When the Jezebel staff was individually queried on their worst song of the year, an informal debate emerged: was Shawn Mendes 2016’s most offensive musician, or was it Lukas Graham? As you can see here the consensus was split but equally flogged with their music, though there was plenty of other trash to go around. In a 2016 that largely belonged to the Knowles sisters, Rihanna, Angel Olsen, Ariana Grande and more, there were certainly plenty of warts to mar the beautiful landscape they built. Here, we contend with the tracks that made us recoil in disgust.
A playlist below, if you must.
Justin Timberlake, “Can’t Stop the Feeling”
This song is the work of someone who has a record deal they desperately want to get out of so they can continue to try to make it as a big-shot actor, and you can feel it through every last cheesy, pseudo soul-inspired note. It could have easily been included in Josie and the Pussycats as one of the songs used to brainwash the youth into buying things they don’t need; as you listen, you can almost faintly hear a voice screaming “THIS WAS WRITTEN FOR A TERRIBLE ANIMATED CHILDREN’S MOVIE AND WILL ALSO BE PLAYED AT EVERY SINGLE WEDDING YOU GO TO FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!!!” The worst thing about it is that it works—when it comes on, you do always end up dance, dance, dancing, like JT is some kind of cult leader con man. Oh wait, when it comes to this song, he is. —Kate Dries
Sia featuring Sean Paul, “Cheap Thrills”
The way this song vibrates makes it move through me like an electric shock or maybe rotten meat. When I hear it, I feel screamed at in needless melisma. Why does “Cheap Thrills” have to be “reggae” by the way, and why is its beat’s backbone those square quotes? Why didn’t Sia dress up like a Rastafarian banana in this song’s video to underscore the mockery at hand? Why did this go to No. 1 and why did so many other songs that went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 this year come THIS CLOSE to getting my vote on this list (including: Zayn’s “Pillowtalk,” Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself,” Desiigner’s “Panda,” Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” and the Chainsmokers’ “Closer”). The answer is: Because we live in hell. And this is our soundtrack. —Rich Juzwiak
Zayn Malik, “PILLOWTALK”
My pick was an extremely tight race between this and Lukas Graham’s “7 Years,” an awful song that I’m 100-percent certain was added to the waiting-room soundtrack in purgatory. These three-plus minutes of Zayn Malik wailing sounds like a teen reaching to sound deep (“It’s a paradise…a warzone”), and the melody activates intense boredom within me. Other things about this song that bother me include the way Zayn sings “Reck-a-less behavior” and “Pillow towlk.” But the main issue is this: he and whoever recorded it think he sounds good. —Clover Hope
Meghan Trainor, “No”
My review is no, my take is no, my response is no, this song has got to go. —Gabrielle Bluestone
Mike Posner, “I Took A Pill In Ibiza”
I very vaguely remember Mike Posner as that white guy who seemed like he wanted to be black and who had that song that was kinda popular during my senior year of college. I actually find it very difficult to wrap my mind around this song being a real thing we allow to be labeled as “music.” It legitimately sounds like something written for a Lonely Island knockoff. That’s right, this song isn’t even good enough to be a real Lonely Island song. There is one useful aspect to this—one of the top 15 most embarrassing performances I’ve ever heard in my life—as it completes the full invalidation of the Grammys due to its nomination for Song of the Year. The next time someone tries to argue that the Grammys mean anything or are at all interested in honoring the best of music, play them this song. —Kara Brown
The Chainsmokers f. Halsey, “Closer”
The positioning of this ungodly track at the top of several Billboard charts for an unfathomable amount of weeks this year was surely given a boost from the perpetually viral and devoted fanbase of Jersey singer Halsey, who loans her voice to it. It’s a midtempo pop “Jack & Diane” for the emo generation, its insipid mediocrity disguised in overly processed synthesizers and Halsey’s sweet tones. I was positive at some point after everyone in America had heard it 33,000 times we’d all wake up to how passively awful and snakily misogynist it was—but I was wrong about Clinton, too. Not even after the duo’s awful Billboard cover, a document of their unfailingly stupid and unapologetically white-frat-bro behavior, did their popularity wane, life in Trump’s America. In that piece, they got wasted and publicized their collective penis size, talked about loving “pussy” and making music for the purpose of date models and, most notably, described the writing of “Closer” as being about “Taggart’s experience hooking up with an ex, then ‘realizing he actually still hates her.’” (Lyrically, that’s fairly obvious: “Four years, no calls,” sings Taggart. “Now you’re looking pretty in a hotel bar.”) The fact that they’ve been cravenly betting on sexism to sell albums from the beginning—recall the cynical gender stereotyping of 2014’s “Selfie”—made “Closer” even more flaccidly infuriating, and yet utterly perfect for the idiocracy into which we found ourselves plunged. —Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Adele, “Hello”
Somewhere between the song’s own immensely repetitive qualities and the fact that it was played over and over and over and over again until my ears nearly detached themselves from my head and lunged into oncoming traffic, I began to really, really hate “Hello.” I think my strong feelings also have something to do with Mike Huckabee, who filmed a tremendously shitty “Hello” parody during his GOP primary campaign on what appears to have been a cell phone and the lyrics “Hello from the caucus night / If Bernie wins I’m gonna die” were stuck in my head for the next 9 months. Which isn’t Adele’s fault, I guess, but I’ll continue to blame her. —Ellie Shechet
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
