Top 10 Worst Songs of 2018 - Ricky Lai

A Perfect Circle - Eat the Elephant

Ah, 2018. Another year of trap music surrealism hitting the charts, headlines about Ariana Grande and more reveals that the members of your favourite bands are abusive pricks.

Although I like to be optimistic about listening to new music, you can’t plough through the amount of music that I do in a year without encountering some records that make my face turn a bright purply colour. Not that I’m feeling ill, more that I’ve started trying to hold my breath for long periods of time because it feels a lot better than listening to these.

While I have a version of this list for albums ready to be thrust upon the Internet very aggressively, I’ve got one for bad songs this year. Don’t worry, the cover of Childish Gambino that you uploaded to Soundcloud won’t be up for this, I’m only putting on blast the artists who truly deserve it.

Feel free to watch this list in video form here.


#10: Paul McCartney – “Fuh You”

Oh, Sir Paul McCartney, you can keep your legacy as one of modern music’s shining icons and now make forays into whichever musical style your heart desires now. Record some emo-trap through a headset mic, handstanding on the buttocks of Anthony Kiedis if you want. Express yourself, buddy, you’ve earned it. Any lyrics about wanting to get wild with a significant other that you'd like to get off your chest? Sure.

Wherever you head, however, know that if you drop a single called “Fuh You” sounding like the intersection point between a Chainsmokers song and royalty free vlogging music strummed on the ukelele, I don’t expect myself to have any much more choice than to just chuckle at least a little bit, because that sounds awkward.

I don’t want to say this song is unacceptable. It’s more a cheery song written with the tone of an anonymous crush admission message on CuriousCat. I think what makes it laughable is just how banal the song sounds, furthermore how it reads; “A love that’s so proud and real, you make me wanna go out and steal” – Ryan Tedder must’ve had aching muscles from how hard he pushed the boat out with that one. Even amidst a new album filled with colourful but standard fare pop songs, something this vivid and sumptious sticks out of the track listing and the rest of McCartney’s late career like an epigastric hernia.

#9: Muse – “Propaganda”

Muse’s forays into neo-80’s synthwave made their new album the Ready Player One of music in 2018. Although their ham-fisted politics are more ham than fist, in that their lyrics seem to skirt around the chosen topic like a toilet duck, I could’ve let them go on to do whatever without demanding old me having to follow them around like an annoying kid in highschool who keeps asking you for bits of your morning tea.

“Propaganda” was bad enough for me to consider, though. It baffles me that you can have so many interesting influences over the course of a release and have none of them work, but Muse have been very good at showcasing that in recent years. With each new section of the song it manages to trip over the laces on its light-up sneakers. A stuttering intro hook with the pitch shifted down to the point where it sounds like a broken tennis ball machine, dubstep wobbles, trap beats, church organ, an attempt at a a funky Prince swagger, Matt Bellamy’s falsetto and for the price of that bundle you can receive a complimentary acoustic guitar slide solo as well. Everything at once doesn’t mean it’ll be good and I appreciate the attempts to sound badass, but badassery stopped being Muse’s forte back in 2009.

#8: Princess Nokia – “Your Eyes Are Bleeding”

I don’t usually disregard the idea of combining emo music with trap, it has some possibility of working, but this is more a case where it just sounds plain bad more than anything. For one, I think Princess Nokia is a perfectly capable artist who functions well in her forte of New York hip-hop, but a cold, lifeless and lyrically tryhard attempt at autotuned R&B with easy-bake sad-vibe lyrics is a difficult case to make, especially if your vocal melody comes dangerously close to having less than one note.

#7: Jedward – “Karma”

Disclaimer: I have since been informed that this "2018 single" has actually been circulating for several years now, only released as a single this year. This is a bit tragic, really, but nevertheless I have to soldier on.

Jedward are back, it seems. They've been around in recent years, actually, but "Karma" was a wonderfully baffling case for their new material. I'd like to disclaim that I find Jedward too harmless to really drive myself to write long, angry scripts about, and my reaction to "Karma" is more of a confusedly amused one. The two sound uncomfortably out of breath and their attempt at a 'haters gonna hate' anthem sounds hilariously out of date both in its euro-pop trance production and pithy lyrics. A bit counter-productive, no?

#6: Carnage (feat. Killy) – “Headlock”

DJ Carnage probably didn’t even produce his album and it still sounded phoned-in. There are lots of contender for utterly woeful attempts to sew EDM and hip-hop together with the sinew of decaying geese corpses but “Headlock” featuring Killy takes the absolute piss. If Killy’s autotune-splattered crooning sounded any less in tune with the warbling, distorted trap instrumental at hand, Captain Beefheart would have risen from the grave and pissed along the middle of the Autobahn on a Lime scooter.

#5: The Orb – “Wolfbane”

It seemed unlikely that a single from an ambient techno producer would make the list since judging anything as abstract and niche as that is largely subjective and dependent on how long you’re willing to listen to the same rhythm loops for. Some cheeky rascals decide to keep them going for half an hour. Anyways, this one track here is relatively short. But just like it says on my favourite t-shirt to wear into town, size doesn’t matter. This one could’ve only been worsened by a greater track length.

The Orb function on atmosphere and dubby instrumental loops to keep time from catching a heavy snooze, but it’s on “Wolfbane” where things begin to melt into a big pile of 14 year-old meme soundboard goo, as one of the greats in ambient and minimal techno music brings the most phoned-in drum loop that you could probably find in a folder of iMovie music samples and plasters unfunny memes from 2014 over them like a geology teacher trying to be "quirky!".

The Orb were ballsy enough to make this the lead single to an album that is otherwise taking itself pretty seriously. Internet jokes dead in the past that shouldn’t be toyed around with unless you’re brave enough to bring a scalpel and tweezers back to a grape.

#4: XXXTENTACTION – "SAD!"

Knowing that XXXTentacion had perpetrated extremely abusive actions upon his partner at the time and such has since been confirmed with released recordings of his prison confessions, one might think that it's poor on my behalf to let the context surrounding an artist influence my thoughts on the art itself, especially considering the artist died at the hands of gun murder. It's a shame that for "SAD!", I couldn't even separate the two even if I tried, not that I'd ever bother to listen to the man's material at large but this was a legitimate hit song that I was hearing on air, one that may sound alright as a summer jam initially until you hear the lyrics and realise X is perpetuating the same abusive bullshit that his fans and a shocking amount of hip-hop listeners are willing to defend him for. But sure, keep threatening suicide if your partner decides to leave you, I'm sure those toxic vigils will keep lighting up like measles on the skin of planet Earth.

#3: Yungblud – “Psychotic Kids”

Having given enough pissed-off energy towards the tasteless aesthetic choices of Yungblud, it’s no surprise that he gains a big spot here. Quite frankly, it’s only telling that I struggled to figure out which of his songs I wanted to include here, each one being just as disgustingly portrayed as the next. Nothing’s quite as tragic as putting up the façade of addressing the topic of living with mental health disorders, then rocking a straight jacket in your music video, drooling blood, flailing your arms around, and pretending that medication is going to cause you to lose control of your moral compass by buying guns and going on a murderous rampage. It’s less the message that offends, more the delivery.

There’s enough to be flummoxed by, just watching the music video, but the song itself sounds like they slapped trap beats on one of the reggae jams from Twenty One Pilots and called it a day... ironic as it seems as if they didn’t give any of this even a minute of thought – using the phrase “psychotic kids” to describe the way that parents look condescendingly upon their children; a concept that could’ve been brought into an acceptable cradle, had it not made a bloody overblown theatre show out of the whole notion of psychological disorders, which baffles me because the rest of the album seems to act as if that was a discussion that it wanted to respect – burying any potential for subtlety or care with tasteless aesthetic.

#2: Tom MacDonald – “Whiteboy”

Tom MacDonald is the natural progression of white rappers in hip-hop – an artist with no respect for what the genre is doing, attempting to come into the scene, trash-talk those in it, and write songs about what hip-hop artists should be doing instead. Then you write a song like “Whiteboy”; a four and a half minute long #AllLivesMatter temper tantrum, acting as if you’re experiencing a heavy dose of victimisation and reverse racism on the basis that you’re white. You know for a fact that you wouldn’t if you weren’t writing songs like this. It’s not a “stop the hate, let’s all get along” song if you begin fantasising up a persecution complex. Piss off with your “braids” and “pretty blue eyes” and take your 'facts don’t care about feelings' ethos back to Facebook boomer groups.

#1: Peste Noire – “Aristocrasse”

There’s been a lot of trap or trap-influenced music on here. I promise I don’t hate the genre, but when something is so popular in the mainstream now you’re bound to be exposed to a lot more failures than you might hope. Thankfully, this band is a bit too niche to be played in clubs, especially as it’s a band that plays black metal. It’s no secret that Peste Noire are literal fucking Nazis that still get underground acclaim because their guitars sound cool and their lyrics are in French. But when they make the forays into hip-hop dashed with a hint of synthwave the possibility of their music continuing to sound atmospherically pleasing is flushed down a toilet. At best, their frontman can’t make his screams sound anywhere near menacing. At worst, it’s a song about white power. That’s not a revelation, really, I guess it’s just a case of this white power music sounding worse than the previous white power music – a pointless competition, I know.