the top ten worst hit songs of 2020

This is probably going to wind up a different sort of list in comparison with my lists of the worst hit songs of respective years.

Namely that in 2020, I’m not really angry at the worst music this year has to offer - or rather that anger isn’t the primary emotion I experienced listening through these. Maybe it came from less exposure - when I was in lockdown, I was listening to hundred of other albums that were not on the charts, so maybe the overplay didn’t screw me over… but I have to be honest, that’s generally true whenever I’ve made these lists and I’ve still found plenty to piss me off.

Or maybe it’s because the pop charts are better overall - it seems like the general consensus is that 2020 has been a pretty damn good year for the Hot 100 if nothing else, with the best showing that pop and country have had in years, along with some terrific R&B; and hell, if you were able to find pockets in rap and trap and reggaeton music, you can find stuff you like. Even the plethora of posthumous releases felt like they were being handled with more care and focus and didn’t feel quite as much like money-grubbing disasters. And even though we were firmly back in the era of album bombs and insane chart turnover and let’s not forget TikTok, maybe because everyone in every genre was doing it the impact wound up manageable and not so disastrous for certain subgenres like in 2018. Or it’s because there weren’t the huge crushing disappointments from acts I really liked, as there were a bunch of megastars who just sat out 2020 altogether, leaving the new kids to chart the path. Or maybe it’s those new kids themselves - it was starting last year, but now there’s an era of pop that’s embracing a brand of ironic detachment that’s at least targeted at Gen Z if not being outright made by it, and while it doesn’t always click emotionally for me, that can swing both ways and the bad doesn’t become atrocious because the distance is built in.

I also get the feeling at least some parts of this year are an anomaly linked to 2020 alone - when you deal with world-shaping events damn near unprecedented in the modern age, it’s hard to think that any moment constructed here will have greater staying power outside of 2020’s context, and that means any bad trends are likely going to fade out just as fast, potentially taking their artists with them. Ergo, my main emotion going through a lot of the worst songs wasn’t anger but revulsion and disgust - a lot less offended or disappointed, more repulsed and thinking that thank god most of this won’t persist beyond this weird microcosm of a year. I’d put money on maybe a third to half of this list not being a thing in 2021 - and again, maybe that’s another net positive going forward too!

So here’s the rules: the songs had to debut on the 2020 year-end Hot 100 list, and even though there are other songs that might flit outside that boundary… and the “year of” qualifier was growing shakier with every Billboard year… but we might as well start with Dishonourable Mentions…

Okay, I said there weren’t any huge crushing disappointments, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t smaller ones - like this duet in the canon of ‘I’m glad your relationship seems to be finally working out, but I really don’t need to hear music about it’. Basically, it’s a duet that plays to the weaknesses of both artists, with none of Stefani’s vamping or flair and none of Shelton’s firepower or emotionally evocative material - in other words, it feels like a collab built because of The Voice and nothing else, which is ironic because it seems like both artists seem to have lost their voices along the way, amidst a cloud of fizzy drum machines, whooshing effects, and such a glaring lack of vocal chemistry that the hook has to rely on a pileup of double negatives. If anything, this reminds me of the slew of duets that were rushed out of Nashville in 2011 to capitalize on what Lady Antebellum delivered, but this is no ‘Remind Me’ or ‘Don’t You Wanna Stay’, this is Blake Shelton regressing to that era and making the most tepid music of his career - I may have predicted that ‘God’s Country’ was a fluke, but not like this.

I know I’m in the minority that doesn’t like this song - mostly because Moneybagg Yo was such a thoroughly unlikable presence in the aftermath of things going awry with Megan Thee Stallion that him making a presumptive cut about all the money he’s stacking feels a little like gloating before you’re won anything. And yes, I know he got a big remix with DaBaby and City Girls which is much better, but in the era of deluxe reissues and chart boosting remixes, for a rule in this list I’m going with what is credited on the year-end - it’s why the remix of ‘Suicidal’ by YNW Melly with the late Juice WRLD is missing this list! And yes, Moneybagg Yo can ride your basic Migos flow and sterile trap percussion, but his rhymes are not all that good especially on the clunky second verse, and it’s the content from this guy that really turned me off - how after he stole a girl from one of his friends, he gave her back to the streets for a full refund because his warranty was good, especially given that you then emphasize she’s salty you ‘scarred’ her, and that you just want head and don’t even want to know what her pussy’s like? Tack on the expected COVID reference to thoroughly date this, and we have another thoroughly unlikable trap song with an artist who’ll be forgotten by next year - let’s move on.

Now in contrast, this is a song you’ll absolutely remember - mostly because where it fails is actually kind of amusing and I can see how this would have ironic appeal. I’ve been saying for years now that Camila Cabello was the least talented singer of Fifth Harmony, but I will acknowledge she’s built a pop presence for herself, especially by leaning into Latin elements. And I have to believe with the increased success of reggaeton that had to play into this song’s run, but not for the first time Cabello reminds me a lot of Jennifer Lopez’s early 2000s run in playing to a sanitized pop image that she can’t credibly back up - and I guess that makes DaBaby her Ja Rule and Shawn Mendes her Ben Affleck and wow this came together way too easily! The problem is that the song really can’t get that hot or heavy, or emphasize any chemistry - DaBaby might be proving that he can do the interchangeable Ludacris guest feature surprisingly well, but that shows there’s no real stakes here, because Camila shrieking that she’s always been the good girl and now doesn’t want to be doesn’t come across as sensual but like a preteen who’s screaming at her parents to let her go out because she just got a black leather jacket and thinks that makes her edgy. And fair enough, I also had a lot of that attitude… into my twenties… which is probably why I feel more embarrassed for this than actually hating it, but when you pair it with gutless writing, too much reverb, a cheap handclap, and melodrama nobody can sell… yeah, this ain’t good.

Hey look, it’s the Drake/Post Malone-ripoff simp anthem that apparently the world wanted! Yes, this is another one of those cases where everyone else tolerated this more than I did - mostly because it seemed like in 2020 all the male pop stars wanted to do was complain about rich LA girls on Instagram and how shallow they are because they spend daddy’s money on Whole Foods and cocaine, seemingly blissfully unaware of their own shallowness by chasing only them! And look, I’ve met women and men in Toronto who can be just like this and it is exhausting and expensive to try and be around them, and that bleary-eyed frustration is the emotion a song like this is trying to go for… the problem is that Arizona Zervas is the definition of one-hit wonder, someone riding better production and a good hook rather than sustainable or unique personality, as he’s gotten nothing moving or charting beyond this; yeah, bad timing with the lockdown, but there’s just not much personality here beyond and outside of the obvious car wreck sound effect integrated into the rickety, cheap-as-hell production, I don’t think this guy was built for anything beyond the meme. Columbia got their quick paycheque, let’s move on.

Oh, I bet a whole lot of you thought this would be way higher, didn’t you? I want to keep this short because I’ve got a lot more to say about Bieber as this list progresses and pretty much everyone already tore this to shreds, but here we go: this song felt gross because of its title word, the sort of awkward trap/R&B sex song that tries to conflate food and sex and just winds up disgusting, but the strange thing is that with a better performer and maybe getting rid of that central word, this could have worked. The bones of a tolerable song are here, and even if you called it ‘yummy’ and had a credible R&B singer make it, this could have worked. The problem is that Bieber has nothing close to that range, and writes and performs sex songs like he needs sex explained to him - I’ll say this, if there’s one thing Bieber sold well in this song, it’s how unreasonably rich he is, that’s the only reason he’s this detached from even good bad taste. And while we’re near that subject…

Okay, so we’re reaching the point where lists of the ‘worst hits’ of a respective year are starting to saturate more of the internet and while I try not to watch many because I want to fully build my own case, I do keep an eye on what shows up, just so I get where consensus might be falling. There are two songs on my list that I’m not sure have shown up very often, and maybe it’s just because folks thought they were too bland to dislike. Maybe it’s because I have a history with both acts which intensifies my feelings, and in this case… I mean, he was sitting out the majority of this year, he didn’t have to do this! At this point, Drake should just stop working with DJ Khaled - whenever he does so and it charts, it’s bad - yes, even moreso than ‘Toosie Slide’, which falls in the category of ‘Drake dance tracks that are thoroughly stupid, questionably produced and mediocre but you can’t hate that much’ - you know, like ‘One Dance’ and ‘Hotline Bling’. No, this is bad in a mostly unique way, with Drake remaking ‘Nonstop’ with an even more formless trap instrumental with less curdled anger and more lifeless flexing in a really bad Young Thug impression with added patois… because of course he’s still doing that. In the grand DJ Khaled tradition, it’s a song resting so heavily on its laurels that it doesn’t even attempt to try - there’s one decent line referencing David Foster and his production credits on the second verse, but that’s also where he effectively gives up mid-verse even with his bad pop star references and increasingly basic desires, all paired with a video where for some ungodly reason he wanted to anchor it to the inexplicable appeal of Justin Bieber. And am I the only one who thinks that wanting a ‘quick easy death’ is in bad taste in 2020, even for Drake in context? Because if Certified Lover Boy flops as badly as it seems primed to, I’m sure Pusha-T knows somebody who can make that happen.

Okay, Trevor Daniel, we already have Kid LAROI to badly rip off Juice WRLD, we don’t need you too, especially given that you apparently threw this together in an hour and it shows. There’s something to be said for doing the basics this wrong, and while I could see this clicking for a brief snapshot on the hook on TikTok, outside of that this barely exists. It’s trying to capture the dread in your gut when after a bad relationship you try again… but it doesn’t have the self-awareness to realize this sort of drippy, oversold presentation probably sets you up for the same sort of failure and you have a disaster in the making! But really, for as much as I complain about bad pitch-shifting and vocal layering, this might be one of the worst in recent memory, especially on the bridge where the chipmunk vocals overlap with his in a really ugly way. And while it is an ugly song, there’s not enough to the performance or writing to elevate it, not matter how awkwardly theatrical Trevor Daniel says ‘come closer’. Exactly the sort of song destined to make you hate it if you hear too much of it on the radio… which from what I’ve seen, is exactly what happened.

Okay, I had more to say about those than I thought I would… might wind up similar for the list ahead, so let’s get things started with…

10. So I rarely bring up ‘chart performance’ in my year-end lists, because it won’t really matter long-term - it’ll wind up forgotten, especially if the song isn’t interesting. But the fact that the song is as tepid and utterly misconceived as this one is, especially in a year with so much #1 turnover for asinine reasons… yeah, we have to talk about this one

This is not really a song: it’s an emblem of monstrous privilege amidst a world-ruining pandemic that on some level isn’t even about the ongoing feud between Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, and the Soundcloud waifu who missed this list altogether Tekashi 6ix9ine. To understand this, you have to realize that the #1 is often built into the record contracts for incentives tied to specifically some pop acts that play the game, which seems to be the largest factor why 6ix9ine and Nicki Minaj have been chasing it for so long - as did Bieber even earlier this year even as Roddy Ricch was doing the Lord’s work by keeping him off of it! But since there’s some warped power games going on between Scooter Braun - Ariana and Bieber’s label boss - and Lucian Grainge - the power behind 6ix9ine as of currently - we got a thrown together ‘charity’ record that’s somehow winds up in worse taste than the sneering troll of a convicted sex offender! I’ll admit I’m a little surprised that so many folks are throwing this on ‘worst of 2020’ lists, because in terms of composition and performance even for the cardboard pop soul this was made of, Ariana can save a lot on performance, even if once again Bieber is hopelessly outclassed. But ‘class’ is the word of the day here: in 2020 it looks pretty damn reprehensible for two ridiculously rich performers who moved into full-on flex mode in recent years do a cutesy, old-school ‘oh I’m stuck inside with you’ song when that surely doesn’t exist for everyone delivering them everything. It’s awful and detached in a way that can’t even match the production or do anything interesting, and while I think time and a vaccine will push this more into ‘forgotten’ than ‘roundly despised’, it’s still pretty damn gross in this moment. I get escapism, but when it feels this detached and phony, a proxy for industry power games, you’re not escaping shit.

9. …look, you should all just be thankful this is the only one of their new singles that caught traction.

There’s a lot of ugly things I can say about ‘RITMO’, but I think what stands out the most is how none of it surprises me. We know the Black Eyed Peas would take a great sample and run it through the meat grinder with some of the most obviously canned and synthetic reggaeton percussion you’d ever hear. We know their content would be beyond stupid, generic party sloganeering that makes your brain leak out your ears. I even knew of the flagrant corporate ties, where in following every will.i.am brand integration Powerpoint presentation, he’d be tying this into a soundtrack for a movie, this time Bad Boys For Life, which was also the revival of a franchise that nobody goddamn needed. But this feels like cultural vandalism, where you know that the Black Eyed Peas didn’t go reggaeton because they wanted to experiment with the sound or stylism, they wanted to cash in on an international market, which is why they use Spanish as garnish to their bad writing in ways that don’t even pretend to make sense, especially when it comes to that second verse. I honestly feel bad for J Balvin, but he was one of a few too many to cosign this, and I’ll at least say it’s nowhere near as bad as some of the worst moments on their album Translation this year. It feels like an ugly caricature that doesn’t even pretend to understand or care about the culture it’s nakedly strip-mining, and the best thing I can say is that better reggaeton from acts like Bad Bunny achieved more penetration than this undercooked knockoff - next!

8. The placement of this song on this list reminds me of how my opinion changed around ‘Robbery’ last year, where it fell back on my list because I understood what it was trying to do. That said, just because I get it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

So there are a few compliments I can give this song - it has one hell of a hook, and in comparison with ‘ROXANNE’, it paints one hell of a picture - a picture stained with machismo, debauchery, and contemptuous nihilism directed at everything and everyone, but if that’s your bag, I get why people got into this. And I even understand how blackbear’s relative blankness as a performer works to this song’s advantage - it appeals to the lowest common denominator, anyone can slot themselves into the glittering parties where seemingly nobody is having any fun, it’s a song that feeds on negative impulses. But there’s a part of me that also just how much of that is a cheap justification for rampaging shittiness, that blackbear isn’t so much artfully blank but one of the least charismatic and expressive pop acts opposite Justin Bieber, that even if the song is cathartic in its shittiness it doesn’t escape the fact this is the second act on this list to appropriate Megan Thee Stallion’s popularity to treat the fairer sex with abuse and contempt. blackbear has also claimed this song is ‘obviously satire’ - which kind of puts to shame everyone excusing it without irony - but if that’s the case it’s bad satire because it’s not making any targeted point beyond ‘everyone is stupid and sucks in their twenties’, and it also doesn’t excuse the fact that blackbear has been making records completely straight just like this for years now! And again, this wasn’t his biggest hit because people ‘got the satire’, it’s because there’s a horde of white kids who made this their anthem, and it feels gross on a level that’s hard to quantify. At least ‘XO Tour Llif3’ had that ‘stare into the abyss’ feel at its darkest moments, whereas this doesn’t have anywhere close to the stomach to go there beyond condom jokes, drug references, throwing up in luxury bags, and broken emo chicks, all from a performer who can’t sell it well. Again, I’ve heard every excuse for this song, and while some of those may save this from a higher spot on the list, it’s still making it - let’s move on before I throw up too.

7. So look, I get that by me placing so many songs that are openly toxic on this list you might think that the moralism angle is back in my criticism, and that’s not quite true - it’s always an issue of execution, it’s why some artists can revel in the debauchery and it doesn’t faze me as much, stay tuned for my best list in a day or two to find out! But sometimes you don’t even get the debauchery - you just get this.

There’s a part of me that wants to throw Gabby Barrett’s ugly political side into this conversation because it’s cheap and easy and it even makes sense given how mercenary Charlie Puth will be to work with anyone… but all I will say is that for a demo that built their politics on bitterness and resentment and ‘I don’t care how this reflects on me, it’s more about screwing them’, it makes sense this is the sort of music Gabby Barrett makes. Granted, I honestly don’t even need to go that deep with this, because on a production level this sounds awful - Gabby Barrett might worship Carrie Underwood’s ‘Before He Cheats’, a song I don’t even like because it’s all built on unfounded suspicion but was just anthemic enough to get overplayed at every karaoke bar, but this has nothing close to that song’s punch. The vocal mixing is overprocessed trash, the guitar is gutless, the snap beat has more impact than the actual drums, and all of it builds to a song that feels more small and ugly in its bitterness than containing any power… and you know that was not the point it was trying to make. And with more listens, I can’t even say Charlie Puth helps the song - not only does he sound shrill and unlikable here in his own right, the complexity feels jumbled, and it doesn’t really match any intended narrative that she might have cheated as well… although hypocrisy wouldn’t have surprised me here either. Ugh, this got a radio push for some ungodly reason, likely because it’s blandly toxic enough to sit the background and only get under your skin if you care… and I don’t think you want to build career on that, just saying.

6. So I mentioned this at the top, in that I have no idea how certain bad trends or artists will last outside of the parameter of ‘it was 2020’, and while I think the increasing number of COVID references were a little excruciating to hear across new songs, it’s an omnipresence in our lives, even for the most rich and powerful, and I get it. Hell, I’m not even sure how well my criticism will hold up outside of 2020, because again, we’re shaped by such unprecedented times in this environment, and a song like ‘stuck with u’ that feels reprehensible now might wind up just the most forgettable #1 of both artists’ careers in five years, just an empty puff of escapism. Ergo, I’m not sure how much my disgust towards this song will stick longer than 2020, but as we can only live in the moment here and I haven’t liked this for months now…

Okay, I get the appeal of this - you’re confronted with your mortality and you look back on an ex for whom you’re still not over, and you wonder if it was all over, would you share one final moment together, even despite all that history. And while you can clearly tell this wasn’t written in the time of the pandemic - because a stranger coming over would be the last thing anyone should want - that maybe could only add to the sentiment because it’s longing for something that would never happen, and it’s not their fault it got big as a sign of the times? But even acknowledging all of that, this is treacly, weak, and feels faintly manipulative all the way through. Part of this is not helped by Julia Michaels playing submissive and self-flagellating the way she has her entire career as a songwriter and performer, but I think JP Saxe is the biggest problem here: as a singer he is a willowy husk that screams blandness, and it creeps into his writing style too. Adding the detail you didn’t even feel the earthquake that set any of this off because you were distracted in traffic makes it feel less desperate and more just a casual thought experiment as an excuse to get your ex back, and that’s before you think with ‘wait, if she’s not down for forever, why would she spend her last minutes before the world ends with you’ - it’d still be forever in that case, just much shorter! If anything it reminds me of ‘Closer’ by The Chainsmokers and Halsey, where the passage of time plays so much into their reconciliation for all the wrong reasons, and in both cases it feels like the girl’s agency is pitched out the window for literally no reason - that’s literally referenced multiple times in the hook, it’s a hail mary that JP Saxe can’t even justify, and at least ‘Closer’ tried to cultivate some tension! But you want to know what really set me off with this? It was produced by FINNEAS, who you might recognize as Billie Eilish’s brother and main producer, so on the one hand you now know why Julia Michaels actually sounds competent for once. On the other, wow, this sounds like a really bad Billie Eilish song stripped of any atmosphere, punch, or a performer who can sell any of it, so on top of just being crap it’s also boring as hell and reminds me of the worst sort of adult contemporary. It only got a smidge of pathos because of the pandemic, and unlike ‘stuck with u’, I can see this song’s reputation only getting worse; just watch.

5. …look, at this point it almost feels like I’m punching down.

Because let’s be real: TikTok might have built a few superstars but it’s also built more than its fair share of quick disposable memes and artists who get a flicker of traction before fading out in record time, likely getting signed by a label - usually Columbia - just fast enough to lose all their royalties along the way. And in that case, it’s hard for me to really hate this because he got involved with XXXTENTACION’s former manager, got a deal, and promptly no success afterwards, with his debut EP not moving any type of needle - the kid’s 19, and odds are pretty bad he’ll get another hit, I’ve seen this cycle countless times before. That said, this is the definition of a bad song built for TikTok - a single verse, a piano line, badly bass-boosted trap beat, and StaySolidRocky barely able to hold a melody amidst the autotune, he sounds faded and incoherent as the girl wants to party hard with guns and drugs, probably more than he does! Hell, that is the power dynamic of this song - it’s not as obvious of a simp anthem as ‘ROXANNE’, but this is considerably worse constructed - there’s nothing glamourous or appealing or sexy about this scene, just a girl cheating with him because she’s mildly interested in his lifestyle, but then treating him like shit when he catches feelings, and don’t dare judge her for any of this. I dunno, from the story StaySolidRocky is presenting I have opinions about this girl, but he looks just as worse for wear, stumbling over his bars, projecting nothing interesting about himself. Really, this feels like the sort of amateurish trap song I get sent every other day by upstart rappers who are trying to quickly catch a trend off one quick single, and like StaySolidRocky, he’s not built for prime time - the reason he’s this high on the list is because the production is terrible and even in the context of the meme it’s not likable, but I just feel bad for this kid - good luck catching the second… or just moving past this.

4. But if there’s a kid I adamantly do not feel bad for, in any capacity…

This is a song I knew would be a single because of the Quavo cash-in verse, but I had no idea why Bieber picked this of all songs to attach it - it’s literally an ‘insert verse’, why add it to one of the most… inexplicable songs of your career?! Again, my primary emotion towards this song isn’t anger, it’s confusion, because Bieber is trying so damn hard to project traditional masculinity in an appealing modern way, and he fumbles it so hard it would be mesmerizing if the song wasn’t complete ass! A huge problem is that Bieber is such a limited presence that when he tries to project sounding lovestruck he sounds prepubescent, and he’s so wildly out-of-touch with trying to connect references that it almost feels like a ‘Hey Soul Sister’ situation where he doesn’t understand how asinine he sounds. It’s him shouting out her parents for raising her, where he then tries to call her a triple threat by being a ‘boss, bae, and beast in the streets’, it’s him using the line ‘stay in the kitchen cookin’ up, got your own bread / heart full of equity, you’re an asset’ - where a song all about trying to empower her, he references traditional patriarchal gender roles and refers to her as a financial instrument! He literally references to her as a brand in the second verse that she doesn’t need the sponsorship, and if she doesn’t feel it for herself, he tells her to ‘act like you know that you are’ - it feels like this song was written by a cross of an 80s Wall Street meathead and the worst IG ‘girl boss’ influencer you’ve ever met, it’s fucking uncanny even before you add Quavo saying these girls don’t want independence! His verse thankfully stabilizes into something a bit more grounded for Saweetie - and the way she’s going, she could well send him back to the streets if he tries the shit Bieber’s doing - but the weird thing is that the song doesn’t sound opulent or intimate either - the production is fizzy and spurting and dominated by the 808s, all shrink-wrapped and sterile. If anything, it feels like Bieber is trying to make ‘Trap Queen’, but five years too late and with nowhere near the punch or personality of Fetty Wap - hell, get rid of Bieber, bring back Fetty Wap for 2021, I think all of us would be on board for that.

3. I feel like in 2020, if you’re making a year-end list and you’re ignoring country because it’s ‘just not your genre’ or ‘I don’t have to care', I feel like you’re missing a full picture. Granted, I’d argue that was true for years, but given Nashville caught up to streaming in a big way and the genre is building their next wave of real stars and finding mainstream traction with them, there was a lot more country on the Hot 100 and year-end list for 2020. And while that’ll be most reflected on my list of the best of the year, as per usual, I would be remiss to ignore the worst of the genre, like from an act that rode the last wave to success and just will not go away…

Jason Aldean is such an anomaly in mainstream country in 2020 that I’m always surprised he doesn’t get more scrutiny: he was the flagship artist of the indie label Broken Bow - now BBR - which until it was acquired by BMG and ergo Sony, was a label built on him. In Nashville, for an artist like him to build such a following is legit impressive… until you actually listen to his music and realize he’s just the goddamn worst. To put it bluntly, Jason Aldean has been at the forefront of inelegantly mashing in bad R&B and hip-hop tropes with his sound since the remix of ‘Dirt Road Anthem’ in 2011, and yet he doesn’t tend to get a ton of positive recognition for it because his music is miserably macho in the worst way possible and his production sounds like stale, mainstream rock radio dishwater; he reached the point of being so thoroughly unlikable both in and out of music I don’t even need to reference his politics or his blackface incident, none of it is surprising. But I will say I was shocked how much this song pissed me off, because this is his worst single in a while - because hey, do you want to hear that guy make a moody anthem to his own complacence opposite a cheap fizzy drum machine, and guitar and pedal steel interplay with no direction. And somehow it gets worse from there - the song is reportedly his wife’s favourite on his album, but it sure as hell doesn’t paint their relationship well, where she’s asking whether he misses the single life or is searching for deeper fulfillment, and his answer is ‘no, and you sound a little crazy talking like that girl, so just kiss me’. He’s got what he’s got, don’t think about his old self - who was just as miserable, I heard those songs - just trust him… but there’s two major problems here. First, the drama is nonexistent - it’s him telling his wife to shut up as he’s happy, but he’s selling none of it! He sounds as miserable as the song does, leading any complacency in the song to feel sour and ugly, completely ignoring that she might be asking him those questions for her benefit too! The obvious way to make this work is just upbeat blandness, but Aldean can’t get away from the macho posturing, even with his wife, and none of this feels fun or likable… and since it was one of his biggest hits to date, we aren’t getting rid of his outdated ass anytime soon. Fun stuff.

2. I knew from the second I heard my last two songs that they’d be the worst hits of 2020. It wasn’t close, I could point to them in a second and say, ‘yeah, these are the reasons I’m making this list at all’. And in this case, I want you to step into the mind of someone who might be a little older or you have a taste for classic country. So you put on the radio, and you hear a very distinctive, old-fashioned twang, and you might recognize it as ‘There Stands The Glass’, a 1953 song by Webb Pierce, and you might think, ‘okay, why is this here, it sounds weird.. but I don’t dislike it, it’s an old barroom song about drinking away your pain’… and then something shifts…

You think I’m making this up, Cody Jinks basically described the same gut-churning feeling I had when I first heard ‘Hard To Forget’ - he was in a dentist office and to quote him, ‘I heard the biggest piece of shit I heard in a long time. I didn’t know who it was but I was pissed. so much in fact that my blood pressure went up and the dental staff had to wait till it went down to start on me’. Unfortunately, I’m not so lucky - I know exactly who Sam Hunt is, to the misfortune of everyone he has a distinctive voice and presence even in bro-country, and ‘Hard To Forget’ and its bastardization of trap and country was not at all surprising… even if it did make want to retch at the sheer unbridled wrongness of it. Again, this is about execution - we’ve seen proof that trap and country can work together, but Sam Hunt does it in the most sterile, whitebread, gutless way possible; I’m not against sampling, but do it in a way where the sample is flattering to the composition, not mutilated so every point is missed! Granted, Sam Hunt framed this song as the key to his album - ergo, if you want mugging jackassery where the girl has very plainly moved on but Sam Hunt just thinks she’s playing ‘hard to forget’, because the girl showed up at the same bar looking hot and hasn’t picked up her stuff yet. Maybe it’s because you’re going to harass her the second she shows up on your property - but the weird thing is that the song isn’t bitter or dark or even all that miserable, it’s got this self-obsessed drive for a big anthemic chorus where he seems insufferably convinced this girl is going to come back for him because she monopolizes everything he’s thinking about! And if this actually played into the sadsack loser element that makes ‘There Stands The Glass’ so populist, that could work… except Sam Hunt has neither that complexity nor emotional range and all across his atrocious album Southside he displays exactly this same sort of lazy presumptuousness. And what’s all the more galling is that MCA Nashville and the radio industry gave Sam Hunt the easy out - he got himself a hit single, got praised by a bunch of coastal media types who wouldn’t know good trap or good country if it pistol-whipped them and stole their girlfriend, and Hunt once again got a shot of life into a career that should be dead in the water, or rotting in a field after Sturgill Simpson ran him over with a tractor - call that cutting some grass! In my Southside review I went off about the systemic laziness and rot that has enabled Sam Hunt, but also keep in mind despite all of that, this is what he chose to make as his newest single for 2020. To quote Cody Jinks again, ‘for the love of god, please stop incorporating classic country samples into shit songs. It’s not paying homage, it’s a slap in the face’. Sums it right up - trash.

1. Okay, this is actually going to demand some explanation, because while it might be a predictable choice from me, for it to top my list above Sam Hunt does require I explain why, especially given I fully expect there to be a lot more songs like this coming in the future and I might wind up repeating myself. And I think some of this is demographics - material that was designed to appeal to millennials is filtering away to be replaced by the increasingly thick cushion of memeable irony that Gen Z lives and breathes. And that can be very hit-and-miss for me - and I know that because Gen X relied on the same set of excuses in the 90s and 2000s to excuse this same approach. So I’m fully aware that this might be a generational thing - at the same time, this song nauseates me to my core and I need to explain why.

I mean, I could go with the most obvious points here: it sounds like ass. The piano erupting off the squonking rollick of the guitars, the underweight groove, the trap elements, the gang vocals that sound goddamn gentrified, and our two frontmen who sing like they’re pinching their nose with the sort of mocking obnoxiousness that at least 3OH!3 and Kesha had the good sense to pair with energy - plus some truly hideous autotune. It literally sounds they’re mocking the audience with the verse melodies, which is the worst possible contrast to a hook where they sing ‘feeling good, like I should’ - it feels like the worst elements of a Sublime song, just with trap elements and even more complacency. And this is where you’ll get people saying, ‘oh, it’s trying to be aspirational, help folks feel better, live through the struggles like they describe on the verse’… but that’s not really what this is, these are two guys who can say ‘whatever’ because there’s no way around it - and it’ll bounce off of them, with the painfully juvenile rhyme structure that gives us such lines as ‘keep good things inside your ears just like the waves and sound did’. None of this feels earnest or warm or affirming - and my god, the desaturated video does not help - it feels privileged and snide, where they’ll be bouncy and happy walking around the neighbourhood looking their best… but you know, that’s not on the docket for you any time soon, there’s a lockdown. Yeah, can’t get away from that here, because this song actually was first released in January 2019, and only blew up in February of 2020 on TikTok… but it has the feel of bad e-boy TikTok, so massively self-assured and preening that the flex might only be implied, but it’s there. This ties into where I mentioned gentrification, and if you want proof that trap is overexposed to the point of losing all unique luster, it’s this: it feels like the ugly Kidz Bop version of itself, especially with those gang vocals, but more importantly it tells advertising executives that this sort of trap is now safe for radio and commercials, so guess how often I wound up hearing this as a result? Now admittedly, if you only knew this from TikTok, you’re embracing with some veneer of irony - it’s obviously phony to some extent, even if the mugging duo performing it don’t hear it… but the phoniness does not translate. If it’s phony in extending support, congrats in finding a new way to be hateable, but if it’s phony in itself, it is the cheapest possible deflection especially when I’ve seen more than a few folks crap on millennial self-assuredness and empowerment anthems; at least the majority of them tried and felt more earnest than this, which feels half-assed all the way down. And that’s the true ugliness, isn’t it - folks might crap on Imagine Dragons and the slew of ‘commercialcore’ or ‘grocerycore’ acts who got co-opted by marketing teams, but this is a song that thinks it can get around it with a cheeky ‘whatever’ and that’ll deflect… even though the content is so sterile this could fit any product. This sort of winking, gentrified deflection was gross in the alternative scene in the 2000s, and since the last generation gave up trying to fix anything, we get their natural descendents; This is disgusting on every conceivable angle - beyond just any vestige of principles this song makes me feel queasy when I hear it - and what’s worse is that I can see a whole slew of mediocre acts looking to cash in with the exact same formula. Worst hit song of 2020, and if we’re not careful, this might be come the next big trend of the 2020s - it’s way more plausible than you’ll want to admit, I’m warning you now.