larger question: Why? I’m not sure there’s a solid answer, but I can certainly make a guess: After Morgan Wallen got blackballed from Nashville radio for saying the n word, country artists realized they had to keep their head down so as to not get caught being racist. Even arguably the most racist singer on country radio, Jason Aldean, did this with a collab with Carrie Underwood in “If I Didn’t Love You” (which is probably his only good hit) This resulted in the transition from the smug and obnoxious bro country to the sedate and bland yet mostly harmless boyfriend country. So what do you do if you get a bro country song that tries to be unthreatening/sedate?...
9. Niko Moon - Good Time (YE: #84, PEAK: #20)
Let me get any faint praise I have for this out of the way first: the guitar sounds alright at the start, I guess. The seeds of a decent, relaxing, and fun song are here. But the problem is the guy singing, Niko Moon, who is a person I’m not sure really exists (I mean you don’t know). Niko Moon has a terrible voice, he can barely stay on key and he makes the increasingly weedy guitars sound even worse. Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen should slap you for stealing the title of a far better hit song, Niko Moon. This is anything but a good time. There’s a reason Niko Moon hasn’t had another song touch the Hot 100 ever since this song.
8...Have you ever come across a bad one-hit wonder so desperate for a second hit you perversely feel sorry for them?...
8.
I genuinely feel bad for SPOTEMGOTTEM here, because he clearly wanted to be a big star, seeing as 11 of his 27 singles to his name are just another version of his one viral hit. But “Beat Box” is just so painfully amateurish. The beat sounds like it was made in 5 minutes, the bass is so loud it clips the mix and is louder than the piano. And SPOTEMGOTTEM himself tries his hardest to make himself sound distinguishable from any other rapper but the most interesting thing about this is the bit where he tries to imitate Young Thug and if it’s not that it’s the part where he calls his dick his…”Peter bone”...? This sounds like middle schoolers in my area trying to rap and let’s be real here. If you ever knew of this song, you probably already forgot this song and the guy who made it even existed.
7...You know how in 2022, bad sampling in pop music became a notorious mainstream trend? In hindsight, this song was a warning shot to that trend...
7.
“Way 2 Sexy” is just humiliating for everyone involved. It’s so incompetently produced and even if that was the point to make it seem more funny, it’s not funny. Future butchers the Right Said Fred sample here. He sounds so bored. Then Drake, he doesn’t have even a hint of irony in his voice. From what I can tell, this song is supposed to be “comedy” when paired with the music video, where Drake is an overweight man parading around like he’s so sexy...? I’m not trying to fat shame here, but this premise just isn’t that funny. What’s the punchline here? And that’s all before I even get to Young Thug who immediately starts his verse by saying “molest me, caress me” while sounding like a constipated puppy. As Right Said Fred said in their original song, “I’m too sexy for this song”.
6...So I only really became aware of the YouTube music critic community in 2021. I went back and watched a lot of the older lists made in that circle, and I think one trend I’m glad mostly died out is when critics put a “fluke indie hit of the year” on the best list just for being indie. If I were to think of any song that probably killed that trend though, I think it’d be this...
6.
I probably alluded to this entry when going over my updated 2022 worst list in my intro, but “Heat Waves” is a song that I’ve had a complicated series of opinions with. I hated this song when I first heard it back in 2020 for a Pulse rankdown and while I slowly grew to like it throughout its chart run, now I can confidently say this song is terrible and I’d rather melt into a puddle in the hot sun in the middle of June than ever hear this song again. In that regard, this song aged like the milk came out of the cow spoiled and then the cow took a shit in the bucket and then someone went and took the shit out of the bucket before putting it back in a few years later (just pretend this is a metaphor that makes sense). The vibey synths have no mood other than just “vibes” and I can’t stand frontman Dave Bayley’s voice. He literally sounds like a dying constipated goat. If the goat was giving birth at that moment. I don’t like Glass Animals’ music very much as is but this HAS to be the worst Dave Bayley has ever sounded. So of course thanks to the radio needing something to clog up the airwaves due to the stagnant period at the start of 2022, “Heat Waves” stuck around long enough to break “Blinding Lights”’s longevity record on the Hot 100 and become the biggest hit of 2022. And while it’s pretty rare nowadays for overplay on the radio alone to make me hate a song, it happened with this, and I doubt it’ll ever recover. This is absolutely TERRIBLE. Fire this into the sun that beams down so aggressively in the middle of June. Fuck this.
5...A song on my 2020 best list redux that I expressed I had a strong turnaround on was “WAP” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion for being intentionally provocative and horny and insanely quotable and fun at the same time. So what happens if we were to get guys to make “WAP” but take out the funniness, quotability, and about 200 IQ points? Well...
5.
In a nutshell, this song is if the average rap song from 2005 were given a trap update to modernize it. And “Throat Baby (Go Baby)” is boringly shitty and nauseating if you pay attention to the lyrics. Especially these:
“With a mouth like that, she can talk her way out goin' to jail
With a mouth like that, if you go to jail, I'll pay your bail”
And yeah, that’s just two of the puke-inducing lyrics in this terrible 3.5 minute dreck of a song. Screw this, next!!
4...But swinging back around to the awful mess that was 2021’s country music and the most notoriously atrocious example of that...
4.
I know for a lot of people, this is probably the clear-cut worst hit song of 2021 and it isn’t even close. But what inevitably kept this song off of the #1 spot here was the fact that at the end of the day, “Fancy Like” is just a goofy novelty song that isn’t even the worst song I’ve heard from Walker Hayes. That said, that doesn’t stop this song from being utterly atrocious, the sub-bass is so loud that it sounds like either someone forgot to EQ it properly or they’re trying their hardest to let you know that they know hip hop exists but aren’t aware of it enough to do it properly. Complete with the co-opting of black slang from 30 years ago!! And then there’s the reason this song nearly went to #1 on the Hot 100, a remix with Kesha. And yeah, the remix with Kesha is even worse. Spectrum Pulse put it best so I’ll quote him here: “But it sadly was the Kesha remix that crystallized why I truly despised this song: not just for the deep-seated embarrassment of Kesha doing whatever she can to make another hit and stooping to working with Walker Hayes, but because her brand of trashy doesn’t even fit here! Her brand of trashy has always been rooted in punk, the outcasts and misfits and those who live rough on the fringes, those that capitalism left behind; Walker Hayes, meanwhile, makes music for the basic consumer, the overly-defensive middle American everyman who is so firmly lodged in his comfort zone that he doesn’t even notice or care about the grist mill of brand names around him, the sort that would have laughed at all the bad jokes made at Kesha’s expense a decade ago… and even despite everything that happened since, they probably still do.” I’ve never actually been to Applebees before - I’m a Hindu vegetarian, what would my ass be doing there - but thanks to Walker Hayes here making an atrocious commercial jingle for them, I don’t think I’ll ever go there. I hate Applebees, thanks a lot Walker.
3...I’ll be honest, I never fully hated Nelly and Florida-Georgia Line’s “Cruise” from 2013. Don’t mistake that for me liking it. The song is still very dumb and mid as hell, but I thought it was saved from being bad because the hook was catchier than it had any right to be. So clearly if it worked once, we all wanted round 2 of that, right?...
3.
The banjo here is trying to give this a groove but all it does is halt this knock-off of a pop song and knockoff of a country song in its tracks. But really, his song is just boringly shitty with Nelly and FGL having no chemistry and Nelly proclaiming himself as the “black Tom Brady in this, [he’s] the GOAT now”. Which is a reference that feels so painfully forced that it’s distracting. It’s like if Eminem were to say he’s the white Dr. Dre, it’s just cringe. And no one’s having any fun here, at least Florida-Georgia Line, at their “best”, could inject some fun into their music that made for some of the few legitimately good bro country songs. At the time I considered this the worst country hit of the year and it nearly topped my original worst list. I don’t like this even a lil bit. So what two songs are worse than this atrocity?
2...Do y’all know the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover”? Followup question: Do you want to know the refutation to that saying?...
2.
I’m serious. If you read the title of this song, putting the pauses after every period and realize the complete stupidity of this title, that tells you all you need to know. But “Drinkin’ Beer. Talkin’ God. Amen.” wouldn’t nearly top this list on its stupidity alone, I’ll get back to this point later but for now let’s just examine why this song in concept alone is stupid, lyrically it’s a basic list-driven song rattling off all the bro-country cliches. It’s literally how Chase Rice and FGL are sitting somewhere, drinking beer, and talking about god. Amen. You literally couldn’t make a more cliche bro country song if you tried!! But the true ugliness of this song reared its head when I realized that Chase Rice faked having COVID during a world-ending pandemic to promote this song. And it worked because this barely scraped onto the year-end list for 2021. So in summation, we have a failed Survivor contestant that was called dumber than a bag of hammers on that show who turned to a country music career and whose methods of promoting this song in particular represent the very worst of country music audience’s ideologies. There’s absolutely no point in Chase Rice in country music. So what could be worse?
1...I’ve gone on record multiple times that I didn’t hate this song as much as I used to. I was clearly wrong because it’s topping this list again. In hindsight though, it was less a change in opinion and more a change in emotion from anger to outright confusion...
1. AJR - BANG! (YE: #56, PEAK: #8)
In hindsight, the sheer inexplicable rage I felt whenever I heard “BANG!” should’ve been a sign that I was happy (I’ll elaborate a bit more in my 2024 lists at the end of the year). And yeah, while “BANG!” no longer makes me angry, I’m just utterly confused at why anyone on AJR’s team thought this was a good finished product. AJR have proven they have legitimate talent, “The Dumb Song” is pretty great and “God Is Really Real” is genuinely a masterpiece, but for their more childlike lyrics to work remotely well, the bad experiences they write about have to feel lived in and have genuine stakes, not as if they are just whiny, privileged, and sheltered kids that have never had to face a problem in their lives. But this song topped this list on its sound alone. “BANG!” takes every hateable aspect of AJR and balls it up into one trainwreck of a song. The slamming of the kick drum giving this no groove, the constant “Bang! Bang! Bang!”’s, the weird voice going “here we go!”, the rickety and lumpy piano keys and the horns with no body, all of that making the production so loud that Jack Met has to scream to not get overpowered by it, his earscraping falsetto, and especially the metronome bit, it’s just a baffling artistic decision that still makes my skin crawl. Absolutely nothing about this song works at all, and I don’t think anyone actually likes this song. So why was this song a hit? As far as I can tell, the only reason this song was a hit at all was because it went bad-viral on Tik Tok. Even the kids on that platform hate this!!
@blazbluefanatic Replying to @wizrat 100 Bad Days or whatever that song is called has been an ongoing joke in my froendgroup for like 5 years because of our shared distaste for this band. Like I feel like if you listen to AJR,your other favorite artists have to be like TOP or NF or something ridiculous like that. #raptok #inblazwetrust #fyp ♬ Bang! - AJR
A quick Tik Tok search for “bang ajr” yields numerous Tik Toks blasting AJR and this song, the Tik Tok above is just one of the many examples I could find. So you know what, I’m comfortable saying this: “BANG!” by AJR - not only AJR’s worst song, but one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard and EASILY the worst hit song of 2021. If we give these guys a second hit, can it please be one of their actually good songs?
And that’s that!! Next list should be my final list redux - the top 10 best hit songs of 2021!! If you have any predictions for that list or your own lists of the worst hit songs of 2021, feel free to comment them down below!! I’m eager to read them!! Until then, the Spotify playlist for this article is linked right here and until next time, remember to keep it Fire!!
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