the top ten worst hit songs of 2021

At first, I seriously questioned whether making this list made sense.

And I’m not saying this for the expected reasons, like ‘oh, it’s been a hard year, the negativity is overexposed and tiresome, focus on the positive, it’s not worth getting all agitated over a few bad songs’ - and for as much as that tends to be true, that wasn’t my issue with 2021. No, it was in that word ‘hit’, and it circles back to why critics like myself make year-end lists focusing on the ‘hits’ - because they’re the popular songs that people might recognize and have some level of cultural ubiquity, even if in the age of cheap virality it’s never guaranteed to last.

But the concept of ‘hits’, especially as defined by Billboard, are a construct, one I’ve always been aware of and have been faintly annoyed with ever since the first year where a song might have fallen short because of arbitrary weighting of sales or radio or streams or Billboard’s increasingly wonky cut-off date. And never did it feel more artificial than in 2021, which felt historically reminiscent of the mid-90s on the level of record label chart manipulation by exploiting loopholes and weaponizing fanbases to chase statistical feats that felt increasingly flimsy. That’s something that a lot of those fanbases never seem to understand, that the more they try to bend or break the rules to bolster statistical success, the more they undermine that statistic… so why on earth should I still care about how Billboard defines a hit record?

Well… call it vaguely aspirational in the desperate hope that someone at Billboard reckons with all of this - that they close loopholes and confront the reality of how their systems can be gamed and then leveraged in the popular consciousness, and if you’re paying attention they’ve been tweaking the formula ever so slightly to do so - or maybe just my own desire to remain consistent year over year, or how in the broader scope of the Hot 100, the most obvious gamesmanship happens at the very top, and the hits don’t just include that. Moreover, when I realized that my underlying emotion towards a lot of the worst music of the year wasn’t rage or disgust but a creeping, deep-seated embarrassment, it made sense that I at least include some veneer of popularity, no matter how it’s calculated: after all, in 2021 this supposedly was what the public wanted, and as always going off the songs that debuted on the Hot 100 year-end list this year, let’s start with Dishonourable Mentions!

Yeah, the embarrassment starts early with this one, as both of these men should absolutely know better than this - I swear to God, Chris Young used to make way better music than this, even his bro-country pivot in 2013 was better! Instead we have a song that doesn’t make any sense coming from these two, a weirdly insecure moment where given that they’re now in the big city of Nashville and aren’t as well-known, they can point back and say ‘no, we have famous friends too back home!’ And not only does the production sound so overpolished and programmed as to indicate both trend-chasing and how they fit just as much within Music Row, it can’t even make sense on a conceptual level: both of these guys are established hitmakers, Chris Young has been in the business since the late 2000s and Kane Brown was a viral sensation, why even try to brag like this? If anything it feels unintentionally revealing of how quickly someone’s starpower can burn out in that city, or how they’re still playing a version of a clout game, but neither of these guys should be doing this.

I was trying so hard to give Thomas Rhett a proper chance this year with his pivot towards more of a neotraditional sound - and look, he’s referencing all the old country songs of the past few decades, and that passes for saying something in another list-driven hookup song, right? Old Dominion tried this a few years ago too and I didn’t like it there either, because it’s trying to appropriate nostalgia for a time and sound that Rhett can’t sell, especially when Dann Huff’s production has turned the entire song into a blurry, overprocessed mess - not only was I around for all of these better songs - the music your own dad made, Thomas Rhett - a lot of the artists behind these tracks are still making music, and in the case of Alan Jackson with the same neotraditional sound way better! But really, they can’t even make it sound 90s with all the whooshing effects, unnecessary handclaps, gutless percussion, and overcompressed vocals, lacking any commitment to its sincerity it sounds flimsy and phony. You could have pushed ‘Heaven Right Now’ a lot harder than you pushed this.

I honestly thought this was going to be higher on my list, mostly because the only reason Kid LAROI is remotely close to the music industry is connections and nepotism, riding the leftover wave of his connection to Juice WRLD to making the palest facsimile of his emo trap sound with a bog-standard acoustic ballad that sounds like Post Malone’s leftovers from 2016. But hey, even if this kid sounds like total ass on the mic with his bad warbling falsetto and lyrics torn from a Simple Plan love song, I can understand the stripped down basics working effectively, how this teenage melodrama might translate with a certain degree of intimacy. But this breaks down with any degree of larger context: the fact we needed a trio of industry veterans as cowriters and it still sounds hacked out in an afternoon, and while whinging bitchfests are dime-a-dozen especially in the poppy side of emo trap, the only reason this became a hit was because the radio needed the safest and whitest possible alternative. Songs this basic and amateurish don’t deserve more attention.

…and here comes the backlash. Look, I’ve heard the other Maneskin singles that are all better than this hacked out cover from 2017, before they had fame, a budget, or Eurovision to propel them into the spotlight. But this is the draft that somehow got them famous, almost reminding me a bit of how the demos of 'Your Love’ and ‘XO Tour Llif3’ were what blew up for Nicki Minaj and Lil Uzi Vert. But even though I still don’t like either song, the central personality and appeal of the artist kind of shone through, whereas this is a cover of a cover where Maneskin are trying to replicate the Madcon version of the Four Seasons original and it sounds rough in the wrong way. The choppy guitars have no muscle, the drums sound like ass, the mixing gives nobody any firepower, and frontman Damiano David sounds like he’s singing through the worst vocal fry possible. I don’t know what bog witch possessed his vocal cords, but his singing and faux-rapping is not only badly positioned in the mix, it feels like it’s forcing a community theater grade of theatricality the godawful production only reasserts. Yes, the band is better than this - but this was the worst possible first impression.

Oh, I know some will be shocked this isn’t on the list proper… but folks, as someone who has been covering AJR for over four years, ‘Bang!’ is middle of the pack when it comes to their catalog - they’ve done better, but my god they’ve also done far worse. Now this is still bad - as much as I appreciate AJR trying to inch towards adulthood with the most embarrassing sentiments of what that means outside of early Lena Dunham, the production is still painfully flat, the uncanny valley of vocal mixing and pitch-shifting gives me a splitting headache, the bombast has no serious punch, and any self-aware forced zaniness only makes you realize this aesthetic is not nearly as unique or special as AJR thinks it is, especially in a year where twenty one pilots just did that sense of creeping dread in the face of change way more effectively. What’s a lot more surprising is that AJR didn’t launch more singles, where even those who are responsible for perpetuating the backlash - hi there - are sick of the discourse. Less a bang… more a whimper.

Just… please stop? This is where the sense of embarrassment comes back in earnest, because both of these acts should absolutely know better than to chase this sort of hacked out easy listening junk! Keith Urban, you can’t just go back to making soft-focus boyfriend country or something - given the era you came up, you’d actually be good at it! And P!nk, the entire era of forward-thinking pop rock you helped push in the 2000s is coming back in style, how is Avril Lavigne beating you to the punch in that arena? But yeah, this was awful from first listen and the only reason that it became a hit at all was radio and residual name recognition - there’s no chemistry, the clunky pop soul approach sounds like a bad leftover from 2017, the entire mix sounds canned and cheap, and the stumbling hangover hookup of a song leaves you with less romance than headaches and dry heaving. Can either of you find some forward-thinking management to get you away from pablum with the consistency of liquid shit - both of you could actually stand for something in a 2000s revival, not make this!

This was the moment where I realized embarrassment was the underlying emotion of the worst of 2021. The majority of you don’t remember who Parmalee are - I’ve reviewed them twice, but they’re c-list lifers on Music Row, having been around since the early 2000s but only catching their break in bro-country in 2013 when they wound up on Stoney Creek, and given that Nashville apparently had nothing else to push in early 2021, why not pair these guys with Blanco Brown from his one novelty song and who sounds genuinely embarrassed to be here, especially on the ad-libs! Probably just as much as me listening to it, not so much boyfriend country as the long-delayed male driven version RaeLynn’s ‘God Made Girls’, complete with a dash of ‘Little Things’ by One Direction - god, all sorts of bad nostalgia coming back with this one! And while there’s a part of me that wants to be charitable because it sounds sincere and they actually managed a second hit despite being produced by a member of Jason Aldean’s road band, with the beyond basic composition, cheap handclaps, sterile mix, and slapdash fusion of filmy live drums and trap percussion, this sounds like it was made for the Hallmark channel with the most blandly shitty pop country sound I heard all year - even worse than Niko Moon because at least ‘Good Time’ sounded like coherent crap! And yeah, Parmalee have never been interesting - it’s the reason reviewing them is a struggle - but when bands become this, I just wind up feeling sorry for everyone involved.

So this where I want to highlight how emotion factors into one’s evaluation of a song, because in theory this isn’t ‘that’ bad - sure, it’s sterile and sloppily mixed and devoid of real punch and BTS are being robbed for their personality to chase a Bruno Mars imitation from the mid-2010s, but you could say it’s lightweight and groovy enough that it shouldn’t matter. And yet here was my problem: I couldn’t listen to it without being forcibly reminded of a month-long harassment campaign pushed by fans who were livid not at my opinion on the song, but on reporting the sales tactics used to juice the chart position, which included breaking ISRC rules and placing foreign currency to drive domestic buys, where it reached such a fever pitch there was an article in Forbes about it. And I can congratulate them about forever attaching an asterisk by music historians to ‘Butter’s chart run for this behaviour, enabling Columbia to ignore any other avenues of promo beyond sales where they raked in the profits of stans chasing position on a functionally meaningless hit parade, in which BTS changed labels where they’ve now gone on hiatus, where Billboard has surreptitiously been tuning their own formula and cutting back on data transparency so this will be less likely in the future, and where a month of flagrant abuse to a music critic and journalist pretty killed my enjoyment of one of their biggest hits. Congrats, you made everything worse both short- and long-term for your own fandom, for anyone consuming Billboard, and music discourse at large - if I could have separated ‘Butter’ from all of this, I would have - but since art is a subjective and emotional relationship, I can’t, and I won’t.

Alright, that was heavy… let’s move onto the garbage proper, starting with…

10. So I’ve been saying it for years: I never outright hated bro-country the same way a lot of critics did. Like any subgenre there was a spectrum of quality, and for as overexposed as the trend became, I always tried to give it a chance, and there was good music there! Hell, I even stick up for the original ‘Cruise’ by Florida Georgia Line - yeah, it’s dumb, but with Joey Moi’s rollicking groove and overblown production and a really good hook, I at least found it fun. Less so the remix with Nelly, but that was more because the production hit the tipping point from overproduced to a disastrous but weirdly bland slurry. Clearly we all needed round two of that, right?

I used to think that it was Sam Hunt dragging the zombified corpse of bro-country forward in its horrible fusion of country and trap that highlighted the strengths of neither, but turns out when both acts here need hits really badly, this is what you get, a song that barely sounds finished that gets tacked on to both of their albums, which is a real note of desperation to highlight. But there’s a weird, sour emptiness to the song that for as stupid as everyone involved here could be is a lot uglier. The dated slang and flat braggadociousness where everyone leans harder on rap where the guitar sounds tinny against the painfully cheap trap clunk, where minus Joey Moi’s overblown sensibilities Florida Georgia Line is stuck trying to merge a banjo into the hi-hat skitter and the groove never builds any power. And yet aside from the undercooked production and how nobody seems to be having any fun and the skeevy pushiness that was always the worst part of bro-country, the line that pissed me off was from Nelly, calling himself ‘the Black Tom Brady, he’s the GOAT now’. I could go on an extended football rant about how Tom Brady rode on the back of terrific defenses and special teams on the Patriots and Bucs, to say nothing of Bill Belichick’s coaching, with short fields and insane playoff luck to compliment his statistical falloff and utterly unimpressive style of play where he could “take pay cuts to support the team” because his wife was one of the highest paid supermodels in the world, but let’s focus on the micro here: Nelly is from St. Louis. For those who don’t know, Tom Brady’s first Super Bowl win came against the St. Louis Rams and their ‘greatest show on turf’ - if he had tried a line like this in the highly regional rap scene of the 2000s, his city would have ripped him apart. This is how desperate he is in 2021 - humiliation all the way down.

9. I feel like I wind up putting a song like this on my list every year - and while they’re certainly deserving of it, I think I’m running out of things to say.

Because we’ve been down this road before: a relative no-name rapper snatches an okay beat and goes viral for one song, usually on TikTok where you won’t notice how he’s saying nothing of interest, he gets a wealth of remixes behind him and a little hype… and then it all disappears, usually whenever that tape trying to follow-up on any of it surfaces to even less interest, and the major label that signed him runs off with all the money. This happens damn near every year and at this point it’s depressing, especially when you realize how many other rappers hopped on ‘Beat Box’ and would get way more out of it beyond SpotemGottem with his weak Lil Uzi Vert and Young Thug impressions and really sloppy flow. And yeah, the flex is barely coherent - his one verse has him going to a party with another guy’s girl and then ditching her for someone feeling on his ‘peter bone’ - but the real issue is the production, where the bass is so clunky that it clips the piano, any other percussion, and his vocals; it’s got Soundcloud rapper amateurishness, but none of the firepower to make more of it, and worse still he’s leaning into the bad mixing on his follow-up songs you haven’t heard. Trust me when I say you’ll probably never hear them… hell, like most viral trends in this lane, you’ve probably already forgotten this.

8. So let’s go back to that idea of ‘embarrassment’ as a key emotion running through this year-end list, because it’s a little odd in context, especially coming from me. I’m not the sort of guy who has much in the way of guilty pleasures or appreciating things ironically, which is where the conversation about embarrassment comes up the most in discussing popular music. When it comes to negative feelings, though, a lot of it has to do with public perception of how you might view an artist or their work, that you might have stuck up for them and then they do something so cringe-worthy that you regret everything you said before. And thus, at the tail end of 2020 but landing on the list for 2021, we got this.

What I find oddly ironic is that this song reflects careers on two different trajectories, with Justin Bieber in particular really turning things around for the year we just had, especially after his disastrous 2020. But while ‘Yummy’ was gross and ‘Intentions’ and ‘lonely’ were mismanaged to a hilarious degree, ‘Holy’ was the moment of Bieber’s arc I thought his career was over, because this was excruciating. Yeah, the production was a little messy but it seemed to work in providing some of that gospel swell - even if whenever the hip-hop percussion comes in the song becomes unbearably clunky… which might as well be the running metaphor of every problem with this! For one, Justin Bieber cannot sell gospel or soul vocally, and when he tries, it’s not long before he has lines like ‘running to the altar like a track star’ and he talks about the pimps and the players and references his old drama, and suddenly I can’t get away from the how much Bieber’s Hillsong theology intersects with the capitalist prosperity gospel and it sends me straight into the uncanny valley. It’s a part of American evangelicalism that makes my skin crawl… but even then, Justin Bieber’s utter lack of convincing swagger could potentially work and he did make better music this year. Which I cannot say for Chance The Rapper - and as someone who stuck up for The Big Day and his big Christian-themed wedding album, this song created the sinking feeling of questioning all the praise I gave him. His verse is utterly corny in the worst way possible - not the first inexplicable Vespa reference we’ll get this year, but it wasn’t as bad as the Joe Pesci line or the Lionel Messi line or ‘he made you a snack like Oscar Proud’ which is a reference that barely works and is somehow worse than all the god-made-girls sentiments from ‘Just The Way’! Somehow this hits the worst elements of Christian music: oversanitized in its piety, but trying way too hard to still be cool with the kids, and as someone who was a track star, I’m stuck between this and Mooski’s bad song that’ll just miss this list. God help us all.

7. So there was a trope with year-end lists where if there was a song that’s a decidedly ‘indie’ feel to it, it normally got a lot of praise from critic types as being closer to the music they already like and wish got more success on the charts. I can admit that early on I was a little guilty of this, but as indie music has become increasingly commodified I’ve had less luck in that arena, and even then it’s never been a consistent thing for me - I’ll stick up for mainstream pop as much as the underground, and there’s no guarantee that good indie music becomes popular, and my opinion is not about to change just when it’s placed context with the mainstream. For example…

I reviewed Dreamland back in 2020 - that album was hot garbage over a year ago, and yet in 2021, Glass Animals’ worst album produced the sleeper hit that’s less psychedelic and more like heatstroke with a stomach virus. It’s a song that makes queasy every time I hear it: the blown out mix that somehow still feels weedy with its chalky drum machines and hideous synth, the derivative-ass pitch shifting and trap elements, and Dave Bayley’s overexaggerated, squeaky vocal delivery where he goes for the pseudospiritual hippie guru zonked out on a lot of club drugs he wants you to try. It’s cloying in a way that immediately raises my bullshit detection - alright stretched to the brink by a band that used to do interesting if weirdly voyeuristic things with its sound now copying trends badly - which does not put me in a good place for a song about mirages and misdirection and also is a breakup song in the ugliest way possible. Yeah, there’s a way to do the wistful, ‘it’s not you it’s me’ approach - somehow the Jonas Brothers and Marshmello managed to pull off a version in ‘Leave Before You Love Me’, and Bayley has described the song as being where you hit a brick wall, see yourself giving up your personality to be with this person and you have to cut them loose. But that’s not reflected in the content at all - you get the indication the relationship has run its course amidst a swampy mix that sounds like a head cold, but there’s nothing about him losing personality or even much context as to why it’s ending, which he seems to regret by seeing this person everywhere and by the second verse winds up nailing her one more time anyway because ‘you look so broken when you cry’. I get that the muggy stasis of the song is intended to reflect his feelings, but in using the second person so much in the writing it feels like the suffocation that comes with a manipulative partner, and all the false imagery doesn’t help - it feels gross and smarmy, the sort of song where none of the earnest emotion translates and it feels hollow; forget the heat waves, I’ll take a cold snap.

6. I’ve been asked why I don’t talk about Eurovision in my videos - don’t think I haven’t thought about it, because I know exactly how much traffic that could draw. But there’s a lot about the competition that can throw me - the nationalism, the weird voting blocs, the hyper-intense fandom, the fact that like most singing competitions it defaults to bland pageantry which can give me very little to say as a music critic… and occasionally, something crosses over and it can be a mixed blessing at best. Sometimes you get acts like Maneskin - other times, you get this.

This is a song from 2019, from singer-songwriter Duncan Laurence from The Netherlands who later saw this song go viral on TikTok late last year around the same time as the launch of his debut album - funny how that happens - which thanks to the slog of adult contemporary radio pushed this up the charts two years late. But even a few years removed doesn’t hide how terrible this song is, as it’s now just dated - I saw posts go viral this year ripping pop folk like The Lumineers and Mumford & Sons for making ‘stomp-clap’ music, and yet all of you gave this shit a pass? But even then, with the wispy backing vocals this seems like it’s trying for a more gothic presentation against the pianos, but the guitars clash awkwardly on the prechorus guitars and none of it obscures how utterly awful Laurence is for this material. The central idea of the ‘arcade’ as a metaphor for continuously chasing and failing at love is not a bad one - The Veronicas actually had a song from earlier this year called ‘High Score’ that actually did this pretty well - but this feels the sort of dingy arcade where you visit because there’s nothing else to do and half of the machines never worked - kind of doesn’t work for the ‘small town boy in the big arcade’, especially when said boy sounds so frail and nondescript as the lead. Give a song like this to Hozier and it might pick up some of the bombast, but this feels undercooked and clunky, not able to do enough with its central idea and not remotely able to sell a rollercoaster of melodrama this clearly needs. I’m honestly shocked this won Eurovision given how paltry of a song it feels, because I think everyone wound up losing; I think I want my time and my money back.

5. But back to embarrassment… yeah, there was no way this wasn’t making the list.

One of the worst things about being a music critic with any knowledge of how it works behind the scenes is that the phrase ‘low quality music’ seeps into your mind, where you can tell nobody really cared to put that much effort in and it’s going to coast on names, birthright, an overdone music video and meme appeal to become a hit. And that’s not saying you need strenuous effort to make great music, or that you can’t catch lightning in a bottle - but at some point you need to call something what it is, and this was lazy trash all the way down, where you can tell nobody even pretended to care; hell, Young Thug sounds like he’d rather be anywhere else, and I don’t think he had a good year either! But this should be embarrassing for everyone involved - the milquetoast percussion, the awful integration of the ‘I’m Too Sexy’ sample with the synths, Drake dropping into patois as if that wasn’t tired five years ago, Future remaining as formless and lacking in intensity as always, where the non-effort is the point because the ‘joke’ is that they’re not trying to be sexy but it’s so over-the-top in trying to not try, so that’s humour, right? When Eminem took this route in 2004 he was deliberately trying to destroy his career; with Drake he’s so comfortable that he’s got the hit that he doesn’t even have to pretend this is remotely good even by his standards. But nobody would dare tell him and his millions that, so the only person left embarrassed are those who actually try to defend this garbage, or anyone who was a fan and is now seeing what Drake has sunk to making. Hacky Chuck Lorre sitcoms would find this beneath them - it’s a bad parody that’s not funny, and if Drake doesn’t regret this hit now, he might well down the line.

4. So here’s an interesting fact: as bad as ‘Way 2 Sexy’ is, it didn’t really have staying power in Toronto, where I currently live. Even though it was a #1 hit, it didn’t really have staying power in the streets, where ‘Knife Talk’ and ‘Fair Trade’ and ‘No Friends In The Industry’ and - I hate to say it - ‘Girls Like Girls’ got more play. And while that song is humiliating and embarrassing to anyone within listening radius, everyone kind of gets that it’s bad and if you like ironically, that’s on you, it’s going to fade quickly and nobody feels ‘sorry’ for anyone involved here. Whereas on this song… yeah, this one was bad right from the jump too, but its true nature took its time to reveal itself.

The fact that this is one of Megan Thee Stallion’s biggest hits off of Good News in 2021 is infuriating - not that the album was stacked with obvious singles, it really wasn’t, and the DaBaby feature meant that at the time it was an obvious pick. Didn’t stop the song from being atrocious from the start thanks to the godawful production - Megan’s production has been hit-and-miss for years now, but this concept was dead on delivery, leaning on the ugly baby cry and crummy mastering from da got that dope, and a very thin concept of infantilization that’s not just gross, but also doesn’t fit Megan Thee Stallion’s brazen, in your face dominant personality at all. It feels like another attempt to work DaBaby’s name into the gimmick, especially as he has the hook and a verse - it really feels more like his song than hers, and given it’s 2021 DaBaby that’s a bad sign - but even that feels dated to at least three years ago when Lil Baby was trying it. And what do we wind up with as a result beyond a song whether neither rapper has any chemistry nor fun here. DaBaby is cranky that the girl’s parents and friends don’t like him - can’t imagine why, given even outside of his falloff and controversies this year how he names all the other women he’s running through - and not only does Megan not think any of this is cheating if she makes the rules and actively derides someone for catching feelings, but she doesn’t even seem like she’s having fun here either, as she ends her verse telling him to fuck her properly! It’s not sexy, there’s no tension that comes with a hate fuck, it’s just tedious and annoying, and it makes me wonder why on earth Megan agreed to this! I can’t imagine her playing it much now, given DaBaby has placed his allegiance with Tory Lanez over her in the mother of all stupid decisions… but hey, to paraphrase George Carlin, sometimes in a career you wind up with the medical plan that includes abortion, and the song that deserves it.

3. So last year I included a song on the very top of my list where I was describing a trend coming in mainstream music that embraced pop with a greater sense of ironic detachment, where you’d get the hasty proclamations of ‘no, this truly shows how happy they are and finding contentment in rough times’ and I feel like you’re pissing on me when it’s raining, especially as someone who has seen this particular run of insincere crap happen in pop before in the 90s and 2000s. But it’s going to be subjective whether you find it authentic or sincere - some people will take it at face value and find it sincere, whereas some will see through it and feel like if it’s not already commodified, it’s putrid in a really ugly, disquieting way. So if you have a cover of a song that was noted for how sincere and sweet and colourful it was, then mutilated through a cheese grater of ‘irony’…

It’s funny, this is the second cover that made this list… and it’s of a song I don’t even particularly like. The original by Corrine Bailey Rae is fine for what it is, a genuinely sweet song seeking its bliss that you either like or you don’t care about - not quite my thing, but I get how and why it works. So naturally what you want is a preening white hipster who goes under the name Ritt Momney after the rest of his band quit to turn into a trash fire of garbled pop trap that doesn’t have anything close to the breezy charm of the original! The frontman has described his version as ‘manifesting happiness’ - which makes me want to manifest a fist through the nearest wall - but what’s ‘happy’ about taking the breezy acoustic pop soul of the original, strip it of any sense of momentum or organic groove, suffocate yourself in willowy autotune that is not the Bon Iver impression you think it is with a worse falsetto, and once you’ve got over the oversold percussion mix and lack of any consistent tempo, you get the pitch-shifted change-up that makes me utterly convinced this is taking the piss out of the original. It feels like someone making a based YouTube poop of the original, and if it just stopped there, it’d be awful. But then you get to how the content is changed by switching from a Black girl singing about self-love and repair to a white guy singing to said Black girl because he changes none of the pronouns and it comes across like he’s playing for the hookup and it feels skeevy and presumptuous in a way that turns my stomach. If it’s being played earnestly, it’s a complete failure to capture the spirit of the original and it becomes this tainted mess, whereas if it’s a troll - which feels more honest to what is being done to the song - there’s a different kind of scumminess that feels like artistic vandalism without a cause. This was another song that only barely survived thanks to its long-dead Tiktok meme - I’m prepared to put this back in the ground.

2. And as we circle back for the most lingering, obvious embarrassment of 2021… I mean come on, easy targets are here for a reason.

You can make a very good argument that this is the worst song of 2021 - and if it wasn’t for a single exception that got under my skin a little more, I’d be right there with you. It’s playing for lightweight jokey novelty, but Walker Hayes remains the most limited singer on Music Row and can’t sell any of the slang he’s bastardizing. He’s tried to keep it ‘clean’ in order to hold onto commercial endorsements, but that doesn’t get around how the mingled food and sex references make this tacky and gross all the way down, from the Alabama-jamma to squeak-squeakin in his truck bed to calling his girl double wide and dipping like fries in her frosty; if it’s just a fry, my man, sounds like you have bigger problems. Then there’s the second Vespa reference to make this year-end list - I feel like someone in their marketing division should get fired for this, and you can add the heads of Monument Records to that as well, not just for giving Walker Hayes some horribly flat country trap production that would embarrass Sam Hunt, but also for leaving your only other act Caitlyn Smith to be stranded in label purgatory after making two of the best pop country albums of the last five years; guess where all of her promo likely went! 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. In my Sam Hunt review I highlighted how Music Row often gives its arsenal of interchangeable white boys the privilege to fail time and again, because this is the success they want. Congrats, America - you were the ones that bought it.

1. So some of you might be asking why ‘Fancy Like’ is not my number #1 - I mean, it’s the obvious pick, right, sometimes the consensus is on the money in more ways than one. Well, there was a part of me that also realizes ‘Fancy Like’ is a novelty song, and I don’t see that magic striking twice; even Walker Hayes admits that. And while Hayes was playing to the most basic of consumer impulses, the song does feel like a bit of an outlier as a whole; I don’t think Music Row can pull off another one of these. But let’s circle back to that concept of embarrassment - in many cases on this list it has to do with artists humiliating themselves when they can do better, or the feeling of me trying to engage with the art and just feeling mortified, but let’s take a wider lens for a moment. And here’s an uncomfortable truth about music criticism: as much as a lot of it can reveal a base dislike for the song or the artist behind it, I think we’d all be lying to ourselves if we don’t admit that some of it spills over onto the audience that likes that material, especially if the music aligns with a certain cultural mindset we disagree with. I’m kind of mixed on whether this is a bad thing - beyond the political angle, obviously you want to engage with art that challenges your worldview, but there’s a note of truth to the subjective enjoyment captured within the in-group or how if folks get behind art you find reprehensible, you might question what that reveals, both about your own perspective and theirs. And of course to some it’s not that deep, you need to keep perspective here - but if there’s a song that made me want to run headlong in the opposite direction, it’s this one.

Let’s put a pin in the politics for now: this song sounds like trash. The electric guitars are drowned in a wall of gauze, the vocal mix actively peaks, the percussion tries to build more presence but the most prominent element is this tinny knock at the very front, the acoustics are swallowed in an attempt at bombast that has no groove or punch, and for supposedly a love song, it feels so sterile and chill, lacking any sense of intimacy or warmth. This is not helped by Gabby Barrett, who has pipes but no idea how show any sense of subtlety or range, not like this synthesized trainwreck would let her show it effectively. But even beyond the aesthetic which feels artificial in the worst way possible, the content is what really skeeved me out and it’s that central hook: ‘he’s one of the good ones’. Put aside the immediate ‘dear future husband’ vibe that reared its ugly head, even if Gabby Barrett is just singing about her fiance, there’s something about her finding a hunk of Bible-thumping white bread that feels like a fantasy without being sold as one. Taylor Swift made her fair share of lovestruck fairy tales that work within their framing, but this is that taking to an entitled, weirdly presumptuous and self-focused view of her partner, where she wasn’t even looking to find him and while anyone can be good once, he’s good all the time, and everyone can find one… just minus, because he’s all hers. It feels like this antiseptic checklist, or watching a Girl Defined video, and while every experience is one’s own, this is a love that doesn’t feel real, the sort of life plan connection that imploded upon contact with reality as Carly Pearce showed to great effect this year on her album. But now let’s bring the known context back in - beyond the conservatism that Barrett has openly showcased, when you realize just how the phrase ‘one of the good ones’ is often used, the weird, stifling chill of the song becomes way more revealing and it makes my skin crawl, especially as to a surface audience given my current situation, I could be considered ‘one of the good ones’, fitting a prescribed role and set of beliefs that at their core fly in the face of the placid veneer this is. It’s inertia that feels toxic to its core, and if calling that out makes me not one of the good ones anymore… goddamn it, I’m fucking fine with that.