The Worst Songs of 2020
A long time ago, I wrote a blog about bad albums. While the objective was a more nuanced and serious kind of music writing, the blog’s most popular posts were invariably the year-end lists of my least favorite songs. I wasn’t happy about that. They were mean and catty and went against the tone of my other posts. I haven’t updated that blog in 5 years, and I don’t write much about music or anything at all these days, but I’m doing another list this year. I’m unemployed, bored and most importantly, much more spiteful and mean-spirited than I was back then.
So:
Tame Impala: “Lost in Yesterday”
What happened to Tame Impala? The one-man-band’s first few albums were fun and occasionally inspired, driven by crunchy psych-rock guitars, big Flaming Lips-style drums and Kevin Parker’s imitation-Lennon coo. What happened, I guess, was unexpected success, as Parker acquired a young and enthusiastic fanbase. While 2015’s Currents crept further into pop territory, this year’s The Slow Rush flew directly into trend-chasing mediocrity. The only comparison I can make is the flurry of 60s and 70s rock icons who sprinted full-speed into the tackiest tropes of 80s pop in order to keep up with a rapidly changing music landscape.
Parker has exchanged psych rock for a kind of bland “vibey” genre-mush of disco, hip-hop and synthpop. Single “Lost in Yesterday” is a perfect example: a chirpy, slightly earwormy melody over a totally indistinct mix of synth and bass. This is what I call “playlistcore”—faceless wallpaper music designed to play inoffensively in a car or over the speakers at an Urban Outfitters. “Lofi indie rock music - beats to relax/study to.” Parker has given up art and given in to the almighty algorithm. I know, there are worse songs and worse albums than this song and this album, but such blatant cash-grab mediocrity from a formerly good (occasionally great) indie band is worthy of scorn.
Powfu: “death bed (coffee for your head)” (feat. beabadoobee)
Okay. Suicide is a serious subject and young people are killing themselves with unprecedented frequency. Like seemingly everyone under the age of 40, I’ve had my own struggles and been on antidepressants for years. I don’t intend to trivialize whatever rapper Powfu is going through but wow, does this song suck. It’s as if he heard Logic’s infamously corny suicide hotline hit and deliberately set out to make something even worse. I find nothing relatable in the song’s faux suicide note lyrics: “I’m happy that you here with me, I’m sorry if I tear up / When me and you were younger, you would always make me cheer up.” It’s less tragic and more like a self-pitying cry for attention from someone’s insufferable, soft-boy aesthetic boyfriend. This middle school poetry is delivered flatly and without flow, like Powfu is a student forced to read aloud to the class. The only thing the song has going for it is its annoyingly catchy hook, sampled from indie rock artist beabadoobee.
Black Eyed Peas: “VIDA LOCA” (feat. Nicky Jam & Tyga)
You may be forgiven if you didn’t know that the long-absent Black Eyed Peas released an album this year. Or that they released one 2 years ago either. It’s kind of amazing to think about how big and unavoidable this group was a decade ago when they went on hiatus and how much of a non-entity they’ve become today. Still, they are trying very hard to stay relevant by tapping into 2020’s explosion of Latin pop. “VIDA LOCA” is—despite its multicultural trappings—an entirely routine B.E.P. affair, unimaginatively mixing interpolations of other people’s music (this time, improbably: “Super Freak”, “U Can’t Touch This” and “Livin’ la Vida Loca”) with deeply lame raps and awful guest stars. Except now it’s in Spanish! Like splashing some salsa on top of a pile of trash.
Florida Georgia Line: “I Love My Country”
One could argue that no year in history has laid so plainly the failures of America as 2020. Creeping fascism, broken elections, endless images of death and assault at the hands of the stormtroopers we call police officers. And of course the pandemic, a crisis unprecedented in recent history, which the American government has floundered and stumbled through with deadly stupidity for nearly a year, racking up a body count beyond conceiving. I have never been particularly patriotic but I sit here at the end of the year hating this country more than I ever have before, cursing its very spirit and wondering how much better of a place the world would be if it had never existed in the first place.
On the other hand: “I love my country / And I love my country up loud!” Country artists have a long precedent of hitching their wagons to the most absurd displays of patriotism in music, but perpetual shitmakers Florida Georgia Line picked an astoundingly tone-deaf time to release this banjo-riddled country-rock abomination. Why, in this cultural and moral wasteland, in the midst of all this misery and chaos, would anyone love their country? “Barbecue, steak fries / Styrofoam plate date night / George Strait singing greats while / We turning up, sitting lake-side,” apparently.
Van Morrison: “As I Walked Out”
Watching the redneck quarantine video for “I Love My Country”, one can at least infer that Florida Georgia Line pass the low bar of believing that the pandemic is real. Van Morrison does not. This year he launched a campaign of songs under the banner “Save Live Music”, a seemingly noble cause. In reality, it’s been a soapbox for him to ramble angrily about “the gaubbahment” over trite blues slogs, sometimes with the help of legendary racist Eric Clapton. Worst of the bunch is “As I Walked Out”, the closest you may ever get to hearing a musical adaptation of your most insane relative’s Facebook feed. Age has turned Van Morrison’s trademark slur into a drunken-sounding mumble, which lends no credibility to elegant lyrics like “Well, on the government website from the 21st March 2020 / It said COVID-19 was no longer high risk / Then two days later they put us under lockdown / Then why are we not being told the truth?” There are plenty of reasons not to trust one’s government and this pandemic has caused a disturbing acceleration of privacy-invasion and authoritarian rule, but we can all do without the incoherent ravings of a paranoid, millionaire QAnon freak.
CORPSE & Savage Ga$p: “E-Girls Are Ruining My Life!”
CORPSE is Corpse Husband, a popular, Among Us playing YouTube personality with a gravelly voice whose existence I only know of because of this terrible song. This is somehow the first time that TikTok has come up in this post, despite being the powerful engine behind the vast majority of bad pop music in 2020. Even the aforementioned Tame Impala have received a strange boost from the app. “E-Girls Are Ruining My Life!” is a song seemingly made for no other purpose than soundtracking embarrassing videos of someone’s 44-year-old uncle playing daddy dom. CORPSE’s bass growl is unique but unconvincing as he raps about choke-fucking and uh, anime? A lot of anime references in this very short song.
CORPSE has efficiently compressed multiple streams of 2020’s pop-cultural sewer—TikTok’s endless faux-BDSM freakshow, talentless overnight streaming celebrities, semi-ironic, post-XXXTentacion, horrorcore meme-rap—into 1 minute and 45 seconds worth of toxic sludge. It’s honestly impressive.
AJR: “Bang!”
The only thing worse than a TikTok song in 2020 is a wannabe TikTok song. AJR are a trio of brothers who look like off-brand Jonas’s and sound like off-brand Twenty-One Pilots. “Bang!” is their biggest hit, a song clearly written with the deep, depressing desire to “make it big” on TikTok. Everything’s here. Amateurish white-guy pseudo-rapping. Production that struts and vamps like the cast of a bad off-Broadway musical. A chorus beat drop perfect for a dramatic camera cut. It is all deeply, deeply obnoxious. It’s hard to say what any songwriter is seeing in their minds when they’re writing but the AJR boys must have seen this: dancing visions of cosplayers and theater-nerds and steampunk weirdos, turning on their ring light and setting up their iPhone to lipsync while doing that annoying, repetitive robot movement thing. This is a reasonable aspiration for an artist in 2020. Nightmarishly depressing.
6ix9ine & Nicki Minaj: “TROLLZ”
At the end of last year, 6ix9ine avoided a half-century in jail for a long list of charges by ratting out his former gang associates. He was free by the summer, but many assumed that his career was virtually over. If only we were so lucky. He made a quick comeback with a new album and a string of singles. “TROLLZ” shot to #1 on the backs of a million Barbz. In the world of pop, fans have become stans: not just devotees but unpaid employees whose duties are to stream, promote and defend millionaire artists 24 hours a day. Nicki Minaj has attracted a particularly cultlike following, and their holy grail has been her first #1 single. The impending release of “TROLLZ” triggered a storm of hashtags and social media campaigns to boost its streaming numbers. It paid off during the song’s debut week, followed by an all-time record-breaking 30 position drop in its second week.
Amid all of this, none of Nicki’s fans seemed to question her choice to collaborate with someone who would be the most despised artist in music even if he was not also a convicted child predator. They also didn’t care if the song was any good, which it is not. The beat is uninspired and 6ix9ine is, as always, an embarrassing parody of modern hip-hop with nothing to say except fuck the haters. Nothing else released this year stinks so much of desperation.
Justin Bieber: “Yummy”
“Yummy” does come close though. Justin Bieber’s slightly disgusting ode to he and his wife’s sex life is about as rote and paint-by-numbers as modern R&B can get. There’s a vaguely trappy beat, some sexual lyrics, adequate but entirely uninspiring vocals. It’s just so lazy. Painfully lazy. There was a time when Bieber was making the transition out of teen stardom when I wondered if he could be something better, maybe the next Justin Timberlake, but he’s shown time and time again that he simply doesn’t have the imagination.
So the song is lazy, sure, but the context is what really earns it such a high position on this list. As I’ve said, fandom in 2020 has become a kind of second job, with no reward except seeing your favorite artist succeed. After years out of the spotlight, Justin Bieber teased his thrilling return at the beginning of the year, only to give his fans this. Loyal fans—people who’ve listened to and defended for years one of the most fairly and unfairly derided pop artists of the 20th Century—excitedly clicked play on his first album single in 5 years and heard… “Yeah, you got that yummy-yum / That yummy-yum, that yummy-yummy.” And then he expected them to turn it into a hit for him. Stans need to unionize in 2021.
Jawsh 685 x Jason Derulo: “Savage Love (Laxed - Siren Beat)”
The most obnoxious and unavoidable TikTok song of 2020 began life as a simple beat made by a teenager in New Zealand that soundtracked a million or so dance videos with its lazy Casio preset synth melody. Then in May, Cats star Jason Derulo got ahold of it, grafting a vocal on top and gearing up to release it without credit, before being forced to give Jawsh 685 equal billing. Kudos to Jawsh for his unlikely success but his beat is so rudimentary and nothingy that it barely registers as music. The song’s appeal on TikTok seems to be its accompanying dance, which is just as generic and lifeless. It’s just empty. The music evokes nothing and doesn’t even seem particularly fun to dance to. At least “Macarena” kind of slapped. As if the original wasn’t bad enough, curious cat Jason Derulo’s cloying falsetto adds another layer of shit to the whole thing, while pawing lazily at meaning. Here is Genius user savage_alpha_princess’s thoughtful take on the song’s lyrics:
Savage love is a love song about Jason who like’s this girl who doesn’t like him back so he sings this song to show that he truly loves her even though he knows she doesn’t care. It is a tiktok trend. Follow Jason.
“Savage Love” is the future: artists trying dispassionately to predict the course of a soulless algorithm that is trying to predict the desires of millions of other humans. Like 2020 itself, “Savage Love” is a yawning chasm of meaninglessness.
“Savage Love” is the abyss. Stare into it.
There’s also a remix with BTS.