the top ten worst hit songs of 2015

There are a lot of critics - myself included - who will say that 2015 was a better year for the Hot 100 than previous years. While there were a fair amount of bad songs, they don't quite dip into the seething rage that sparks when you have songs implicitly endorsing date rape like in 2013, or watching two of my favourite genres spiral into inane, offensive nonsense like in 2014. And sure, some of that did continue into 2015, it was largely overshadowed by the good songs being better and the bad songs not quite having the same staying power or cultural presence, with a few unfortunate exceptions that we will be discussing.

So let's re-establish the rules: the songs need to have debuted on the Billboard Year End Hot 100 this year, and just being obscenely boring doesn't cut it. So if you were expecting Rachel Platten's 'Fight Song' or 'Somebody' by Natalie La Rose on this list, it's not going to happen. And one other thing: just because I might have had a passionate reaction to the song on Billboard BREAKDOWN is no guarantee that the song might land on this list. As much as 'Coco' by O.T. Genasis is ridiculously incompetent, it's too stupidly earnest to be hateable so much as it is hilarious. This list is for songs that make my stomach churn, the tracks I avoid with all costs, the compositions where you wonder who in the Nine Hells greenlit for public consumption.

Of course, for some tracks you can see what they were going for, so let's start with our Dishonourable Mentions!

You know, I didn't hate Iggy Azalea's 'Fancy' as much as so many people did, but I know a brazen rip-off when I hear it. And yet somehow Jidenna and Roman GianArthur are even less believable in their appropriation of gangster imagery than Iggy Azalea was, half because their flow and bars are nowhere near as good and half because it's kind of hard to cultivate a smooth, classy vibe against gang vocals! And that's before we get lines about his crew slinging cocaine like a dandy - you know, if I remember The Godfather correctly, the Corleones wanted to keep the drugs out of their territory. But the biggest issue is that neither of these guys are remotely convincing as either a 'classic man' or a gangsta, half because so many of their lines are ridiculously corny and half because neither of them have anything close to assertive presence in their voices - Charli XCX these guys are not. And am I the only one that feels the song gets a little petulant whenever we get the lines 'even when she go away' on the prechorus? Yeah, you keep on trying to convince yourselves after she leaves, that'll be about the only people you convince.

Really, Nick Jonas, your right to be 'hellish'? Look, on some level this song might have been salvaged from mediocrity - it's got a decent, if overmixed groove and Nick Jonas is doing his absolute best to be Justin Timberlake, which he'd later repeat to much better results later this year. But between the chipmunk fragments, a beat that is nowhere near as punchy or tight as it should be, and lyrics that try to twist Nick Jonas' passive-aggressive envy into an attempt at complimenting this girl and making her envy seem just as attractive... I'm sorry, this is just ugly and distrustful, two overblown egos feeding into a relationship that seems destined to fail - and it turns out, it did.

Granted, if your relationship fails, this is probably not the way to act out your most pissy instincts, a track going on about how much you gave your ex and how much you sacrificed and now where is she when you need her? And really, I'm divided on where this song falls apart - is it Justin Bieber's inert and self-obsessed crooning presence on the microphone, the flagrant abuse of pitch-shifting and choppy vocal fragments over a painfully thin mix, or that distant weedy synth fragment that seems to spasm off beat and just sounds awkward, no matter how much textured trap percussion you pile on top? Either way, it fits into the category some of the worst work of all three men - and keep in mind Skrillex once worked with Korn, Diplo has produced for Riff Raff, and Justin Bieber is Justin Bieber. Next!

If it wasn't for Normani's prechorus, this would have landed on the top ten worst for certain. One of my most controversial reviews this year was of Fifth Harmony's debut album Reflection, and yet I think ended up downplaying how much this song pissed me off with its bargain-barrel Syco production, the hollow and ugly vocal production that makes every member sound like they're singing through a tube, or the melodic sax hook that might as well be pulled straight out of Jason Derulo's 'Talk Dirty'. Then there's Kid Ink spitting the same verse twice with some of the laziest rapping of his career before the girls drop into a nasal hook bragging about we should 'give it to them because they're worth it'. So not only do they come across like spoiled divas, but given all the sexual implications, what they want 'given' takes on a very different connotation. Oh, and for reference, at the time this song was record, the youngest of Fifth Harmony was 17 - Kid Ink was 28. Ewww...

So here's a true story: I was country karaoke, and just as I finished singing an old Travis Tritt song, a girl comes up and she says I should totally sing Sam Hunt's 'Take Your Time' because he's such her favourite country artist right now. And I had to restrain my urge to issue the following corrections: one, this is not a country song; two, there's less singing than half-rapped talking on this track that can't settle on either; three, the song is a disingenuous slice of bro sleaze that doesn't have the stones to outright say Sam Hunt wants to nail this girl, no matter how much 'self-aware' commentary is going on. He just wants to 'take her time', but the real revealing lines are 'I don't have to make you love me' - you know, because she's just going to fall head over heels for Sam Hunt anyway because he's playing hard to get. And maybe her friend's coming to get her or she hasn't left because she's looking for the polite exit and you're coming across like a goddamn creep! So no, I didn't sing this terrible song that night, I sang Alan Jackson instead - you know, real country music.

You know, this song is a lot lower than I'd otherwise expect, considering how much rage it inspired in that episode of Billboard BREAKDOWN. I think part of it is that the odd gritty feel to the groove actually proved surprisingly decent against the wiry synth line, or because the majority of the lyrics are borderline incomprehensible if you don't have them in front of you. And if you're looking to enjoy this track in any way, I highly recommend you keep that in mind, because they reveal some ugly things about Rich Homie Quan. Like how in the chorus he likes to give girls ecstasy to get them in bed with him, or how he compares the girl he's with - who of course he stole from you - to Dennis Rodman, or how he describes getting a blowjob like a 'toupee', or how he compares himself and his girl to a big dog and cat and how she likes it in the back - which I'm fairly certain isn't possible - or how at the end of the day it's vapid luxury porn we've heard hundreds of times before that avoids rhyming to instead go 'ooh ooh ooh', which calls to mind chimpanzees and that's loaded with implications I never want to touch... and yet Rich Homie Quan insists he's not flexing. Why did we give this guy a career after 'Type of Way' again?

The best thing I can say about this song is that it wasn't the worst song off of Fan of a Fan. But really, is that saying much, when you throw two of the least likable men in hip-hop and R&B on top of a pretty bouncy and likeable synth line for them to behave like autotuned douchebags, always screwing your girl and then treating her like disposable trash afterwards? It's the self-obsession that drives me off the wall on this song - Tyga's looking in the mirror having an 'I'd fuck me' moment, as if that makes any sense, Chris Brown references breaking the restraining order he was specifically given to keep away from women for his anger management issues, and they're all 'tatted up like Mexicans' and with their section of the bar filled with lesbians - the implication that Chris Brown and Tyga are such sex gods they can easily seduce them into three ways. Yeah, no, this song is so painfully juvenile that I can't really hate it, but I can dismiss it coming from two overgrown man-children with delightful charges of domestic abuse and borderline pedophilia. Screw this!

And now onto the list proper - what can be worse than what we just talked about?

10. This was the year of the Vine dance craze - the seeds were planted in 2014, but they really exploded this year to the point where I coined the term 'nu-crunk' on Billboard BREAKDOWN to explain them. And while there were a slew I could choose from, at the end of the day they're fairly inoffensively vapid and it's not like we've ever expected dance songs to have a brain.

We do expect they sound better than this.

10. 'Hit The Quan' by ILoveMemphis (Billboard Year-End Chart Position #83)

Okay, I could start by saying that iLoveMemphis doesn't belong anywhere near a microphone with a voice that sounds perpetually constipated, but that's only the beginning of this song's issues, the majority of them focused on production that would be creepy if it didn't sound so embarrassingly cheap. A oily squeal synth against a bass hit that sits there like a leaden block plus hi-hats that you'll never convince me didn't come from a cheap preset, it leads to a sound that perpetually keeps my stomach uneasy - it sounds like someone tried to make a Mike Will Made It beat and failed! And then we have the lyrics... where honestly, this song is saved from being lower by one decent ninja turtles reference and nothing else. iLoveMemphis then proceeds to rhyme 'crazy' with itself four times as he tries to pick up a girl to hit the quan with him - and really, if I was the boyfriend in this case, I don't think I'd be panicking, because getting down low to swing your arms? Drake did that on 'Hotline Bling', and nobody took that seriously! But in the end, this song shouldn't have even made the charts - cheap Vine trash like this and 'Bet You Can't Do It Like Me' and 'Nasty (Freestyle)' are so shoddily constructed eventually quality will win out. Let's just hope that's sooner rather than later...

9. But say what you will about how curdled and ugly 'Hit The Quan' was, at least it was marginally original!

9. 'Watch Me' by Silento (Billboard Year-End Chart Position #8)

Look, I get that most of these vine hits are designed to sound cheap and disposable, built off of a keyboard line you would have heard in 2008 and the thickest bass hit you can afford. But Silento went the extra mile here by having painfully whiny vocals completely unable to back up his limp rip-off of a track, which didn't even bother to invent its own dance moves and instead stole from other bad dance songs wholesale! And of course it's also got the Nickelback 'Photograph' problem - if we're listening to the song on the radio or some sadistic DJ throws this on at a wedding or house party, we can't watch you! Granted, I can't imagine why anyone would want to watch this, but the inclusion of these lyrics only highlights how this was never intended to get big! This isn't even like Soulja Boy, who at least had the personality to ride to future hits that nobody remembers! Silento is trying right now with even worse songs like 'Dessert' for a second hit - let's do ourselves a favour and not let happen for at least another eight years, okay?

8. So hypothetically, if you wanted to make one of those dance songs work, logically the first thing you could do would be to give it a budget, some production with weight to it, give it to an established star that might be able to elevate the material ohwai-

8. '7/11' by Beyonce (Billboard Year-End Chart Position #61)

Beyonce... why? I mean, i get it, you release a self-titled album full of heavy themes and you want to do something to unwind, show you can still get down and party, but this isn't even the dance floor diva Beyonce that made clattering annoyances like 'Single Ladies' - she's better than this! And when I say that I mean Beyonce has never been good at playing up a gangsta or ratchet side, remember 'Diva'? And while I won't this song is worse than 'Diva', it certainly isn't anything I can respect - the production is overloaded with a rattling trap beat, when we do get a synth line it's more creepy than fun, and the bass seems to mutate and warp with every verse. It's an ugly and misshapen track, not helped by Beyonce squawking out perhaps her worst vocal performance and lyrics that remind me of an extremely drunk choreographer coked out of his brain. This is the sort of track that plays at the moment where parties tilt into sloppy debauchery, and the hazy outro where Beyonce slurs that she's so much fresher than me only seals the deal. I get that this is not for me, but whoever this is for, you can have it in all of its intoxicated, messy glory - I don't want to deal with the hangover.

7. And speaking of artists are nowhere near convincing on their chosen tracks...

7. 'Bitch Better Have My Money' by Rihanna (Billboard Year-End Chart Position #48)

I get the feeling that Rihanna and Beyonce just walked into each other's studios by mistake, because while I didn't buy Beyonce as a ratchet girl smacking her own ass, I buy Rihanna as a hard-edged gangsta even less. Granted, if you go back through the decade of Rihanna hits, she's always been all over the map, but her best material has always been sleek and sexy, dark but making it fun. This song doesn't so much do that as it features Rihanna barking over another skin-crawlingly repulsive trap beat that takes some of Kanye West and Travi$ Scott's bass-heavy production and pairs it with some of the oiliest synths I've heard all year, and that's before we get to the chopped and screwed outro that throws pitch shifting into the mix and oh god, she is trying so hard to sound intimidating. And I could go on about how the flow of the lyrics is terrible and if Rihanna's going to spend half the song bragging about her immense wealth why she even needs to care about the titular bitch, but the biggest problem is Rihanna herself. Her verses are barely on key, her voice has nowhere near the presence to match the production, and with every crack the illusion breaks even further. Now we didn't get a Rihanna record this year, even despite multiple singles doing well, which gives me the impression there's been a lot of retooling behind the scenes - let's hope the rest isn't like this!

6. If you look outside the main charts, one of the running themes of this year has been comebacks from long-established artists that have been on hiatus or otherwise haven't been recording. You didn't see a lot of that reflected on the Hot 100 - it's not like 'Bitch, I'm Madonna' was a charting presence, but we did get one that broke through, courtesy of the last gasp of DJ Mustard's fading popularity... and it's arguably one of the worst examples.

6. 'Post To Be' by Omarion ft. Chris Brown & Jhene Aiko (Billboard Year-End Chart Position #24)

I guarantee most of you don't remember who Omarion is - member of B2K, went solo in the mid-2000s to very limited success as the R&B boom sputtered out, and made a comeback with an album bankrolled by Rick Ross that nobody cared about. And after you get through this trainwreck of a song, you will continue not to care about Omarion, because he is a non-entity on this track, somehow needing more autotune than Chris Brown needs on this song as he sing-raps about stealing your girlfriend - but wait, he's not to blame for any of it, because she plainly wanted to blow him anyway, that's facts, no printer. And yes, that's one of the many, many awful lines in this song, but what really gets under my skin is how smug and self-satisfied it is, not helped by Chris Brown all the more blatantly ripping off an old Jamaican pop song without giving credit. And all of this is supposed to be off-set by Jhene Aiko playing 'yo chick' - which is how she's credited in the opening bars - but then you get lines saying that the guy needs to 'eat her booty like groceries'? That lyric somehow got critical acclaim and apparently is the only thing pop culture remembers about this song, but more to the point, why the hell is Jhene Aiko on this song? I know you were friends with Omarion a decade ago, but you dropped one of the best R&B albums of the past few years with Souled Out, you don't have to do this! The sad fact is that outside of decent production from DJ Mustard, she really is the best part of this song, but it doesn't make it any less of a disappointment. And as of now, this is her biggest hit - in a just world, that would be how it's 'post to be'.

5. It may have started in 2014, but 2015 was the year that bro-country was officially done, at least to the point where the last dregs of the genre had their waning snippets of popularity and Nashville moved onto the metropolitan, R&B-tinged sound. But that doesn't mean it wasn't going to go out swinging - or shaking its ass, one way or the other.

5. 'Kick The Dust Up' by Luke Bryan (Billboard Year-End Chart Position #87)

Seriously, did anyone like this song? I have family members that are Luke Bryan fans, and even they didn't like this, which probably contributes to the reason why Luke Bryan did not have a good year in 2015. Sure, he still sold a ton of records and this did go to #1 on the country charts, but the fact we didn't get anything beyond a lyric video for this song seems to indicate even disinterest from the Luke Bryan camp. And it's not hard to see why: it s a blatant retread of 'That's My Kind Of Night' - and while this is marginally less embarrassing without the hip-hop cliches, it's still godawful. The song is choppy and has no coherent groove with some of the worst drum production I've heard this year, the synth tone slathered all over the chorus like spoiled mayonnaise, guitars crushed into a slurry except for a pathetic four bar solo, and then there's Luke Bryan himself, looking to 'tear it up up'. And while I'd say the lyrics are otherwise asinine and forgettable, what really tips into awful is the smug jerkass attitude. I'll admit I'm a city guy and as someone who lives in Toronto I can't stand overpriced nightlife either, but what's telling is the sense of jealousy - why else would you be bragging that you have beautiful people too? You're going in cornfields and under bridges with bad moonshine and diesel engines - I'll stick to my downtown nightclubs, which will still play better country music than this! Next!

4. This year I gave out two of my lowest scores ever for albums, 2/10. That would be a 1/5, unquestionably a failing grade, but for very different reasons. The first case was for Thomas Rhett's Tangled Up being a smug, self-satisfied, badly produced and plagiarized atrocity that offends me to this day, but I can at least take some comfort knowing that outside of 'Die A Happy Man' charting as the 'Thinking Out Loud' rip-off that it is, nobody cares. The other album is making year-end lists, and it's arguably just as bad - and while most of its 'hits' avoided making serious chart impact, one made it high enough...

4. 'No Type' by Rae Sremmurd (Billboard Year-End Chart Position #70)

I've heard every defense for Sremmlife and this song - it's supposedly to be mindless club garbage for people to get turnt to, it's fun, to quote Pitchfork, 'Its weightlessness is its purpose'. And you know, that can be a valid defense for pop music like 'Good Time' by Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen... or, you know, the entire last Carly Jepsen album! But maybe because I grew up in the age of crunk that was just as based but actually a pulse and vocal personalities like Lil Jon who could carry the music... this is not fun to me. A big chunk of this is Mike Will Made It's fault - a limp buzzy synth line against a bass that swamps out a leaden hook with sparse hi-hats, and then add in two of the worst vocalists and rappers to ever take the microphone in the past few years. Now to their dubious credit 'No Type' is far from the worst song on Sremmlife, especially in the lyrical content and flow which is better than expected, but the worst part has always been the hook where they go from saying they have 'no type' to saying 'bad bitches is the only thing that I like'. So avoiding the atrocious grammar and the fact that he's calling women 'things', is being a 'bad bitch' not a type anymore? And I can't be the only one who sees Swae Lee trying to claim I don't have a life when his painfully thin and weak voice needs a pile of reverb to carry anything. It's a godawful chorus on forgettably lifeless dreck, and the diminishing returns Rae Sremmurd saw all year is hopefully proof that the mainstream finally woke up to that fact.

3. You know, I've made three of these year-end lists chronicling the worst hit songs of 2013, and you eventually start to notice patterns - godawful hip-hop, terrible bro-country, abysmal lyrics, production that's way too dark and creepy to make their songs remotely fun... oh, and Lil Wayne.

3. 'Only' by Nicki Minaj ft. Drake, Lil Wayne & Chris Brown (Billboard Year-End Chart Position #51)

Granted, 'Only' is not Lil Wayne's song - it's his protege Nicki's, who along with Drake and Chris Brown have populated nearly a quarter of my lists. But he's one of the many reasons why 'Only' is one of the most horrendous hip-hop songs I heard this year. Technically a left-over from The Pinkprint - and along with 'Anaconda' almost entirely responsible for making that record measurably worse - 'Only' initially got popular thanks to a music video that piled on the Nazi iconography... and then somehow stayed popular enough despite being a slice of atrocious rapping from everyone involved. It's a bad sign when the person who leaves this track with the most dignity is Chris Brown handling the hook, but to her credit NIcki probably is the next best. Yeah, explaining her own duct tape line is stilted as hell, and she seems way more concerned with defending her ass and the fact that she never screwed Drake or Lil Wayne to get to the top - you've been in the game six years, nobody would question you if you hadn't been wildly uneven in quality - but there are lines that kind of connect. But Drake... if he hadn't spent the entire year proving his career was unbreakable despite wild shifts in quality, I'd say this is his worst moment, where he sounds like a delirious eleven year old gawking at tits for the first time. If we're looking for a reason why Meek Mill might have started his beef with Drake, this track's a good indicator because Drake sets himself up as the next in line - granted, they've been doing this since 'Moment 4 Life' but here it's just pathetic, where he then brags about partying with crack-smoking former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford and then being around girls when they put on make-up - so either you're the stereotypical gay best friend or you got friend-zoned HARD. The miscalculation is almost so stupid it's funny... and then Lil Wayne shows up and in his first two bars says he'd only screw Nicki Minaj if she was drunk because she needs dick in her life. Which of course then leads to him saying he pisses greatness like goldish yellow and proceeds to ramble incoherently about shooting up people's houses and wow, he sounds terrible. Half his bars are slurred, he has no real fire, he sounds like a total mess and that's when he bothers to rhyme. All of this comes against an drippy four-note synth line that lends a whole new layer of ickiness onto this track. And yet it's only at #3 - want to know what's worse?

2. Okay, to explain why this next track doesn't work, let's go back the 1950s and a mostly forgotten pop star named Pat Boone. If you're a metal fan, you probably just involuntarily tensed, but he's more well-known for being a major figure in the growth of the Christian subculture and a contemporary of Elvis interpreting black music for white audiences. Now unlike Elvis, Pat Boone was godawful, epitomizing the stiff, try-too-hard conservative and painfully white stereotype that would come to characterize the rest of his career and is offensive in its own right. And yet in a year where you had Kendrick Lamar and Lupe Fiasco and #BlackLivesMatter, and say you were a racist record executive who had just done a ton of horse tranquilizers, how could you possibly bring that back and not be Post Malone? Well...

2. 'Marvin Gaye' by Charlie Puth ft. Meghan Trainor (Billboard Year-End Chart Position #75)

I think I was the first person to coin the joke on Twitter that this is the whitest song about sex since 'Afternoon Delight', but the real atrocity is how damn hard this song is trying to be sexy and failing spectacularly. Neither Charlie Puth or Meghan Trainor sound like they've ever heard of sex, and instead decided to borrow as much as they can from black culture in order to set the mood. Putting aside how Puth tries to turn Marvin Gaye's name into a verb and desecrate one of the greatest legends of soul music, it also samples the bassline from Ben E. King's 'Stand By Me'... and even with that, it fails spectacularly. 'Karma sutra show & tell', the fact that he's bragging about being subtle and isn't remotely, the fact that Puth justifies the godawful chorus by saying, 'Well, 'I Want It That Way' by the Backstreet Boys didn't make any sense, so I don't have to either' - way to be both wrong and shit on my favourite boy band, asshole. Then there's the production, which tries for a retro soul vibe with the fake record scratching, throws gang vocals into in the mix, and on Meghan Trainor's verse we get trap percussion, which doesn't fit with anything. Seriously, this song reminds me of the historically bad production that was on Glee, but at least most of the time the cast had actual pipes. Because then we get to Meghan Trainor who describes herself as a dog without a bone... and look, I don't want to call her a bitch, but what am I supposed to do with this? And look, I get there's an audience for this dreck - people who are scared of their own genitals need music too - but this is gentrified cultural vandalism by two people who represent the very worst in modern pop music. And on that note...

1. So here's the thing about these lists: I don't really concern myself with cultural impact or popular consensus, mostly because it's pop music and generally people will forget the bad stuff and move on. As much as I can't stand 'U.O.E.N.O' for implicitly endorsing date rape and 'Bottoms Up' for being a horrendous example of the worst of bro-country, looking back on them now they've mostly been forgotten. Brantley Gilbert hasn't really been relevant in 2015 with singles not landing a lot of impact, and the damage to Rick Ross and Rocko's career has been pretty undeniable. But when it comes to this song... it didn't kill her career.

It should have.

1. 'Dear Future Husband' by Meghan Trainor (Billboard Year-End Chart Position #74)

I'm not the only person who has thrashed this song or branded it as the worst hit of 2015, so finding new territory to rake the abomination over the coals is a little tricky. For starters, the cultural appropriation continues as Meghan Trainor grabs up chunks of Dion's 1961 song 'Runaround Sue', or more recently of Olly Murs' 'Dance With Me Tonight From 2011'. And while I do like doo-wop, Meghan Trainor's sing-rapping feels stilted as hell and her lower range is not flattering, even against this painfully plastic and whitebread song. But then we have the lyrics... and here's the thing, if she was trying to play this comedically or for satire like what you might see in country from Shania Twain or Miranda Lambert, it might have worked, taking that vintage, Stepford-esque Americana and showing the toxic attitude beneath it. But that's not how the song is framed - because Meghan Trainor is playing it straight and she doesn't seem to be remotely aware of how toxic her attitude is. And it starts small - I could rant about how the titular line isn't said by anyone with emotional maturity, but it's the entitlement that sneaks into the opening verse on how she deserves the date and the flowers and then she'll be the perfect wife. And the weird thing is that this 'perfection' basically means her way or the highway, not so much traditionally demure but the sort of archetype that comes toxic sitcoms with zero self-awareness. Because of course she's never wrong and you should apologize regardless even when she describes herself as crazy - which is a nightmarish can of worms for a different day - and then maybe after you buy her a ring and operate as a premium doormate she might give you some 'kisses'. Yeah, a little hard for me to buy into any cuteness when before it you said 'we'll never see your family more than mine'. That's insane - but the framing presents it as cute and innocent and a good message for young girls looking to stand up for themselves! But what scares me about this song is that people are already saying, 'hey, this is feminism, right' - whereas in reality any self-respecting feminist would be saying, 'THIS IS NUTS!'. In other words, on top of being an atrocious slice of self-obsessed retro-pandering nightmare fuel with the weakest key change I've heard all year, this is a song that can actively do cultural damage and take us backwards. In other words, I imagine this is what Donald Trump thinks feminism is - all dolled up to hide latent insanity. Easily the worst hit song of 2015, and if we're lucky, time and progress will leave Meghan Trainor behind.