Worst Songs Of The Year - 2008

 

While 2008 is unlikely to go down in history as a vintage year for classic songs, it well and truly earned its entry in the Stinkers Almanac, with a tide of pop effluent that had our ears stockpiling wax and fashioning it into a musical dam.

 

Perhaps the biggest insult to taste and decency came in the shape of what's been described as 'flat-pack indie'.

 

 

These were bands who appeared to have been assembled on a production line to look and sound as much like "wot da kids are into" as possible, but on closer inspection were insubstantial, cynically marketed facsimiles of groups from the recent past – minus the creative spark that terrifies record companies because it so often results in said groups making music that DOESN'T GET PLAYED ON THE RADIO.

 

Their MDF counterparts, however, could be relied upon to deliver perky, inoffensive, digital-station-friendly fluff that, as was discovered, people would buy by the bucketload, seemingly unaware that every record sold by the likes of The Courteeners, Hoosiers, The Wombats and Scouting For Girls is a vote for Satan and all his farting elves.

 

2007's She's So Lovely may have been more obnoxious than a Frosties advert but this year Scouting For Girls gave us the equally repetitive Heartbreak, Elvis Ain't Dead and James Bond – three songs only deserving of praise if the composer had recently undergone a frontal lobotomy and had stopped licking the carpet long enough to yelp, "I do love / She does a heartbreak", over and over again until he got a biscuit.

 

While we're on the subject of our simian cousins, The Verve staged one of rock's most underwhelming comebacks with Love Is Noise ("and the award for most meaningless, adolescent song title goes to…"). There's a delicious kind of justice in the fact that the supposedly cool and iconic Verve failed where the apparently uncool Take That succeeded.

 

But that was because Take That wrote more than two good songs to begin with and, when they came back, wrote even better songs that didn't feature the sound of a seagull shouting "hello" down a chimney, unlike The Verve's disastrous effort that was so bad, every time it came on the radio we feared the earth would burn up with embarrassment. i.e. VERY, VERY BAD!

 

And staying with shaved apes (only this time in Paul Weller wigs), we can't imagine anyone was really expecting Oasis to write another Some Might Say, but they returned with a set of songs so lacklustre we can't imagine how anyone involved retained the will to live. If seventh album Dig Out Your Soul were a dog, the RSPCA would encourage you to shoot it in the face.

 

But all that pales when compared to the absurd rebirth of Queen (+ Paul "you know, the one who was in Free and Bad Company and sang that song All Right Now" Rogers). A band whose reputation was always disproportionate to their actual abilities, even when the only interesting member was still alive and the most talented member could still bear to play bass in their presence, were now a band who had the audacity to follow up the worst musical ever written (one day we'll topple that statue of Freddie in Tottenham Court Rd, just like they did Saddam) with a new album under the name Queen + Paul "who was also in The Firm but we can't remember any of their hits" Rogers, entitled The Cosmos Rocks (oh good grief!).

 

Queen + Paul "why didn't they just get George Michael to do it again because at least he can hit the high notes without sounding like he's straining out a poo" Rogers also released a single called C-lebrity (oh good grief!), damning our obsession with reality TV stars (oh good grief!) that was stuffed full of lyrical conceits as clumsy as a giant picking up pins, and sounded as joyless and stilted as a Gordon Brown-hosted Xmas party. They did not rock us.

 

But our nomination for worst song of the year (now we've been spared the agony of hearing Eoghan wrap his gormless lips around Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah – thank you wise, X Factor voting public) is going to be a controversial choice.

 

It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the tune of Beyonce's If I Were A Boy. The tune was nice. Very nice. Well done that woman who wrote it who wasn't Beyonce.

 

But the words made us want to buy a bra, wear it until it became fashionable for men to wear bras and then burn that bra in protest and disgust at the ludicrously clichéd portrayal of men within its fake-empowerment verses.

 

Apparently, if Ms Knowles had danglier genitals, she would: "Roll out of bed in the morning / And throw on what I wanted / And go drink beer with the guys." That's not a boy, that's an unemployed alcoholic! She also imagines: "I would turn off my phone / Tell everyone its broken / So they think that I was sleeping alone."

 

Again, this isn't the natural behaviour of the Y chromosome. It's the behaviour of a dishonest, unfaithful git which, last time we checked, wasn't exclusive to either gender. What's so awful about If I Were A Boy is that no such man exists and no such relationship exists, except perhaps in beer commercials. The entire song is a lie and an insult to all complex, individual and free-thinking human beings.

 

Of course, the real lyrics should go something along the lines of: "If I were a boy / I'd pee standing up / Then I'd take my car to the garage / And be amazed that they didn't patronise me about the trouble I've been having with the clutch."

 

Now that's a song we'd want to hear.