What the fuck was
2009?
It was certainly annoying, that's for sure. Most of the
songs on this worst list do a fair job of straight pissing me off, because I
remember hearing them nonstop in 2009 when once was one too many times. There's
a certain level of stupidity to these songs, too. Not as bad as 2010, but
certainly a worthy precursor to it. So, what are we waiting for? Besides the
best list, I mean. Well, we start with the worst list first, so let's go!
---
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10. "Crack a Bottle" - Eminem, Dr. Dre and 50 Cent
If Encore was the
warning sign that Eminem was losing his touch and his drive, then Relapse was the total and utter
destruction of everything that made him good. And for the record, I think Relapse is a thousand times worse than Encore. This song is indicative of all
the problems with it: it's just as juvenile and crass as Encore, but also so much more self-indulgent. The beat is certainly
better here than on "Just Lose It", but that kind of ends up going
against the song. If you're going to make a chorus where you repeatedly ask
where the rubbers are, you may as well just say "fuck it" and blow
the entire song. But by Dr. Dre creating such a hard-hitting beat, you'd expect
Eminem and company to be saying something a bit more. Except maybe 50 Cent, who
has always been overrated and useless.
This was also the first indication that maybe we didn't need
another album from Dr. Dre. If we want to talk about being burnt out by 2009,
Dr. Dre certainly fits that bill, with his mediocre guest verse where he sounds
like he'd rather be anywhere else. And honestly, I'd rather be somewhere else
too. Next!
---
Shut up. Shut up. SHUT UP.
9. "Birthday Sex" - Jeremih
You know, I'm no prude or anything. But I have to admit that
I kind of miss the coy nature of a sex jam from back in the day. Never straight
saying what you mean, but using clever metaphors and imagery to get your point
across.
And then, on the other end of the spectrum, we have BIRTHDAY
SEX, a song so unsubtle it makes "Because I Got High" look like a
complex essay. Jeremih has always been to my money far less talented and
tolerable than Jason Derulo, but like Derulo, he has gotten better in recent
years. This is the start of his mainstream career, though, and it is easily one
of his most intolerable songs. I have no idea who could actually find this
braying idiot sexy. Had the world stopped to consider that maybe we didn't need
someone to replace Chris Brown? That his absence was a void that didn't need to
be filled? Of course we got him back the next year anyway, in
all his woman-hating glory. But at least Chris Brown had his own thing! Jeremih
offers nothing new or clever to the table and ends up falling flat on his face
with one of the least sexy songs to my memory. "I Just Had Sex"
is sexier and more subtle than this!
Shut up, Jeremih. Wait until around 2016, when you've
finally discovered melody and smoothness.
---
I understand that Soulja Boy is being celebrated now as one
of the pioneering voices of our rap scene today. But even so, did anyone want
this from him?
8. "Kiss Me thru the Phone" - Soulja Boy Tell 'Em
ft. Sammie
This... oddly feels like a regression in Soulja Boy's
musical oeuvre? Again, maybe I'm missing something. Lord knows I got Soulja Boy
all wrong throughout his entire career. I may not like him, but I can respect a
pioneer when I see one. But this? This feels like a song that any low-rate
rapper from 2006 or so could have made. Shame on you, Soulja Boy! You can do
better! Yes, I just said that.
Not to be outdone by a low-rent Soulja Boy, of course, we
have a low-rent Lloyd in "Sammie", who delivers such a boring,
affectless chorus that it may as well have been performed by a robot. You're
with Soulja Boy, my man! Have some class. Okay, let's not lose our heads here.
But honestly, where the song really falls apart for me is
the production. It's full of these squeaky synths that feel like they're from a
different time period, except they wouldn't have even sounded good in the crunk
era. Not to mention they don't go along with the message of the song at all,
which is... well, exactly what it says on the tin. "Kiss me thru the phone."
A message crafted by only the most Shakespearean of love poets... of course,
what were you expecting from Soulja Boy? This is about as romantic as he's
probably gotten with a girl.
I don't know, man. I could probably understand Soulja Boy's
appeal of being shockingly bad, but this is just boringly incompetent. On that
merit, it's quite possibly the worst Soulja Boy song out there. It doesn't suck
enough to be classic Soulja Boy, but it sucks enough to land on this list
anyhow. It's in that dead zone of suck. Yeesh.
---
So, a query: What do you get when you take The Lonely
Island, remove all their brain cells, and pump their egos up to a million? You
get 3OH!3.
7. "Don't Trust Me" - 3OH!3
This song is just gross. It stinks of a guy using too much
Axe deodorant in the changeroom because he never learned any basic hygiene
skills. Which is a pretty good descriptor of the 3OH!3 guys in general. Especially
this one. Yuck.
Thankfully this song wasn't big enough, or radio-friendly
enough, that it actually got play on radio. I can't imagine a universe where
that would happen, unless there's a universe out there specially designed to
torture me. As is, this is just a mediocre electro-rock song with maybe half a
punchline in total, where the 3OH!3 guys show they lack basic understanding of
courting, boundaries, and Helen Keller. Was that one line really so good that you decided to make it the whole bridge?
I don't know. If you found this funny in high school, I
could at least excuse it. But what adult actually listens to this for anything
other than nostalgic reasons? It's a gross song by two gross dudes, and probably
better off shoved in a locker somewhere.
---
*shrug*
6. "Down" - Jay Sean ft. Lil Wayne
Who is Jay Sean? What is his personality? What mark did he
leave on pop music?
This song may not be the worst thing, but I put it on here
because I have no idea why it hit #1, and that alone kind of rubs me the wrong
way. It feels like a fluke that this hit #1. Jay Sean is a nobody, he has no
personality, and he left no mark on pop music. There, I answered my questions from
earlier. This song is so free of identity. It goes in one ear and out the
other. And that includes Lil Wayne's verse, which is just more boring, bland
mush to throw on the pile. It was easy to get sick of Lil Wayne around this
time, anyway.
Down like her
temperature, cause to me she zero degrees
Because she's... cool? I thought you wanted your girls to be
hot! Am I missing something here?
Man, I can't wait until I'm done reviewing this song and I
forget how it goes again. Hey! Why not now?
---
Oh, Dead or Alive. You didn't deserve this fate.
5. "Right Round" - Flo Rida
No one even remembers Flo Rida outside of his hooks anyway,
so using this interpolation feels particularly cheap and shameless. I don't blame
Kesha for not wanting to be in the music video. When your song is too
embarrassing for Kesha circa 2009, you got problems.
Seriously, who even cares about this song? It's a cheap way
to get airplay off of the recognition of a much better 80s hit. Flo Rida is a
non-presence as usual, this beat is messy as all hell, and the lyrics aren't
even worth mentioning because Flo Rida is not worth mentioning. If he wanted us
to notice his lyrics, he'd make more of an effort to present them.
Time to get paid,
it's maximum wage
That body belong on a poster
That body belong on a poster
Yeah, with lyrics like this, maybe it's best you don't show
them off. "Girl, your body's so hot... it should be on a poster. Like...
one that I would keep in my room and jerk off to. Hey, where are you going?"
It's actually stunning to me just how long Flo Rida has
stuck around. He's the most anonymous man in music (well, next to Jay Sean, of
course). What little charisma he has doesn't make up for the fact that 99% of
his songs are trash like this. So turn right round and go home.
No. No. NOOOOOOOO
---
It seems weird to say that the band who made "My
Humps" could take a downgrade, but "Boom Boom Pow" set out to
prove that anything is possible, it seems!
4. "Boom Boom Pow" - The Black Eyed Peas
It also seems weird to want to add context to a song so
flavourless and sterile, but that's what I tried to do with this
video. And wow, it is stunning to see just how groundbreaking The Black
Eyed Peas thought they were by releasing this as their first single! Fergie
goes on about how it's "not your typical first single" and how The
Black Eyed Peas "have always been misfits". I agree that this doesn't
sound like your typical first single, mostly because you want to leave a good
impression with your first single. And "Boom Boom Pow" just leaves me
feeling... sad. This was the sound of 2009, and this is exactly what I mean by
2009 being an annoying year on the pop charts. It's... it's just noise. There's
really no point in picking apart the lyrics one by one, because they're beyond
meaningless. Somehow The Black Eyed Peas found a way to harness all the most
annoying sounds in the world and put them into one song, a talent that would
follow will.i.am for years to come. And yes, that includes Fergie's
oversinging, which might be the worst part of the song. Look, Fergie is
talented. So it baffles me that she feels she needs to stoop down to this level
of insanity. Really, everyone can do better than this. I remember what The
Black Eyed Peas used to sound like. So it's sad that it came to this in 2009,
and somehow got worse with their next album. Black-eyed peas might be soul
food, but this is completely soulless.
---
Let's talk about white reggae, shall we?
The conversation in white music always seems to come back to
cultural appropriation at some point, and white people making reggae music is a
big part of that conversation. Mostly I just get offended if the music is
terrible. Usually if you find a way to fuse it with another genre or pull off
enough charisma to make it credible, you're golden. The Police are one of my
favourite bands, for example.
Another path you could take is make weaksauce, pointless
crap music like this and wind up in my bad graces forever!
3. "I'm Yours" - Jason Mraz
If you know me, I get it if you might think that my hatred of this song is a
bit... disingenuous. After all, this is the song that kick-started
ToddInTheShadows' hatred of "White Guy With Acoustic Guitar" music,
and it'd be only natural that I'd grow to hate this song too, due to his
influence. So I think I should make absolutely clear that I have always hated
this turd of a song, from the moment I first heard it. So there.
Now, I didn't always hate this guy. For example, I think "The Remedy (I Won't Worry)" is one of the best hit songs of 2003. But that was back when he had some sense of
personality and groove in his music. All that has been washed out by 2009,
where he replaces radio-friendly pop rock with radio-friendly cod-reggae. There is no point to this goddamn song. Sure,
it's sunny. But I've never felt happy by listening to it. It's so sparse and
stiff. It feels like the melody was compiled on a calculator, to mathematically
make the most brain-meltingly simple song possible.
There's nothing wrong with a simple arrangement or even
simple lyrics. But if you're going to present this basic song in the most smug,
self-aggrandizing way possible, and on top of that it sticks around on the
charts for an obscene amount of time, that's where I have problems. I used to
like you, Jason Mraz. What happened? This has all of the dopey smugness of
Jason Mraz's goofier songs with none of the excitement. And adult alternative
stations loved it until the end of time. Yuck.
---
Miley.
Whatever you want to say about Miley Cyrus, you gotta
respect her hustle and her creativity. She’s certainly made her foray into many
different genres over the course of her career, some more successful than
others. And whatever you want to call her, you certainly can’t call her boring.
Except when she is.
2. “The Climb” – Miley Cyrus
Knowing Miley Cyrus’s career as Hannah Montana is almost
essential to knowing the mythos. It’s basically where she came from as a pop
star and something she’s been constantly rebelling against ever since. And if
she was specifically rebelling against this song, I could understand it fully,
because this is dogshit.
“The Climb” is like if you took one of those “hang in there
baby!” posters and repeated it for a full four minutes. Maybe this could be
inspirational to the children watching the Hannah Montana movie, but all I hear
is emptiness. And Miley’s voice really does no favours to this song. I’ve
actually liked some of her experimentations with other genres, but when you
leave her as the sole reason why your song should be memorable (because this
music certainly isn’t going to do it) then you’re left with an uncontrolled
singer who hasn’t even hit 20 yet, and is in way over her head. I never watched
that Hannah Montana movie. But knowing that this was the centerpiece of it all
certainly doesn’t make me want to go rushing out to buy it.
“The Climb” would be Miley’s last hit for a while as she
tried to figure out what the fuck she wanted to do with her career. I feel
confident in saying that no matter what you think of her later years in music,
at least it’s not this. This sucks, full stop.
---
"Break Up" by Mario and gang is one of the most baffling
songs I've ever heard to hit the Hot 100. It's almost avant-garde in its
shittiness, or it's like a tornado swept through the recording and just swept
up all the pieces of the song and spat them out in random order. It's an
anomaly of bad club shit, even for 2009.
But one song was worse.
1. "Pop Champagne" -
Jim Jones ft. Ron Browz & Juelz Santana
I have to imagine this only got play at nightclubs for brief
seconds before people realized what was playing and demanded the song be
changed. First off, this is the absolute worst use of Autotune I've ever heard.
T-Pain this guy is not. Second, the beat is near-non-existent. We could
definitely use a stronger beat here to drown out these losers, but no, we just
have a basic thump with some synths thrown in seemingly at random. Third, both
guest rappers are absolutely worthless. They have been for their whole careers,
but here they aren't even bad in an interesting way. It's just Ron Browz
(who??) and Jim Jones cribbing lyrics from a much better Biggie Smalls song, and
Juelz Santana having the most disposable rap verse since… well, all of them. So,
what do you get when you take three no-talents and put them in the same room?
Well, you could get "Break Up". But even more depressingly, you could
get this. A song so devoid of life and energy that I can't imagine anyone
dancing to this for a fraction of a second. It should be illegal to dance to a
song like this, to prevent numb-nuts like these from ever making a song like
this again. Let's put that law into action, and let's leave this turd of a
song, as well as its "artists", firmly in 2009.
