The ten worst songs of the decade

Every now and then, the global music industry produces something so awful it's beyond redemption. This past decade, they've done it quite often, and here's my bottom 10. Now, I know I said songs in the title, but there's a few where I haven't been able to pick a single song to encapsulate the phenomenon. So perhaps more accurately, these are the ten most horrible, stupid, repulsive, vomit-inducing things in popular music over the last ten years.

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10. Whatever I've forgotten. I've done my best to try to recall the most horrible musical travesties of the past decade, but as I finish this post, I just know I've forgotten something that definitely deserves to be on this list. The trouble is, I know there's something missing, but I haven't got a clue what it is. It's in your face, but you can't grab it. This is. What is it? (submissions accepted)

9. Dragonforce - the fact that they exist. There have been a lot of unbelievably hideous things going on in heavy metal in the 00's, but Dragonforce is far and away the worst of them. I don't know which song to pick, as I've never been able to listen to a whole one. There are YouTube videos where their songs have been either slowed down to half speed or speeded up to double. As far as I know, Dragonforce is only band in the history of music who actually benefit from this treatment: their songs sound better at half or double speed.

In a sense, Dragonforce takes the heritage of Yngwie Malmsteen to its logical extreme, and manages to produce something that sounds even stupider. And to pre-empt the inevitable counter-argument: no, it isn't funny. Not funny as in "ha ha", not funny as in pointing and laughing like Nelson on the Simpsons, not funny as in a British engineer tank on D-Day, or in any other sense of funny. It's just rubbish. The less we see of this musically retarded insult to heavy metal, the better.

8. Lady Gaga - Pokerface. Making pop music has long been an industry on par with any other, but few of its products seem as mass-produced, bland and manufactured as Lady Gaga. Maybe she's a genuine artist in her own right, but every single song she's put out so far has been too generic to describe. Pokerface doesn't feel like a song that was created by a composer and writer; it feels like an industrial product designed by a computer. Which is really what it is.

What makes it worse is that the form of expression they've chosen is basically 90's techno, which is something we do not need to have brought back. This kind of pop can no longer claim to be expressing any kind of artistic vision or communicating any content at all, even on the basest level: it is merely a scientifically engineered collection of beats, hooks and vocals designed to get stuck in people's heads. Far be it from me to argue that pop music has ever been decisively more intelligent or evocative, but this isn't a song any more, it's the musical equivalent of a computer virus. Hearing it on the radio or TV is exactly like having Form C on your hard drive: a slightly annoying viral infection that is, in the end, totally pointless.

7. Metallica - Frantic, or the general failure of heavy metal. In the 90's, we had heavy metal that was innovative, interesting and diverse. In the 00's, we had a whole bunch of heavy metal bands seemingly straight out of the cloning vats, all sounding and looking almost exactly alike. As heavy metal made its way into the album charts, much of it became more radio- and kid-friendly, resulting in insipid bullshit like Linkin Park, and as a counterreaction, the more "edgy" bands became intolerable. System of a Down is a fair example of the other extreme, with Serj Tankian's pseudo-political bleating combining with abrupt shifts in tempo and the worst aspects of death metal to create something that is truly impossible for any even mildly civilized person to listen to without feeling physical pain.

In between the Scylla of Linkin Park and the Charybdis of System of a Down was a vast wasteland of identical-sounding neo-death metal bands that even fans have difficulty telling apart. As if this wasn't bad enough, several genuinely good bands of the 90's turned into parodies of themselves: Metallica and Iron Maiden sound like half-assed tribute bands to themselves, and all the new material Metallica has produced since Load is horrible enough to warrant headlining this entry. Frantic was the moment when I stopped being a Metallica fan, because I don't want to be associated with crap like that in any way. One of my favorite bands from the 90's, Paradise Lost, sold out and began churning out horrible gormless shit that sounds more like Limp Bizkit than Draconian Times. In these conditions it's nothing short of astonishing that perhaps the most unlikely 90's revival, Alice In Chains, is actually damn good.

All in all, this has been an awful decade for heavy metal. All of the innovation, attitude and edge of the 90's is completely gone, and metal is even more bloated, self-indulgent and boring than stadium rock in its heyday. I can't even say I'm a heavy metal fan any more, for fear that people will think I listen to Slipknot or Disturbed. In mere years, Headbangers' Ball has become the most boring music program on MTV. I'd rather watch The Hills.

6. Béyonce - Single Ladies. I'm now going to irrevocably make myself old, but I have to ask: is this even music any more? The jerky rhythm, the seemingly randomly shouted vocals and the epileptic dancing made me think I was watching a parody of a music video. Béyonce's duet with the strangely gyrating South American dwarf whose name I've forgotten could qualify for this spot as well, but the fact that anyone can actually listen to her wheeze through her nose and call it singing is testament to the sheer power of midget porn.

Béyonce, on the other hand, is demonstrably capable of doing much better, but in this decade, she can come up with Single Ladies and see it top the charts. Of course, its denial sparked Kanye West's memorable scene at the MTV awards, highlighting the ultimate problem: rap, hip-hop and r'n'b are disappearing up their own collective ass. All of this music is becoming more self-indulgent, masturbatory and divorced from reality than a Michael Lynche performance on American Idol. I fully expect the next Béyonce hit to be a totally atonal noise with a video where she jerks around like a disfigured puppet. No, wait, she did that with Lady Gaga already.

5. Anything by Franz Ferdinand, My Chemical Romance, 30 Seconds to Mars, and everyone else who looks, sounds and acts exactly like them. Sadly, because I avoid all of this garbage like the plague, I don't really know which particular song to pick to represent the steaming pile of shit that these bands are. Actually, that's not sad at all. These morons in eyeliner weren't content with making utterly forgettable, plain bad rock; they had the effrontery to pretend they were punk. Watching that guy from My Chemical Romance have what looks like an epileptic fit but he probably thinks is performing, or Jared Leto poncing around pretending to be emo, is painful, as are Franz Ferdinand's look-everyone-we-went-to-art-school music videos, but by far the worst part is the actual music. This crap is, quite simply, the worst "rock" in decades.

An awful combination of inept rock and pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness, the sooner everyone realizes that "30 Seconds to Mars" is one of the most appalling band names in history and leaves this toxic dump of music behind them, the better.

4. The Black Eyed Peas - My Humps. Ah, the Black Eyed Peas. Made up of three men who pretend they can rap, and an ex-heroin addict who pretends she's hot. Everything they get their hands on turns to shit. At best, the Black Eyed Peas produce mindless, pointless pop that isn't really offensive in any way; it's simply rubbish. Everything I said about Lady Gaga applies even more strongly to them. At worst, they come up with My Humps. It's a song so brutal that even Dick Cheney couldn't bring himself to add it to the Guantanamo Bay playlist. It is literally so bad that I had a hard time justifying placing anything above it on this list, as I don't think any other song released in this decade can legitimately be considered a crime against humanity. "My Humps" proves that you don't have to believe in a god to experience blasphemy, as this song insults the entire universe.

To make things worse, this is one of those songs that's going to turn up on a "best of the 00's" list twenty years from now, and your children will ask you what the hell was wrong with your generation. And you don't have an answer.

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And now, the top three.

3. Green Day - American Idiot.

Ah, Green Day. Once a decent punk rock band, they disappeared from the music scene in the late 90's. I don't know if they ran out of money or what, but as the 2000's rolled around Green Day sold out. As far as I can tell, their record company re-packaged them as an edgy, supposedly political parody of themselves. Thus we were treated to the spectacle of children thinking they're rebelling against authority by watching MTV and buying albums from multinational corporations. In a sense I think it's positive that pseudo-leftist antiauthoritarianism has been co-opted by corporate America as another money-making tool, because I have zero sympathy for the faux-political crud that Green Day spew. Overall, I consider it intellectually pathetic that this mockery of both music and politics can be so popular.

As I said, I've had a hard time coming to the conclusion that any of the songs in this Top 3 are actually worse than the atrocity that is "My Humps". I'll try to justify this. Throughout the history of rock, there has been political rock music, and other kinds of political music as well. I have nothing against politics in music, even if they disagree with my own views; on the contrary. Some of it has been immensely influential; most of it has a very powerful quality. What makes Green Day worse than "My Humps" is that it makes a mockery of this tradition. There is no actual musical or political content here; there is simply the greedy, cynical calculation of the record execs. So anyone who fell for the political play-acting and musical debility of this song and album is, indeed, an idiot.

2. Coldplay - Viva La Vida.

I mentioned this song already in a previous post, but really, there isn't enough disk space on the Blogger servers to adequately describe what an insult to music this piece of shit is. Coldplay as a whole is a fair definition of pretentiousness. Musically, they're as engaging and emotionally charged as muzak, and their lyrics have an artistic quality on par with a badly machine-translated user manual: the best that can be said for them is that they're occasionally inadvertently amusing. This combination is delivered by some of the laziest musicians I've ever heard on a record, and the insipid whining of their sorry excuse for a lead vocalist. Again, the most shocking thing by far is that they're popular. For reasons I cannot begin to imagine, several thousand people seemed to mistake this pathetic pseudo-lounge music for a rock band, and for a while at least, it was impossible to avoid Coldplay.

A few years back they apparently decided to test how gullible their fans really were, and released a shitty techno song with a stupid title: "viva La Vida". Even in the heyday of Eurotechno, this rubbish would have been seen for what it is. The 90's techno beat, pathetic clock sound effect and whiny vocals add up to what may well be one of the most cynical attempts to abuse the music-buying public's gullibility for years. Judging from the rotation it got on MTV, they didn't underestimate that gullibility. The video is as awful as the song; as if it wasn't bad enough to have to watch Jenson Button's gay little brother in the first place, it's even worse through a pathetic Photoshop effect. The best thing I can say about Coldplay is that they're one of those bands that no-one will remember five years from now.

The one thing that makes this horrible crap worse than "My Humps" is the fact that its fans seemed to genuinely think they were listening to proper music. I've never heard anyone claim that the Black Eyed Peas make music that touches your soul, but a shockingly large number of people were taking Coldplay seriously, and looking down their noses at people who didn't like it. Surely that makes them even worse than "My Humps".

1. Rihanna - Umbrella.

I said "My Humps" will show up on lists of top music videos of the "noughties". So will this song, and if you think you'll have a hard time explaining that, try this one.

Rihanna is the current manifestation of an old pop-industry cash cow: the Caribbean import. Not many people seem to know that Bob Marley was one of the pioneers of this particular marketing ploy; his first international album was entirely played by studio musicians in Britain. After his success, the record multinationals have regularly foisted a Caribbean artist on us. In the early years of the decade, we got the inadvertently hilarious Sean Paul, whose videos can still reduce us to giggling. This time around, it's Rihanna. Somehow, her song about music from the speakers running through your sneakers became a runaway hit, and she rocketed to inexplicable popularity. The lyrical and musical quality of her material has, if anything, declined since then, with "Umbrella" capping her résume. The key lyric is, after all: Umberella, ella, ella, ee, ee, ee.

Even for a brainless pop song, "Umbrella" is astonishingly idiotic. The plodding, repetitive music, the mentally deficient lyrics and the awful video combine for a mind-blasting experience. This is the only music video I've ever seen that's left me speechless. The first time I saw it, I was unable to react to it in any way. I had to start by checking that I wasn't dreaming. Throughout the whole time that MTV had "Umbrella" on heavy rotation, I quietly wondered if the entire world around me had gone completely insane. I was scared to talk to people, because if they thought "Umbrella" was a good song and video, they would probably think the proper way to reply to "Good morning" was "Albatross 16 brouhaha". If a person was capable of going to a record store to buy music and coming out with Rihanna's "Umbrella", what would they bring me if I ordered lunch? If "My Humps" is too horrible to use as torture, "Umbrella" transcends torture. Had the US Army interrogators at Guantanamo Bay played "Umbrella" to the inmates, they would all have gone stark raving mad and started eating their flesh and piling up their furniture.

At the end of the day, "Umbrella" is unquestionably more horrible than "My Humps" because it made me question my sense of reality. The Black Eyed Peas give you the ordinary, dull annoyance of bad music; "Umbrella" opens up a gaping vista of eldritch horror in which all of your perceptions about the world are hideously warped. Can people who bought this song be, in fact, people? If my perceptions differ from theirs this fundamentally on this topic, who's to say they agree on anything else? When I'm not around, do they remove their masks and gibber and sway to the tune of "Umbrella" at the foot of some unspeakable idol to the Elder Gods? To me, the popularity of "Umbrella" is incontrovertible proof that a substantial percentage of the world's population perceives a different reality from mine. In this sense, it upsets my conception of the universe. I didn't think music could do that.

So not only is "Umbrella" a terrible mockery of a song, but its very existence threatens my sanity. No other song in the history of pop has been able to do that. At the very least, "Umbrella" is the worst pop song of the decade. It may be the worst pop song ever.