the top ten worst hit songs of 2023

In previous years, I’ve highlighted an emotional response to my worst list. In 2020 it was disgust, in 2021 it was embarrassment, in 2022 it was sheer dumbfounded amazement that such disasters as songs got big enough to be hailed as the biggest of the year. And that produces different attitudes when approaching a year end list - there isn’t a need to be as angry because while the songs are truly terrible, the emotion provides different context.

In 2023 I was not so lucky - the anger is back, folks, and if anything it felt like there was a monkey’s paw hanging over the Hot 100 the entire year specifically to bait my reaction. You didn’t think pop was particularly strong or special last year, now watch it dry into a desperately forgettable husk recycling entirely too many old hits. You wished that rap would pull itself together and in the mainstream it had one of its worst down years in recent memory. You hoped that R&B would get more moving and once again the results are haphazard at best. You might be finally getting a handle on reggaeton, so here’s the regional Mexican sound which routinely had worse production and of which you only started ‘getting’ midway through the year to mixed results. And after a year where so many country songs made your best of 2022, and you could see the genre going into a new era of unparalleled success decades in the making… you get some of the worst country songs and discourse of recent memory!

But most notably, 2023 was finally the year I had enough with Billboard. It should have come sooner, if I’m being truly honest - it’s not like the publication hasn’t earned the scorn I’ve thrown at it the past decade as the unofficial public relations arm of the record labels to provide a facade of legitimacy to their bullshit - but in a year where their events planning division took control to synchronize the year-end list with the timing of the Billboard Music Awards, which even further screws up their tracking year for the sake of an awards show nobody watches or cares about, I had enough. So in working with my comrades at Talk of the Charts, we produced a 200 song year-end list that was better aligned with where Billboard should have ended their year-end, from early December of 2022 to end in late November 2023, and I’ll be using this list structure going forward. Not only does this allow me to get around the Christmas glut and a lot of songs that long outlast their welcome year-over-year, but it allows me to be more consistent where as a record-keeping entity Billboard does not appear to value to the same extent. It also allows me to better sample songs that would have been caught late in the year and just not accumulated enough longevity, or songs that had more cultural impact than the industry push would recognize, ergo if you’re curious about what would have made the worst list in 2022 under these conditions, here you go. When it comes to the decade list situation… if I’m still doing all of this in seven years… well, we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it, I’ll figure out what I’m working with then.

But this also means I’m going to provide a slightly expanded list of Honourable Mentions - which for the record are in no particular order but all find unique ways to piss me off. And we’re going to start with a bit of a curveball.

…I didn’t hate this when it dropped - and I feel like I should have? Meghan Trainor was responsible for some of the most shrink-wrapped and regressive music of the mid-2010s and emblematic of a retro craze that has aged haphazardly at best, her ‘comeback’ should have really pissed me off… but let’s be real, this was on the back of TikTok and screamed of fluke novelty. Sterile and clunky, riddled with brand names, playing to the exact same tacky, whitebread appropriation of rap slang that she pushed nine years ago where the formula is so obvious it can’t even be good camp. But nobody really cared beyond the one song - she hasn’t seen another hit since, and while her 2022 album sold alarmingly better than you might expect, nobody is coming back for more of this cake - good riddance.

Whereas I never liked the song and my reasons why have only deepened throughout the course of 2023, starting with the realization of ‘…ohh, this is why y’all hated Bazzi’ in the late 2010s, I get it now! But this is also so much worse, the sort of shrink-wrapped, sterile prettiness where the juxtaposition of the frankly embarrassing rap verses with the grand glittery hook is trying for romantic bombast and has neither subtlety nor tact - this song references Frank Ocean’s Blonde in the second line and it doesn’t come close to appropriating its vibe - I don’t even love Blonde like that but I’d take it over this! And while I could reference its godawful video and make the obvious Twilight joke, or how JVKE also has that atrocious collab with Jax that interpolates Barney the Dinosaur, what’s most revealing is how some internet sleuths are saying the AI-generated ‘Heart On My Sleeve’ utilizing fake vocals from Drake and The Weeknd was actually made by him as that ghostwriter. I’m not 100% sold on all of the evidence, even if the work by yokai was really well-assembled, but the same cheap, hollow disposability hangs over all of this too and it would not remotely surprise me if this was the case. But on the topic of cheap hackery…

I have more history with Sabrina Carpenter than any music critic should - I’ve been reviewing her since 2018, I’ve given her multiple chances to rise above basic, small-scale pop dreck and pissed off her fanbase multiple times, but to her credit this song actually has a new idea to it: being meta about the process of making a nonsense song. Now normally I’m a sucker for metacommentary in music - it’s why I’ve given twenty-one pilots entirely too many chances - but where they use it to elevate and intensify their themes, Carpenter is using it for cutesy jokes and pisstakes where she’s not even sure she’d leave any of it in… and yet she does, because who cares when it’s an obvious studio goof-off, her funstyle. The one good joke here is that she has to jump the octave, but that only amplifies Carpenter’s shrill keening against the limp guitar lick and leaden percussion in a cheap Ariana Grande imitation. But again, I get why some folks might find this charming… but then Olivia Rodrigo made ‘bad idea, right’ which plays the central conceit of having a brainfart in the face of newfound attraction actually have some dramatic stakes with a way better performance and production and I knew we certainly didn’t need this badly produced pop knockoff. But speaking of knockoffs…

Again, this is another song where I just can’t hate it as much as some do, and even if it could have made my worst list in 2022 I doubt it would have gotten that high. Does David Guetta’s hollow EDM groove sound both stiff and hopelessly compressed, do Bebe Rexha’s lyrics sound like an amateurish first draft and her vocals predominantly in a minor key utterly fail to convey any good time happening against one of the most oversold earworm melodies sampled from Eiffel 65? Yes, we all know this, the absence of good is palpable… but it’s also where I feel there needs to be more to get under my skin than just vacant emptiness where this desperate ploy for chart attention and another fifteen minutes of fame has already been revealed for what it is. It’s not like Bebe Rexha was able to follow through on this: her self-titled album this year tanked, and the career revival for David Guetta only translated to one more obvious sample with ‘Baby Don’t Hurt Me’ with Anne-Marie showing even less personality than usual and Coi Leray phoning it in, the last song cut from these Dishonourable Mentions. And you know, while we’re talking about Coi Leray…

For a significant chunk of this year, the sheer disappointment I had with ‘Players’ was going to place it on my worst list proper - I stuck up for Coi Leray, I thought she had some legit talent as a rapper. Instead she chose to triple down on obvious gaudy sampling on her sophomore album this year that only exposed just how hollow and lacking in new ideas she and her handlers were - and again, the issue is not the obvious sampling in and of itself so much as finding a new twist or interpolation beyond just a Family Guy reference callback, and she was far from the worst in 2023 as you’ll all soon see. To her credit, Coi Leray’s flip of ‘The Message’ could have worked, and I’m not even against the Biggie callback on the second verse, but the synth groove in this form is way too stiff to give her any tangible foundation and that’s before we get lines about going from ‘rags to riches’ that are just as bullshit as when Drake did it ten years ago on ‘Started From The Bottom’; you’re Benzino’s daughter, it’s been a topic of your own music, this doesn’t help your case of selling something you can’t back up! Granted, when you hear that Coi Leray freestyled this song all in one take, it’s certainly believable, and that a Jersey club remix off of TikTok was ultimately responsible for making it a thing; shame that she chose this approach for that album this year that also tanked; I’m not surprised, I’m not even that mad anymore, I’m just disappointed.

Look, I can accept that the regional Mexican sound is probably just not for me - the underproduced ‘live’ sound actively makes the rickety grooves worse for me, and when you translate the lyrics they often come across as horny and banal as any mainstream trap or reggaeton. That being said, I’ve heard more than most this year - as in I tried to hear multiple albums in this genre beyond just what got fed to the TikTok algorithm - and I found acts I can like, and for the rest even if I could tell more of them apart they probably wouldn’t make my list… yet I’m confident in saying that Fuerza Regida are some of the absolute worst, where they might have more flavour but it only winds up making them sound more obnoxious. Of their solo hits this year, this one was “better produced” in that the farty horns and brittle acoustics sound a bit fuller, but the horny flexes are also paired with a passing jab at Peso Pluma for actually hesitating if being asked to shoot someone - they don’t have that problem. This entire song screams of unloading too soon, if you catch my drift.

Song of the year, folks, because if we weren’t going to get a Maroon 5 hit in 2023 we might as well get the country trap imitation of their gutlessly bland pop crossover years, with all the bad rapping, smug presumptuousness, and non-sex appeal that it has. It’s actually a little alarming how much of the heartfelt “romance” that Morgan Wallen used to sell has just evaporated for a song about as miserable as the relationship described within it; this would have been higher on the list, but we all know that Wallen had worse this year - stay tuned.

Bit of a curveball with this one, and…. look, I like Jelly Roll’s story, ‘Son of a Sinner’ is a really good song, and I’m genuinely happy he got out of that unkempt pocket of country rap that has some truly ugly undertones - he has multiple songs with Adam Calhoun, if you know you know. But if you also know your country rock, ‘Need A Favor’ is just lousy, a sour and demanding song that comes off less desperate for God’s help and more like he’s shaking someone down who owes him money. But I can also imagine how this could have worked and was just fumbled in the execution - this was the only song Austin Niveral produced on this album and he cannot deliver the muscle this needs in the low-end or seriously ramp up the bombast - it feels filmy and underpowered, which doesn’t pay off any of the texture in Jelly Roll’s voice. As a follow-up single to ‘Son Of A Sinner’ this killed any serious hype I had for Jelly Roll and I haven’t been that impressed by anything he’s released since… we’ll have to see here.

And that’s two duds for Fuerza Regida, where I would say there’s nothing so egregious as the passing shot at Peso Pluma amidst the brand name porn and the horny flexing and the passing reference to real-life Mexican drug cartels in which they pledge allegiance - more of it funds the music industry in all genres than you know, folks - until we saw the line that when translated is a shoutout to Travis Scott for him to ‘bring me Kylie’. I had to check to see if Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott were still together - apparently they’re not beyond coparenting - so it’s more likely they’re using her name as a metaphor for cocaine, which might be the only explanation why the horn pickups sound like the up-close aftermath of a colonoscopy but with reverb! Again, there are acts that I think are passable in the regional Mexican scene, and I’m not calling this a trend even if there’s no guarantee these acts maintain mainstream crossover, but given that one of the biggest acts to crossover was Fuerza Regida, I don’t have high hopes.

I bet a whole lot of you expected this to be on the list proper and probably pretty high, especially once you realized it was eligible when I expanded my list criteria. And let’s make this clear, this song is terrible, an abbreviated whooshing embarrassment where NLE Choppa tries to be sexual and fails so catastrophically that anyone taking pointers from this in the bedroom should have their heads examined and then sue for professional negligence! It’s the sort of sex song that is so disgustingly ridiculous in its provocation - ‘eat the dick like you was ugly’, putting his dick - which he tells her to climb like a ladder - in her kidneys, wanting her ass in his face so long that he gets pinkeye, fucking everywhere from the church to the basketball game, saying his cum tastes like sugar gravy but he doesn’t cum quick because he controls his bladder as he says all coochies matter - even the diehard fans on Genius thought this was out of pocket! On all of that alone it would be a lock for a high spot, nobody could possibly take this seriously… but then I realized that over-the-top absurdity has always been NLE Choppa’s trademark whenever his ridiculous bullshit has made one of my lists, he’s like Lil Wayne with less talent, or 2 Chainz with way less dignity! And in a year where the worst songs actually pissed me off, a cut that feels like a dare to make the least appealing sex song to chart that makes me laugh instead… I can’t in good conscience say it’s good because I’m not fully convinced NLE Choppa is in on the joke - again, the first leak of this song happened on stream with Adin Ross - and there are leagues separating this from a ‘WAP’ in more ways than one, but I can’t hate this. I don’t like it and I won’t listen to it outside of this year… but in 2023, there are bigger problems than this.

So that’s our Dishonourable Mentions… now onto the meat of this list and the truly reprehensible stuff…

10. I’m tired of dancing around this: UTOPIA by Travis Scott was lousy, and this was one of the biggest reasons why.

Now some of you who didn’t see my review of UTOPIA might think that’s unfair - it’s a big redemptive comeback that sounds so experimental provided you didn’t hear Yeezus or recognize any of the song fragments from when they leaked the past five plus years, and who cares about Travis actually saying anything or deserving any sort of redemption, it’s all about getting hyped and curating the vibe. Well the vibe curated here is utterly rancid, with the goopy rage synths, stock trap percussion, and Playboi Carti sounding like a muppet with COVID with perhaps his worst and least effective vocal choice to date - I know a few Carti fans and they didn’t even like this. And that’s not to mention Travis Scott’s own bleating of the word ‘FE!N’ all over the hook like a minion - it’s not even the word ‘fiend’, it’s a hackneyed fragment like the rest of this song. And for as much as Travis is trying to imply so much is at stake here in his career, imply some sort of menace, by appropriating rage music for some attempt to catch up with the kids he gives the game away - this isn’t creating a new sound, it’s the overcooked leftovers of a sound that only barely works in a mosh pit with his collaborator mid-asthma attack. Neither of these guys are interesting or fiery enough on the mic to make this worth hearing outside of seeing them live, and even knowing Travis’ reputation and having seen him live twice already… yeah, this isn’t worth the hell it wants to summon.

9. And speaking of songs that sound like sludgy, curdled ass…

I’ve said before that Morgan Wallen is at his worst when he draws on stale, bro-country cliches, and while this year he tested that theory even further, this is probably the worst example of it. And if you’ve seen my bro-country video essay, it should be no surprise why this is a total migraine for me: the oily electric guitar is suffocated behind the brittle acoustics and dull percussion, the entire song sounds sickly especially alongside Wallen’s processed squawking as he rattles through country cliches and brand names because that’s just how it is, where on the second verse he even acknowledges how cliche it is! Of course, there’s a certain irony that Morgan Wallen did not write this song at all; maybe that’s the excuse for the clunky spelling gimmick that breaks down entirely the second time they try it - oh, I’m sorry, ‘T-R-Y’d it’ - or for all of the mediocre rapping, but let’s go back to what works in bro-country: a light touch, good times, partying, not this sour, defensive slurry. I can’t quite say this is the worst Morgan Wallen song we have here - stay tuned - but on a thirty-six song album of which maybe a quarter is worth salvaging, the fact this didn’t get cut is just gross; to answer the metaphorical question of this song, it is, indeed, some shit.

8. Look, I’ve seen enough rage acts live at this point to ‘get’ their appeal - it’s about the communal pit experience, the more ragged and slapdash it is, the more the sound makes sense, it’s the Soundcloud rap paradigm. It’s probably never going to fully work for me given that I grew up in the late 90s and 2000s and a slew of rappers who brought more baritone presence on both record and live than any of these rage acts can credibly sell, to say nothing of actual content, but that’s not really the issue here. No, it’s the same as any new upstart subgenre - eventually it’s going to get watered down and co-opted by the acts who are utterly out of ideas.

It’s very telling to me that the Yeat fans I know don’t seem to like this, and for different reasons too! Some for how Yeat sounds on this - I can see their point there, after a really pretty piano buildup nakedly sampled from Azimuth for nearly a minute, we get a non-transition to a checked-out Yeat swallowed in buzzed out chiptune goop that occasionally makes him sound like Donald Duck and otherwise like Young Thug but without the power or creativity in any flexing - some for how Drake’s verse is just ass. And it is - I hope to God the ‘stay with the O’ lines were freestyled and not something Drake thought was clever alongside that lightsaber line that barely makes sense - but it’s also about as bad as him trying to match Yeat’s energy and take over part of the hook and it’s so obvious he’s fumbling all of this. Apparently this was intended as a diss to someone jacking their style - although why anyone would want to take this misshapen mess of a record I don’t know - but when you discover that this was apparently recorded two years ago and was intended for a Yeat album but Drake grabbed it instead… well, that just makes all kinds of sense for an insecure rapper struggling for any way to stay relevant with the kids, who probably don’t want their sound commodified and rendered this garbage. Congrats to Yeat, I guess, for getting a bigger hit than he ever will on his own, but I know how Drake treats his collaborators once he hops off their sound; you should give a fuck about that.

7. I was a little shocked when assembling my list that this wound up so high. Make no mistake, I have always thought this is crap, but it’s a low-grade crappiness, relying on big names and trying to sell edgy provocation and commentary on the nature of fame and the industry when in reality it’s just not interesting or potent enough make any of it work. And while we’re on the topic of The Idol…

For there to be so much talent working on this - The Weeknd, Madonna, Metro Boomin, Mike Dean, and even Playboi Carti is here for some reason, he’s utterly inessential on this outside of his usual empty post-chorus and bridge that according to The Weeknd was apparently pulled from an entire different song - the fact that ‘Popular’ is such a lazy dud is truly something to behold. You’d think that given how much The Weeknd worships the lurid bombast of the 80s, pairing him with Madonna should be a slam dunk… and yet instead we got the Madonna who wants to make glib, vapid metacommentary on the existential emptiness of fame like she was doing in the 2000s, pairing it with the non-structure of a ‘Justify My Love’ and my God, I’m sick of it. But the music might be the bigger issue here: the chintzy but weirdly spare synths, the gentle rattling patter of percussion, the phoned-in guitar passage before the final hook. there’s no flair or grandeur or cinematic bombast to it, it doesn’t even sound classy or opulent so much as office elevator music for artists so convinced of their artistic genius they don’t think they have to care. If I was giving them all way more credit than they deserve, you could argue that this muted boredom is probably more representative of the reality of fame than any flashy parties or debauchery; shame nobody told the songwriters that because they’re leaning on imagery of murder and selling souls and the intoxicating rush of fame… paired with references to running up debt and doing camgirl work, and given that Madonna is the only woman on the song, that’s skeevy but in the cheapest and most disjointed way possible. I can say that it certainly matches the show they made… which is frankly more damning than anything I just said.

6. One thing I’ve found interesting about the folks who defend this, and the album that it’s on, is an acknowledgement that ‘look, he’s never going to be as good as he was, we’ve been lying to ourselves a lot the past seven or more years, it’s at least close to what worked for him before, let us have this’. And I gave y’all a year to marinate in that, y’all knew from at least last year this was coming - time’s up.

There’s a lot that I can add to my short review of Her Loss and the excoriation I later added on Billboard BREAKDOWN - I consider it Drake’s worst album by a comfortable margin for its godawful mixing and mastering, the pile-up of cornball lines, the now flagrant misogyny because why even pretend to have complexity or excuses when you can just get away with it, and the very obvious desperation with plugging in 21 Savage to salvage Drake’s popular momentum after the house experiment Honestly, Nevermind was something of a misfire. Hell, you get evidence of that with the opening that went viral on TikTok, with Drake pathetically mewling for 21 to do something for him; to me it was never funny, just very revealing of the cowardice to retreat back to what he knows will “work” because he has it down to a science to game streaming. And you know, when 21 has his verse against the watery trap menace I was almost onboard… until he asks the girl on her period to suck his dick before the most lazy Megan Thee Stallion reference - let’s not dwell on that implication - and then the beat switches into a leaden clunker with dull pianos and Drake somehow offkey where even if you think the acronym rhyming is clever, you get the line ‘I’m steady pushin p, you pushin’ PTSD’. And I’ll say it again, I was done at that point: aside from that being the emotional undercurrent that reflects the lived experiences of those kids trying to get out - and of 21 Savage’s most emotionally evocative work, for the record - this song and the album often dallies in the same kind of violence but privileged enough to avoid any kind of consequence. Even if you accept they’re playing the bad guys and reveling in it for the sick thrill, there’s no menace here, just the reality that if you’re rich and flexing, if you’re a star, they let you do it, and if they don’t it’s her loss, right? Gross.

5. So after all of that, you might be surprised that this is this high - I mean, it certainly seems more innocuous, might even be playing to a sound I like, produced by the guy who helped push it in the first place nearly a decade ago. Should be a slam dunk, right? Well… the devil’s in the details with this one.

It’s not just that it’s an obvious Hozier ripoff, down to getting his original producer. It’s not just that it’s a Hozier ripoff in the year where Hozier put out a new album, which might not have been great but absolutely had enough great songs that could have charted - hell, ‘Eat Your Young’ did chart! And it’s not like Hozier couldn’t have charted because thanks to Noah Kahan trying to create any vestige of cred he brought Hozier onto his remix of ‘Northern Attitude’ and that hit the Hot 100! No, it’s all of that… coupled to the reality that David Kushner is the worst sort of ripoff, one that found the text of the original but misses so much of what makes him special. So much of Hozier’s sound is indebted to blues and soul and takes any religious or classical framing as an excuse to ramp up the horny, horny melodrama. David Kushner, meanwhile, plays this with the ponderous but clumsy sexless solemnity of being deeply rooted in religious strife that wants to sell the intensity of Christian rock but with nothing close to serious fire or brimstone, with a substantially more basic metaphor at its core. Jelly Roll’s ‘Need A Favor’ was underpowered and sour, but to me this is worse in being close enough to evoke a better sound but only on the surface aesthetic that misses everything that makes the original article special, like smothering half of his overdubbed hook in a buzzy filter or that cavernous mess of a final hook. In other words, I finally understand all those people who hated ‘Take Me To Church’ nine years ago - I hope we see twilight on this in record time… and now I’m just thinking that if this song had been released fifteen years ago it probably would have made the Twilight soundtrack, and made it worse because those soundtracks went way harder than they had any right to go. We’re getting off-topic, this blows, give Hozier another proper hit you cowards.

4. Okay, so for the next three songs there is something of an underlying theme around how they approach women, and for at least the next two, there has been some appeal to women in the past, it’s one of the big reasons they’ve had the pop crossover success they have. I’m not going to be so naive and say they squandered all of it this year… but come on, did you hear this shit?

It’s tough to pinpoint whether this is Morgan Wallen’s worst song, but my god it’s close, where he leans into the nascent ugly sourness that runs through so much of One Thing At A Time to concern-troll his ex with the smug presumptuousness that whatever she’s doing with her new guy, she’s thinking about Morgan Wallen. And there are layers to how ugly this song gets: that electric riff against the creaking acoustics that get warped by the hi-hat and leaden trap percussion, where Wallen’s voice gets more mechanical underneath the multi-tracking, how he feels bad for the guy but not for her, because she’s so obviously doing everything to forget Morgan Wallen and yet can’t quite get his sour, whiskey-soaked memory out of her mind, and then you realize for as much as this song is goading her, the bridge reveals that she ‘ought’ to be back with him in the miserable clingy mess that persists on so many other Morgan Wallen songs. There’s a way you can read this song as being delusional or pathetic, but that would require a daring and self-awareness in which Wallen is plainly too terrified to show, because it’s not like he wrote this one either. Again, the album was thirty-six songs, and when you have cuts that aren’t romantic or interesting or even particularly edgy, instead producing this turgid slog… tell me again why this wasn’t on the cutting room floor? And yet because country and crossover radio got behind this one, it was one of his biggest hits this year - because clearly, ladies, this is the sort of guy you’re supposed to want, right? Think on that.

3. Okay, so the next two songs… if I had not expanded my year-end criteria, they would have missed the cut. The next one, we’ll have to see if it lasts long enough to scrape on in 2024, but I doubt it will. And some might say that despite this debuting in the top ten that it doesn’t really count as a proper hit; hell, most of the time with album bombs I abide by that logic, a ‘hit’ is not what it used to be, even if you know all the different ways the Hot 100 has always been a rigged game. That said, you can argue this is Drake at his absolute worst, and the fact that folks let it stick around…

At this point it almost feels too obvious to point out everything wrong with this, I’m reminded of every time I’ve ripped into ‘I’m Upset’, the flaws aren’t just glaring, they’re inexplicable! You sampled ‘One More Time’ by Daft Punk and turned it into downtuned slush behind your cheap trap instrumental and then utterly phone in the attempt to sing along his interpolation about getting blown to end off the song, and after your first four bars you make the implication that Megan Thee Stallion lied about getting shot by Tory Lanez. I don’t know why anyone would attempt to side with Tory on this - who was sentenced to ten years in prison, who threw shots at you in the 2010s, and against Megan who not only tried to cover for Tory at first with the police, but then has faced years of harassment over this shit - outside of aligning with the lying, grifting misogynists like DJ Akademiks and Adam22 who have been trying to elevate Tory as a martyr until he stops getting them clicks. You know, the clout chasing losers of mainstream rap, and Drake’s association with them only makes him look incredibly insecure, especially when it doesn’t seem like Megan has the time of day for him, especially now that she’s gotten out of her own exploitative deal - you’d think given everything that’s happened with Lil Wayne and Young Money that you’d have some sympathy here, Drake! But truth be told, I don’t know how invested Drake is in any of this - outside of the line he knew would get him attention, the rest of the song is mob ties flexing, 21 making threats, and the entire track feeling like a vacuous mess - and again, if they’re playing the villains, this is the banality of evil, where it’s all crushed into mulch. It’s ironic that For All The Dogs was the album that caused so many Drake fans to snap awake and turn on him, mostly because he didn’t give them what they wanted… you know, more of this shit. And literally hours before I sat down to finish this, Drake released a music video for ‘You Broke My Heart’ - you know the worst song on that Scary Hours 3 EP that was the most transparent and insecure attempt to win back those fans and Joe Budden that I have ever seen… and wouldn’t you know, Morgan Wallen was in the video where women blow up their car because being in on the ironic joke makes it all better, go figure. None of that is her loss, it’s all of theirs - good riddance.

2. …but say what you want about Drake, the incident with Megan Thee Stallion seems to be settled, she’s moving on, Drake’s moving on, and I don’t get the impression he wanted violence upon her. Compare that to this.

Look, I said my piece on HARDY at the beginning of this year, and ‘wait in the truck’ with Lainey Wilson had its run - I figured after the album got critically savaged and he delivered a performance so bad at the WWE that they apologized for it, I figured as a solo act he was done, and he was going to go back behind the scenes to only annoy those of us who read liner notes. Then ‘TRUCK BED’ became a thing, and I already know the defense: it’s a joke song, he drank too much and got thrown out and now he’s hungover and angry, he’s only getting his gun to shoot the birds that woke him up, it’s 2023’s version of Eric Church’s ‘Jack Daniels’! First off, that song has a bright hangdog comedic tone, to the point where in live shows he literally hands out shots of Jack Daniels, and secondly, that would imply there’s anything witty or funny about this beyond HARDY getting drunk in his own backyard, falling asleep in his truck, and getting thrown out of his house because the girl is sick of his bullshit, all paired with guitars that stagger around the whistle until they pick up crunch they frankly don’t deserve, the excruciatingly tinny synths, and the underpowered trap skitter - if you want a song that feels like the embodiment of a hangover, it’s this one! But that’s all being charitable - if I was being less so, I’d highlight how the line about the ‘fuckin bird catching this .45’ could easily be referring to his now ex catching shots, only amplified by the pitiful excuse for metalcore that passes as the final hook in him getting his final revenge. I mean, it’s not THAT much of a reach - the music video looks like an outtake from Project X where the girl is terrified and angry inside the house as she watches the cops join the party and someone getting lit on fire! And again, I’m willing to meet a song that’s going for pure, unkempt halfway, especially where everyone is an asshole… but HARDY can’t sell it, his overprocessed drawl barely works when he’s rapping and is laughable when he tries to build any grunge intensity. It doesn’t work as country or rap and certainly not as metal, and the fact that this has had legs at all is a truly dire sign, especially if rock radio is desperate enough to platform him. Looks like someone’s truck needs a few tires popped.

1. …it wasn’t going to be anything else.

More than anything, this is one of those songs that will go down in infamy - I already know for a lot of folks this is the clean-cut worst hit of the year and it’s not close, and I said my piece on it months ago, how it’s a turgid, thinly veiled threat of a song that can’t muster much tempo or edge with one promising guitar lick Aldean can’t do a damn thing to optimize, a reactionary song attempting to goad a takedown piece highlighting its dogshit framing of protesters and attempted gun reform and let’s not ignore the racist dogwhistles by filming in front of that Tennessee courthouse in which there has been lynchings and race riots, and I find it very difficult to believe he didn’t know about how the video with pro-cop montages would be taken given that there’s a memorial there to the victims that music video location scouting would have found! And I could drag out crime stats of small towns compared to cities and cite systemic poverty, or how the police montage was weirdly international in sourcing footage for a song that’s trying to be so stridently American, or how Aldean isn’t from that small of a town and we should take anything he says about race in good faith given his blackface incidents, but I’m going to stop - because he doesn’t care, and it would be playing his game to make this more of a spectacle. Does the fact he didn’t write this song mean it reflects his personal beliefs or character - no, stop, don’t open that Overton window to engage with his ideas especially when he does not seriously think nor care about them - at least Toby Keith wrote his own songs and came to his jingoism honestly! In interviews after this song, especially with LA Weekly, it became abundantly apparent Jason Aldean has never seriously engaged with the ideas he’s selling in his music, nor has he been required to, privilege at its core is the freedom to never think, but he does care about selling to his audience and getting a reaction from liberal hacks who refuse to engage sincerely with country music but want this to be emblematic of country. That backlash and controversy was what ultimately got this to #1, not the nonexistent merits of the song itself, which Music Row and country radio was primed to ignore as Aldean’s career continues to flame out, like anyone who actually covers country music would tell you, and speaking of which, the album that contained this song was his worst performing since his debut in 2005. If y’all had left this alone, or left it to folks who actually know how to handle bad reactionary propaganda in this space, it would have likely never charted at all; you do not have to give this shit oxygen because you need ragebait content, especially as Aldean was on his way out and still is. But y’all made this bigger than it ever had to be, and made country discourse a living hell for anyone actually in this space, and that is why I’m angry. That’s why this is the worst hit song of 2023 - hopefully y’all may have learned something here, and we can try to move on.