earwaxinggibbous - Tumblr blog

earwaxinggibbous · 4 years

Text

Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 2019

So 2019 was kind of a weird year, wasn’t it? Not just for like, life, though it was weird in that aspect, but in music.

I can’t tell if 2019 was an incredibly strong year for music or a weak one. This, to me, is a sign that we’re transitioning into a new era of popular music. The youth are once again taking the reigns of the music scene as did the punks of the 70′s and the grunge kids of the 90′s. Meanwhile, the oldheads flounder for relevance in the face of this new adversity. “Nobody could’ve expected this!”, said no-one ever.

There was a lot of great pop this year, which I will get to, but there was also a lot of bad pop. All of it was either by shitty new artists who have no talent or previous hitmakers swimming around in their own piss. Regardless, it was all interesting to look at. You won’t see any “this entry is short because this song is boring” sections. I also won’t have to rant and rave constantly about the reprehensibility of certain artists, though it will come up. So I guess 2019 was a better year to talk about bad music.

Less do dis.

10. Senorita - Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes

I can’t explain why I hate Camila Cabello so much. I didn’t even realize I hated her until, like... now.

I thought Havana was okay, and her work with Fifth Harmony was tolerable, but every other single she’s dropped has been fucking excruciating. Bad Things sucked, that one song where she can’t pronounce the word “heroin” properly sucked, and this song sucks.

Much like Selena Gomez above, Camila Cabello is yet another female singer who lacks the ability to display any chemistry with anybody, even her actual real friend Shawn Mendes. As well, like sister Gomez, she fills the chart niche of sexy Latina women for men to drool over. “I love it when you call me senorita” is one of the corniest and stupidest lines ever written. She may as well have said “it gets me hot when you call me Ms. Cabello” because that’s essentially the equivalent.

There’s nothing sexy about the airy whimpering or the obnoxious “ooh-la-la”s or the way Shawn harmonizes, which implies he also loves it when you call him senorita. Nobody actually bothered to think any part of this song through because nobody ever thinks very hard about writing Camila’s songs. Otherwise Bad Things wouldn’t have accidentally sounded like an abuse anthem when it was supposed to be kinky and sexy. And it’s how creepy lyrics like this got by in Senorita.

If he says you’re just friends then you’re JUST FRIENDS. Did we learn nothing from Ann-Marie and Marshmello last year?

This is just yet another lame, plotless, meandering love/sex song by Camila Cabello who has a good voice, but only ever performs these god-awful sex jams with no sex and no jam. And it’s unfortunate because this is sort of the lot dealt to most Latinx artists. Pop-friendly artists like Camila are divvied up into racial categories without anyone even noticing, and most likely she will only ever write and perform sex jams because that’s what a Latina woman in pop is pushed into. Not that I think she has any problem with it, it’s more indicative of a bigger problem than specifically one with Camila herself.

People have been sexualizing the Latinx community since the dawn of time, and while the new movement of Spanish music might change this, it sure as hell hasn’t started yet.

At least it isn’t seven minutes long like Te Bote.

9. Money in the Grave - Drake and Rick Ross

Drake had 25 hits last year, and only one of them was a song I might say I actually like. I remember I said there’d be no boring songs, but... Drake hasn’t been interesting in a long time. Even when I found out about his secret son, or the fact that he was with a significantly younger woman, I just kinda shrugged and said “oh”. Drake has to be on his way out. How much longer are people going to stand this?

Money in the Grave isn’t as turgid as 2018’s Nonstop, or as audibly inept as the 2017(?)’s Pop Style, but God. At this point, every Drake song sounds the same. The man is incapable of bringing forth any kind of emotions, his beats are pathetic drum loops, nothing he writes has any personality. It’s almost funny how boring his music is.

Rick Ross, if you remember him, was known in his time for writing shouty drug dealer anthems. He yelled a lot, and I was sitting with bated breath waiting for him to fucking 6ix9ine scream over this track, only to be disappointed when he lowered into a calmer register for this tune. Drake even made Rick Ross boring, and Rick Ross is one of the funniest bad rappers I can think of, aside from like, Soulja Boy.

I no longer understand what niche Drake fills. You can’t dance to this, you can’t get high to it, nobody’s gonna think you’re cool if you enjoy it, the lyrics aren’t even passably interesting. It’s the same rap cliches as always, perhaps with a new coat of paint, but said paint is the same color as it already was previously, and makes no change.

No wonder Drake endorsed Lil Baby. Nobody else can equal his talent at sounding bored.

8. Bad Guy - Billie Eilish

So here’s an unpopular music critic opinion: I don’t like Billie Eilish.

I’ve known of her for a long time, and never once has she drawn my intrigue. I’ve gone all over asking people why they like her, and I’ve heard all sorts of answers. Her voice is good, her lyrics are good, her production is interesting, her subject matter is deep... whatever it actually is, I couldn’t tell you. But in the end, I basically feel the same way about her as I do about Twenty-One Pilots. She’s an artist in an oversaturated micro-genre who, despite being of lower quality than her contemporaries, managed to do something different enough that she rose up in the latter part of the genre’s life. In Billie’s case, it’s the trend of female alt-pop singer-songwriters who write about things like politics, feminism, and ESPECIALLY mental health.

Lorde was the original, but we also have Lana Del Rey, the more pop-friendly Halsey, Marina and the Diamonds, the dreaded Melanie Martinez, to some extent even Alessia Cara, just a whole bunch of them. They all had their own unique personality. Billie Eilish’s personality is that she has none.

Okay, I’m being a little mean. I do think that Billie’s music videos are actually very interesting, but good music videos does not a good musician make. Her voice is more of a phlegmy whisper than people let on, and her lyrics... like, what, what makes them so special? And why didn’t wish you were gay get ANY backlash when it’s basically just a backwards version of Little Big Town’s Girl Crush?

Bad Guy is the worst of her singles without question. Its beat, much like most of her songs, sounds like two people accidentally banged on top of the Cassio and somebody pressed record. Her voice continues to be boring and flat, for some reason she has to whisper everything, and the lyrics are some of the most mind-numbing shit I’ve ever heard. Which moron at corporate told the 17-YEAR-OLD to write a “steal yo man” song where she threatens to seduce my dad? Like, ignoring my own personal history with my dad, you are literally a CHILD.

Generally speaking, the song sounds like someone gargling mouthwash in my ear for a minute or two, but like, very quietly. Which is kind of pathetic for a song called Bad Guy. You sound like a pretty average guy to me.

It’s obvious from the music video that Billie’s main inspiration is grunge, and if that isn’t the case I’ll be surprised. The weird imagery and intentionally dressing like a homeless person to every public thing she does gives off big Nirvana energy. One could argue that Billie Eilish is a good segway into teaching the youthsters about the ghosts of music’s past. There’s just a few problems with that.

One: Bad Guy sounds nothing like a grunge song.

Two: Billie Eilish does not have a grunge voice.

Three: Billie Eilish just... isn’t doing it right.

Billie Eilish’s parents are two wealthy actors and she was basically born with the ability to get into the business easier than other people. I’m not saying that you can’t be a grunge artist if you’re wealthy and have a decent family life, but I am saying that Billie’s music doesn’t convey any kind of grunge appeal. There’s no roughness or rawness to it because she could immediately walk into a producer’s studio with a wad of fifties and ask for a sick beat. Her music displays no emotion, and emotion is the main draw of grunge. Like, Kurt Cobain wasn’t a very good singer, but he knew how to perfectly channel how he was feeling. Grunge music is about feelings, not polish. And Billie Eilish is all polish.

I’m not gonna get all angry because grunge is being gentrified by a tiny girl when it was originally started by broke heroin addicts and lesbians, but I am gonna get angry because her music sounds worse than albums made on a budget of 600 dollars by a guy who has had one voice lesson his whole life.

She should just go into modern art.

7. Worth It - YK Osiris

Originally I was gonna give this spot to a different song. Worth It was so immediately bad that it rescued Lil Baby from my list this year.

Don’t expect to be this lucky next year, bitch.

But we’re not talking about that squealing douchebag, we’re talking about THIS squealing douchebag:

YK Osiris. I have no idea where he came from, I think he was part of last year’s XXL Freshman Class? He’s more of a singer than a rapper, so I’m not sure why he was, other than the predetermined idea that all black artists in pop are rappers. I wouldn’t even call him a singer, because the man cannot sing.

At the beginning of the music video, you see dozens of paparazzi swarming around YK Osiris’ car as he exits with a girl. This is the set-up for the song’s impressive amount of self-fellating narcissism, as YK Osiris assumes he has fans. Who the fuck listens to YK Osiris? I mean, clearly someone, because he charted, but like... what does a YK Osiris fan look like? Do women actually like hearing him wheeze into their ear? Like BEES?

NO MORE BEES!

Hearing this fucking chicken nugget talk about whether or not I’m worth eet is the lamest thing. Why does she have to be worth it? Are YOU worth HER time? Who the fuck are you? The attitude is very, I guess, mid-70′s Paul Anka-esque. And now I’ve made you imagine a YK Osiris cover of You’re Having My Baby. I also remember Todd in the Shadows compared this song to Earned It by The Weeknd, but I dunno if I get that vibe.

I mean, Earned It is a song about like... BDSM sex, presumably. So that’s more of an “if you’re good master will make you squart” kind of thing. This is more some sentient dildo insisting that you prove his worth to him before you’re even DATING. That’s a red flag on the same level as meeting a guy who lives alone and still puts a lock on his fridge. Like, what’s in there? What’s in the fridge? Is it human meat?

The guitar solo in this song is the only thing about it that’s... worth it. ZING!

6. ZEZE - Kodak Black ft.Travis Scott and Offset

ZEZE is a bad song. Plain and simple. It’s the essence of bad.

It feels like... it wasn’t even finished. Like everyone involved came in the next day to finish tweaking it only to find out that it was already sent out to be published and sold. I feel like there are things missing. Like yeah, the steel drums are nice, but where’s the rest of the instrumentation? There’s a drum and a steel drum and then nothing. Why does this song feel so naked?

Kodak Black sure doesn’t help, still sounding like he’s half-man half-screaming rubber chicken and mumbling like an actual infant still figuring out the whole “talking” deal. It’s not like Travis Scott or Offset add anything. I can’t remember what they did. ZEZE sounds the way I imagine taking ketamine and cocaine would feel. This song is so amateurish, I almost have good will for it.

If this was made by, say, a couple of high school kids dinking around with a Garageband, I might find it a little cute. The problem is that this song was made by several Whole Ass Adult People who have enough money to not make shit that sounds like ZEZE. It’s cute until you remember that Travis Scott produced big sexy SICKO MODE and yet somehow his presence couldn’t make ZEZE sound like it was made on a higher budget than 20 bucks. Someone even put an echo on Kodak’s voice, like that’d make him ANY BETTER.

It doesn’t help that I have continuing ill will towards Kodak Black because he’s a sex offender and nobody seems all too pressed about it. (Some rappers even congratulate him for having a rough past, like yeah, I guess some of those serial killers really did deserve better, huh?) I won’t be satisfied until he’s wearing orange pajamas on an island far away, and until then my feelings stand.

As it is, ZEZE is a song so chintzy-sounding and lame that I can’t imagine who would enjoy it. This song has the same energy as one of those hula girls you put on the dashboard of your car: Cheap and ugly.

5. The Git Up - Blanco Brown

Whenever something new is created, there’s always a leech.

I probably don’t need to tell you about the monstrous year Old Town Road had on the pop charts. For weeks and weeks, Lil Nas X was blocking people from his throne at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, bumping off new faces like Billie Eilish and oldheads like Taylor Swift. Old Town Road knew no mercy. This is the year that a gay black kid singing about horses ruled the world.

And Blanco Brown wanted a piece.

Blanco Brown is one of those artists who started out producing and writing for other hitmakers. He worked on some song by 2Chainz, a couple by some woman named Demetria McKinney, he produced that accursed MILF song by Fergie, a lot of relatively famous people. But he looked at Old Town Road and realized that he, being a black man from the lovely state of Georgia, could also do that.

He could not do that.

The Git Up is a husk of a song, only validated by the fact that it achieved what it was aiming for: TikTok memes. It’s as shameless as Watch Me, but doesn’t even have the small sense of excitement Silento gives off. Blanco Brown’s The Git Up and the “challenge” that it’s attached to are pathetic. The only reason Blanco isn’t too ashamed to go outside after writing this is because he knows plenty of people have fallen into his trap, and that they’re bigger fools than he is.

I started off hating Old Town Road, but over time I’ve sort of come to love it. There’s innocence in it. Lil Nas X didn’t mean for it to be a number one hit, it just happened. A lot of artists were trying too hard this past year, and I suspect it’s why Old Town Road made the pop charts its bitch. It didn’t have to try.

A lot of people will point at rock bands for being “fake”. If they draw inspiration from grunge or punk, and they don’t have the proper edge, many will point and laugh. But just because something is fun and hip doesn’t mean it’s easier to make. In fact, I feel it’s a lot easier to tell if someone’s making a shitty pop song for any reason other than themselves. A lot of people thought Lil Peep was faking, and he really, really wasn’t. There’s grey area in topics like depression, but Blanco Brown (and anyone like him) is as transparent as a window. I see through his mock-excitement, his cute little dance challenge, his “innocent” song. We all do.

I believe Tyler Durden put it best:

“Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.”

4. I Don’t Care - Ed Sheeran ft. Justin Bieber

Speaking of being fake...

I don’t know if Ed Sheeran realizes how embarrassing this song is. More than any other song he’s been involved in. More than Shape Of You, or that one song on Revival, more than anything. I Don’t Care is an exercise in humiliation.

Generally speaking, I don’t like Ed Sheeran’s music. I think he’s had a couple good songs, we all like Sing and Castle on the Hill, it’s not like he’s untalented. But every time he’s gotten a big hit these past few years it’s been so shitty or mediocre that I wanted to scream. I’m not sure why, but all of his fans seem to flock towards his worst songs. And of all of them, I hate I Don’t Care the most.

Usually the problems with Ed Sheeran’s music just revolve around his meek, tiny personality and his weird style of lyricism. The level of detail he gets into can be both an asset and a detriment. I remember I basically described Shape Of You as a virgin anthem, because Ed Sheeran exudes dorkiness. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and when it comes to nerd music I’d rather take Thomas Dolby, but he definitely had a style.

I Don’t Care is Ed’s Intuition.

As in, the Jewel song. The blown-up pop song released by Jewel, a previously sincere folk singer who played acoustic guitar and sang about break-ups and The Media(TM) and stuff like that. Ed Sheeran is a lot like Jewel, if you think about it. Both of them are skilled lyricists who play acoustic guitar and sing about personal topics, and both of them suddenly decided to throw that away and make a sell-out pop hit. If this kills Ed’s career, they’ll have had basically the same musical trajectory.

Ed Sheeran opens the song by saying he’s at a party he doesn’t wanna be at, and that’s how the song feels. You, the listener, are at a party you don’t wanna be at. What good did adding Justin Bieber to this song do? Oh, right, that’s what made it a hit. I Don’t Care goes far beyond Blanco Brown’s brand of shamelessness. Blanco Brown specifically wanted a dance challenge hit. Ed Sheeran just wanted a hit. Any hit will do. He brought in guaranteed hitmaker Justin Bieber, tossed out his acoustic guitar for fully electronic production, and sang about something vague and already done. And the worst part is that it WORKED.

I imagine this was almost entirely through radio play, because this song is so radio-friendly and milktoast it’s unreal. With a stupid music video greenscreening Ed’s face onto shit and “ooh ooh”s and all, this song exists to pander. It wasn’t created for humans, rather, it was created for the pop music algorithm that’ll shove it into people’s laps without them asking. There’s no artistic integrity, nothing worth thinking about for longer than its runtime. It made it to the Hot 100 because it can be played in grocery stores and clothing stores and really any kind of store. Ed Sheeran is a God of nothing, and I can’t imagine he’s proud.

3. No Guidance - Chris Brown ft. Drake

This song is bad on every possible level. Starting off with the fact that it’s nine minutes long. It out-lengths last year’s overly long garbage fire that was Te Bote.

And then you look at the credits and know exactly who’s to blame for all this:

I don’t know if Lil Dicky anticipated giving Chris Brown’s career a second wind with Freaky Friday, but I think that’s what he did. I defended Lil Dicky last year, and I’m still not clear on how much he actually wanted to work with Chris Brown since that’s not really the kind of thing famous people are honest about, but this wasn’t Lil Dicky’s hit. This was a springboard to launch Chris Brown back into the limelight. Earth didn’t even chart. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the last gasp of Lil Dicky’s career in the spotlight.

But I’d take Freaky Friday over No Guidance any day.

No Guidance is the formal beef-squash between Chris Brown and Drake. Apparently they both dated Rihanna at some point and allegedly had an actual literal bar fight. Despite Drake claiming he still loves Rihanna, he’s also choosing to publicly make up with and work with the man who got her hospitalized at 19 years old. Then again, Rihanna also wants nothing to do with Drake.

(source)

Over time, Drake has proven himself to be his own flavor of scumbag, a weirdo who dates younger women and pretended not to have a son. Perhaps this is his way of getting back at Rihanna. Or he’s simply using Chris Brown’s new power to bolster his own career. Regardless of why it is, it’s gross, especially when he’s dropping bars like this:

Someone else here is looking a little violent, no?

On pure quality, it sounds like every other Chris Brown song, just with Drake tossed into the mix haphazardly. It’s a lame song about hitting on some girl where both artists drop references to their old songs because that’s the easiest way for a failing artist to feign relevance. Assuming nobody features Chris Brown on another massive hit next year, there’s a fair chance he’s done for, and after years of oversaturation, the public finally tires of Drake. No Guidance is a nothing song with scummy shit going on behind the scenes.

RIP Lil Dicky.

2. 7 Rings - Ariana Grande

I never really understood the hype around Ariana Grande. She has a few songs that I enjoy, and her voice is very good, but nothing by her really stands out to me as an amazing song. Ariana stans are relentless. When I posted my review of the thank u, next album some complete stranger replied to it with “Uhhh ok sis”. Like barring the fact that I’m not a girl and we’re not related... it’s an opinion, calm yourself.

Frankly I don’t know how people enjoyed this song. Her stans are insane, but surely not that insane, right? I mean... this isn’t a song. It’s a MISTAKE.

Between Gwen Stefani and Ariana Grande, sampling The Sound Of Music for your pop song is a dangerous game. And really, she should’ve sampled like, anything else. Because nothing says “wealthy, savage girl” like a cute song about your favorite things, I guess!

I’ve never felt quite so immediately gross and uncomfortable as I did when listening to 7 Rings. I have no problem with women flexing, of course I don’t, but this isn’t flexing, it’s mocking. 7 Rings makes me feel like I’m being bullied.

Ari had a horrible 2018, and she’s more than allowed to flex a little, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to essentially play the villain of a high school movie. She’s not Cher Horowitz or Regina George, because then at least she’d be entertainingly bitchy. I judge a flex anthem based on how much I get excited for the person being wealthy and cool. This song makes me want to commit a robbery.

The lyrical content isn’t the only bad element. It also sounds like shit!

Ariana Grande is a belter. Everyone knows she’s here to sing and not... rap. Which is exactly what she does on this song. The filters she puts over her voice during the rapping sections are just... gross. When she drags out certain words it hurts my ears. That and apparently multiple people have accused her of stealing their flows, though that’s really hard to say since it’s an incredibly generic rap flow. Also, she samples Gimme The Loot by Biggie Smalls, a song about robbing people. Which makes sense because if you bought Ariana’s album, you were robbed! Congrats!

But in the end, the most damning thing about this song is its lyrics. Why should I be excited about this absolute bitch having tons of money? Why should I care when she has the gall to say shit like this?

There were ten writers on this song and nobody thought of saying “hey, maybe the phrase ‘happiness is the same price as red-bottoms’ is a little fucking shallow!”

And I’m not making any judgments on Ariana’s character in real life. I’m sure she’s a perfectly nice person, but if this song was supposed to project some sense of camaraderie and a “we did it!” attitude, it fails. What it does project is a snide, rich girl looking down on you for not just buying yourself out of depression. Never write a song like this again.

Honorable Mentions

Happier - Marshmello and Bastille

I’m not gonna be the first to say every Marshmello beat sounds exactly the same, but every Marshmello beat sounds the same. I picked this one because it charted highest, but really it makes no difference which Marshmello song I pick on.

Sweet But Psycho - Ava Max

This song reads like a 12-year-old’s deviantART journal.

Drip Too Hard - Lil Baby and Gunna

Like I said, this song almost got on the list proper. It’s a slow burn. At first you feel like the beat is solid, and Lil Baby rides it decently enough, but then it keeps going and the flows never switch and Gunna basically sounds the same as Lil Baby and you begin feeling like you’re losing your mind.

Thotiana - Blueface

People kept memeing about this. I thought it’d be fun. I hate you guys.

God’s Country - Blake Shelton

Namedropping The Devil Went Down To Georgia does not make you Primus. Because you are not creative or interesting.

Trampoline - Shaed

I wouldn’t have even given this song a second thought except apparently it’s hit the alt-rock charts? Where is this rock? Like I get we’re pushing the boundaries of genre but I think the bare minimum of a rock song would be a GUITAR.

Knockin’ Boots - Luke Bryan

This song is dumb. But I’m oddly amused by how dumb it is, so it may live.

Baby - Lil Baby and DaBaby

Sometimes things sound like a good idea, and then they’re not. This didn’t even sound like a good idea and it proved to be an even worse idea. Something definitely could’ve been done with this, but Lil Baby is essentially a creative void that consumes all it sees.

Someone You Loved - Lewis Capaldi

Another song that’s too dumb for me to really get mad at. God knows, Capaldi is putting a hell of a lot of effort into something. What it is, I’m not sure, but he’s doing his best.

With those out of the way, we move onto

Number One:

You Need To Calm Down - Taylor Swift

"I AM LAID LOW BY THE HUMAN RACE. ME, AN INNOCENT WOMAN, MUST DEAL WITH ‘HATERS’ EVERY SINGLE DAY. MY HEART HAS BECOME WEAK WITH ALL OF THE UNKIND WORDS. DARE I SAY... I AM OPPRESSED?”

It’s ironic hearing Taylor Swift tell me to calm down. She hasn’t been calm for a long time. She sure as hell isn’t calm in this song. It’s basically the equivalent of someone screaming “I AM NOT ANGRY!”

Like, you’re... still mad about the snake thing? It’s been a few years now and you’re still bothered enough by an emoji that you referenced it in a song about how not-bothered you are? I mean, apparently this song (as well as ME!) is about celebrating individuality. It definitely is celebrating an individual: Taylor Swift.

I think a big theme of this year was “embarrassing”. The Git Up was embarrassing, I Don’t Care was embarrassing, but none of them are more embarrassing than this. You could probably do a list of the ten worst Taylor Swift lyrics and it’d be mostly this song. And if the lyrics aren’t terrible enough, it also blatantly copies the beat from Sunflower, the second-biggest hit of the year and a personal favorite. Like, a fellow critic remixed them together and the backing track is essentially unchanged.

And then we get to the gay stuff.

I’m not the first to point out that the underlying message of this song is pathetic at best and offensive at worst: “I have haters, and gays have haters, so we’re basically the same.” This is essentially Taylor Swift hoping she’ll get an invite to judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

There’s just kind of an eensy weensy problem.

Gay “haters” are like... ACTUALLY DANGEROUS.

They’re not just the goofy, protest-sign waving boomers she depicts in her music video. An internet comment is harmless. Homophobia isn’t. Homophobia leads to suicide, gets teens kicked out of their homes, causes hate crimes, it can cause incredibly serious harm. Someone sending you a fucking snake emoji isn’t the same as years and years of systematic oppression!

Does Taylor Swift have to worry about her safety when she tours in more conservative areas? Does she have to fear the possibility of losing friends and family ties when opening up about herself? Does she have to worry about letting the public see who she dates, beyond the usual celebrity drama? Do people shout slurs at her on the street? Do churches and politicians campaign against her right to marry?

Of course not.

Taylor Swift has always made everything about herself. She’s lied and been petty for years and years in her music. Imagine lying about KANYE. You don’t need to lie about fucking Kanye to make him look bad! He does it himself! She was the victim that time, and every time. But at no point until now did she stoop low enough to openly compare herself to oppressed groups because people are mean to her on the internet.

Like this isn’t even about articles or tabloids or anything, it’s about people being nasty online. The phrase “shade never made anybody less gay” is basically a crackhead way of diminishing our suffering. It’s not “shade” we’re worried about, Taylor, it’s having our fucking legal rights taken away. Your biggest worry is “haters”. Haters aren’t going to ban you from being married.

This song is phony, it’s a rip-off of a much better song that literally came out in the same year, it’s repetitive, it’s petty, and most of all, it tries to diminish the oppression of the LGBT+ community by boiling down all of our pain and suffering to simple “shade”.

I will not calm down.

Woo-ee. That was something alright. We’ll be moving onto the best list soon, if I don’t get caught up in my other quarantine activities.

#panda posts #top 10 list #worst hits of 2019 #top 10 worst hits of 2019 #worst hits #pop song review #pop music #music criticism #music review

1 note · View note

earwaxinggibbous · 4 years

Text

Tumblr deleted my old main. Super cool that I missed year-end list season.

still doin em tho

-Mod Panda

#panda posts #not a review

0 notes

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

Album Quickie - “Rules!” by Manila Luzon

Manila Luzon - Rules!

Best: Robbed ft. Latrice Royale

Worst: Inspire Me

Overall: 8.5/10

Final thoughts: With all of the Drag Race alumni making technopop music about being fierce and shady, it’d have been easy for Manila to fall into the background. But she has one thing going for her, which is that she’s super funny. Though there’s a lot of drag-based in-jokes that a lot of people won’t get, I definitely enjoyed it and had a good laugh. Also, despite allegedly not being able to sing, Manila isn’t too bad. And hey, Future sings all the time, and he’s not good at it.

Individual song scores below:

The Official Trailer (Intro) - N/A (very funny though)

Go Fish - 8/10

Barbra, Can You Hear Me? - 8.5/10

Gay Man - 9/10

Fuck Fashion - 8.5/10

Robbed - 9.5/10

The Rules (Interlude) - N/A (also funny)

Inspire Me - 8/10

Inspire Me (Reprise) - N/A

#album review #album quickie #panda posts #manila luzon #rules!

2 notes · View notes

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

Album Quickie - “thank u, next” by Ariana Grande

Ariana Grande - thank u, next

Best - ghostin

Worst - 7 rings

Overall - 3.5/10

Final thoughts: I don’t get it. I am truly, supremely baffled by this entire album. Ariana, at this point, has strayed so far from her actual talents that you can’t help but wonder why nobody stopped her, or said anything. Clearly the most experimental, most of it sounds like trap rap-infused indie shit made with a budget of three dollars and a ham sandwich. Ariana’s crooning and whispering genuinely made me feel creepy tingles up my spine. I get that she’s been through a lot, but surely there’s better ways of coping than making shit music.

Individual song scores below

#ariana grande #thank u next #album review #album quickie #panda posts

9 notes · View notes

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

Album Quickie - “BOX Office” by Aja

Aja - BOX Office

Best - Willy Wonka

Worst - Yokai

Overall - 8.5/10

Final thoughts: This album was a little underwhelming, which considering that it's still an 8.5/10, says pretty good things about my opinion on Aja. The “bad” tracks are, at worst, filler, and the good tracks are honestly some of the best shit I’ve heard from ex-Drag Race alums. Really what turns me off is some of the hooks, and also the completely worthless guest artists, with the exception of CupcakKe.

Individual track scores under the cut

Tutankhamun - 7/10

Decepticon - 6/10

Monster Jam - 7/10

Breakfast at Tiffany’s - 6.5/10

Willy Wonka - 9/10

Rocky - 6.5/10

Slytherin - 8/10

Chango - 7.5/10

Ghost - 8/10

Jekyll & Hyde - 8.5/10

Yokai - 5.5/10

Anarchy - 9/10

Clowns - 7.5/10

Safari Zone - 9/10

Kill Bill - 8/10

#album review #aja #box office

0 notes

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

Eminem - Worst to Best

So I was watching theneedledrop and thinking I could do this too. That’s all the prefacing you’re gonna get.

I know it’s hard to believe I can judge Eminem from an objective standpoint considering I’m such a big fan that I ranked Kamikaze as my favorite hit song of 2018 (my actual favorite song was probably When You Die by MGMT or Stop Smoking by Car Seat Headrest for the record) but I am able, physically, to have negative opinions even about the rap god himself.

My only rule is that this only includes his full-length studio albums. Infinite won’t be here due to my lack of knowledge regarding it, but everything else is fair game. This will be heavily opinion-based.

Let’s go and start from the worst!

9. Revival (2017)

Initially I was gonna put Encore below this one. After all, in my opinion, there’s nothing egregiously awful about Revival in my mind. It just sort of existed to me, like that dead roach that stayed in my high school’s gym for over a month before disappearing without a word about it.

It wasn’t until I gave a few of the tracks a re-listen that I realized Revival has nothing going for it. This is Em’s sellout album, the one where he collabs with Beyonce, Ed Sheeran and goddamn X Ambassadors in the vague hopes that it’d get him a hit. Songs that don’t bother having clever writing because all they need to do is slap a semi-important pop singer on the hook.

It’s easily Em’s most ballsless album. In a universe where Kill You and Same Song & Dance exist, there is no need for Framed, Em’s almost saddening attempt to return to his Slim Shady roots even though, let’s be honest, the years of Shady are long behind us.

I’m not saying I need Em yelling slurs and talking about murder every five seconds, I just want him to be, for lack of a better word, the most authentic version of himself he can be. And this really isn’t it to me. No amount of politics or wordplay can hide that this is a sham of what an Eminem album should sound like. I don’t need diss tracks, or songs about serial killing, I just want him to say what he wants and not hold back.

Everything about the album is weak and tired. Every song melds into one another, without thought or purpose, only broken up by the celebrity hooks that define them. It’s the blackest mark on Em’s discography, and easily his worst album to date. Not even worth sneezing at.

8. Encore (2004)

I guess we shouldn’t let Em do whatever he wants...

Encore has the opposite problem that Revival does, and it’s a problem I empathize with. Encore is essentially word vomit in album form. It’s the musical equivalent of Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous prose, loud and incoherent and kind of gross. It’s what happens when ambition goes unchecked, and Em just leans a little too far into what the media says about him.

This was also deep in the throes of Em’s drug abuse problem, and it shows. This album feels like a bad drug trip, sludgy and gross and heavy, in a way that makes it hard to move your arms and legs. With these absolutely god-awful sung choruses on songs like My First Single, Eminem dares you to make less sense than him as he rambles like a crazy person through song after song, only taking breaks from his half-attempts at comedy on tracks like Mosh, Like Toy Soldiers and Mockingbird, which try to be serious. But it’s hard to be serious when you’re essentially getting choked in a soup of valium and regret.

I don’t hate Encore like I do Revival, because in some ways I can understand where it comes from. It’s trying to do the same sort of thing its predecessors did, with silly songs and serious ones. But the funny songs are so weird and frankly gross that it quashes any attempt of seriousness. It’s like Eminem thought the only way to make his songs better were to take what his detractors hated about him and turn it up to 11. Songs like My First Single are complete nonsense complete with gut-churning sound effects and a shitty beat, whereas Just Lose It, a song I’m ashamed to admit I enjoy, fills itself with baseless offensiveness and weird reference humor to function. And that was the big hit single off of this album.

Really I think Just Lose It was the best way to sell this album. What says Encore more than a song insisting that Eminem diddles little boys? FACK would’ve been in place on this album, which is not a compliment.

7. Recovery (2010)

Recovery shares a lot of problems with Revival, a lot of radio-bait songs featuring pop artists that have no business being within ten feet of Eminem. But I’ll admit its singles were far superior to that of Revival. No Love was far superior to anything Revival spat out.

I just kinda don’t care about this album. Other than how Love The Way You Lie was permanently ingrained in the cultural consciousness around 2010, I have very few thoughts about it. I remember hearing most of the singles when I was in elementary school, and they were all just kinda fine. Space Bound was okay (other than that coked up line about love being ‘evil’ spelt backwards) and Not Afraid was sincerely underwhelming considering what it was going for.

It’d been diminishing returns for Em for years, so I’m not shocked he needed some time to get back on his feet. But there’s just not much to say about Recovery. I feel like Em was a lot prouder of it than anyone else.

6. Kamikaze (2018)

At some level, I feel like Kamikaze set itself up to fail. And it did pretty well in spite of that.

The album’s main selling point was that it was dissing everyone. Shady’s gonna name names, I remember hearing, as this album dropped right the fuck out of nowhere in the late summer of 2018. Diss track drama has never really been for me, since oftentimes it pits artists I like against one another over petty bullshit. And hearing that Em slammed people simply for disliking Revival only made me more nervous about what Kamikaze’s outcome would look like.

I’m glad to say it was not nearly as bad as I was expecting.

I’m sort of on the fence about this album. While I think it is punchy, and pretty fun lyrics-wise, it definitely doesn’t hold a candle to any of his older stuff. It doesn’t even really hold up against MMLP2. It’s less that I enjoy this album, and more that I enjoy the possibility of Eminem managing to pick himself up after Revival and move into the new age while still being himself.

Easily the worst moment on this album is Eminem calling Tyler the Creator the f-slur and even implying he’s pretending to be gay, which he has since apologized for. However, the scariest thing to me that the line represents is the possibility that Eminem’s personality is too anachronistic. That in an era of young-adult trap rappers with very experimental homemade beats, there’s no longer room for a famous, albeit angry man in his 40′s being backed by a studio. It’s the years of Soundcloud, where anyone can be a rapper, and someone as old and frankly polarizing as Eminem may never truly have the limelight again.

Em’s style has simply fallen behind the times and he will never be content with updating himself, because that isn’t who he is. And while I love that about him, I think it might speak disaster for his career.

I like the songs though.

5. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013)

Now we’re getting into the good shit. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 starts off with a bang, the first song being Bad Guy, a direct sequel to Stan and an incredibly powerful sequel at that. Eminem asks questions about his fame, his identity, and most notably, he fucking gets murdered at the beginning of this album.

MMLP2 strips off all but one skit. No Paul Rosenberg cameo on this one. This was him getting serious after the relative failure of Encore and Relapse. This was, frankly, what Recovery should’ve sound like. With Berzerk being a fun sort of party hit, Rap God is what really got him back on the map. The song asserts his lyrical dominance. It is a brag track, and it earns that right.

Despite it being of incredibly high quality, this is nowhere near Em’s best work, which speaks highly for his track record. The fact that something this well-made is comparatively mediocre when put next to the top four is incredible to me. This album is more of a revival than Revival was. It’s Eminem reaching out of the dirt after being buried and yelling “Hey, I’m not dead yet!” It’s the hearbeat running through a comatose body as they return to consciousness.

But when it comes down to it, I love what this album represents to me more than its content. Aside from Berzerk, Bad Guy and Rap God, none of the songs really stand out either way. It’s all good, of course, but none of it can match up to his older work. Regardless, this album means a lot to me on a spiritual level. Whenever I listen to this I feel like a proud parent, and Em is my son who just completely crushed his elementary school talent show.

It’s a good feeling.

4. Relapse (2009)

At this point it was sort of like picking my favorite child. My number one is obvious, but deciding how to order these three was trouble.

People will probably argue with me saying that Relapse is one of Em’s best, but fuck that. This album is severely underrated among the fanbase, and is an incredibly powerful listen. This album is an auditory representation of rock bottom, in the best way possible.

This is one of the only albums to really define a split between Marshall and Slim Shady, with Slim being a deep-voiced demon and Marshall being a fucked-up middle-aged man who just came staggering out of a rehab center. The way the characters play off of one another is beautiful, Slim trying to manipulate Marshall into his ways and wiles. This also easily has the most horrorcore-type sound and content out of any Eminem album, with Slim occasionally playing the role of a serial killer, such as on 3 am or one of the standout tracks, Same Song & Dance. Insane tells a story possibly regarding Slim’s father, or maybe representative of something else entirely.

One of my few issues with this album, aside from We Made You of all things being one of the singles, is that one of the best tracks is only on the deluxe edition. My Darling ties off the Slim and Marshall story in a nice little bow, plus Careful What You Wish For sweeping up all the themes and putting them in one place.

This album is beautiful, it’s cinematic in a way. It’s deep and powerful and incredibly, incredibly scary, with Em at his lowest point in his life and career. Sadly, it was not well-received critically, which I think is a shame. Clearly they weren’t seeing what I see.

3. The Eminem Show (2002)

Screw Revival, this is easily Em’s most politically powerful album yet. I listened to this whole thing on a boombox I got at Best Buy for 20 dollars and I felt like I had fucking transcended.

This album pulls out all the stops, immediately starting out on White America, a song so goddamn strong that every time little me heard it on the radio I immediately got down and lost my shit. I didn’t even understand what it was about, all I knew was that it was big and important. And it is.

While his first two big albums tried to be weird and threatening, The Eminem Show just wanted to be big, and talk about big things. Eminem fearlessly tears into heavily-charged concepts in White America, Say Goodbye Hollywood and Square Dance. Then on the flipside he aims the gun at himself on tracks like My Dad’s Gone Crazy, Cleanin’ Out My Closet and even Hailie’s Song. It’s a gut-punch of an album, this is where Eminem is truly fearless.

I’ll also say I feel this album is a little bit more accessible, weirdly enough, than Em’s earlier stuff. It’s much less crude and aggressive, but still carries his trademark style. It’s got the skits, he yells a lot still, but the topics are easier to swallow than his earlier albums. I’d say it’s a good entry-level Eminem album if you’re threatened by rape jokes and Em yelling the f-slur constantly. And unlike what Teens of Denial was for Car Seat Headrest, I feel like The Eminem Show manages to be that entry-level album without completely castrating Eminem’s lyrical content.

But even longtime fans can gain enjoyment from this album and how loud and proud it is, how fearless Eminem really is on this album. This one, more than anything, is the unfiltered Marshall Mathers experience. No filters, no jokes, just him and his daughter and Dr. Dre.

But easily the best part of this album is the DVD extras thing where you get a free episode of the Slim Shady Show. Fuck yeah.

2. The Slim Shady LP (1999)

The Slim Shady LP was Eminem’s first really successful work. It was also the first thing he ever put on a CD. Yeah, Infinite was on cassette only. And this album is fucking great. It’s a perfect debut for Eminem. It’s got his first big hit, My Name Is, and a myriad of other great tracks. It’s just good late 90′s rap, with fun beats and interesting lyrics. As much as I love SSLP, I don’t really like talking about it because... yeah, it’s good, I’m just never sure what else to say.

And that might make it sound like I like it less than The Eminem Show, but no, that’s not it. As much as I think political Em is great, I’ll forever prefer nasty rat boy Em any day. This is the Em that inspires me the most, the grody, crude one that reminds me of myself. Best tracks include 97 Bonnie and Clyde, Bad Meets Evil and of course My Name Is. This is also the only album where Ken Kaniff is played by Aristotle. There’s your fun fact for the day.

1. The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)

FUCK everyone else, I respect YOU!

The Marshall Mathers LP is a defining rap album. It’s lyrical perfection, the hooks are god-tier, and it is without contest the best Eminem album of all time. I doubt he’ll ever top this, and if he does it’ll probably break space-time.

MMLP ticks all the boxes an Eminem album usually should. It’s quirky, it’s comedic, it’s dark, it’s angry, it’s violent, it’s everything I could want and more. But beyond that, it’s the thing that really proved what Eminem can do. He can tell stories, he can do lyrics, he can flow, he has good beats, he can murder his ex-girlfriend, he can get his own songs censored on the uncensored version of his album, he can do it all.

The songs on this just put me in a good mood. Even though they’re horrible, and I don’t mean they’re bad songs. The content is absolutely fucked, this album is not for the faint of heart. But it makes me feel represented, not for being gay, trans, mentally ill or short, but for being a fucked-up weirdo who lived a fucked-up life and just wants to scream and lose his shit. More than anything, this feels like an album that’s there for me, for better or for worse.

The standouts on this album in my opinion are the two “named” tracks, Kim and Stan. These tracks are incredibly disturbing, but they both mean a lot to me and are incredibly written and acted. The Real Slim Shady is still an amazing single with an awesome, hopping beat. I’m Back is incredibly solid, Criminal is cleverly contradictory, every track on this album is great without any misses. If there were enough words in the English language to describe how much I love this album, I’d probably use all of them.

This album couldn’t exist today. If this came out today, it’d probably be thrown to the wayside for a myriad of reasons. It’s too late 90′s, it’s too dark, it’s “problematic”, we have like 500 white rappers now, but for the record: Anyone who writes this kind of music today owes it to Eminem, ESPECIALLY all of the white rappers who insist they’re better than him. (Looking at you, MGK.) Even if he’s not doing that great now, even if you don’t like him, it’d be foolish to not acknowledge what MMLP did for rap. And not only was it influential, but it still holds up to this very day.

So there you have it. All of Eminem’s full albums (besides Infinite oopsies) listed from worst to best. Have any differing opinions? Leave a reply. Just be polite, you filthy animal.

#worst to best #eminem #music review #music criticism #panda posts

6 notes · View notes

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

So hopefully the next post will be the beginning of a NEW SERIES entitled Is It That Bad?, which basically looks back on acts that are hated by most of the sane population and asks the question... enh. Was it that bad?

I’m willing to take requests as long as you don’t send XXXTENTACION.

-Panda

#panda posts #not a review

0 notes

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

“Scared of the Dark” - Li’l Wayne and Ty Dolla $ign/”Falling Down” by Li’l Peep and XXXTENTACION

In the words of Drake, I’m upset.

So I just saw Into the Spiderverse a few days ago. It was a pretty good movie. I don’t know shit about superheroes and it’s all white noise to me, MCU this and Suicide Squad that, but I love a good animated move that isn’t generic CGI pulled out of Walt Disney’s frozen asshole.

But you know what really dragged me into the fray was a bopping soundtrack. I mean one of the big hits was by Swae Lee and Post Malone, two yodeling fuckheads who I’d die for. And it’s a great song, too.

So why am I mad? What is there to be mad about?

Scared of the Dark is an amazing song, with a nice piano and trap beat, a powerful chorus by Ty Dolla $ign and Li’l Wayne actually putting effort in. Dare I say I might actually like this song. But hey, there’s actually three artists on this. And who’s the third?

WHY. WHY. WHY. WHY. WHY!

One of the best songs on a soundtrack by a great movie, and some asshole decided to dump another fucking postmortem recording of XXXTENTACION onto the track. You know, the known abuser and homophobe whose biggest hit revolved around the idea of threatening suicide to keep your girlfriend in check. A human scum pile who’s gonna be remembered as a legend in the same way King Tut is. He added nothing to society and died young.

I’m angry.

This is honestly indicative of the music scene as a whole nowadays. Who owns posthumous tracks? Do we even have the right to release them? We’ve been doing things like this for years, but I honestly blame people like JT and Drake for it becoming even more common. Remember when they both sampled Michael Jackson? Specifically tracks that MJ never wanted released? After he was dead? And now suddenly everyone thinks it’s an honor to the dead to do this?

I’m so, so tired. Why of all people is it that XXXTENTACION gets to continue existing. You never hear from Li’l Peep anymore, but this guy? It reminds me of how the Saw series has managed to get to eight films despite Jigsaw having died in the third movie. X is the Jigsaw of the rap game.

We need to stop shoving dead people’s samples in songs. Especially dead people who do not deserve and should not earn a legendary status. On a song that has nothing to do with what they’re saying.

Remember Falling Down?

This song was a postmortem track by Li’l Peep and iLoveMakonnen titled Sunlight On Your Skin. X allegedly wanted to record a song for Li’l Peep, as he’d apparently wanted to record with him before he died. Falling Down was released shortly after X’s death. And that’s fine, even though it’s not his song and obviously iLoveMakonnen was clearly trying to profit off of their deaths.

One problem though.

So I don’t know if X knew this or whatever, but in case you don’t know, X shared a prison cell with a gay man. Said gay man looked at him, looked at him in a way he didn’t like, and X beat the living shit out of him. X is a known homophobic person. Had he improved? Doubtful.

To put him on a track with an out bisexual man, a bisexual man in the rap community of all places which is not exactly the coziest of spaces for LGBT people, is offensive. A posthumous track made for a bisexual rapper, and iLoveMakonnen slapped XXXTENTACION into it for money. Not only is that not fair to Li’l Peep, but it’s not fair to any of his fans. And it’s a blatant cash grab because of X’s rampant fanbase.

Yes, he’s dead. But to lump him in with Li’l Peep just because they died in the same year is cruel. To honor his music and his crimes simply because he died young is an offense to everyone he hurt. To consider him a legend and continuously sprinkle his recordings into every song for a quick buck is an offense even to people who like him and associate with him. It’s not an honor, it’s a flex. It’s saying, “we own the rights to this dead man’s audio and we can do whatever we want with it”.

It’s disingenuous, it’s immoral, and it’s wrong.

We need to stop profiting off of the deaths of young celebrities. We need to stop these fucking grave robbers. We can’t allow this, there is no reason to allow this other than blind nostalgia. And the worst thing is, it sells. Nobody realizes how much of a gross move this is. X’s fans, and Peep’s fans for that matter, miss them so much that they don’t realize they’ve been duped by record executives trying to beat gold out of corpses.

And to ruin a perfectly good song just to make money off of a dead man, and a dead abuser and homophobe at that, is absolutely sickening. Blindly allowing corporations to make money from dead rappers is not okay, and we need to shout out against this instead of allowing it. It is not an honor. It is not a gift. It is an offense, and should be seen as such.

I’m upset. With everyone involved here.

#song review #negative review #pop song review #panda posts #lil wayne #ty dolla $ign #lil peep #i refuse to tag him you cant make me

3 notes · View notes

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

Top 10 Best Hit Songs of 2018

As I geared up to make the list of hits for 2018, I was prepared for difficulty, and I wasn’t wrong. Hence why there are a few little cheats here and there. Really anything that even had the potential to be a hit got on this list because the Hot 100 was fucking barren and I figure I’d rather give some exposure to some good artists that didn’t get what they deserved.

I do discuss alcohol/drug use briefly in my number 9 + 6 and abuse in my number 4. Let’s get this shit on the road.

10. Mine - Bazzi

This song is dumb. And I love it.

Mine by Bazzi, who no doubt will not show up on the charts next year, is a song that all of you know even if you think you don’t, because it’s the one with the memes.

You so! Fuckin! Precious! When you! Smiiiiile!

Yeah, it’s that one.

There’s not much to say about this one. It’s a quick and easy listen at only a little over 2 minutes. Bazzi has a nice enough voice, and the production manages to stand on its own. Honestly the reason it’s here is because the lyrics are adorable.

It feels very teenage, but not in the obnoxious way that Lucid Dreams is. It’s just very innocent despite the second line being about hitting it from the back. It’s a kind of innocence I can enjoy mostly unironically.

Like, whatever man. Just enjoy life.

9. Betrayed - Lil Xan

So I wasn’t actually sure when this song charted. I believe it was either late 2017 or early 2018, possibly with some crossover, but I’m counting it because I love this song so much.

Betrayed actually shares a lot of similarities with Juice WRLD’s Lucid Dreams. They were both towards the bottom on each respective list, they both have videos made by Cole Bennet, and they both have a sneaky anti-drug message.

Ironic considering his name is Lil Xan. Also I lied it’s not very sneaky at all. Which is good, if you’re gonna be anti-drug then just fucking do it. The beat is chill, the bars are chill, it’s all super chill. That’s probably in part due to the fact that Lil Xan has a super calming voice. This is weed music. Like Car Seat Headrest. And good weed music can be enjoyed when you’re sober, which Betrayed can be because it just sounds nice.

A good chunk of Betrayed is about the pitfalls of the rap game, and how suddenly everyone turns on you and wants your money, which is kind of neurotic but not entirely inaccurate.

This was actually the plot of a Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake song called Holy Grail from a few years back. And I hate to say it but this song does it way better, because it’s not trying to make fame out to be some horrible demon priestess who’s sucking your soul out of your ass, but rather, more of a lifestyle with very different complications.

Which is what it is.

So Jay-Z got outdone by a 12-year-old with face tats named Lil Xan, and if I heard about that my ego would be deeply, deeply bruised.

The only reason it isn’t higher is because, uh.

Oof, Lil Xan. Come on now.

8. King’s Dead - Jay Rock ft. Kendrick Lamar, Future and James Blake

So a lot of people actually didn’t like this song. Which... I kind of get.

Also apparently this was on the Black Panther soundtrack. I never saw that movie, but a lot of the lyrics on this, at least according to lyric genius, relate to that movie. Which I guess is why I have no clue what it’s about other than the average rap music cliches. The only thing I knew about King’s Dead for god knows how long was this gif of Kendrick eating corn in a palm tree.

I feel like the best argument against this song (other than Future’s high-pitched sampling of Slob On My Knob that made me lose my shit) is that there’s nothing really special about it. I mean yeah, Kendrick has a voice that’s smooth like butter, but King’s Dead has a generic beat and bars that just don’t stand out.

But I don’t know. I just love it.

This is just a nice fun song to chill out to. I can put it on, throw myself into bed, and let the cares of the day shloff off of my body as Kendrick whispers to me in the language of the ancient ones. This is nowhere near his best work, not even remotely close to it. All it is is nice and small and easy to listen to without being completely boring.

Maybe I also just like it because it’s been forever since a rap song really sounded like one. This is partially the fault of Future, who is on this song, and doing the same shit he usually does, but at least the rest of the song sounds like words. It feels like it’s been a whole decade since rap music wasn’t just an autotuned jumble, and while I’m easier on mumble-rap than most, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss good old fashioned regular rap.

Regardless of whether it’s blind nostalgia or some level of actual quality, I enjoy King’s Dead for what it is. It may just be a rock and not a diamond, but it’s my rock and I love it.

7. In My Blood - Shawn Mendes

So like, what the fuck happened with Shawn Mendes? He just kind of got really good all of a sudden. Like when every genre, every artist, every newcomer and every single is shitting the bed, it’s Shawn Mendes of all people to bring it home. That’s like if Charlie Puth turned out to be the savior of music. It’s like if Chingy developed into a rap legend. And this song, In My Blood, is about something we all wanna do! Giving up.

Okay, so that’s not exactly what it’s about. It’s about the feeling of wanting to give up, but refusing to, in a very chronological way. With the verses representing the low points and the chorus representing the swell of energy that forces one to get back on their feet. It’s an incredibly well put-together song where Shawn’s voice is actually put to good use instead of him gargling pus like he did on Treat You Better. I’d be lying if I said he didn’t emote wonderfully on this.

I haven’t heard any of the other singles he’s released around this song, but I’m definitely interested in doing so because In My Blood is an experience, kind of in the same way that like, a really good Panic! at the Disco song is. It just punches you repeatedly. You ever been punched by a song? It feels great. I wish more songs would punch me.

In a lot of ways In My Blood is also nostalgic for me, since it brings me back to an era where I actually got excited about pop music because it was important to me some-fucking-how. And I don’t mean like, I was interested in pop like I am right now. When I was littler my parents basically raised me on old alternative music and jazz, and while I definitely enjoyed it I had literally no idea what other kids at school listened to. The first pop song I remember hearing was Pokerface by Lady GaGa, I was on the school bus, and it sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. Over time my sister began playing the radio so that her friends at her new school would stop goofing on her for not knowing any pop artists, and hearing all this new music was kind of an experience. Of course after awhile we both moved into individualized tastes and neither of us really listen to the radio unless it’s during the holidays, but hearing In My Blood somehow reminds me of a time when being a hit actually meant something.

It’s a song where you put it on and it just owns the room despite its minimalism, and with tons of easy listening alt-crap hitting the stations nowadays, it’s nice, albeit surreal, to know that Shawn Mendes is the one who gives a shit.

6. Genius - LSD

In case you didn’t know, LSD is the combined efforts of rapper Labrinth, singer Sia and producer Diplo. I hadn’t actually heard of this group until pretty recently, and I wish I had because if you know me, you know about my wretched obsession with Sia. Maybe I’m too forgiving, but I can’t remember a single bad track she’s put out. And Genius is no exception.

Lyrically this song’s a bit lacking, despite the title. But soundwise it sticks like gum, with a layered production. I always say that they should have Sia work with one of these sing-rappers, so having it finally happen is proof that god might be listening to me.

It’s like bubblegum for your brain, it’s sweet, it tastes good, it’s fun and it sticks. Even after only one listen I couldn’t get the tune out of my head. And god knows I just want the charts to be fun for once. No, I don’t think this song charted, which is an absolute shame. LSD should absolutely have the star power to hit the top 100, but I guess this just wasn’t a good year for them.

Regardless, I have heard that LSD plans to do a full project, and after listening to the rest of their short album I am more than excited. The only reason this isn’t higher up is that, judging by the group name I was expecting it to be way more of an acid trip soundwise. It’s definitely hard to compare LSD’s Genius to any other type of pop in recent years, but I feel like that’s moreso because Diplo and company have taken all sorts of elements from all sorts of pop music and sneakily fused them together.

Regardless, Genius is a highly enjoyable listen. Sia’s at top performance as per usual, Labrinth sounds really nice beside her and Diplo’s production is solid. Also I seriously recommend the music video. It’s super weird. I wish animated music videos were more common with pop, to be honest.

5. Better Now - Post Malone

I almost feel like I’ve sinned putting a Post Malone song above a Kendrick Lamar song, but god do I love Better Now.

The Post Malone conversation is still very much underway, with a lot of people saying they hated Psycho because it was boring (which I can get even though I don’t agree) and that they hated Jackie Chan because it was just really really stupid. But, much like Candy Paint, I have yet to hear anyone say they dislike Better Now. And I do honestly believe that he hit it out of the park on this one.

This one’s sort of the reverse of Genius. It has pretty basic trap production, but really nice lyrics. Possibly building on the story from I Fall Apart, though with a slightly more mature outlook, Post talks about an ex-girlfriend who he misses, trying to drown his feelings in alcohol, drugs and expensive stuff in the wake of the relationship.

A total bummer, but Post sells it pretty well.

Like damn. That’s a detail right there.

I mean, I could argue that nobody has a specific drawer for socks they don’t like, but who cares really.

Anyway, unlike I Fall Apart, which was a turn-off for a lot of people because it felt spiteful and juvenile, Better Now doesn’t really place the blame on Post or his ex, which is a much more realistic scenario. Because really, his ex isn’t at fault for no longer being in love with him, but Post isn’t at fault for pining. He’s only human. Judging by the lyrics, the story is that Post was dumped for being a druggie in this song.

Though Lyric Genius also argues this is a reference to the death of Lil Peep, who was close personal friends with Post Malone in real life. If this song is somehow in a weird roundabout way an ode to Lil Peep, honestly it does feel like it’s a good send-up to him from another rapper. Like yeah, a love song might seem weird as a tribute to a dead friend, but it definitely does feel like a mournful, sad song about longing for a close person who’s gone for the long run.

Whether this is a tribute to Lil Peep or just a breakup song, it definitely carries the weight of the emotions, partly since Post just generally sounds sad all the time. And in a year full of pissy break-up songs, this is the one that hits home more than any other for me. If Post is going off of past experience, it shows, and if he isn’t he’s just a really good actor I guess.

4. Freaky Friday - Lil Dicky ft. Chris Brown

This song is the bane of my fucking existence.

Why do I laugh at this? Why do I laugh at jokes about Lil Dicky having a small penis still? Why am I losing my shit at the idea that a white guy in a black guy’s body would immediately wonder if he can say the n-word? Why am I, a grown man with presumably mature tastes, going ‘hee hee hoo hoo’ over the phrase “I’m DJ Khaled! Why am I yelling?” And why the fuck, in the year 2018, am I actively enjoying a Chris Brown song?

Lil Dicky I have a soft spot for. We’re both Jews, we’re both stupid, we both look dead inside in every photograph taken of us. We’re basically like long lost twin brothers. Plus I do think he’s a skilled rapper, with his greatest track easily being Professional Rapper featuring Snoop Dogg, and if it had been my choice, that song would’ve been his first big hit. But no, it had to be Freaky Friday. A song that, for all accounts and purposes, is about as funny as an early Your Favorite Martian song, and yet still makes me roll into a screaming fit laughing my ass off.

I’m not gonna sit here and pretend I’m over the Chris Brown drama just because there’s plenty of worse artists charting right now. Forgetting it would be an offense to everyone involved. Do I think he’s probably matured since? Maybe. But that doesn’t excuse or explain away what he did. But for me to pretend I don’t enjoy this song would be disingenuous, and it breaks my heart to actually enjoy a Chris Brown song. In 20-fucking-18.

Everyone hates this song. And they’re valid, honestly. I just like the chorus, maybe? I don’t know. It’s hardly Lil Dicky’s best work, but fuck me. Of course I had to be the one suffering with the curse of enjoying Lil Dicky’s Freaky Friday to the point that I put it above a ton of songs that are probably objectively better, all because I laugh at dick jokes and love a catchy chorus.

But I will give it credit, this is the first popular comedy song in a long time I’ve been able to get down to. Selfie and What Does The Fox Say made me wanna scoop my eyes out with a melon baller, but of course the fucking Chris Brown comedy song makes me shriek in body-wracking laughter as if I’ve never heard a joke before.

It’s been at LEAST a year since I felt this shitty for enjoying a song, but that’s life I guess. Just enjoying bad music by bad people for bad reasons.

3. High Hopes - Panic! at the Disco

How is it that we’re having a Panic! at the Disco hit in 2018? Whatever, I’m not mad.

I mean, come on. A swelling Brendon Urie anthem about finally being able to achieve your dreams and shit? That’s really all I need on a bad day, isn’t it. Thanks 2018.

I don’t even remember if this song has good production or not. It’s really loud. Everything is loud. Do you think I care if it sounds good? I mean, Brendon sounds good, but like. Biz Markie’s Just A Friend fills me with emotion and it sounds like it’s being sung by a donkey. My standards are not high. Maybe I’d need higher standards to not like this song.

Frankly, I don’t care if the production is bad. Because this song is just good mood music, and I like that it’s loud. I want Brendon to scream in my ear about having high hopes. Do you think I care how it sounds?

No but really. It’s a perfectly well-built song, Brendon performs well on it. Bless this shit though. If there’s anything that represents hope in my mind, it’s Brendon Urie skittering up the side of a building while singing about having high hopes and his mama and whatever whatever. In a year full of dour break-up songs and people dying and abusers getting famous, all you can really have is high hopes. And that’s all there is to it.

2. Neva Lavd Yah! - Dusty Ray Bottoms

Can we all agree RuPaul’s Drag Race is kind of a hack show at this point? I mean, Season 10 was a disaster and so far AS4 has been a disaster too. I’m not even sure why I still watch it at this point.

Anyway, this is kind of a cheat. Neva Lavd Yah! charted on Billboard LGBT, and actually charted pretty high. Not the actual Hot 100, but do you think I care anymore?

So we’re all mad that rock music is dead, and that the only remnants we have of it is Imagine Dragons and other similar garbage. But don’t fret (unless it’s on a guitar) because Dusty Ray Bottoms, queen of my heart, is here to solve that problem. Full electric guitar and drums. No autotune. Just pure Dusty Ray on the track here to kick ass.

I guess Neva Lavd Yah! is a generic “fuck the haters” anthem, but for once I actually believe it. Maybe it’s because it’s being sung by a 50-foot-tall gay man with dots all over his face. Maybe it’s just because, with every drag queen doing techno music, Dusty Ray has done something completely different. God knows I was sick of every drag queen doing overproduced electronica about nothing at all.

Neva Lavd Yah! isn’t polished or clean. It’s screaming and loud and full of passion. Sometimes you’re just a 50-foot gay who wants to yell, sometimes you’re a 5-foot gay who wants to yell. Maybe you don’t feel like yelling right now, but you’ve probably been in that mood before. Neva Lavd Yah! is for when you wanna chill in a garage with an electric guitar and write songs and then scream with your shitty garage band and it’s the 90′s and you’re gay.

Damn right.

And before we move forward,

let’s hit those honorable mentions.

I Like It - Cardi B ft. Bad Bunny and J Balvin

This song really did almost get on the list, and I mean it was like a baby dick’s length away. I almost feel bad that I let Mine on instead. Cardi I am so sorry.

Nice For What - Drake

This was the only good song Drake released this year, and while Drake talking about “strong women” on the same album as I’m Upset seems like bullshit, I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t at least kind of a banger.

Now or Never - Blair St. Clair

This was the only other big drag queen hit I remember this year. It was released in the wake of Blair St. Clair coming out about a sexual assault, and while I do think it’s an empowering song, I don’t like the way it sounds that much.

Pray For Me - The Weeknd ft. Kendrick Lamar

How I liked King’s Dead more than this I can’t even explain to you. The beat on Pray For Me rocks my tight ass though. Plus let’s be honest, The Weeknd and Kendrick are a fucking dream team.

I Love It - Kanye West ft. Lil Pump

I can’t hate this. Fucking look at it. They’re in roblox costumes!

Famous Prophets (Stars) - Car Seat Headrest

Not a hit, which is the only thing that kept it off of here. Consider Song of the Summer by Remo Drive, Humanity by Gorillaz and When You Die by MGMT also in this spot.

On to number one, and if you know me you probably know it already.

1. Kamikaze - Eminem

Listen. I don’t care if this didn’t chart. I don’t care if it didn’t get close. I don’t give two fifths of a fuck if Eminem isn’t as good as he used to be. I don’t give a single rat’s ass.

Because I fucking love Kamikaze.

(The song.)

The album was fine, I wasn’t huge on the whole “call out everyone” angle it took. Sure sometimes it landed, but other times, like with the Tyler the Creator diss, it was completely pointless and kind of petty.

But the title song? It bangs.

The lyrics are good, obviously, it’s an Eminem song and he hasn’t been struggling with lyrics since... Revival I guess. The production on Kamikaze is interesting, the chorus is catchy. I just love it. It puts me in a good mood for reasons I cannot explain using words of the English language.

Maybe I just love Eminem too much. But in a year of stolid depression like 2018, all I wanted was for my favorite rapper Eminem to say “fuck” and yell a lot and just be kind of motivational in his weird way. And he did it. And I understand if people don’t enjoy Kamikaze (the song or the album) but I just can’t not love it, it makes me so excited every time I hear that intro. I feel like a child almost.

I saw Eminem live for the first time this year at Governor’s Ball. It was an experience. My feet were killing me because to get good spots, my sister and I had to sit through Chvrches. (Didn’t like them very much.) It was loud and crowded. It started raining, I was cold as shit and tired and this enormous drunk guy in a wifebeater nearly elbowed my head clean off of my shoulders just due to a lack of spacial awareness. And I didn’t even give a shit until it was over.

The music ended, and I realized I was freezing my ass off. And that’s what good music does to a guy I guess. And being able to download a new, really good Eminem song was like capturing that moment in a bottle. A bottle of white boy spite, but a good bottle nonetheless.

Of course I’m biased. God knows if this song is actually better than something like In My Blood or Genius, but I love this song too much to put it any lower than number one.

Whenever I need motivation or I’m just really pissed, this song is here for me to listen to, so I can lose my shit by the side of a man who I’ve literally begun referring to as my dad at this point. And that’s just what I want. A song that I can feel next to. A song that can feel with me. And as good as some of these other songs are, I don’t feel with them like I do with Kamikaze.

See you next year, I guess.

#top 10 #top 10 list #top 10 best hits of 2018 #year end countdown #panda posts #positive review #pop song review

2 notes · View notes

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

10 Worst Hits of 2018!

I hate the 2018 hit list.

I hate all the artists we brought back. I hate all the new ones we got. I hate the fact that Lil Peep kicked the bucket without getting on the hot 100 but XXXfuckassaton got three hits. I hate that nothing off of Kamikaze reached the year end hot 100 despite it being one of the only good hip-hop albums that dropped this year. I hate that we’re all alive and that Tumblr has banned porn. But life goes on.

Bad hit songs. Bing bang boom.

Fair warning, I’m gonna be hitting a lot of trigger topics including abuse, pedophilia and rape.

10. Lucid Dreams - Juice WRLD

Before I say anything, can I just point out that ‘Juice WRLD’ is one of the absolute worst rap names I’ve ever heard in my entire life.

Anyway, Lucid Dreams.

I feel like rap music has been having a lot of sad pathetic break-up songs lately. And this won’t be the last one, absolutely not. Pretty much everything about Lucid Dreams, much like a seizing, dying epileptic old man, is wriggling and frothing uselessly in a puddle of its own filth. With nothing to do but choke out on a mouthful of blood it can only try to scream weakly through a pool of foamy spit that’s settling towards the back of its throat. It’s sad in the same way that ASPCA commercials are sad, as opposed to how a good break-up song feels.

As Juice WRLD brokely copies the beat of Lil Uzi Vert’s smash hit XO Tour Llif3 from last year, and also randomly samples a song by Sting, he stumbles weakly through lyric after insipid lyric that sounds like it was written by a 13-year-old. I tried to find an example of specific bad lyrics but holy shit, I’d honestly be better off just putting the lyric genius page here, complete with verified translations of this lyrical xanax binge from our boy Juice WRLD himself.

It’s a break-up song, but it’s as whiny as one can get. With Juice WRLD claiming “evil girls have the prettiest face” (gag) and insisting the girl in this song “wants him dead”. His whimpery vocals don’t help any part of this droning septic tank that I can only describe as the closest similarity we’ll ever get between a song and the pokemon Muk.

Even the music video is just a shittier version of XO Tour Llif3, and while it’s honestly more interesting than the other 75% of rap videos, what does it really add? I can only imagine that whoever was directing it realized this song has literally nothing going for it other than the possibility that stoners and pill-poppers will mistake it for XO Tour Llif3 if they’re high enough and threw in some surrealist imagery with the excuse being that, well, it’s titled Lucid Dreams.

Really the most egregious thing about this song is that, in the lyric genius page, Juice WRLD goes on some tangent about how popping pills isn’t cool and he was popping pills “before it was cool” and now kids are doing it. Hey Hi-C, you know these kids look up to people like you, right? Why not actually make a song about how doing drugs is bad instead of just offhandedly mentioning how you used to pop pills to, quote, “feel a-okay”? Not that I’m assuming you ever thought of that when you were writing this, most likely dosed up on a gallon of cough syrup.

Then again, I dunno if I wanna be preached to by the man who wrote a song titled All Girls Are The Same.

A lot of songs this year were underwritten and boring. Lucid Dreams isn’t the worst offender, but it’s definitely the saddest. And I don’t think it was sad the way ol’ Juicy Juice was intending. Personally, I’d rather just drink the kool-aid.

Blurgh... Muk cannot change you... Muk must replace you...

9. Meant to Be - Bebe Rexha ft. Florida Georgia Line

Is it bad that I honestly wasn’t sure who was the feature and who was the headline of this song?

Anyway, here we have Florida Georgia Line returning for another year of meathead bro-country crap and Bebe Rexha returning for another year of having literally no personality whatsoever with a song that has so little substance it may as well just be air.

I’ve never really extrapolated my thoughts on Bebe, mostly because she’s a complete and utter non-presence in every track she appears on. I honestly didn’t even realize she had a music career of her own, I felt like she just existed to feature on everyone else’s shitty music. What the hell is she gonna sing about besides the damn factory she was built in?

I’ve also never extrapolated my thoughts on Florida Georgia Line.

Here’s what I’m imagining their brains look like:

Yeah. So a combination between two walking cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a literal sex robot. What can go wrong? Well. Everything.

With a title like Meant to Be, you’d think it’s about running screaming into a relationship because you know it’s gonna work. Not so, as it’s actually about staying relaxed in a relationship. We got time, right? At least that’s what like, 75% of it is about that.

Bebe seems more than ready to rush in and get sloppy, but you think Florida Georgia Line are 100% ready to enter a steady relationship with a dead person? I wouldn’t be.

The production is just a piano and some sad trap drums, so basically every other Florida Georgia Line song. It has nothing going for it other than maybe masturbating to the music video and Bebe’s sweet, sweet inflatable titties trying desperately to crawl their way out of her country girl flannel.

And that’s really it.

You tried.

(Or did you?)

8. Friends - Marshmello ft. Anne-Marie

Aww! They’re so cute.

Marshmello is kind of a cryptid to me. I never really understood the whole trend of producers and DJs wearing these weird things on their head. And part of me, well, all of me feels like Marshmello rides purely on quirkiness alone.

Look at him! He’s so wacky!

The production on this isn’t bad per se, other than this high-pitched squeal they drop into the final chorus, but it’s definitely not great and kinda has me wondering why Marshmello is basically producer of the year despite not doing anything much more interesting than all the other producers. At best he has a little bit more energy behind him.

Anne-Marie has apparently, allegedly existed before this year, but I have literally no recollection of any song by her. But if this song is anything to go by, she’s annoying and sucks.

Friends touts itself as “the friendzone anthem” and tries to be relatable to teenage girls who’ve had to friendzone a boy, and if I had to guess this is sort of in response to all the friendzone songs from 2016 like Treat You Better. This would be fine except 1. you’re two years late, 2. nobody wants to hear a friendzone anthem and 3. this song is the highest level of cuntiness anyone can comprehend.

Here’s the thing about the concept of the friendzone. Nobody sits around wanting to friendzone people. Nobody is chilling in their bedroom with their friends wishing they could have a friend who has a crush on them and then that friend is like “I like you” so they can be like “uhh we’re just friends”.

Which is why we don’t really need an anthem for it.

The friendzone sucks. It’s not even a real problem, dudes just make it a problem because apparently being friends isn’t good enough for them. Nobody wants to have a friend who’s crushing on them, nobody’s happy about that. And the catty Mean Girls tone that Anne-Marie takes to it makes it seem like she’s a strong independent woman trouncing on the hearts of men like some kind of TERF horse when really nobody feels that way when having to “friendzone” a person.

Plus judging by the lyrics, this guy is showing up at 2 AM in the rain. At some point you need to stop being friends when he starts obsessively stalking you, maybe a few words to consider would be R-E-S-T-R-A-I-N-I-N-G O-R-D-E-R.

Women have the right to see their male friends as just that. But nobody is proud of having to do it. It’s not a point of pride, it’s just a choice people make, like what shirt they wanna wear in the morning. Trying to sell it as some kind of bootleg female empowerment anthem is pathetic.

Also I swear to god she spells friends as “F-R-I-N-D-S” in the chorus.

“We’re just frinds, Deadmau5.”

7. Yes Indeed - Lil Baby and Drake

Who the good god damn is Lil Baby? I’d never actually heard of him until someone in my music history class gave us a presentation on Lil Baby and how cool he is. I’d literally never heard of the guy before, because I never really listen to any of these hits until the end of the year.

Turns out Lil Baby is just another mumble-rapper, this time jacking his style from Young Thug. Color me surprised, I guess. How come none of the mumble rappers I actually like came back this year? No Desiigner, no Lil Uzi Vert, no Lil Xan? No. Fuck you. You get Juice WRLD and Lil Baby, two of the worst rap names on the planet.

He’s on the list of rappers made famous by Drake, and Drake had a monster year this year. Even with me living in a hole I knew the impact God’s Plan had, but apparently all 25 of his crummy songs charted at some point. That is 25 monotonous Drake songs circulating through the radio stations, 25 Drake songs constantly weighing on the shoulders of the collective public, and 25 Drake songs even his detractors probably knew all the words to just through exposure. Even I’m sick of the guy, and I have Hotline Bling on my Google Play Music library.

Yes Indeed is honestly void of things to say about it. Drake is boring, Lil Baby has one of the worst voices in recent history I can think of, the beat is nothing, it’s just a nothing song. The only noteworthy thing about it is that Lil Baby references Pikachu, a big mistake, as Young Thug also referenced Pikachu on one of his first hits. Though I’ll admit a yellow car has more similarities to the electric mouse pokemon than diamonds do.

What bothers me about this song is less the song itself, as the song is a non-presence, but moreso that in a world where streaming has finally seeped its way into the Hot 100, we have come to the conclusion that this is what people want to hear. They wanna hear Yes Indeed. And I just don’t get it.

Also, “waah waah waah, bitch I’m a baby”. High art.

6. Te Bote - A whole shitload of people

I feel like Spanish reggaeton has been an on-and-off interest of the American public. But it really reached a head recently thanks to Despacito, which all Alexa memes aside, is a great fucking song. But the fruits of its labor have been less than impressive, from last year’s goat-screeching jam Mi Gente to whatever the hell this is.

It’s nice knowing that foreigners write music as shitty as we do.

The title, Te Bote, roughly translates to “I dump you”. But it can be read much harsher in Spanish as bote is often the verb people use to describe tossing out garbage. And boy, is this song... uh... you know.

I don’t like to barf out the word “misogyny” constantly just because, well, anything can be misogynistic if you look deep enough. There’s a point where even I, the ratty little feminist I am, just don’t care. But Jesus, referring to your woman as garbage in the most backhanded way is... wow.

But I’ll be honest, being an English speaking moron, I don’t care about the lyrics. My problems run much deeper than blatant misogyny and pettiness.

Namely that this song sounds like ass.

Te Bote has six artists on it. Six artists, and not a single one sounds good. Most of them are squealy. I don’t actually know who’s who except Ozuna and Bad Bunny. Ozuna is considered one of the worst Spanish artists of today, and I can see why, because he just straight-up sounds like the lovechild of Akon and Lloyd.

As for Bad Bunny, I was slightly more drawn in by him because he looks like a cross between Blackbear and Pitbull, and I dunno if he’s dropped any other better singles, but on this he straight-up sounds like Barney the Dinosaur. Not as much as Lil Yachty, but still. Most of the others sound like autotuned mice, but there’s one guy who tries some kind of low-voiced speed-rapping and it sounds weird and wrong. The production is nothing notable, and uses the bum, bum-bum drumline of literally every reggaeton and Spanish pop song including Despacito.

And I could forgive all of that.

But let’s look at this for a moment. Each artist has their own verse. That’s six verses. Six verses plus five choruses, one pre-chorus, an intro and an outro. And how much does that add up to?

Nearly seven minutes.

Seven minutes of the same beat. Seven minutes of basically the same kinds of singers. Seven minutes of misogynistic lyrics. Seven minutes of garbage, garbage, garbage. Imagine listening to this whole thing. There are people on this earth who have actually sat through this whole garbage song multiple times and thought, “yeah. I like this.”

I mean of course Te Bote barely got any radio play, it’s nearly 7 minutes long with no breaks. So obviously some massive group of people had to be streaming it and listening to it by choice.

5. Taste - Tyga ft. Offset

Remember Tyga? He was one of the Young Money rappers that didn’t completely fall off after the 2000′s, along with Nikki Minaj and Drake. But after he put out $timulated, a song about how he fucked a 17-year-old Kylie Jenner but, in the words of Slim Shady, “look at her bush: do it got hair?”

we all dropped him, because that’s fucking gross. Kylie Jenner dumped him and is now dating someone else, I forget who because I don’t care. And with us having to deal with 6ix9ine I was comfortable leaving Tyga in the wastelands.

Honestly? The only reason this song is even here is because it’s a return Tyga single. I’m not even mad about Freaky Friday, because like, whatever, it made me laugh like a stupid idiot, but this? We asked for this. A Tyga single in 2018, about nothing, with a nothing beat, and Offset still bragging that he’s the best member of Migos when that’s like being the twinkiest member of One Direction. And once again, people actively wanted to hear this song about nothing in a year full of songs about nothing that, at the very least aren’t by pedophiles.

I don’t even wanna talk about this anymore.

4. I’m Upset - Drake

Me fucking too.

Like I said, Drake dropped 25 songs on his new album Scorpion, and all of them became hits. The worst of which, in my opinion, being I’m Upset. Just look at that title. That’s how your father talks to you when you slam a window open with a baseball and he walks through the glass shards.

This one has backstory, my favorite, longtime rival Pusha-T stated in some song that Drake actually had a secret child with a porn star and was planning on using that kid for like, an Adidas sponsorship or something. Which is fucked up. And at least part of that has been confirmed on Drake’s end, he did have a secret son with a porn star.

And then Scorpion and I’m Upset dropped. And it sucked. All of it.

The chorus of I’m Upset is weirdly catchy, but the beat is like every other Drake beat, Drake himself sounds about as upset as he can convey, which is very little, and it’s all just really really boring soundwise. When Drake goes on for long enough he begins to just sound like a bunch of bees. Bees, bees, bees, nothing but bees. And I’m tired of Drake bees! I’m sick of it! I don’t want anymore!

Anyway, lyrically the gist of I’m Upset is about how Drake doesn’t like paying alimony, and NO.

BAD DRAKE! BAD! BAD RAPPER! GO TO YOUR ROOM!

You do not get to be a world-famous rapper with fuckillions of dollars to your name and get to whine and bitch about paying alimony to your baby mama. You don’t get to roll on the floor whimpering about how your evil harpy whore of a porn star one-night-stand is (legally) receiving money from you to take care of the son that YOU ditched.

You had 25 hits this year. 25. And you’re getting pissy because you have to pay and I quote fifty to a hundred thousand dollars child support. For you that should be nothing. You are practically drowning in money, and if you really don’t wanna pay child support you could, I dunno, raise your goddamn son instead of leaving him in the hands of someone who probably barely makes a fraction in a year of what you make in a month?

Look, say what you want about Eminem. At least he was a good father on record, and if he isn’t a good one in real life I’ll be very very shocked.

I’m upset too, Drake.

3. Roll in Peace - Kodak Black ft. XXXTENTACION

I fUCKING HATE KODAK BLACK

Might wanna consider writing stuff down, Kodes.

May I call you Kodes?

Anyway, Roll In Peace is the only song on this list that isn’t ACTUALLY in the Year End Hot 100, but I couldn’t just let it slide. Not when it’s a collab beween Kodak Black and XXX. Not when it sounds like ass and feels like being shot.

If Drake sounds like bees then Kodak sounds like mosquitos, right in your ear, in the deepest parts that can only be reached by one of those earwax slurping tools. The beat has that flute again, probably because it’s half of what made Tunnel Vision famous. (The other half being controversy of course.) X’s verse has like, two lines to do with the actual plot of this song. And what is the plot?

Oh, poor pitiful Kodak can’t roll in peace. Poor Kodak Black can’t have any time to himself! The media is just all over him and X for no reason whatsoever! He’s never done anything wrong, other than, oh I don’t know, the rape allegations? The abuse? Armed robbery? Assault? That one time X nearly killed a gay dude in prison for no reason other than the gay part?

Yeah, fuck you.

You can’t “roll in peace” because you don’t have the right to anymore. You are a bad person. And X, when he was alive, was a bad person too. Sure maybe he was claiming to be working on self-improvement, but the only way I’d believe it is if I saw it, and it’s too late for that now.

As long as you refuse to apologize, you will not “roll in peace”. As long as you don’t see that you have done something wrong and continue to blame it on systemic racism which is a very real thing that you continue to trivialize again and again so you can avoid your rape allegations, you aren’t allowed to have any peace in your goddamn fucking life.

You can’t try to deflect it on Lil Uzi who posts Satanic imagery on his Instagram despite wearing a Jesus piece. You don’t get to deflect. You get nothing, and you deserve to go broke and fuck off.

There’s a joke I can make, but it’s too soon.

2. Gummo - 6ix9ine

Oh, okay, I can do this.

Uh, Gummo is this really good movie directed by Harmony Korine about some kids in this town that was totally wrecked by a tornado. And after that everything’s in shambles, so these kids can just do whatever they wa...

Oh. Oh dammit.

GOD IS DEAD GOD IS DEAD GOD IS DEAD.

So imagine you’re me looking at the Hot 100 for one of the very first times about a year ago, and you see a song titled after one of your favorite flicks of all time. And sure, it’s being sung by a guy who looks like a Lisa Frank condom, but god you just love that movie so much. And sure, Nicole Dollanganger has already made songs referencing that movie, but you want MORE.

Then you play it and it has literally nothing to do with it.

It’s loud and obnoxious and stupid and has a very clearly hispanic dude dropping the n-word like he fucking owns it. He’s just screaming these nonsense lyrics about nothing. And it’s not like I just don’t get songs with screaming. I have the entirety of Carcass’ Reek of Putrefaction on my phone. But this? This sucks. It sucks! The beat doesn’t fit at all and no matter how I look at it it wouldn’t fit anywhere else, and 6ix9ine’s flow is the death of all art. The only thing he can do, much like a child in a well, is scream and scream and scream and it’s horrible.

And trust me.

This was far before I knew of 6ix9ine’s baggage.

In case you don’t know somehow, this Rainbow Brite little fucker was actually convicted of filming a sex tape of a 13-year-old. While I don’t think he actually had sex with her, he was at some level sexually involved with her.

How did we respond? We gave the ugly fucker a hit. And his hit was this. Where he directly references his sexual involvement with this 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL.

He doesn’t give a shit. And he knows his fans don’t either. He continues to release low-effort garbage music, and in an interview about FEFE he even openly stated that he doesn’t put any effort into writing lyrics. He doesn’t try, he’s a bad person, and his blind fanbase continues to shower him in money like he deserves it.

We’re idiots.

An awful song made by an awful person. The only way to hold a candle to it would be, well, an even worse song made by an awful person.

Anyway, dishonorable mentions.

FEFE - 6ix9ine ft. Nikki Minaj

This song sucks too. And Nikki Minaj should be ashamed for working with this fuckhead.

God’s Plan - Drake

I’m almost definitely a minority in absolutely loathing this song, but I can’t stand it. It’s not structured, there’s no flow to it, it just feels like a whole lot of nothing with no point. And while I will give it to Drake that throwing money at homeless people is a really good thing regardless of why he did it, it was still a super obvious publicity stunt.

Plug Walk - Rich The Kid

Boring.

Girls Like You - Maroon 5 ft. Cardi B

Also boring. My tolerance for Maroon 5 has lasted way longer than anyone else’s, but I think it’s about time we let them go.

I Like Me Better - Lauv

I’ll be honest, the only part of this song I really hate is the weird synth interludes. The singing is fine, the content is fine, it’s all the perfect level of mediocre without that violin fart synth.

No Brainer - The ‘I’m The One’ crew, but we replaced Wayne with an actual baby

Really just an even less interesting version of I’m The One, but without Li’l Wayne. Also Justin Bieber kind of looks like a trucker now, and I hate to say it, but that’s the most attractive he’s ever been in my opinion.

Freaky Friday - Li’l Dicky ft. Chris Brown

I’ll be honest, I actually love this song. It’s funny to me, I mean, maybe I’m a simple-minded man, but a good dick joke can send me off the rails. But I’m still at least a little miffed that we’re letting Chris Brown have money, so it gets a mention.

Gucci Gang - Li’l Pump

It would be here if it wasn’t also a hit last year. Consider this a placeholder for any crossover hits I didn’t like, like Mi Gente, Perfect, Believer, and Sorry Not Sorry.

Let’s do number one. And if you know me, you know what this is. If you don’t, don’t just immediately get pissed with me when you read it. Okay? We’re good here? Alright.

1. SAD! - XXXTENTACION

So here’s a fun little sobstory for you. Less than a year ago, my boyfriend introduced me to this great artist. They were in a really oversaturated genre but doing something completely different with it, and I fell in love immediately with their dark topics, interesting production, cool music videos, and general aesthetic. And their name was not XXXTENTACION, it was Melanie Martinez.

Late last year she was pressed with a rape allegation, and one that couldn’t be proved either way. Desperately I scraped through the bowels of the internet in search of something that could disprove it and came back largely empty-handed and wounded. Because Melanie’s music meant a lot to me, and I do mean that. I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t sure what to do knowing that a person I’d based my own aesthetic, my own writing, my art, and my music on would do something like that. I tried to force myself not to listen to her music, but it just wasn’t possible.

Over time the wound scabbed up and closed and I finally gave up and decided to split the art from the artist, feeling like at the very least I wasn’t directly giving her any money by downloading her music on Google Play. But I’ll still never be able to get back the way she used to make me feel.

So what I’m saying is, I get it.

I’ve actually gone and listened to a few of X’s songs on my own before doing this. And I put myself in the mind of me a year ago discovering a new artist without those preconceptions. And I felt it. I don’t know how, but I did. I felt it. I listened to Look At Me, and I felt like if I’d heard it before I knew what X had done, I’d probably love it. Sure the production is a fucking disaster but the lyrics are just the kind of shock rap that entertains me. The production on Moonlight is really interesting and while I didn’t think Changes was very good and kind of guilt trippy, I could definitely understand it.

But then I circled back around to SAD!

And I lost it.

Something about this song just kills all the good will I might have ever had for this kid or his fans. And really it’s all because of one line, and everyone probably knows what that line is already.

So according to lyric genius this line might not actually mean what I think it means and could potentially be referring to X’s friend Jocelyn Flores, who took her own life tragically. And though on X’s song about her and every time he addresses her he seems to make it all about himself, he really did seem wounded by it. He seemed like a wounded, mentally fucked-up person who needed help.

Except that this song is about Geneva.

The girlfriend he allegedly abused.

The girlfriend who was pregnant, who he abused, and judging by this line, who he is now performing the age-old manipulation tactic of threatening suicide if she ever leaves on.

When I remove this song from context, there’s no way of excusing that line. The rest of it I can understand, and he really does seem emotional in the verses, and I know we’ve all been in a place at some point of being somehow spurned by a lover and still missing them in spite of it. But to threaten suicide if they try to leave is inexcusable.

His voice sounds fine, and the beat is once again stolen from XO Tour Llif3, but there’s a point where I can’t really care about it. Because children do listen to this kind of music. And along with Melanie Martinez, this song brings me back to when I was young and one of my favorite songs was What The Hell by Avril Lavigne. A song about cheating on your S/O and not seeing a problem with it. My sister and I would sing and dance to that song all the time, so much that I never really realized what it was about, or that there was anything wrong with it. Not until I was an adult and I looked back on it. And wouldn’t you know it, children can sing along to SAD! too.

I know X is dead. And I know it’s not my business to dictate how people should feel about things. Geneva deserves the right to be sad about X’s death, and she forgives him, even though I really don’t. But the way people have treated her especially after X died is inexcusable, and it’s in part because he wrote songs like this. He didn’t just manipulate her. He manipulated everyone. Every single one of his fans probably really did think he would kill himself if his girlfriend left her. And yes, X is on record having thoughts of suicide, I would never take that from someone.

I used to have a close friend who would feign a panic attack every time someone criticized him. It felt like he was threatening suicide once a week. And I always supported him because I cared about him. It was exhausting. I ostracized people because they knew he was a bad person. I shut people, good people, out of my life because they wanted to help, and I said bad things to them. Eventually we fell out and I was left cold and alone with nobody left to take me back, and I slugged through mud for a year just to pick myself back up.

I can imagine that’s kind of what being an XXXTENTACION fan is like.

And like me, with any luck, they’ll regret saying the things they did too.

That’s all for this year. I’ll get to the best when I have more energy, but now I just can’t.

#panda posts #top 10 #worst hits of 2018 #top 10 worst hits of 2018 #pop song review #negative review

11 notes · View notes

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

yall better get ready for some worst and best lists

-Mod Panda

#panda posts #not a review

3 notes · View notes

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

“Look What You Made Me Do” by Taylor Swift

Well, it was only a matter of time.

Hey y’all, it’s Mod Birdie, and for my first post on this blog, I’ll be covering a song that more talented people have already torn to shreds. Yes, I am fully aware that this song is widely hated, and has been reviewed and dragged through the dirt since it first came out. But here I posit a revolutionary idea.

What if this song...

isn’t that bad?

Oh god wait no please don’t leave.

It sucks. A lot. But certain aspects of it don’t suck as much, and honestly, that’s what makes it as bad as it is.

Let me explain.

Let’s just touch on the backstory, just so you can understand where this piece of shit came from. Kanye included a line about making Taylor famous in his song “Famous”, she got pissed, everyone sided with her, and then holy SHIT Kim K. West posts a video of Kanye on the phone with one Taylor Swift, notifying her of the lyric and gaining her whole-hearted support. Down comes Taylor, toppling down from the tower of victimhood she’s been building brick by brick since the 2009 VMAs.

So now Taylor is not the victim, but the villain. The manipulative, snakey, lying... this is getting off-track. Point is, she can no longer put forth her image of wholesome pop-country singer (that had already started to disappear following the release of Bad Blood).

Look What You Made Me Do is like Bad Blood except without the enjoyably cheesy video. It is, for lack of a better word, cringey.

Let’s start with the video, shall we?

We open on an overhead shot of a graveyard, where eagle-eyed viewers will spot T-Swizzle’s initials spelled out with gravestones. The old Taylor is dead, guys. This is the new Taylor. It’s not a phase, this is who she really is, and you totally just don’t get it, Mom!!

The music, right when it starts, is... well, remember how I said this song wasn’t all that bad? This is where that comes into play.

The very first instrument we hear is some sort of stringed instrument being plucked in staccato (or possibly a music box being played), giving it kind of a horror-movie vibe right off the bat. In the background are... violins? Cellos? Violas? Again, some sort of string instrument, playing long, low notes, also adding to the aforementioned creepy vibe.

Whatever that instrument is, I’m a sucker for it. I actually like the opening - it almost sounds like we’re gonna hear some twisted lullaby. If this came on the radio, and I had no idea what was about to follow, I’d be at least a little interested in what might follow. Unfortunately, what follows is this.

Don’t look at me like that, you brought this on yourself.

The almost-interesting opening is replaced with a painfully basic electronic beat (kick-SNARE-kick-kick-SNARE) that goes on, and on, and on... under Taylor’s, er, rapping.

Okay, it’s not exactly rapping, just like how this isn’t exactly a diss track. It’s more of a “sing-talk” kind of thing - you know, what Kesha used to be ridiculed for. But while Kesha’s almost-rap was fun, enjoyable and harmlessly trashy, this is a pain to sit through. Kesha never tried to pretend she had any street cred or acted like we had to take her seriously. Taylor is different. Taylor wants us to know that she’s very, very serious and very badass and you really shouldn’t fuck with her. Taylor can beat you up. She takes karate.

The lyrics seem to imply that she was forced into the role of the “bad guy” and we should all be sorry for her, but that doesn’t work well when she’s also trying to lean into the villainous image.

Now, is what I meant about it having parts that didn’t suck, and how those parts make it suck more. The pre-chorus returns mercifully to the theme from the intro (and to actual singing), giving us a satisfying buildup, hyping us up for the payoff, and...

OOOH, LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO! YOU MADE ME DO THIS THIS IS ON YOU

The whole song grinds to a halt, the beat comes back in full force, and Taylor has abandoned all pretense of singing, deciding that she will now subject us to genuine rapping. It’s like going up, up, up on a roller coaster, preparing yourself for the drop, looking over the ledge, then falling two feet and running head-first into a brick wall. And that’s a gentle way of putting it.

And so the song continues on and on just like that, with the bridge being kind of a break. But here’s something I want to touch on that appears specifically in the music video.

The Taylor Team. The Swifty Squad. The Victim, uh... I can’t think of a synonym for “group” that starts with a V.

What is this. Why. Why would you put this in. It’s campy and dumb and makes you look like a worse actor than we already know you are. Were you trying to seem like a manipulative puppetmaster, two steps ahead of all the normies? Cause it’s not worth it.

In conclusion, Taylor Swift is not smart, she is not ahead of the game, and she is not good at writing electronic music. What else is new.

#mod birdie #taylor swift #look what you made me do #music review #music reviews #long post #song review

5 notes · View notes

earwaxinggibbous · 5 years

Text

“Teens of Denial” is the least good Car Seat Headrest Album (and here’s why...)

On May 20th of 2016, Teens of Denial was released, and it stands to be one of the only Car Seat Headrest albums to reach a mainstream audience. The original Twin Fantasy had a cult following, but nothing quite like Teens of Denial did. And, frankly, unless they make a Teens of Denial 2 or something, I wouldn’t be surprised if Car Seat Headrest never quite reaches that level of moderate fame again.

I don’t feel like reviewing it, but let it be known that Teens of Denial is a pretty solid album with some fun, interesting songs on it.

It’s also proof that Will Toledo knows his audience a little too well.

For the record, my first Car Seat Headrest album was the 2018 edition of Twin Fantasy. It was poignant and personal, and I actually had to listen to it twice over to really parse any of it. It took months more for me to really discover all of the layers that went into it. Almost every Car Seat Headrest album is like that, deeply self-referential with lots of other concepts thrown in. Twin Fantasy even has bible verses of all things in it, along with art gallery information clips, monologues, life stories that only pretty serious fans would get, and Andy Katz rapping.

With this, however, comes an unforeseen issue, which is that arguably, Car Seat Headrest’s music is so personal that it lacks accessibility to new fans. With its 16-minute power ballads and lyrics that only make sense if you spend like, ten hours on lyric genius. To pre-existing fans, this stuff is beyond welcome, but obviously if you’ve never heard a Car Seat Headrest song in your life, you’d be lost as shit.

Teens of Denial drove to fix that, and ultimately undid all of my favorite things about Car Seat Headrest’s music.

A lot of things about Teens is different from their earlier albums. One of the only really acceptable ones is that it’s recorded with better quality, though I’m pretty sure they were able to do that before Teens. But the most glaring issue with Teens is how impersonal, how just not Car Seat Headrest it is. It’s like the skeleton of a Car Seat Headrest album, but completely lacking in the stylistic meat.

And, arguably, that’s why it is so popular. Which is upsetting.

Teens is what I consider to be the gateway album to other Car Seat Headrest works. You know the basic gist of who Will Toledo is and what he does, and now you can dive deeper. Teens is the early diagnosis, but everything else is the surgery. But oftentimes it’s the only Car Seat Headrest album a person will ever know, even though it’s really just a facsimile of a real Car Seat Headrest album.

In essence, Teens of Denial wasn’t just made to be more accessible. It was made to be more popular. Sort of like MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular, though not nearly as transparent about it.

Every decision made that separates Teens from their other works is in favor of being more comprehensible to new fans, less intimidating, even. So let’s start with the smaller stuff, the structural stuff, and then get more serious and move into the lyrics. Mainly I’ll be comparing this to Twin Fantasy (Face to Face), as that’s the one I know best.

First off, there’s the lack of varying song lengths. Obviously, Teens of Denial doesn’t have the feelsy 200-year long emotional car rides that Twin Fantasy did. They’re hard to pick up and listen to, which I can confirm, as Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) was my first Car Seat Headrest album and took me three separate listens to finish because “Beach Life-in-Death” and “Famous Prophets (Stars)” were just too daunting for me.

However what surprises me is that they also cut all of the super-short songs. If you know me, you know that “Stop Smoking (We Love You)” is my favorite song off of either iteration of Twin Fantasy. I also particularly enjoy “Drunk on a Work Night”, another short song. (If we’ve even spoken for two minutes, you probably know I love songs that are just yelling.)

Aside from “Battle of the Costa Concordia”, which clocks in at 11 and a half minutes, and “Joe Goes to School”, which is only a minute long, the song lengths on Teens of Denial are largely similar. Keep in mind that the song length standards for most indie bands are kind of weird, and Car Seat Headrest doesn’t really exist within the average concept of what is a “long” or “short” song. For them, below 4 minutes is short, and only when it passes I’d say 9 minutes would I consider it long. Pretty much all of the songs on Teens fall into this 4-to-8 minute mark.

That doesn’t sound important, but part of what helps build the sort of narrative of every Car Seat Headrest album is the song length. It’s a lot like life, some moments feel only a second long, and others feel an eternity. With Teens, it doesn’t really have that. The time dilation expressed by “Drugs With Friends” is the same as that of “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales”, and so forth.

Another notable missing piece on the album is the lack of SFX, filters, or alternate audio recordings. Mostly because Twin Fantasy was absolutely FULL of these, from the weird glimmering sound effects and story of The Lady on “High to Death”, the sort of old telephone filter at the very beginning of “Nervous Young Inhumans”, all of Will’s monologues, a goofy rap number from drummer and 1TraitDanger frontman Andy Katz on Bodys.

Teens doesn’t really have much of that. (It’s there, but very little.) Plus it’s largely lacking in the quirky, personalized asides that Twin Fantasy had. Here’s some cute examples:

I think one of my nameable issues with Teens of Denial is how intentional it feels. You look at Twin Fantasy, or How to Leave Town, or ESPECIALLY the really old janky shit like Monomania and Disjecta Membra, it listens more like it’s Will having a conversation with himself. Or like he’s telling a story to an old high school friend. Teens of Denial really does feel like he’s reading it out of a notebook where he wrote the lyrics down. It’s all predetermined.

And that’d be fine if it were anyone else. But for a goddamn Car Seat Headrest album, it’s way too calculated. Not to mention it’s very rarely funny. Which yes, oftentimes, the other albums were funny. At least when it made sense. A few of Teens’ lines have a bit of humor, namely in Drugs With Friends and Destroyed by Hippy Powers, but it’s remarkably stagnant. And this bugs me because humor was part of what made the other albums feel real. If you have depression, it’s horrible, yeah, but for whatever reason we automatically shift into telling jokes about it.

In essence, the greatest crime of Teens of Denial is that it doesn’t feel like an album by a man who has depression. It feels like an album about a man who has depression. It’s impersonal, but only by the standards of Car Seat Headrest. By god, if this was a Twenty One Pilots album or something I’d probably be shocked as shit by the talent displayed.

But for Car Seat Headrest?

No. It’s too disconnected, every little scintilla of their usual style is buried in really just vague, sad goop. And I can’t help but feel like it’s intentional, as this album dropped not long after Car Seat Headrest got a record deal with Matador. I have this itching feeling that this was Will’s attempt to punch into the mainstream by stripping away lyrical depth and replacing it with catchiness. Plus a vague, sad feeling that every teenager can look at and say, “I’ve been through that before. I’m a teen of denial.” Will Toledo is smart, so I doubt he just didn’t know.

And in comparison to all of their other albums, it just feels hollow, even if it’s technically still really good.

That’s why I believe Teens of Denial is the least good Car Seat Headrest album.

-Panda

#and here's why #car seat headrest #teens of denial #panda posts #analytical

6 notes · View notes

earwaxinggibbous · 6 years

Text

“Congratulations” VS. “Started From The Bottom”

Started as a bottom, now my whole team’s fuckin’ rears.

Self-aggrandizing rap and hip-hop anthems have existed since the genre was invented. It’s just a really nice, friendly way of saying, “hey! I’m better than you.” Generally speaking, whoever is on the track should have the power and clout behind them to make all of the bragging seem warranted. A great example is Eminem’s Rap God, which has a chorus that literally has Eminem saying he’s beginning to feel like a rap god. And we buy it, because hell, Eminem basically IS a rap god. Regardless of how you feel about him, especially as a person, there’s no arguing that his flows and style require an insane amount of skill. (Or at least, they used to.)

The other big rule, once again using Rap God as an example, as that the song should actually be good. Because if you’re bragging about being the coolest rapper with the most chains and bitches while rapping like complete shit, your point is pretty much moot. When Eminem speed-raps in Rap God, it’s essentially the proof that he is in fact the man named in the title.

There’s only one real problem with these songs when it comes to audience reception: They’re not relatable to anybody except other rich rappers and musicians. Which can be kind of a problem since that’s not really who the music industry is aiming to please. So in somewhat recent times we’ve been getting a different flavor of self-aggrandizing rap. Songs that, instead of saying “I’m super great”, they say, “Hey, I started from humble beginnings and worked my way to the top, and now I’m super great”. Which gives us viewers the idea of this sort of achievable dream that is nearly within arm’s reach.

Enter two very, very different hip-hop artists, at two very different times.

Drake and Post Malone, in my opinion, are both pretty good, in my opinion.

Let’s start with Drake. Drake feels at least a little more like a “real rapper” than Post does. Maybe because he was on Young Money, or because he doesn’t have that sing-songy flow that Post does, but he just feels more like somebody I’d describe as a rapper. If I had any reason, I’d say it’s because Post Malone’s music, even his ego-boosting shit, tends to sound stoned or morose the bulk of the time. Drake’s voice isn’t much fun either, but at least I can believe his ego based on his vocal tones alone. Post has a tendency to sound really, really sad, or just super high.

Now one might say, “Panda, you can’t compare these two songs. Started from the Bottom precedes Congratulations by four years.” But the reason I’m making this comparison is that, despite Drake being considered the superior artist by nearly everyone, Congratulations is basically the better version of its predecessor.

Let’s discuss this.

Now for one thing, I fucking hate the music video of Started from the Bottom. Not because it’s that bad, though depicting “working at a drug store” as “the bottom” is pretty fucking stupid, the video itself does a pretty good basic job at getting across what it wants. I just hate the skit.

I remember pulling up the song on YouTube and thinking, Jesus, this song is 5 fucking minutes long? Half the lyrics are just the title. Relax, past Panda, one minute of that video is a stupid skit that shows up randomly before the second chorus. A full fucking minute of two of Drake’s coworkers, not even Drake himself, but two of his coworkers at Duane Reade or something ogling some woman who’s checking out of the store. It’s not funny, it doesn’t really add anything, and the two guys can’t act. Drake’s body language is awkward and goofy in the music video, I doubt he’d be a great actor either, but that’s fine, he’s just the guy who made the song. Most of what he needs to do is lipsync along to the track and wave his hands around anyway. But the two guys are in a skit, an acted skit that requires acting to happen, and they suck.

It doesn’t help that it’s interrupting what is already one of the most monotonous songs that the lord hath graciously dumped on top of our collective consciousness like a weighty cow turd. The video actually tries to help the song by making it look like Drake really did work a crappy job with a bunch of assholes and was raised in a shitheap. But this isn’t true.

And I hate bringing the lives of artists into their music more than anything. Because ever since really getting into Eminem’s works, I’ve been seeing every musician’s persona as a character. Now some musicians characters, like say, Mary Lambert, are very close to their real-world self, or even identical. Others, like David Bowie or the aforementioned Eminem, are essentially entirely different people offstage. Then there’s incredibly creative people like ThatPoppy who sort of blur the difference between a musical persona and the person behind it. And honestly I find that way more interesting than ripping into an artist personally. (Unless it’s Taylor Swift.)

But Started from the Bottom is an argument against critics who don’t believe Drake ever really suffered or understands the lower class. And I’ve read about him, so I can say that he should. He wasn’t living in a complete shithole, generally Canadian shitholes are better than American ones, but he still dealt with a parental divorce, bullying due to his race and Jewish upbringing, and having to see his father arrested. But there’s two issues once we reach this point.

One. This song never mentions any of that. And two. After dropping out of school he got a TV job to act as a main character on Degrassi. And since this song isn’t about his childhood, I can only assume it’s looking back on his days as a working-class young adult.

NO, Drake. BAD hip-hop artist.

Being an actor on a TV sitcom is not the bottom. Not to mention that even when he left to start making music, he essentially had his career set. Once you’re an actor on television, if people watched your shit, you can almost definitely get a job in music afterwards. It worked for Miley, Demi, Ariana, and Selena, there’s no reason it wouldn’t have worked for Drake. Not to mention that he got picked up by Young Money, which is essentially a free win for anyone who’s better and more interesting than sentient iguana man Li’l Wayne. (Which was surprisingly rare, apparently. Where the fuck is Gudda Gudda’s next single, Wayne?!)

Yes, Drake, we know you weren’t rich. That doesn’t mean you were at the bottom. I live in a comfortable apartment in Midtown and my mom works a law firm, and we don’t even call ourselves rich. “Not being rich” is different from “the bottom”. “The bottom” is only owning hand-me-down underwear, living in a downturned umbrella and eating dirt for nutrients.

But lyrically this song doesn’t tell you anything. All the stuff I know about this guy is just from Lyric Genius and Wikipedia.

Wow, you only argue with your mom once a month?

Lucky bastard.

Also, really quickly I wanna comment on the uncle line for a second. “The keys” are specifically to his drop top Lexus that young Drake was borrowing. I don’t think you need me to say that people who are on “the bottom” don’t tend to own convertibles.

And, like, rich people work at night and get in traffic too. Just because you’re in a limousine doesn’t mean there’s no traffic. It’s just slightly more enjoyable traffic.

And then Drake just spends the rest of the song essentially sucking his own dick without expanding on his hardships, which was supposed to be the point of this track from the beginning. And I don’t get the whole “no new friends” thing he always says, this isn’t the only song he’s said it in. Drake, unless you’re gonna tell me that the entirety of Young Money and several other well-known rappers went to high school with you like some kind of wacky rap music-based sitcom, I’m pretty sure you’ve made some new friends. Either that or your obvious baby crush on Nicki Minaj is painfully laced by inconceivable amounts of mistrust.

So you’re either a paranoid asshole who just admitted to not trusting the people that got him into the game in the first place, or you’re a liar. Good to know!

Honestly this song makes me just kind of not like Drake as a person. Which is probably one of the worst things you can do as an artist. If you’re trying to make a song that allows people to sympathize with your plights or revel in your success, being this illegally unlikable while doing it isn’t helping your case in the slightest.

But honestly the worst part isn’t even the douchey lyrics, it’s just the song itself. It just feels like it goes on forever.

(Pictured: A hook, apparently.)

The chorus itself is so repetitive I’d rather listen to fucking Come and Get It, Drake has a really bad habit of sounding literally bored to death, and the beat just sounds like a Future song jacked off on GarageBand. Lame snares and lame backing tunes. One whole piano key. Wow, Drake, you’re almost as good at playing physical instruments as your mentor.

(Even he hates it.)

Sad to say the beat and production is probably the best part? Drake’s voice wrecks what was already a weak beat. Whenever he wants to be self-aggrandizing he just sounds fucking bored. Like the most self-aggrandizing thing about it is the fact that he doesn’t think he needs to actually try. In fact, The Motto (YOLO) had the exact same problem. I actually prefer that song. The beat still isn’t high art, but it’s got a little more snap to it. Kind of reminds me of Sage the Gemini’s Gas Pedal, which falls into the category of songs that aren’t that great but can be danced to if put on the setlist.

But this? It’s no fun. A hard 1 out of 5, and that’s only because its attempted premise was almost salvageable. But all I really got out of this song was that Drake is an asshole, he went to school with Lil Wayne apparently, his mom is really really nice since they only argue once a month, and he should just go back to desperately wishing his girlfriend would call him on his cell phone. You’re way better at being sad than--

Fucking... goddamnit.

Now Post Malone is kind of... different. In many ways. One time he said he doesn’t write rap music, and while normally I’d attribute that to him being a pussy who’s too afraid to contribute to what is and has always been a predominantly black genre and racism and he secretly doesn’t wanna be associated with them or whatever. But honestly I’m inclined to give Post Malone some leeway because really, he’s a singer. He makes notes. He’s singing with a hip-hop flow and occasionally has actual rap guests who... honestly end up doing a similar thing on his tracks. (In this case, it’s Quavo! Hurray!)

Oddly enough I actually went through a few songs to compare this to before settling on Drake. I considered Cheap Thrills, as they both sort of follow a similar concept of ‘today’s a good day, let’s go clubbing with only three bucks in our collective pockets’. Decided not to because really Cheap Thrills could be more accurately compared to a myriad of other songs. Considered White Iverson, his first single, but decided they didn’t really have enough in common to use it. I had options.

Really the only reason I went with this is because Congratulations succeeds in every place that Started From The Bottom fails.

Rather than attempting to detail Post Malone’s past suffering, it moreso discusses the actual rise to fame. And alllll the people who said he couldn’t do it.

Beatwise this one outclasses Drake’s already. I remember reading critics describing Started’s beat as “haunting”, which was apparently a good thing. I don’t get it. Congratulations, on the other hand, is carried by a sort of stoned, laidback tempo. Really speaks to the whole idea of “hey, we worked really hard, our album dropped, and now we can take a break and have some fun!”

Honestly if Post Malone wrote more songs like this and less straight-up luxury porn/self-aggrandizing rap like White Iverson or rockstar. (I feel like I’m a minority in not really minding either one of those songs.) Also I must say that Post Malone seems to be really good at picking guest artists. On rockstar he has 21 Savage, whose big thing is that he’s gangsta and shoots people and don’t fuck with him, which at least fits into the attempted tone. (Honestly Sav fits better on that song than Post does.) And in Congrats, we get Quavo.

Not only do Quavo and Post sound really good together on this, as their vocal range seems somewhat similar implying some kind of bro-type unity shit. Honestly this song gives me more band vibes than rockstar does, albeit a very different kind.

You know, you just started your band, you’re waiting to hit it big, you’ve put in all this effort with barely any money, you��re living in a shitbag apartment with 4 other sweaty dudes and you all have to sleep together and Quavo keeps rolling over and shoving his nuts in your face. It’s completely garbage and your drummer has to whore himself out for money, you accidentally get paid for a gig in beer tickets like in that one episode of Metalocalypse, and then finally, FINALLY, you drop a tape that hits big. You get on TV, you meet a record exec, and you’re calling your mom during the afterparty and you’re all celebrating because it’s been so LONG since you could just have a BREAK and now everybody’s SAUCIN’.

EXACTLY.

The lyrics work perfectly for this, but not only that, it’s to show all of the naysayers who insisted they couldn’t do it. All the haters who are now suddenly super gung-ho about how they used to be friends with Post Malone even though they actually shoved him in a locker literally every day. This somehow manages to be super-laidback and super-hype at the same time, which seems to be Post’s general style. Candy Paint has sort of a similar feel. That’s also a fucking great song. I love Post Malone. There. I said it.

But the biggest difference between these two songs is that I somehow get some feeling that Post Malone started somewhere. When I hear Congratulations, I feel like he actually had to put in some effort to get where he is. His first big hit only even got released because somebody leaked it. Nobody was ever expecting it to be as big as it is. Stoney in general is an insanely personal album, and it all feels surprisingly honest for the genre despite the drops of luxury porn and self-aggrandizing.

Basically, TL;DR: Drake cares more about the destination than the journey. Post gives us both the conflict and they payoff. Drake’s beat lacks texture or purpose, whereas Post manages to meld his melodic voice with a smooth backing track. Also, Post occasionally bothers with wordplay! Lyricism in a melodic rap song? Who would’ve thought?

Hell, it even manages to fix the “no new friends” idea displayed by Drake by sort of re-interpreting it as “no fake friends”.

And fuck, I almost forgot to mention Quavo.

Oh Quavo. Your verse may be short, severely lacking in punchlines and technically mediocre, but you just... you sound good. You sound good with Post. Somehow Post fucking Malone manages to totally outclass one of the Migos on this track. But Quavo does pretty well. I kinda like the “Huncho Houdini” line and a few of the football puns. In the end his verse is a little too short to really judge as anything more than decent.

(Also, the music video is great.)

But yeah, who would’ve thought this white stoner with braided sideburns would manage to completely slam Drake, the god of the late 2010′s? I’m honestly tempted to give this thing a 5 out of 5, but due to a few not-rhymes that nearly slip past due to Post’s mild drunken slur, I’d have to drop it into a 4.5/5. Still, I love this song. I love this song, I love Post Malone, fuck it. Judge me if you want. I have yet to hear a Post Malone song I don’t like.

Which I guess doesn’t mean much since he only has an album and an LP out, but...

It’s more than can be said for Drake at this point.

#song vs song #post malone #drake #song review #panda posts #music criticism

3 notes · View notes

earwaxinggibbous · 6 years

Text

So I took it upon myself to listen to “Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz”, and...

It could be worse?

-Mod Panda

#panda posts #not a review #be fucking prepared though

0 notes

earwaxinggibbous · 6 years

Text

10 Songs that make Love/Sex Sound Like No Fun

Happy Vagina Day! I mean Happy Valentines Day!

[wipes brow]

What do you mean it’s the 15th???

Valentines Day has always been my least favorite holiday, even now when I can actually appreciate it as a taken man. I was never a very romantic person, as hard as I try, and a lot of the gushy crap forced down our throats around February is akin to being buttfucked with a tree branch. It’s like walking into a store and all of the workers are talking in uwu-speak.

Hewwo wewcome to Gwistedes dat wiww be 20 dowwaws! Cash oah cwedit?

But if February is good for one thing aside from overcoming your Winter Break Hangover, as a song critic, it’s a good time to talk about love songs. (And fuck songs, ‘cause there’s a lot of those.) But talking about songs that actually bring out powerful romantic feelings is absolutely no fun, because like I said, I’m not a romantic man. Wouldn’t it be much more fun to find love and sex songs that make the acts seem... really, really lame? So that’s what we’re doing.

Keep in mind that I don’t know every song on the planet, in fact, my scope is actually a very small, strange corner of the musical world. So if you have your own list, feel free to put it together and show me if you want! Go crazy.

Honorable mentions go to any songs that aren’t actually intended to be romantic or sexy. Stuff like The Nine Inch Nails’ Closer. Or Eminem’s Kim. If that’s your idea of love, well... you do you I guess. There’ll be more honorables later.

Nuuuumber 10!

Closer - The Chainsmokers ft. Halsey

I personally believe both of the artists involved in this are more sexually weak than Kevin from F is for Family. (And if you’ve watched the whole series you know exactly what I’m talking about. Also hit me the fuck up, I need someone to fanboy over that shit with.)

I like Halsey. I don’t think she’s amazing or anything. Oftentimes I feel like her greatest flaw as an artist is that she wants to do three things at once: Appeal to internet people who like stuff like Marina and Lana del Rey (eg. Colors), appeal to a mainstream that just likes regular easy-listening pop music (eg. New Americana), and also just do her own thing and talk about her own experiences (eg. Control and Gasoline). These things don’t really work that well together at times. New Americana is one of those times, I hate that song. Closer is another one of those times.

The Chainsmokers kind of improved by 2017, but for awhile they were putting out soulless crap like Don’t Let Me Down with all the excitement of a party that only consists of art students. Closer is also lame. But more than that it shows me two things: The first being that Andrew Taggart is an asshole, and the second being that the Chainsmokers don’t know how to write women and even Halsey’s halfway-decent voice and attempts at emotion can’t really fix it.

“Hey, I drink a lot. But everything was fine before we started dating, so it must be YOUR fault!”

Part of me almost feels like Taggart just really wants to fuck Halsey and so he wrote this song as an excuse, like it’s essentially the expensive version of a self-insert fanfic.

If the Chainsmokers are good at one thing, it’s lyrical detail. It worked in their favor in Paris, which is a song that I actually really love. All of the tiny details worked into it paint an insanely vivid picture of these two rich kids basically having some kind of one-night stand.

In Closer it does the complete opposite. I have a hard time believing that there’s any thought less sexy than fucking in the backseat of a range rover with a mattress in the trunk that belonged to your roommate, and they probably masturbated on it and how do you even have this car if you can’t afford it? Or is Taggart just being fucking presumptuous? Dammit, man.

Halsey plays this really pathetic character who left Taggart’s character based on looks alone, and is now regretting it because I guess the endless sexual draw of the weird long-headed guy from the Chainsmokers would make anyone change their mind. It paints Halsey’s character as pathetic, and that’s a character I have absolutely never wanted to see her play. Because her personality as a singer is kind of thin. When she’s playing a character who is aggressive and violently emotional, it works, but when in a role like this it feels like misuse of her actual talent. Kind of equivalent to when they got Eminem on that strip club song Shake That.

(He don’t get it. You don’t get it. And most of all, I don’t get it.)

Frankly, Halsey’s strengths (”specific yet vague” emotional detail) don’t play off well with the Chainsmokers’ strengths. (detailed scenery to piece together vague stories) These two should never have gotten together. Frankly, they shouldn’t have even tried,

Numéro Neuf

You Was Right - Lil Uzi Vert

His face is so weird. It’s just so weird.

I have a kind of odd love of Lil Uzi Vert, despite the fact I’ve only heard one song that I really liked. (XO Tour Lif3, for the record.) I feel like he has a creative energy that most artists in pop are missing, but he’s really, REALLY not using it to his advantage. A lot of his songs are just kind of... nothing.

You Was Right is one of those hits that was so early in 2017, my brain keeps telling me it was a 2016 hit. It was also Uzi’s first platinum single. It’s an okay song musically. Not that interesting. Beat kind of sounds like it was bumped from Wicked, which is not helped by the fact that Metro Boomin’ was involved in both songs. But lyrically, this song is... weird and confusing.

The basic plot makes sense: Lil Uzi’s character in this song feels bad after cheating on his girlfriend, and he wishes he could turn back time and stop himself from doing so. But man. This song makes the idea of a relationship with Lil Uzi sound like way more trouble than it’s worth.

I bet you’re asking me: “Panda, is this line accompanied by the most obnoxious eye-roll possible in the music video?”

Yes. Yes it is.

Yep, that’s right. Lil Uzi is feeling guilty, and wishes he’d never taken this girl home, and--

Uzi stop.

You should’ve just not. Done anything. Because you have a girlfriend. You shouldn’t have boned, you should’ve gone home and boned your girlfriend, dammit Lil Uzi. Let me like you, you bastard.

The reason this isn’t any higher is because I at least feel like Uzi has some kind of love for his girlfriend. As the second line indicates that the moment he saw his girlfriend, he immediately passed by some other woman to hit her up. But still...

I THINK YOU KIND OF DID WRECK HER. YOU FUCKED A GROUPIE, MAN.

This whole verse is just funny I have no explanation. Like. You’re in the same room, but because the door is locked, even though... you’re in the same room? You can’t talk? But she’s actually in the bathroom. And Uzi needs to take a piss, so he’s basically just forcing some romantic lovey-dovey crap, like babe I wanna caress you, I’m seriously gonna wreck the carpet right now, can we just move on from this.

But here’s the best/worst line, in my humble onion:

1. What does this have to do with anything,

2. He’s gonna fuck your sister and then kill her if you talk shit, I guess. So to my sister, I am very sorry.

I think Uzi improved on conveying emotion in his next album, or at least with the big single XO Tour Lif3, which I’ll defend until I’m dead. But as for You Was Right, well... he was wrong.

Número Ochoooooo!

Shape Of You - Ed Sheeran

Did you wanna fuck Ed Sheeran?

NO?

TOO BAD.

Ed Sheeran is a musician I enjoy purely for the purpose of mocking him. While he does, now and then, drop a good single like Don’t, Sing or Castle on the Hill, oftentimes he exudes only one thing:

PERPETUAL VIRGINITY!

Maybe it’s because of his voice. Or maybe it’s because he looks like a high schooler who hit puberty too late. Maybe it’s because I have THIS picture of him saved to my computer:

Look at him. Look at his fucking face.

He just exudes involuntary celibacy. Not like the reddit “hurgh durgh FEMOIDS” kind, just like. The “sees a naked boob and passes out bleeding like an anime character” kind.

Look at his fucking face. He looks like he’s not sure how to hold a woman’s hand. He looks like he doesn’t even know what it is. I don’t know how I’m expected to recognize Ed Sheeran as a sexually active man. The weird dinky three-tone beat ripped straight from Sia’s Cheap Thrills and pretty much every Rihanna song ever, namely Work, doesn’t help in the slightest. Because here’s the thing: Work and Cheap Thrills are not sex songs. If anything, they’re songs about the lower class and their struggles. No fucking required, unless you count Drake’s verse on Work.

Shape Of You is a sex song. And it’s about as sexy as wedging your dick in a paper bag.

It’s like it was supposed to be a romantic sex song, but the vibe I’m getting is a teenage boy up in your DMs asking (admittedly politely) for titty pics.

He’s in love with the shape of you. Just your outline. Your contour. Like that one episode of Ed Edd ‘n Eddy where Jimmy somehow gets his linework stolen and has to be kept in a blender? He wouldn’t fuck a lady like that. You gotta have a... shape. Square. Circle.

RECTANGLE GIRLS OF THE WORLD

This isn’t helping the whole “virginal loser” thing for the record.

The verses try to be more romantic, and totally fail at it because let’s be honest, if Ed Sheeran took me to an all-you-can-eat buffet on our first date, I’d probably kill him. McDonald’s is even preferable. I guess it’s also technically more expensive if you want seconds, but like... everyone there is probably sweaty... and the food usually looks really gross. Sometimes you have mashed potatoes in the steak bucket and it just completely ruins your day.

Ed’s wispy delivery really doesn’t help, as he has all the sexual energy of a castrated Charlie Puth. He’s not crazy. He does not fit the radio definition of “crazy”. He’s the musician that I just see the least as one who fucks. Puth gets more pussy. The ICP get more pussy. Meghan Trainor probably fucks more than he does, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she was some kind of otherworldly plant being that reproduces via budding.

Also I’d feel bad if I didn’t mention the video, which is literally, no joke, the video for Maroon 5′s One More Night. You know, where the lead singer becomes a badass boxer who punches shit. Now I’ll probably drop my feelings towards Maroon 5 with more detail in the future, but in short, I actually enjoy most of their singles. One More Night is a fun song in my opinion, not high art or anything, but I like it. Adam’s falsetto doesn’t bug me as much as other people. I’d prefer him singing in a high pitch than, say, Swae Lee.

(Dammit Swae, let me love you, you bastard.)

But see, I actually also prefer the VIDEO for One More Night. For two big reasons.

1. Adam Levine is at least a little more threatening than Ed Sheeran. Remember how fucking goofy Animals was BECAUSE Adam was singing it? Imagine if Ed was on that track. It’d be ridiculous.

and

2. One More Night was a song about how his relationship with his girlfriend basically feels like a warzone. The violence in the music video was, at some level, metaphorical. In Shape Of You it doesn’t have any emotional or symbolic relevance, so I just have to take at face-value that Ed Sheeran is a boxer, and...

That’s just not happening.

Numerum VII!

Blurred Lines - Robin Thicke ft. Pharrell and T.I.

This would easily be higher up if not for the fact that, on the most technical level, it’s a joke song.

Bet you didn’t know that.

Yeah, the joke here is that these three are singing this ridiculous sex jam despite in real life all being happily married men (or at least were at the time this song came out, Robin’s wife promptly dropped him as soon as this album fell into our collective hands) who are way past their prime when it comes to flirting with chicks at the club. Also, Pharrell looks like an alien.

I’m not gonna extend this too much, as everyone’s already riffed on Blurred Lines more than we’ve probably riffed on other socially questionable songs like U.O.E.N.O. or Treat You Better. But this song sounds like it... COULD BE about sexual assault?

I’ll be fair and say that I don’t think this is straight-up a rape song. Because the thing is that it’s not actually about sex, it’s about picking up girls. But Robin’s approach is so slimy and gross that I’d honestly prefer, very specifically, to re-enact that one scene from The Simpsons’ Cape Feare where they drive through a bunch of cacti with Sideshow Bob hanging on the bottom of the car, and I’m Sideshow Bob, but facing the ground with my dick out, so it slides through the cactus like a sad, sad little pool noodle full of thumbtacks.

On one hand, there’s implications of attempting to get consent, and on the other hand, there’s also discussion of whether or not he’s actually GETTING consent or not. Maybe it’d work if Robin Thicke had more swagger to his personality, and if they removed all the stuff about “blurred lines”, it’d be less suspicious. But even then it’d still sound like a /r/niceguy trying to convince a girl that she WANTS to fuck him.

Once again I’d like to mention the video real quick, specifically the alternate version.

The topless version somehow makes it even LESS sexy. When the women were clothed, it definitely gave more of a vibe of “cheeky girl at a bar playing hard to get”, but once you have a bunch of topless chicks running around looking unhappy and bored, it reads more as... “harem sex dungeon”.

Not much else to say, really. Other than that Miley Cyrus has horrible taste in men.

Even you can do better, Miley.

Nummer Sechs!

The Hills - The Weeknd

The Hills is about as sexy as getting the bottom half of my body lost in the void while prime minister Shinzo Abe projectile vomits onto my face.

I actually like this song. But it doesn’t sound like sex. At all.

It does sound like a good horror movie soundtrack, which I guess...

I guess at least this line would make sense if it was?

Everything about this song kind of punches you. The beat punches you and the tune punches you and it’s really really loud. Literally everything about this song fits together EXCEPT THE PREMISE. This is, from what I can gather, a song about some dark spooky sex machine who’s helping a girl cheat on her boyfriend, but doesn’t really care because his drug problem or something is more important to him. And nothing fits with it.

Say what you want about Earned It, it sounds like a sex song. Maybe I’ll discuss that song in the future, but while Earned It creates the vibe of some sort of expensive Blank Space-esque rich guy mansion with a sexual twist, The Hills sounds more like... an explosion in a really dark place. Even the video works for the sound more than it works for the premise. Frankly, if this had been a song about a break-up or being sent to prison or something, I’d totally buy it. The Weeknd’s warbling baby voice can convey suffering more than it can convey sex.

The best way I can explain this is...

Imagine if Rolex was backed by the ending track from A Serbian Film. That’s the tonal problem we’re talking here.

Though lyrically, The Hills isn’t high art either.

Bragging about erectile dysfunction: Counting this and Young Thug’s Lifestyle, I guess we can call this a theme now. I hate it. Also, Weeknd rhymes “simple” with “simple”. And the fact that this is a fuckjam makes the title drop of The Hills Have Eyes even more questionable. I’d honestly rather hear a sex song based on Cannibal Holocaust.

Also, fun fact, this song has a remix featuring Eminem. Fucking EMINEM. That is the least sexy rapper you could have picked. You could have chosen anyone for your sex song, and you picked the man responsible for such classic sensual love songs as Stan and Just Lose It.

Dear Weeknd, I wrote you but you still ain’t callin’...

Still a song I like. Just... pretend it’s not about boning.

Numero Cinque!

Bad Things - Machine Gun Kelly ft. Camila Cabello

I debated deep in my heart as to whether or not I could, in good taste, put this song on the list. Because I really shouldn’t expect a whole lot from ex-Fifth Harmony member as well as the only Fifth Harmony member anyone knows the name of, Camila Cabello, as well as this weirdo Machine Gun Kelly, who looks like a very failed attempt to clone Macklemore.

But then I read this.

Wait, this is a love song?

I thought it was just... about like, fucking.

ALSO WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU SAMPLE OUT OF MY HEAD IN A LOVE SONG.

And most importantly, and much less aggressively, why does this song sound like it’s about, like... abuse.

Like, yeah. You’re- you’re giving each other scars. And guess what! This is actually edited.

Somehow the edit makes it both better and worse. Because on one hand, like, bruises usually sounds like more of an abuse thing. When I think of an abuse victim I see bruises. But, also, scars are... technically a bigger deal? Bruises go away. If you’re scarring up your SO, then you have some serious issues. And MGK’s uninterested delivery makes it way worse, as well as the Fastball sample that is from a song about hurting your lover. Which kind of sounds, uh, a lot like... what’s going on here.

And, uh, I guess you could argue they’re in a really intense BDSM relationship? I guess Camila seems pretty into it, and not really in like, a Stockholm Syndrome way. But the other thing that takes up a good chunk of this song is the comparison between drug dependence and romance.

Which really doesn’t help?

Like drugs aren’t a good thing. Honestly I feel like Kesha using this metaphor was a sign of things to come considering what happened to her in 2017. Because, here’s a crazy thought, drugs may be addictive... but they also hurt you.

Like an abusive partnerokay we’re moving on sorry.

Numero Neljä!

Treat You Better - Shawn Mendes

Oh hey, I like, just mentioned this one.

Honestly, Kodak Black’s Side N**** would’ve taken this spot, except that I don’t wanna think about Kodak Black. Ever. So you get the whiter version of it.

Treat You Better is another one of those songs that makes the idea of dating the singer sound insanely unappealing. But unlike You Was Right above, Treat You Better has next to no self-awareness.

I’ll admit that I don’t really hate Shawn Mendes. I actually like Stitches, the tune is nice enough and regardless of how you feel about this apparently 6′2 tower of twink flesh, you can’t really argue that he hasn’t got a decent set of pipes on him.

But damn if his songwriters aren’t trying to sour my opinion of him at every turn.

If this were an actual review, I’d complain about how the backing guitar sounds exactly LIKE Stitches, but the problems arise in the lyrics, and the way the video plays off of the lyrics.

oh wait excuse me

Alright sorry.

But in case you can’t tell, Treat You Better is basically a niceguy anthem. I mean, when I read the title I thought it was like the earlier-mentioned Fastball’s Out Of My Head or Hoobastoobaskeeboodidillybaboobastank’s The Reason where the male singer does some nonspecific bad thing to their SO and vows to be better in the future. You know, like--

(YAH... HUH... I PROMISE TO, UH... BE BETTER... YIEAH...)

But no, actually. Treat You Better is more equivalent to Daya’s Hide Away, which you could honestly consider as on this list in the exact same spot because they’re basically the same song.

I suspect the reason nobody wants to date Daya is because she dresses like Heather Chandler in the 2018 Heathers remake.

I also suspect her and Shawn would absolutely love one another’s company.

To be absolutely fair, neither of these songs take the stance that real life nicefolk take, because it’d make them look absolutely insufferable. The big reason I chose Treat You Better over Hide Away for this list is that the video tries to imply that Shawn’s object of attraction is being abused by her current boyfriend. Which I guess makes sense, but...

I love how the combination of the song and the video essentially imply that Shawn’s got this ladyfriend who’s being beaten to shit by her boyfriend and his only response is man, this is why you should’ve dated me instead! I would be WAY better to you than that guy!

Instead of, you know.

This guy is seriously terrible to you and I’m calling the police.

Or better yet!

Kill him.

Also this girl’s just not... a very good actress. I’m not asking for a Hollywood performance, just, you know. Some kind of expression other than “mild disinterest” when you’re about to get your shit kicked in would be nice.

Really the big issue is that, regardless of whether or not we’re supposed to see the girl as an abuse victim, Shawn will forever see himself as the victim. Which means it’s either

A. Some dildo victimizing himself because his best friend is a taken woman and he wants to Betta in her Dannygans.

or B. Some dildo victimizing himself because his best friend is in an abusive relationship... and he wants to Betta in her Dannygans.

So either way, Shawn Mendes’ greatest worry isn’t your safety, or if you’re happy in your current relationship, his one worry is getting his spindly little baby-soft white boy hands into your undies. And frankly, I just don’t need that in my life!

the third one

Honey I’m Good - Andy Grammar

How much do you wanna bet all these couples broke up/got divorced after featuring in this thing?

I labored over how this one matched up with #2, but decided it was at least making some sad, sad attempt to promote faithfulness in couples. See the plot of this song written by Andy Grammar, who I’m assuming is a one-hit wonder because I’d certainly never heard of him until this song came out, is stated very clearly:

I think the best part about this is the way it’s worded. “I gotta be like oh baby, nah baby” makes him sound so annoyed. Like, “Ugh, I wanna bone you, but I wanna be nice to my wife or whatever, so I GUESS I’ll turn you down... Sigh...”

So this is essentially a self-fellating anthem congratulating Andy’s character for not cheating on his wife. Because, as he says,

“Yeah, babe, better men than me have cheated on their wives, so it’d be totally fine if I DID, but I’m such a Nice Dude that I won’t do it. For my wife. Smooch.”

One could argue that he’s supposed to be drunk, but let’s be real here: Being drunk doesn’t make you lie. If anything, it makes you more honest. Booze is a truth serum. Now if he had just gotten out of dental care after getting his wisdom teeth pulled and his hot lady dentist was trying to flirt with him, maybe I could imagine it making sense.

And once again, the Devil’s Advocate could say, “well if he’s being honest, then this shouldn’t be a problem, he’s faithful to his wife”, but the thing is that he’s not even totally drunk yet.

Translation: If I have another drink, I’ll be so boozed up that my honest feelings will make me want to fuck that ass.

He’s tipsy at best, which is why he’d admit to considering this at all, but if he were more drunk he’d totally fuck this assumedly more attractive woman. So for all we know he’ll go back to the club tomorrow, have one too many, and considering how well this stupid song did, he’d throw enough money at the next Cambodian prostitute he runs into to buy her a mansion.

The congratulatory tone to the music doesn’t really help, it really does feel like Grammar is sucking himself off for having the “willpower” to not be a completely terrible person. The only thing that makes it even more hilariously sad is the video of elderly couples lip-syncing to it, all the while holding up signs or wearing shirts that say how many years they’ve been together. It’s as if they’re bragging about how their marriage is bound to last way longer than the marriage in the song.

“Mildred, do you promise not to bone a random guy at the bar when I’m home?” “Only if you promise not to do that either, you rascal you.”

For all I know, Andy Grammar’s a great guy! But with only this song to go by, I’m obligated to assume that he’s a complete dildo who wears a mask of faux-Southern charm when he’s sober and avoids getting drunk so that mask doesn’t shloff off of his face like he’s a juggalo at the official sprinkler festival.

The weirdest part of this to me is that this song is so catchy we actually fell for it, if only for awhile. And its happy tone kind of makes you forget the lyrics. I almost feel like that was intentional. Like, his producers looked at the lyrics and just said, “Boys, let’s fix this shit.” It’s not even good production, it’s just really catchy! Fuck!

All in all, Honey I’m Good is about as romantic as listening to my parents argue at 12 in the morning. Not only is there no reason Andy Grammar deserves any congrats on his mediocre “feat”, but he really doesn’t seem to love his wife that much, if a shot of tequila and a scantily-clad cokewhore is enough to wreck his faith.

Numbah TWOOOOO!

What The Hell - Avril Lavigne

I’d honestly argue that Avril Lavigne’s character as a singer is equally sociopathic to that of Taylor Swift and Cher Lloyd. I feel like after Hello Kitty slaughtered her reputation and career forever, we kind of forgot how genuinely terrifying she was. She’s like every horrible thing about being a teenager squeezed into one person who’s way too old to be pretending to be a teenager. I mean, look at Girlfriend. The only thing more terrifying than Girlfriend is, well, What The Hell.

Because, you know. That’s not a problem or anything.

Rather than the obsessive character from Girlfriend, Avril in this song is the complete opposite. She doesn’t make connections with anybody, and when she’s sick of a relationship, she’ll move onto her boyfriend’s friends, strangers, fans, non-fans, parents, teachers, Todd Howard, etcetera. So she’ll go around macking on anything she wants and then have blase, slightly annoyed reaction when her boyfriend is completely horrified by it.

(This? This is my greatest fear.)

Her disinterest really comes out in the lyrics, and her sales pitch is, basically, this is just who I am and you should fuck me even if you don’t like it. Especially since, while I hate to be the guy who says it, if this was a song by a guy, everyone would fucking hate it. I actually don’t mind the beat or the tune, honestly, I listen to this song sometimes when I’m out of music that rises above the bar of “guilty pleasure”. That almost makes this worse. Everything is delivered with the disinterest of a Future verse, as if this is just a normal thing, and looking back imagining middle school me singing along to this is pretty fucked.

Not that I really blame this for any kind of influence on children. Honestly I don’t think anyone was really listening to the lyrics, they were just having fun. It’s fun! That’s pretty messed up.

By the way, I think this bit on the bridge says a lot about Avril as a writer (and maybe even as a person):

I love the assumption that this guy is still devoted to her after she has cheated on him and shown no remorse whatsoever. Why would he really want her back? Personally I’d say something along the lines of “fuck you, bitch, go get syphilis somewhere where it can’t be transferred to me.” Bye bye!

Really, though, the more Avril Lavigne tried to lean into her teen rebellion phase, the more I realized how old she was. And as she got older, and tried to be more rebellious, it became less endearing and more sociopathic. Maybe she’s a really nice person, but at the same time, to write a song like this, I can’t really tell. Especially when THIS is how she describes it:

Avril, you read the lyrics, right? Of course you did, you sang it. Jesus, lady.

Well, before we move onto the big weiner, let’s talk honorable mentions!

You Belong With Me - Taylor Swift

Surprised that Taylor didn’t make it on here? It came down to the wire, but in the end, the concept of screwing in a pile of jizzy sheets in a range rover bumped this one off the list. Still, though, Taylor’s attempts to be “relatable” end up making her sound desperate. And also Taylor’s pre-existing ideas of why she’s “better” for him than this other girl kinda remind me of...

Hide Away - Daya

I almost wish I had found space for this song since I hate it so much. But really my biggest problem with it is that Daya sings like a rubber goose and that, of course, the nicegirl/niceguy mentality needs to die and people like Daya are perpetuating it.

Don’t Wanna Know - Maroon 5 ft. Kendrick Lamar

Yikes, dude. Just... yikes.

Marvin Gaye - Charlie Puth ft. Meghan Trainor

Charlie Puth and Meghan Trainor are two beacons of sexlessness and this song does Marvin Gaye a disservice. The only reason I left it off is because it’s honestly been discussed to death, I’m almost like, tired of hearing about it.

Side N**** - Kodak Black

This isn’t even a niceguy song, it’s literally “you should date me because I’ll shoot you and your man if you don’t”. I’d have loved to make space for it, but I don’t even want to listen to this song in full, or talk about this guy. At this point Kodak Black is keeping the fire lit with controversy. I’d like to just dump water on it.

NUMBER ONE!

Sigh. This one’s obvious enough.

Dear Future Husband - Meghan Trainor ft. Satan, probably

Sometimes you just gotta throw your hands up and say STOP, MEGHAN! STOP!

STOP!

Meghan Trainor is an artist who I actually do understand the appeal of: She appeals to white feminist teenage girls and soccer moms that still read Twilight even though their daughters are long since over it. But, sadly, that’s two demographics of people I hate, and thus, I find myself hating everything Meghan Trainor puts out. The only remotely passable single I remember by her was Lips Are Moving. Dear Future Husband isn’t even my least favorite fucking Meghan Trainor song. (It’d probably be No, if I had to pick.) But god, if this song isn’t just... oof.

Let’s get the shoehorned feminist message out of the way:

We know you have a job, nobody’s expecting you to cook, why would you bake pies all day, who needs that many pies, no you can’t write a hook, and these views are insanely outdated for anyone who doesn’t have a Return of Kings account. So great, you have a job and can’t cook. Cool. That’s a thing with a lot of people.

Honestly the insistence that she “deserves it” even though she makes no attempt to prove herself a good wife aside from saying she’ll buy you groceries and fuck you sometimes. This song kind of lays on the assumption that you’ll do literally anything because, duh, she’s famous musician Meghan Trainor, and if you don’t do these things, YOU JUST HATE FAT GIRLS.

(Mary Lambert never pulls this shit. And she weighs more than the gold toilet you use, while you’re using it, MEGHAN.)

Honestly though, listening to Meghan Trainor songs just kind of turn me into that obnoxious guy on 4chan who unironically uses the term “feminazi” in 2018. Because really, she fits every feminist stereotype in existence, and she never says anything of any worth.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way--

Acting crazy... how?

Do we mean like, Ren & Stimpy crazy, or Avril Lavigne crazy?

Because I’m terrified it’s the latter.

Meghan kind of talks about her theoretical future husband like he’s a dog, or some other kind of animal that does badass tricks. Essentially obligating him to constantly do what she wants, when she wants it, and never disagree with her even if she’s in the wrong, because then she MIGHT fuck him. Or, uh, excuse me,

Some KISSES! :D

You like KISSES, don’t you? Who’s a good boy? WHO’S A GOOD BOY? IT’S YOU! YOU’RE A GOOD BOY!

...

[clears throat]

It doesn’t help that this song is, essentially, just a list of requests and things this guy has to do. So while Meghan can do whatever she wants, her husband is still required to do the traditionalist romance crap like buy her things, lose every argument, hold doors, accept potential insanity, and be “classy”.

Honestly, don’t let Daya and Meghan Trainor do a single together. I think the pain of hearing it will overtake my body. Like that forcible body-wracking feeling you get when you dry heave.

The best part being that I haven’t even touched on the worst line.

So like, ignoring all of the other shit, if a girlfriend or potential wife said this to me, I’d jump ship. Like, controlling every other aspect of your life wasn’t enough, she also gets to decide what people you see! So if she doesn’t really like your good friend John, then he’s banned from this house forever. And forget about seeing your grandpa. She doesn’t care if he has cancer! You fucking MISOGYNIST PIG! LOVE YOUR WIFE!

Urgh. Of course the song that combines the insanity of What The Hell with the me-me-me attitude of Treat You Better and the bored lack of emotional connection in You Was Right would top this list. I’m glad Meghan Trainor killed her own career in 2016, because I don’t think I’d be able to handle another year of these shitty faux-feminist throwback jams. Thanks, Me Too!

If I was you, I’d wanna anyone besides me, too!

Also, if anyone’s curious about ratings I’d give these, here you go.

10 - 2/5 stars. Not good enough to be mediocre.

9 - 1.5/5 stars, mostly because Lil Uzi can do better, which is half a saving grace and half a detriment.

8 - 1/5 stars. Ech.

7 - 2/5 stars. I’ll admit the Blurred Lines controversy was blown out of proportion, but it’s still not that great of a song.

6 - 3.5/5 stars. I can get down to this, it’s just... not sexy.

5 - 0/5 stars. RIP Fastball.

4 - .5/5 stars. Only because Shawn’s slurring is funny.

3 - 2/5 stars. At least it’s fun, I guess.

2 - 2.5/5 stars. Again, at least it’s enjoyable if you ignore the words.

1 - 0/5 stars. No more Meghan, please.

#top 10 #valentines day #panda posts #music criticism #top 10 list #negative(?) review

4 notes · View notes

earwaxinggibbous · 6 years

Text

“Mo’ Bounce” by Iggy Azalea

Warning for tiny children smashcut against Iggy’s wiggly ass

Let’s talk Iggy Azalea for a second-- Nonono wait come back.

So many moons ago we were graced by this guy named Eminem, who I sadly missed at his peak because I was 1 year old and only listened to my dad’s alt-rock albums. But for better or for worse this was the only rapper I ever remember my dad actually being into, mostly because he saw Eight Mile one time and liked it a lot. Eminem caught on because 1, he didn’t sing about the traditional bitches-hos-and-smoking-blow kind of stuff, and 2, being a white guy on the rap scene is pretty much like being a black guy anywhere else.

But white guys in rap are more common nowadays. We’ve got Post Malone, Li’l Dicky, Froggy Fresh (the man responsible for ‘Get Dunked On’), Machine Gun Kelly, Macklemore, Aesop Rock, G-Eazy, Gnash, the Insane Clown Posse, probably your 12-year-old brother, and Weird Al counts too apparently. (Also Pit Bull if you’re like me and didn’t realize he was actually latino until about a year ago.) We’ve also got plenty of female black rappers under our belt, like Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, Missy Elliot, Salt ‘n Pepa, I know there’s other ones but I’m totally drawing a blank.

But that begs the question: Where are our white lady rappers?

Now Iggy Azalea had actually already hit stardom in her home country/weird enormous zoo known as Australia, where they don’t care nearly as much about people putting on fake accents to make shitty rap songs. People here refer to her as a female Eminem, but considering that she still talks about the same rap cliches as every rapper that ISN’T Eminem, it’d probably be more sensible to call her a white Nicki Minaj.

You know. They both have fat asses that just won’t quit and love fucking and partying nonstop. And, much like the Eminem comparison, it’s incredibly obvious as to who is of higher quality. In fact, even someone like 50 Cent has more varied topics than Iggy does, 2/3 of her music is just about her ass. Like, wow. And when Iggy’s ass is not the topic of discussion, usually it’s that she’s Bad and Boujee. I mean- I mean she’s Fancy. Which is basically just a shittier version of Bad and Boujee that only has the advantage of having come out before it.

She’s not relevant anymore, needless to say. Her popularity very slowly declined after she featured on Ariana Grande’s Problem. None of her other singles got that big. I managed to completely miss Black Widow, thank god, since that song doesn’t even have Charli XCX to save it. (Rita Ora is an artist I know nothing about, but she looks about as interesting as wet tissues.) Pretty Girls was a failed attempt to make both Iggy and Britney Spears relevant again, because apparently Britney wasn’t humiliated enough working with Will.I.Am. Say what you want about Will, at least he knew he sucked. (And also released... at LEAST one good song.) Also apparently she wrote a song with J-Lo that was literally just called Booty. I mean, okay, whatever you want.

The only single she released this year that I’ve ever even heard about was this picture of artful regret known only as Mo’ Bounce, which is already fucking confusing because she has ANOTHER song just called Bounce that also has some goofy faux-foreign music video. At least in the Mo’ variant she doesn’t squirm around in a sari. Great job convincing people you’re not appropriating culture, Iggs. Apparently people griped about Selena’s Come and Get It but not that. I’d review Bounce but it’s not interesting in any way whatsoever.

(Iggy, put some fucking clothes on. There’s CHILDREN here.)

The video of Mo’ Bounce is probably twice as regrettable as any of Iggy’s other life decisions, let’s be honest here. The best way I can describe it is if the Anaconda video was directed by Harmony Korine. Ever wanted to see Iggy’s jiggly wiggly Iggly ass smashcut against tiny dancing multicultural children? Because I had to sit through an entire songsworth of it. I remember I was debating on whether the iSpy video was weird (the official one, not the animated lyric video) because it has Kyle and Li’l Yachty as weird-looking children hanging out with and ogling scantily clad women. But 1. This is somehow way worse, and 2. iSpy is actually a good song.

This fucking child? She’s never recovering. Nobody recovers from Iggy’s cheeks. NOBODY.

The actual lighting and whatever is fine, usually color-grading in music videos is good since they don’t take as long as actual movies. (Somehow they fucked that up on Chained to the Rhythm, but I’ve already complained about that enough.) Though the blacklight neons were probably copped from other better music videos. This is How We Do is the first one to come into my mind, but I’m almost certain it wasn’t even original when that vid came out. Really without the kids it’s just the average titty-bitches rap video. You could probably replace the kids with clips of Jason Derulo and play Wiggle over this, and I’d be like, “Man, this video has way more of the same white girl in it than I remember.”

I suspect that the chiddlers were put in there for shock value, and if you’re like me and you’ve watched A Serbian Film twice because you actually liked it, you’re probably just wondering who the fuck let these kids on set. Or, for that matter, who even had this idea. I can’t help but imagine Iggy just sitting there. Menacingly.

Mate, wot if we put sum ankle-biters in me vidya? An like, ‘ey was wotchin me shake me ass? Wot then, mate? Money rolls in. Controversey. Shrimp on th’ barbie.

(That’s what Australians sound like, right? Right?)

It’s not like Iggy was ever a shock artist. Lady Gaga was a shock artist. Rihanna was a shock artist. Eminem was a shock artist. Iggy? Iggy’s that drunk girl at a college party who’s started saying the n-word. Nicki’s rocking the pole, and Iggy’s trying to figure out how to climb it like a firefighter. Even Miley knows shock better than Iggy does. Iggy did a collab with Ariana fuckdamn Grande for fuck’s sake. Ariana’s idea of shock is admitting she wants a guy to go down on her.

So yeah, the music video doesn’t work for me. And apparently people are taking it as evidence that Iggy is trying to make pedophilia acceptable, and while I can see where they’re coming from, I see it more as just a really stupid idea and the last pathetic gasp of Iggy’s hastily dying career.

And, much like Wrecking Ball, the video is honestly way more interesting to talk about than the song.

Iggy, you don’t know what’s been on that floor!

The beat is the worst thing about this song, like I didn’t even catch any of the lyrics besides “Mo’ bounce in the mothafuckin’ house”, because this beat is actually the worst I’ve ever heard on anything ever. You remember that one episode of Recess where the principal tries to ban the word “whomp”? Because that’s me now. I want to ban whomps forever. That’s what this song is built on.

BWOMP BWOMP BWOMP BWOMP BWOMP BWOMP BWOMP

I can’t think of anyone who could make this beat work, even rappers I like. Nicki couldn’t work with this, Cardi B couldn’t work with this. Maybe Lil Uzi could work with it if he continues his trend of not fucking up things that I totally expect him to fuck up. (Hopefully XO Tour Lif3 is proof of that trait living on.) But it’s just the worst, it sounds like Skrillex taking a shit. It sounds like the g-major bass-boosted version of that Peewee Herman laugh that Eminem does in Just Lose It. It sounds like the sputtering tornado that is residing in the anus of someone’s electronic keyboard. It sounds like all of the Chainsmokers vomiting at once. IT SOUNDS REALLY BAD IS WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY.

And here’s the worst part. Iggy’s voice is so terrible, that when she says “bounce” it just sounds exactly like the beat. So her voice becomes the bwomps. She IS the bwomps. She has assimilated with the bwomps and I cannot tell the difference. How the fuck do you screw up your voice so badly that you begin sounding exactly like blasting synthfarts. Honestly my only question is where her career can go after this. She’s either gonna record herself physically humping a goat, or try to become wholesome like Miley. (If it’s the latter, she’ll probably suck at it. Like Miley.)

I actually thought I’d have more to say, but this is really just an ass song that sounds like ass. I guess I’ll look at the lyrics?

I lied, this bitch just rhymed “assholes” with “assholes”, goodbye! Fuck you Australia.

This song sucks, it sucks, the video sucks, and the beat sucks, and Iggy’s voice and flow... well, that always sucked. When has Iggy Azalea not sucked? Why would I ever expect any less? It gets a sensual, lotion-drenched, thong-wearing 0 out of 5. Congrats! It may be terrible, but at least it’s slippery.

Also this single cover is a fucking wreck. What is even going on? Is she just wibbling her buns in front of a mirror? And like, someone walked in? And she’s like, “wot? whozzis? oim lookin at me own buttock mate.” What the fuck is going on in the background? Is she just shaking her ass in a mirror in glitch space? Terrible. Bad.

#panda posts #song review #pop song review #iggy azalea #mo bounce #negative review

0 notes