1. Fergie, Big Girls Don’t Cry (2007, #1)

The thing about drecky ballads is that a lot of people like them.  No matter how bad they are, they are going to be popular.  As every rock band and pop diva ever can tell you, an increase in schmaltz leads proportionately to an increase in radio play.  And ballads don’t go away, either; no matter how monstrously bad they are, adult contemporary radio picks up on them and then they’re around for years and years, ready to pounce the next time you go to the dentist or run to Walgreen’s.

Fergie’s Big Girls Don’t Cry may never die, unfortunately.  It was the single most-played song of 2007 on American radio.  And according to ARC, the semi-official chart that monitors airplay, it’s the third-biggest single of the decade.  It hit #1 in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Ireland, New Zealand and Norway, and hit the top ten pretty much everywhere else.

So, yes, it’s quite possible that overkill played a part in my choosing it as the decade’s single worst song.  Admittedly, it’s not as blatantly offensive as Eminem’s Superman is, and it doesn’t make fun of poor people like Nickelback’s Rock Star”(or Fergie’s own Glamorous.)  It doesn’t pretend to be smart like Jason Mraz or edgy like Katy Perry.  It’s not as hypocritical as “Gold Digger” and it doesn’t rhyme “fried chicken” with “stickin’ up for you.”

But oh, is it ever whiny.  And bland.  I have probably heard this song literally hundreds of times by now, but unless it’s actually on I can’t even hum the verses for you.  Googling the lyrics doesn’t even help, though Fergie and co-writer Toby Gad sure whipped up some doozies in that department:  “Like the little school mate in the school yard, We’ll play jacks and Uno cards.”  Does she really say that?  How have I never noticed that before?

Oh yes, because the chorus made my ears stop working.  If all of the freestyle divas of the eighties combined forces to produce the world’s whiniest ballad, they couldn’t approach the levels of annoying that Stacey summons to sing that line about the child and the blanket.  Big Girls Don’t Cry makes All Cried Out sound like an anthem of empowerment.

will.i.am produced this song, the fourth single from Stacey F’s very popular album The Dutchess.  Though I’ve never heard the album in its entirely, I almost want to, just because the quality of the singles is so inconsistent.  First there was London Bridge, co-produced by Polow Da Don and Danja.  It was tinny and made no sense, but I liked it.  Next there was Fergalicious, a crappy and abrasive will.i.am-produced mess structured around JJ Fair’s Supersonic.  Then there was Glamorous.  That song instructed me to take my broke ass home if I didn’t have any money, so I did, because I worked in retail.  (I have little patience for songs about how rich other people are.)  But amazingly, after Big Girls Don’t Cry spent five hellish months in the top 10, Fergie released Clumsy.  Clumsy is a good song; no, Clumsy is a really good song.  Sampling both Deee-Lite and Little Richard, the song takes Stacey’s worst trait–the fact that all of her non-whiny moments are devoted to tuneless yelling–and makes it the song’s selling point.

So, there it is.  The worst pop hit of the decade.  And now this list is finally over, and I can go back to listening to songs I don’t loathe.

[Sorry for the gap in posting.]

2. Kanye West, Gold Digger (2005, 10 weeks at #1)

Where to begin, where to begin…

Okay, so. Some background: I hated Kanye West from day one, or at least from day one as a performer. Without knowing his name, I admired the Jackson Five sample in Jay-Z’s Izzo (H.O.V.A.) for its sheer clunkiness, with that little bit of Michael sneaking in every few seconds. And ‘03 Bonnie and Clyde is a good song, too.

But West’s seemingly out-of-the-blue emergence as a performer was really annoying. Through The Wire, a song recorded while West’s mouth was literally wired shut, made for an interesting story, but it’s still a horrible song, and I resent that it launched a deluge of crappy hip-hop songs with sped-up samples of songs that were pretty terrible to begin with.

West followed Through The Wire up with the even more annoying All Falls Down and the offensively self-serving Jesus Walks. In that one he complained about how nobody would play a song about Jesus on the radio which, I’m sorry, is very irritating for someone to say on their first album.  West for some reason presented himself as a college dropout, but his mom was a professor and to date he is the only mainstream artist I’ve ever heard of who played the campus of my not-particularly-notable alma mater.  So who cares?

But as much as The College Dropout tormented me, the follow-up Late Registration was worse. The first single, Diamonds From Sierra Leone, used blood diamonds as an excuse for Kanye West to tell the world how awesome Kanye West is. It also mauls Shirley Bassey’s Diamonds Are Forever* in a way I could shed tears over. That awful song would surely have topped the bottom 40, had it not (thankfully) only reached #43 on the Hot 100.

So, that’s out then. But still, there’s the other hit from Graduation Day, Gold Digger. If you’ve forgotten since that song’s ten-week run at the top of the charts, Gold Digger’s the one where Jamie Foxx pretended to be Ray Charles and Kanye rapped about how women are materialistic hos. Oddly, Jon Brion co-produced it.

The flaws of materialistic women is a theme West returns to a lot. Girlfriend troubles are necessarily poor subject matter for a song, mind you.  But it’s really irritating when someone–especially someone whose songs mostly sound like self-absorbed diary entries–raps unironically about money-grubbing women when all of his other songs are about all the shit he buys with all his damn money.

West became a very popular personality to follow in the last couple of years, throwing childlike tantrums at the likes of Justice and Taylor Swift and George Bush. Surprisingly, though, his songs got better.  Though I hate admitting it, some of the singles from 808s & Heartbreak were actually pretty good.  Heartless, for instance, is just as much about girlfriend-hating as Gold Digger is, but the newer song has actual emotion and doesn’t completely rely on an actor doing an impression of a popular yet dead pianist.

As much as I want Kanye to go away forever, I know he won’t.  So let’s just hope that he continues to step further away from sped-up slow jam samples and dreadful interpolations.

[*I once had a conversation with a defensive West fan who asked me how often I really listened to Shirley Bassey. A lot, actually. In addition to a Bond fetish, I've got a boyfriend who's very into easy listening hits of the seventies.]

Listen to an archive of the show here.

Rank. Artist, Title (Last Week, Peak Position, Weeks On Chart)

1. Amerie, Heard ‘Em All (5, 1, 7)
2. Alphabeat, The Spell (1, 1, 7)
3. O.Children, Dead Disco Dancer (3, 3, 6)
4. Richard Hawley, For Your Lover Give Some Time (8, 4, 5)
5. Moby, Mistake (2, 1, 8)
6. Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions, Blanchard (3, 3, 8)
7. Britney Spears, 3 (10, 7, 6)
8. Jordin Sparks, SOS (Let The Music Play) (14, 8, 6)
9. Ellie Goulding, Under The Sheets (NEW) GREATEST GAIN
10. Shakira, Did It Again (18, 10, 3)

11. Lily Allen, Who’d Have Known (20, 11, 3)
12. Ian Brown, Stellify (6, 4, 9)
13. The Raveonettes, Last Dance (9, 9, 7)
14. Lady GaGa, Bad Romance (25, 14, 2)
15. Linda Sundblad, To All My Girls (17, 15, 5)
16. My Tiger My Timing, I Am The Sound (22, 16, 4)
17. La Roux, I’m Not Your Toy (11, 9, 9)
18. Julian Casablancas, 11th Dimension (13, 13, 5)
19. Coeur de Pirate (16, 16, 5)
20. Brand New, At The Bottom (27, 20, 2)

21. Natalie Imbruglia, Want (7, 5, 8)
22. Pink, Funhouse (12, 1, 9)
23. Gin Wigmore, Oh My (15, 15, 5)
24. Kent, Tontarna (30, 24, 3)
25. Kings of Convenience, Boat Behind (35, 25, 2)
26. Saint Etienne, Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Richard X Remix) (31, 26, 2)
27. Little Boots, Earthquake (NEW)
28. Nina Sky, Beautiful People (33, 28, 3)
29. Jessica Mauboy, Up/Down (34, 29, 2)
30. Royksopp feat. Karen Andersson, This Must Be It (NEW)

31. The Horrors, Whole New Way (NEW)
32. The Slits, Ask Ma (24, 24, 5)
33. Jim K Ressource, Taka Danser (37, 33, 2)
34. St. Vincent, Marrow (NEW)
35. Giana Factory, Trippin’ (NEW)
36. Trashcan Sinatras, People (NEW)
37. Annie, Songs Remind Me Of You (21, 3, 10) LONGEST CHART SITTER
38. Boy Crisis, Fountain Of Youth (19, 10, 8) BIGGEST DROP
39. Golden Filter, Thunderbird (NEW)
40. Taylor Swift, Fifteen (26, 2, 10) LONGEST CHART SITTER

3. Eminem, Superman

I blame George W Bush.  At least, I blame his opportunistic framing of September 11 into a battle of good and evil.  How else can you explain the abundance of terrible Superman metaphors that kept popping up this decade?   Sure, 3 Doors Down released Kryptonite two months before Bush was even elected handed the presidency, but 9/11 paved the way for Five For Fighting’s kinda charming yet ultimately very wimpy Superman (It’s Not Easy).  And about the same time that puddle of goop hit radio, tedious drama Smallville started on the WB.  By 2007 it seemed only natural that Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em should appear to turn Superman into a verb.

Eminem, as he constantly reminds us in this terrible 2003 single, is not Superman.  He’s just a man.  But he’s not just any man.  No, Marshall/Slim reminds us yet again that he is a uniquely condescending, childish, abusive asshole. And apparently we’re supposed to care.

Eminem–the myth, the man, the hitmaker–has been exhaustively critiqued from pretty much every angle, including from within.  Feminists hate him and it’s generally acknowledged that he’s severely Bad For The Gays.  He’s also bad for lots of other people, including his family, whose flaws he has made a career out of judging with a flagrant lack of narrative distance.

Surely Mr. Shady himself would be the first to tell you that he isn’t perfect, that he doesn’t really hate gay people, that he had it rough growing up, that he has feelings too, etc.  And that’s all fine.  But that doesn’t get to the heart of the fact that his songs are almost all really terrible.  Even if I thought it was sensible to like a song about ripping Pamela Lee’s tits off, that wouldn’t excuse the fact that My Name Is is an abrasive mess.  And maybe, maybe, I’d accept his talk about shooting his kid’s mother and grandparents (by name) in Cleaning Out My Closet if that song had a catchy hook.

Superman, right now anyway, is my least favorite of all.  Not because Anthrax and Tampax can’t make a clever rhyme, but because the song–with no trace of subtlety, let alone irony–is about an abusive dickhead and lacks even the narrative pull of his family episodes.  Unlike his previous single, Lose Yourself, Superman tries to shock listeners.  But by this point the man was three singles into his third album, and the point had been made.  With a little bit of restraint and a little bit of perspective, it might be provocative for a rapper to go into the reasons why he might want to race around leaving a trail of drunk bloody bitches.  But Eminem never allows that; he’s always too busy complaining about his hard life.

I recently heard some douchebag sing this at karaoke, and I was immediately brought back to awful parties featuring everyone I hated in high school: the Sublime-loving Family Guy enthusiasts.  They didn’t hate women, they were just drawn to lots of different media where women were constantly abused and ridiculed.  I’m not saying that Eminem causes boys to hate women, or that the millions of people who bought his albums are inherently bad.  But I am saying that he’s a one-trick pony, and that his trick wasn’t a very good one to begin with.

4. Sheryl Crow, Soak Up The Sun

You know what song is really terrible?  Get On Your Feet, the second single from Gloria Estefan’s 1989 album Cuts Both Ways.  I hate that song.  Theoretically inspirational but only in the vaguest possible sense, Estefan’s performance is so forced and joyless that the song might as well be call Oh Just Die Already, See What I Care.

Sheryl Crow’s complete lack of enthusiasm in Soak Up The Sun reminds me a lot of Get On Your Feet.  It is painful to listen to.  When Crow says she’s gonna tell everyone to lighten up, she sounds like a hostage reading cue cards at gunpoint.
Lyrically the song is pretty dippy, but Crow, often in collaboration with writer/producer Jeff Trott, frequently attains a likeably Melanie-esque blend of cutesy and stoned on songs like A Change and Everyday Is A Winding Road.  But there’s no charm in Soak Up The Sun, and no sense that Crow is even remotely engaged with her words, from the opening line about her friend the communist to the grating “maybe I am crazy too” towards the end.

I guess part of the problem is that I always really liked older Sheryl Crow and didn’t expect her to become completely terrible so abruptly.  The Sheryl Crow I knew and loved always switched rather seamlessly between heartfelt ballads and beatnik nonsense.  All I Wanna Do (from her debut album) is a silly song, but Home (from her second*) and My Favorite Mistake (from her third) are both beautiful. Nevertheless, like one really bad hangover, this song completely turned me off completely, and I haven’t bothered trying anything she’s done since.

[*Her second album, the self-titled one from 1996, is actually still very awesome.]

5. Nickelback, Rock Star

There’s some intense cynicism at work in Nickelback’s 2006 ode to fame, though the earnest yet wildly popular Canadians are so humorless that it’s unclear how much of their hatred is intentional.

Despite all reason, Nickelback became big rock stars in the fall of 2001 when How You Remind Me bulldozed its way onto radio. By the time Rock Star was released in late 2006, the group already had twelve other hits, nearly half of which had topped the dreadful Mainstream Rock Chart.

If I walked into a deli and the man behind the counter sang me a song about how one day he wanted to be a delicatessen, I might be amused, if not baffled. I might also be annoyed, and I’d definitely start getting my sandwiches elsewhere if he kept it up.  So I truly can’t explain the popularity of this song, wherein a big rock star sings about how he wants to become a big rock star.

Is it autobiographical?  Ironic?  Sneering?  It’s never clear, because the band, and Kroeger in particular, sounds exactly the same as they do on every other Nickelback song.  How can he be kidding when he’s singing with the exact same frowny croak that made How You Remind Me and Photograph so popular?  At least when Gwen Stefani sang about wanting to be a rich girl you got the sense that she was a deranged kook singing in character.  She also made the point that money wasn’t everything, a point which Kroeger doesn’t get.

Rock Star is the sound of a wealthy, humorless man makes fun of poor people for not being as wealthy as he is.  Ha ha, Chad Kroeger is saying. My name’s Chad Kroeger and I have a giant bathroom and do lots of drugs and I was on MTV Cribs once and I’ve got so much money that even my skeezy ass can get some action on a plane.

Right around the first time Rock Star hit radio, the housing market crashed and millions of Americans watched helplessly as their homes and jobs started disappearing.  When the was inexplicably re-released ten months later, things were even worse, so the cynicism—and people’s mindless embrace of it—seemed particularly nasty.  Songs like this are all too common in mainstream hip-hop, where divas namedrop shoe brands and rappers brag about how many millionaires they can squeeze at one banquette.  But rock stars are, generally, supposed to be a little classier than that.

[We edge closer to the top.  I meant to finish this godforsaken list tonight, but I'm leaving for New York Thursday morning and do not have a single clean garment in the house.  So, laundry night with no wireless it is...]

10. Puddle of Mudd, Blurry (2001, #5)

Has a band’s name ever described its sound so accurately?  These Kansas City toads sound as muddy as whatever swamp they crawled out of.  They’ve had five number one singles on the mainstream rock chart, because the mainstream rock chart is awful, but thankfully they’ve only hit the pop chart twice, with this and then with the more misogynistic but slightly less sludgy She Hates Me.

This song is horrific, but what sets it apart from the similarly dreary works of Staind or Trapt or Hoobastank (and, amazingly, Creed) is Wes Scantlin’s appalling vocals.  No human voice has ever managed to simultaneously sound that nasal, that phlegmy, that bored, and that completely full of self-pity.  And the song’s chorus, which roughly goes “whine whine something something take the pain away, yell yell oh the angst something something in my face,” would make Silverchair blush, that is how tuneless and dumb it is.  Fred Durst, the auteur, directed the video.

9. Bowling For Soup, 1985 (2004, #23)

Is there anything worse than the new millennium’s endless profession of love for the vague, annoying, and historically dodgy thing called “the eighties?”  No, no there is not.  And this song is the best example of why the eighties are the worst part of the oughties.  In 2004 the moronically named Bowling For Soup had a massive hit with a song about one specific year, yet didn’t even aim for anything resembling historical accuracy.  (Dudes?  Blondie broke up in ’82.  Nirvana’s first single came out in ’88.  Shut your traps.)

Shockingly, though, while doing some background research on this crime against humanity I learned something really crazy that would have knocked me down if I weren’t already sitting: 1985 is a cover.  No, really.  It was originally done in more or less exactly the same style by SR-71, the briefly popular punk-pop group whose lone hit was that one about fake plastic submarines.  Bowling For Soup heard that version and decided that this song really needed to be covered.  Why?  Why?!

[OK, so Richard Thompson, who isn't terrible, covered it too, but that was only after it was famous.  Also, he's very old and presumably had some kind of vision when he recorded it that wasn't just "Yeah, the 80's!  Yeah!"]

8. Jason Mraz, The Remedy (I Won’t Worry) (2003, #15)

When Jason Mraz says that the remedy is the experience, and then says that this is a dangerous liaison, do you think he’s trying to be deep?  When he says that the comedy is that it’s serious, is he trying to be funny?  What about when he says to shine the light on all of your friends when it all amounts to nothing in the end?   Do you think he’s high?  Or is he just trying to be cute?

See, I’m not sure.  I think he’s trying to be funny and cute, but I’m not sure.  In that sense Mraz reminds me a lot of Jeffy from Family Circus.  Because this particular form of wordplay (or alleged wordplay, anyway) could only appeal to a two-year old, or possibly the two-year old’s hard-of-hearing-and-maybe-dead grandparent.  Who likes this crap?  Ida Know, that’s who.  The Remedy has all the edge of a church youth service, but it’s only about half as fun.

7. Train, Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me) (2001, #5)

This atrocious song rhymes “fried chicken” with “stickin’ up for you.”  And that is really all you need to know about this song, which plagued the top 40 for thirty-eight damn weeks in 2001 and stayed on the adult contemporary chart for over two years.  Oh, and songwriter Pat Monahan says he doesn’t know what the hell the title means, either.

6. Avril Lavigne, I’m With You (2002, #4)

Choosing a least favorite Avril Lavigne song is not unlike choosing a least favorite venereal disease.  Complicated, for example, is a lot like chlamydia, woefully common and likely to cause uncomfortable burning sensations.  Sk8er Boi is more like scabies, in that listeners might break out in a painful rash when exposed to it.  (Friends will also likely laugh uncontrollably when you mention it.)  My Happy Ending most closely resembles Donovanosis, a pile of hideous ulcers that will slowly and miserablyy destroy your reproductive system.  And Lavigne’s catchiest song, Girlfriend, is curable and relatively benign, though still to be avoided, much like crabs.

But like Kaposi’s sarcoma, which mainly affects AIDS patients, I’m With You is frequently overlooked, though it is a torturous plague in and of itself.  And like those incurable lesions, I’m With You is a very, very nasty song, and that’s why it’s my least favorite.  It was the third single off her dreadful debut album, Let Go.  Determined to pass herself off as punk, the bratty Canadian yowler fooled no one, following up the pandering Sk8er Boi with the decade’s whiniest ballad.  Mysteriously nominated for a Song of the Year Grammy, this song has dated even more poorly than Sk8er Boi, which just sounds kind of laughable when it’s not actually on the radio ten times a day.

Every single week I find a handful new pop songs that both excite and delight my ears. But for every new song I like, there’s unfortunately at least three that I don’t, and some of those stinkers become quite popular and really very annoying over time. Here’s my list of the forty worst offenders of the decade. So as not to drive myself too crazy, I restricted the list to songs that made the top 40 on Billboard’s Hot 100 (which is not the same as the airplay chart, but which is much easier to find by lazily browsing Wikipedia.)

Some artists have spent much of the decade annoying me, and each new release makes me want to throw my hands up in despair. Or just throw up. Yet I restrained myself, limiting the list to one song per artist. Because really, is there any point in weighing the cons and cons of each 3 Doors Down hit? No.

I spread my choices out over a bunch of posts. Click on the titles to be linked to my ranting.

40. Lonestar, I’m Already There
39. Gym Class Heroes feat. Patrick Stump, Cupid’s Chokehold
38. The Calling, Wherever You Will Go
37. Carrie Underwood, Inside Your Heaven
36. Sara Bareilles, Love Song
35. Nelly, Grillz
34. Uncle Kracker, Drift Away
33. DHT feat. Edmee, Listen To Your Heart
32. Akon, Lonely
31. Daniel Powter, Bad Day

30. 3 Doors Down, When I’m Gone
29. Staind, It’s Been Awhile
28. Evanescence, Bring Me To Life
27. Colbie Caillat, Bubbly
26. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dani California
25. The Black Eyed Peas, Hey Mama
24. Los Lonely Boys, Heaven
23. 3Oh!3, Don’t Trust Me
22. John Mayer, Daughters
21. Hinder, Lips of an Angel

20. Michelle Branch, Are You Happy Now?
19. Katy Perry, I Kissed A Girl
18. All Star Tribute, What’s Going On
17. Kings of Leon, Use Somebody
16. Hoobastank, The Reason
15. Clay Aiken, Invisible
14. Plain White T’s, Hey There Delilah
13. Aerosmith, Jaded
12. DJ Sammy and Yanou feat. Do, Heaven
11. Creed, With Arms Wide Open

10. Puddle of Mudd, Blurry
9. Bowling For Soup, 1985
8. Jason Mraz, The Remedy (I Won’t Worry)
7. Train, Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)
6. Avril Lavigne, I’m With You
5. Nickelback, Rock Star
4. Sheryl Crow, Soak Up The Sun
3. Eminem, Superman
2. Kanye West feat. Jamie Foxx, Gold Digger
1. Fergie, Big Girls Don’t Cry

Every single week I find a handful new pop songs that both excite and delight my ears. But for every new song I like, there’s unfortunately at least three that I don’t, and some of those stinkers become quite popular and really very annoying over time. Here’s my list of the forty worst offenders of the decade. So as not to drive myself too crazy, I restricted the list to songs that made the top 40 on Billboard’s Hot 100 (which is not the same as the airplay chart, but which is easier to find by lazily browsing Wikipedia.) I also limited the list to one song per artist, because really, is there any point in weighing the cons and cons of each 3 Doors Down hit? No.

So, without further ado, part 3B of the list.  For readability I’m breaking this quarter of this list into two. The higher up we’re getting, the more we’re getting to the songs I really truly despise, and when talking about some of them it’s hard to keep the word count down.

15. Clay Aiken, Invisible (2003, #37)

You know what’s a great song?  Celine Dion’s cover of I Drove All Night.  No, really.  Roy Orbison wrote it, which is a plus, but when he (and later Cyndi Lauper) sang it, you could tell in their performances that deep down they knew there was something creepy about driving all night and climbing through a loved one’s window and creeping into their bed without bothering to call first to check if it was okay.  But with Celine’s unironic version, part of a Chrysler campaign, there’s no such awareness.  And it’s really, really unsettling.

Clay Aiken’s Invisible, a song about wanting to be a  fly on the wall watching someone while they slept, is similar in subject matter and just as creepy, though it’s not nearly as good.  Aiken’s sad-sack lament has almost no tune, for one thing, and what melody it has vaguely resembles a more downtrodden version of the theme from Just The Ten Of Us.

And while America did vote Aiken was the second-best singer of 2002, the man’s first post-Idol single gave him nothing him to work with vocally.  To make matters worse, the song’s subject matter made Aiken’s gayness (unacknowledged by him, though assumed by the world at large) seem creepy, adding to the stalkerish sense that this song was about a passive-aggressive and sexually-repressed psycho.  But, you know, not in a good way.

14. Plain White T’s, Hey There Delilah (2005/2007, #1)

Dumpy band of lugs has their biggest hit with a syrupy acoustic ballad?  It’s not the first time it’s happened, but it’s the first time it’s happened with a song as dumb as this one:  “A thousand miles seems pretty far/But they’ve got planes and trains and cars?”  Come on now, child.  Are you even old enough to drive?

Determined to make this overly long song a hit, the band’s label put it on two consecutive albums; it was over two years old by the time it finally caught on, much to the chagrin of people with ears everywhere.  (Also:  It was almost three years old when it stupidly got nominated for a Song of the Year Grammy.)  Lately, the group have been trying—and, sadly, succeeding—to recapture the hearts of sugar-starved tween girls with the equally moronic retread 1, 2, 3, 4.

13. Aerosmith, Jaded (2000, #7)

Not every Aerosmith song is terrible.  Love In An Elevator is kind of funny, and Janie’s Got A Gun is actually pretty good if you’re in the mood for it.  If you catch me on the right day I might even admit to liking Dream On.  Plus, part of me is grateful to the band for the Crazy video; because even though that song is really boring, thirteen-year old me really appreciated the presence of Naked Dude Whose Clothes Got Stolen While Skinny-Dipping With Alicia Silverstone And Liv Tyler.

However, some Aerosmith songs are unforgivably terrible.  I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing is one.  Also there’s Pink, their other grody hit from the late nineties. And Dude Looks Like A Lady is really stupid, too.  But is any other Aerosmmith song as bad as Jaded?   I’m not sure.  Because while the dictionary says that jade can be used as a transitive verb, I have never once in my life heard that usage outside of this song.  And the way Steven Tyler sings it, I’m pretty sure he thinks he’s being very witty and clever.  When really he’ sounds like an old creep and I just want to punch him for being a smarmy dickhead.

This was, thankfully, their final appearance on the Top 40.

12. DJ Sammy & Yanou featuring Do, Heaven (2002, #8)
Spend enough time in gay bars, or better yet gay strip clubs, and you’ll realize that any song—literally, any song—can and will be turned into a crappy club track with some anonymous lady singer.  So while I can’t particularly blame this cover of Bryan Adams’ crappy ode to love despite vaguely articulated odds, I can express my continued dismay that this tedious song somehow made the rare leap across to pop radio.

Also, did it really require three people to make this song?  OK, so presumably DJ Sammy had to actually turn his equipment on before pushed the Generic Club Song button, and presumably he’s the one responsible for hiring a woman named Do to sing generically and clubbily over it.  But what does that leave Yanou to do?

Oh well.  At least it wasn’t this song, I guess.

11. Creed, With Arms Wide Open (2000, #1)
Creed had twelve mainstream rock hits between 1999 and 2004, eleven of which were also modern rock hits, because at some point modern rock decided to stop being different from mainstream rock.  Scott Stapp and his then-cronies also had four entries on the Top 40, all of which are identically bad, though of those four this was the lone number one.

By the way, in the year 2000, if you came back from the future and told me that these Floridian Jesus monsters would be responsible for only the eleventh worst pop hit of the decade, I think I probably would have just killed myself.

Every single week I find a handful new pop songs that both excite and delight my ears. But for every new song I like, there’s unfortunately at least three that I don’t, and some of those stinkers become quite popular and really very annoying over time. Here’s my list of the forty worst offenders of the decade. So as not to drive myself too crazy, I restricted the list to songs that made the top 40 on Billboard’s Hot 100 (which is not the same as the airplay chart, but which is easier to find by lazily browsing Wikipedia.) I also limited the list to one song per artist, because really, is there any point in weighing the cons and cons of each 3 Doors Down hit? No.

So, without further ado, part 3A of the list.  For readability I’m breaking this quarter of this list into two. The higher up we’re getting, the more we’re getting to the songs I really truly despise, and when talking about some of them it’s hard to keep the word count down.

20. Michelle Branch, Are You Happy Now? (2003, #16)

This was a bad decade to be a female musician, particularly the kind of female musician that writer her own songs and plays guitar. The Lilith Fair burned a lot of people out on the genre tha was in retrospect pretty offensively termed chick rock, meaning a lot of outlets for female rockers were shut off once the backlast started. (The Fair was also a lot more diverse than many remember: Erykah Badu, Sinead O’Connor, the Cowboy Junkies and Liz Phair all played dates on the ‘98 tour, for instance.)

But the new millennium swept all that away, and the only female singer-songwriters left for a while were new faces that were very bad at rocking: Michelle Branch and Vanessa Carlton and Avril Lavigne and the thankfully-forgotten Amy Studt, all of whom sang tedious songs in the same torturous style that was devoid of life or charm.

Branch was the first and most popular with adult alternative audiences, who respond particularly well to crap. But after this Alanis-lite song was released as the lead single from Branch’s second album people began to move on. After this stinker she’d only have one more charting single, the completely forgettable #36 hit Breathe.

19. Katy Perry, I Kissed A Girl (2008, #1)
I don’t mind lesbianism. I don’t even mind the porny kind of lesbianism that’s only designed to get boys hot and bothered. I don’t mind Gary Glitter-inspired beats, and I certainly don’t mind female pop singers who try to defy convention.

What I do mind are vocal performances where every single note sounds completely unrelated to the notes coming before and after them. I Kissed A Girl is a pop version of Frankenstein’s monster, with each syllable seemingly stitched together separately from the worst of twenty or thirty possible takes. (Try singing along and matching her notes; it’s not easy!)  If she were just a bad singer that would be one thing, but this is also quite possibly the most heavily-produced pop hit of the decade.  It makes no sense!

Of course, it also doesn’t help that Perry is a completely annoying person who comes off like a tool in interviews, makes horrible faces all the time and sounds just as bad on her other hits, including the decently-written but intensely headache-inducing Waking Up In Vegas.

18. Artists Against AIDS Worldwide/All Star Tribute, What’s Going On? (2001, ?)

There are so many things that can go wrong with a charity record.  We Are The World, the mother of them all, meant well and raised a lot of money for famine relief, but it’s also a very taxing song to listen to.  Do They Know It’s Christmas meant well, too, but it begged a question best left unanswered. And don’t even get me started on Gulf War 1.0 anthem Voices That Care, which presumably also meant well but which featured Celine Dion, Kenny G, Will Smith and Nelson.

But I feel like What’s Going On, an unholy recreation of the much-beloved Marvin Gaye song, possibly didn’t even mean well. And I don’t mean for listeners, who struggled to keep up as co-producers Bono and Jermaine Dupri struggled to incorporate Ja Rule, Nelly Furtado, Michael Stipe, *Nsync and Fred Durst into the same song. (Their method: everybody emotes heavily in their signature style for half a line each, except for some of the rappers who probably wouldn’t be recognizable if they were just singing; they get longer bits.)

But even in terms of charitable intent this song’s kind of dodgy.  Originally intended as a benefit for Artists Against AIDS Worldwide, the song’s was recorded less than a week before 9/11, so at the last minute tplans were changed and only half the money went towards AIDS research.  The Red Cross got the other half.  So as not to offend the large chunk of Americans who like America but don’t like people with AIDS, the name of the project was changed from Artists Against AIDS Worldwide to the more generic All-Star Tribute, and the song’s video—showing artists like the Backstreet Boys and Nas joylessly recording the song together—included interspersed and extremely unrelated footage of Rudy Giuliani wandering around Ground Zero.

Despite the fact that this song doesn’t feature Peter Cetera or Nelson, it’s still the most offensively awful charity record ever. And six months after its release, Pulp would say all that really needed to be said about the concept.

17. Kings of Leon, Use Somebody (2009, #4)
Remember just a year or two ago, when Kings of Leon were kind of a joke American music writers had about how lame the British could be sometimes? Though they originated in Tennessee, the band of dullards has had nine top 40 hits in the UK now, whereas in the US nobody ever gave a rat’s ass about them until this stupid song came out and proceeded to terrorize rock and pop radio for the past thirty-nine weeks (and counting!) Theoretically “indie”, this group of brothers sounds like a band that couldn’t decide whether to be sanctimonious like Creed or sanctimonious like U2, so instead aimed for the worst parts of both. It also doesn’t help that smug singer Caleb Followill sounds like the bastard spawn of Ray Lamontagne and early Chris Martin, only more incapacitatedly drunk.

16. Hoobastank, The Reason (2004, #2)
According to Wikipedia, Hoobastank singer Doug Robb said the band’s name comes from the name of a gas station in Germany. Also according to Wikipedia, Hoobastank singer Doug Robb said the band’s name was an inside joke and had no particular meaning. Additionally, according to Wikipedia, Hoobastank’s name was originally Hoobustank.

That is all the research and discussion Hoobastank warrants.  Let us move on.