digitalfreaknyc

just getting ready for work and.......

Mr Brightside by The Killers

comes on. My god do i loathe that song. Odd, because I like Somebody Told Me so much. But it really gets under my skin. No other song that's played on the radio right now gives me that reaction.

You?

Tscott

I will always love you and my heart will go on.

Urgh- uh- *shiver* blech... I just made myself physically ill typing those two titles out. Ack.

Andalusia

"My Humps" - Black Eyed Peas

My vote for worst song so far this decade. Why can't they go away?

jonnyrocks

That was the first song that I thought of when I saw this thread title.

Just hearing it--and it's really tough to never hear it--makes me so damn angry! Bad songs rarely drive me to the point of anger; but, for some unexplainable reason, this song manages to trigger the madman in me.

Mr. Cinema

"My Humps" has nothing on "Laffy TaffY". I do not understand why people like this song.

Giles

this is why I don't listen to radio, they play a song, then play it ad nauseum, then you hate it ...

nothing comes to mind though.

uberjoe

From Slate.com:

Notes on "Humps"
A song so awful it hurts the mind.
By Hua Hsu
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005, at 12:53 PM ET

"Taste has no system and no proofs"—this much we know. But some 40 years after the critic Susan Sontag made this and other observations on the good, the bad, and the in-between, the times have a-changed: Irony and camp have recast taste as an ethical shell game and we feel no guilt celebrating things that are, in the parlance of VH1, Awesomely Bad. But are there still songs that qualify as "bad"? Consider the Los Angeles hip-hop quartet the Black Eyed Peas. Their current single, "My Humps," is one of the most popular hit singles in history. It is also proof that a song can be so bad as to veer toward evil.

The Black Eyed Peas story begins in the early 1990s, when the rappers Will.I.am and Apl.de.ap met as members of a Los Angeles break-dancing crew called Tribal Nation. After a contract with Ruthless Records went nowhere, the duo regrouped with a third member, Taboo, and renamed themselves the Black Eyed Peas. The trio's earthy, post-Benetton aesthetic resulted in two moderately successful but unspectacular albums: 1998's Bridging the Gap and 2000's Behind the Front. In 2003 they added a fourth member, the singer Fergie. Propelled by a more upbeat frat-party vibe, their songs went platinum.

For all the brow-furrowing about the precise, Pavlovian engineering of hit singles, pop music is a wholly unpredictable, unstable enterprise. Lazy artists catch lightning in a bottle, bizarre throwaway jingles are greeted as bursts of quirky ingenuity, and puffy bits of melodrama accidentally become the catchiest thing ever. This is the weird appeal of the radio (or however you get your populist fix): Anything—good, bad, or otherwise—can sound genuinely perfect for a summer. If an Awesomely Bad pop song survives a few years and enlivens a party sometime down the line, so much the better.

This is what makes "My Humps" such an inscrutable pop moment. It's not Awesomely Bad; it's Horrifically Bad. The Peas receive no bonus points for a noble missing-of-the-mark or misguided ambition (some of the offended have responded with parody videos and snickering anecdotes about how the group uses Hitler-approved microphones). "My Humps" is a moment that reminds us that categories such as "good" and "bad" still matter. Relativism be damned! There are bad songs that offend our sensibilities but can still be enjoyed, and then there are the songs that are just really bad—transcendentally bad, objectively bad.

As a piece of music, "My Humps" is a stunning assemblage of awful ideas. The song's playful pogo and coke-thin, ring-tone synth line interpolate Sexual Harassment's 1982 left-field electro hit, "I Need A Freak". But where the original trafficked in something icky, sinister, and darkly sexual, the Peas' call-and-response courtship fails to titillate—in fact, it's enough to convince one to never, ever ogle again. The "humps" in question belong to Fergie, who brandishes her "lovely lady lumps" for the purpose of procuring various gifts from men who, one would assume, find the prospect of "lumps" very exciting—one lump begetting another lump, if you will.

"What you gon' do with all that ass/ All that ass inside them jeans? … What you gon' do wit all that breast?/ All that breast inside that shirt?" rapper Will.I.Am teases in response, rendering literal what had heretofore been pretty much literal. It's a song that tries to evoke a coquettish nudge and wink, but head-butts and bloodies the target instead. It isolates sectors of the female anatomy that obsessive young men have been inventing language for since their skulls fused, and yet it emerges only with "humps" and "lumps"—at least "Milkshake" sounded delicious.

The most fascinating aspect of "My Humps" is that it is widely believed to be the most successful unsolicited single in history, and, as of this writing, it is the most-downloaded song in the country. The Peas achieved all this without releasing a single. Instead, file sharers and intrepid radio programmers were the ones who more or less discovered the song and pushed it toward hit status, eventually forcing the label to respond with a proper single release. (Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me" is another recent example of a song that hit because of radio programmers rather than label strategy.) For now, "My Humps," has become the standard-bearer for the direct-democracy cultural possibilities of the Internet. It will certainly be supplanted. Soon, hopefully.

Hua Hsu is a writer and student living in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131640/

TimeandTide

And to think "Fergie's" dad used to be my boss.

Anyway, the song that most gets under my skin is "I Like to Move It" from the movie, Madagascar. But only because one of my students walks into my classroom EVERY morning singing and dancing to it.

Every. Morning. With dancing.

Michael Corvin

I know most will list current stuff but these just grate on my nerves

She Drives Me Crazy - Fine Young Cannibals

Tom's Diner - Suzanne Vega

da da duh da, da da duh da, blech

Maxflier

Ditto.

All the British sounding groups they play so much on the radio nowadays get on my F'ing nerves.

Tracer Bullet

Whoever sings that fucking song about wishing their girlfriend to be as hot as her should be shot in the head.

TimeandTide

The Pussycat Dolls? Agreed.

woofman

"Cumbersome" by Seven Mary Three: That voice!!! A reeeeaally bad Eddie Vedder wannabe.

Not unlike another lead singer scott stapp who has been involved in several drunken brawls recently...

milo bloom

What's really creepy is how this thought was plucked straight from my head. How can one band manage to pull such a horrific 180 in such a short time?

From the discussion, Humps is absolutely horrific, and as I commented in it's earlier thread here, it's particulary bad because of Fergie's lack thereof as shown in the video.

I think the Pussycat Dolls' "Dontcha" falls into the same category as Milkshake (as noted in the big article). Both are bad, but they retain enough campiness to be good.

And the original acoustic Tom's Diner is much better than the remix, though I admit to liking them both. My favorite version of that is R.E.M.'s though.

grunter

"Photograph" by Nickelback.

Because it's played every 10 seconds on commercial radio. EVERY 10 SECONDS!!!

DRG

Anything from Coldplay or John Mayer
Ludacris "Splash Waterfalls"
Kenny Chesney "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy"
Led Zeppelin "Stairway to Heaven"

...are just a few that make me rather hostile.

boredsilly

"Laffy Taffy". This song is popular which just baffles me.

Dan1boy

*insert any r&b song here*

nickdawgy

Mr. Brightside is a great song, way better then somebody told me.

nickdawgy

They may sound British, but they're from Las Vegas.

nickdawgy

Another great song, wow you guys are picky

ChrisKnudsen

I somehow still apperciate that song. It is too catchy.

ChrisKnudsen

You only say that because you are a racist.

ChrisKnudsen

I think you can knock out the complete 4th wave of grunge with that remarks.

digitalfreaknyc

ugh. i work at a radio station.

and i'm playing it.

right now.

god i fucking hate this song.