rolling fuck this shit worst songs of 2015 thread

actually I guess I hate hearing it out but on the radio it sounds perfect

god, is that only song that uptight motherfucker has ever sounded LOOSE on?

latch is disclosure's best song. liking their others and not that is to labour under a misapprehension

The longer but essentially identical answer is that this very whitebread congeniality sets up shop at the exact point where politeness short-circuits with rudeness, offering a soulfulness so garish, so ripe for colonisation by a particularly gauche display of aspirationalism, that it can only end up as the authentic* music of a street culture disinterested in the vexed, handwringing negotiations of self and other that both inspire and erode 90% of contemporary British dance music.

tim f's sharpest bit of crit this decade imo

(that's about 'control' i should say but it remains the pertinent vector into "bland whiteboy soul" hardman postures)

Yesterday I left the room briefly and came back in and everyone was laughing, and he said "yeah sorry, guilty pleasure this one"

lmao I should clarify that was a *positive* writeup of "control" (as it well should be)

between video and song this is a pretty good contender for worst of the year imo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSam5sBjvPk
"Most video directors thought my ideas were too zany, I forced myself to learn how to edit and directed the video myself, and who better to star in my video then The Fat Jewish who has always been a supporter of my Instagram page. I wanted to create something that made you feel like you were on drugs and portrayed internet culture in a nutshell."

It gave me a headache and so I took an aspirin, so technically speaking I suppose I do now feel like I'm on drugs.

i was able to last 1 minute before shutting it down

SPLURT
#OMW2SYG
"The Fat Jew"
"Swiggity Swooty I'm Comin Fo Dat Booty"
pseudo-"RAPPA POM POM!"-dancehall stylez
champagne facial
sub-tim and eric video skills
"OFFICIAL MERCH"
recurring iphone framing
#SWOOTYDANCE

i'm just saying this has everything you want from a legit worst song of 2015 contender

This might be a controversial offering, but Little Big Town has a new Top 40 crossover called "Girl Crush." It's not about platonic admiration of another woman, it's about being furiously jealous of a girl who gets to date someone she has a standard crush on. Even the intimations of lesbian urges are couched in this jealousy. I want to taste her lips is followed by Yeah, 'cause they taste like you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYZMT8otKdI

Hoping this doesn't start some "is it right or wrong to be offended/not offended" thing, but using the phrase "i've got a girl crush" to mean "i wish that i was jessie's girl" seems pretty fucking tragic

turns out jezebel already wrote about the song (figured it made the radar of people who don't wait till it hits the top 40), but in terms of country audiences not digging the saphphic winks, rather than the co-option of the phrase "girl crush" to mean something bitter

http://themuse.jezebel.com/little-big-towns-girl-crush-a-perfect-storm-of-country-1693794535

i'm not saying your take is necessarily wrong, but that song is great

feel like a song like this generates its energy *because* its gets its own core concept wrong. it's "annoying."

yeah i wonder if it would do as well if the line was "I have a hate crush"

like, everyone knows what "girl crush" means, everyone knows what lesbianism is, even way down there in nashville. this is... both! neither! some other thing! about a dude anyway!

i think "girl crush" is a beautiful song and i love it but i feel your take croup

phrases like 'man crush'/'woman crush' etc have just become another 'no homo' anyways (perhaps they always were but at first it was at least kinda charming that heteros were getting less uptight abt expressing strong maybe-physical admiration for members of the same sex)

it's definitely well written, catchy, etc. not pretending there's songs i love that aren't also reprehensible and depressing in their pandering/co-option.

i see that charlie puth is (rightly) an alum of this thread, i only realized yesterday via radio dj chatter that his surname is pronounced 'pooth'

it's about mimetic desire

Cant wait to find out whether Blake or brad gets to be the guy at a country music awards show who talks about someone with a hot wife and then sings "I got a guy crush" to applause

"girl crush," as an expression, I thought expressed or expresses something important for which it felt like there hadn't been a good phrase before. an experience people had and recognized. ime it was never "no homo" in the way that "man crush" usually got laden with (due to bro-ist usage from pretty early on i think, and much more commonly used as "YOU have a man crush on him, ha ha ha!"). it was a good thing for our culture to have more ways of women expressing admiration, solidarity, and even the kind of passionate but not necessarily sexual (but not necessarily not) feelings you can have towards other people, especially when you're young and they just seem so tremendously awesome and amazing. but our pop music just leaves this all behind.

woolf:

It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally's. For in those days she was completely reckless; did the most idiotic things out of bravado; bicycled round the parapet on the terrace; smoked cigars. Absurd, she was--very absurd. But the charm was overpowering, to her at least, so that she could remember standing in her bedroom at the top of the house holding the hot-water can in her hands and saying aloud, "She is beneath this roof.... She is beneath this roof!"

team dresch:

It's where the obvious turns dumb, and clarity turns off
I'm standing somewhere near the back of the room
I'm on my left - I'm in between her
She's amazing, her words save me
She holds her head as if it's truth

and we get, what, "i kissed a girl and i liked it"? i might be a little out of date with that reference. and not being a pop-hating snob, just a pop lover disappointed in the state of the art.

well like i was getting at with the brad-paisley-at-the-cmas scenario, if a guy sang about mimetic desire (a phrase i didn't actually know before it came up here!) and referred to it in anguished self-seriousness as a "guy crush", people would be rofling. but between this and "i kissed a girl" - where katy keeps demeaning the smoochee as an "experimental game" etc - pop is clearly ok with the idea of these kinds of self-loathing erotic impulses coming from women.

and to be clear, i can totally understand being affected by "girl crush" AS an ugly expression of mimetic desire - "Kissed A Girl" is probably one of my favorite Katy Perry songs because of that weird, contemptuous undertone. i just find it depressing that 20 years after "rebel girl," THIS is how the phrase "girl crush" makes the top 40.

DC & dc otm

as hot a take as "those backwards hillbillies who listen to country" is for sites who only cover music for the viral angles, the "controversy" is largely not:

http://m.billboard.com/entry/view/id/119493

yeah i was kinda surprised when i searched for commentary about this song and just found "can hillbillies handle GIRLS KISSING?" as if the GIRLS KISSING aspect wasn't couched in male-flattering lovers-triangle talk

KRYS Corpus Christi, Texas, has only recently begun spinning the song, and while PD Big Frank Edwards says it's too soon to gauge a response, he adds, "I'm a narrow-minded, conservative, eighth generation Texan, and I think the song is fine."

gonna end all my reviews like that

totally. "I'm a simple, eighth-generation hyper-chicken from a narrow-minded, backwoods asteroid, and I think the song is fine."

and ha, i almost brought up "rebel girl" rather than "she's amazing."

Apologies if this has been posted but i wanted to share the horror (i saw it on a friends FB wall - think there was an article about it somewhere perhaps as apparently the band have record industry exec connections)

anyway its just plain bad imo but judge for yourself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfol9YlSvPc

those guys scored an NYT profile
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/arts/music/sxsw-pays-off-for-the-prettiots.html?_r=0
i never got around to hearing it
it is not good on first listen

I don't know if I want to listen to it again necessarily but I found it inoffensive. Shit band name though. Like a portmanteau of pretty and Poirot. v bad

the NYT profile says it's a portmanteau of 'pretty' and 'idiots'. 'The Poirots' would be a nice band name

lol i was going to say "oh leave em alone, that cheap video implies they're not out of the oven yet" but it turns out the video was directed by richard kern

I find the premise of the song amusing, but the execution kinda lets it down -- & that singing style is terrible, of course, but I've resigned myself to the fact that it's here to stay

i asked my friend where she saw it and it was here. Didn't know about the NY Times article.
http://martiandanceinvasion.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/the-starving-artists-of-1.html

Danny goldberg's daughter? Just warning 90s folks - if you hate that on principle, you also have to hate That Dog

the drummer is the all grow(ing)-up Trachtenberg Family daughter; thought i knew her from somewhere

T/S Richard Kern vs Larry Clark

yeah, I was about to say, this sounds exactly like a that dog. song

(and IMO is far too good for this thread, also pretty good in general, also if you want to dismiss artists offhand because of their parents you've got a fuck of a lot of artists to dismiss)

i said the song was shit before i read anything about them

Yeah, this song is alright at best and ignorable at worst. I suspect they have the potential to make some REALLY BAD songs in the future, tho.

seems like glossy antifolk to me which i can like with proper massaging but there's not much going on there that makes me wanna stick around; though i agree it's not fuck this shit worst and there's a certain degree of not unfair to presume dog whistle commentary that goes along with slagging it as such
i would link to frankie cosmos' "birthday song" as "child of famous parents DIY lo-fi done right " corrective but i don't want that song in this thread

the NYT profile says it's a portmanteau of 'pretty' and 'idiots'.

well that's prettiotic

I suspect they have the potential to make some REALLY BAD songs in the future, tho.

They have the potential to make some great songs too, surely.

That song doesn't even annoy me as much as "88 lines about 44 girls."

He's whistling now

Judging from the video I was dreading that the Prettiots song was going to feature the first boyfriend singing at some point, but: Garfunkel and Oates > this song > Jesus H. Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse.