Music thread

@Mr.Myoozik
Well then, good thing he isn’t embarrassed by it, I guess!

Nicko McBrain has announced his retirement from Iron Maiden.

@𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐫
*He retired from touring with Iron Maiden.

He said he’ll still be involved in other Maiden projects, likely including recording and producing.

@♬𝕸𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖔𝖜 𝕽𝖍𝖞𝖙𝖍𝖒♪
These guys honestly are really old to perform now for guys from the 80s still around kicking today. That’s amazing.

They STILL haven’t live toured my country yet and it’s this pandemic’s fault we almost got them here live supposedly on April of 2020.

@𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐫
Their tenacity and logevity really is fucking amazing, man! Like the Stones and such. Yeah, hopefully they’ll hit the Philippines before they hit the sack.

@♬𝕸𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖔𝖜 𝕽𝖍𝖞𝖙𝖍𝖒♪
That’s good he’s still in the Maiden family

@Dashie41 YT
I mean, the post also makes it clear he wants to foucs on other personal projects outside of Maiden, but I’m still sure the takeaway is he’s not barring himself from future projects with his main group. He’s just stepping back from the grind, as he says.

I thought about going to an Iron Maiden concert this year, but the timing wasn’t right.

I’ve been on a “Soul Metal” mashup kick lately. War works really well as a metal song.

I picked Blood Incantation Absolute Elsewhere Album of the year now to the very worst and most disappointing

Disappointing I’m picking Shining by Swallow The Sun and worst Motley Crue Cancelled EP and Popular Monster by Falling in Reverse.

One thing that really fascinates me as a chart enthusiast is seeing a song become a hit in the UK while either didn’t chart high in the US or never charted at all, same for the inverse. I’m shocked that songs that were hits in America charted low in the UK.

Mariah Carey back on top as expected, gonna stay at number one for the next three weeks before she leaves

@Mr.Myoozik
Seems to happen almost every year

I had a vision a convicted gangster will DM his friend to kill Drake in an assassination attempt in 2025.

Year End finally got published and Lose Control is the number one song of the year unsurprisingly. I personally wanted A Bar Song (Tipsy) to be the top spot of the year on account of being spending more weeks at number one and because it’s a much better song but we can’t pick and choose our battles. Overall, I thought this was a good year for hit music, better than last year and very soon I’ll get started on making both my best and worst lists.

I fail to understand why Jelly Roll is hated.

Don’t give me bullshit reason like it’s because he’s “yet another run in the mill” artist or “country”, you’ll look dumb for saying that.

My 10 Least Favorite Hit Songs of 2024:

It’s that time of year again where I talk about the ten worst songs to have become big this year in my opinion. Personally, I thought this was a good year for music, a lot of the songs that became hits I liked and the really awful songs thankfully didn’t stick around for long or didn’t become big to begin with. Compared to last year where the hit songs weren’t as strong, the hits from this year were way better. Simple rules: I’m including the songs that made the Billboard Year End list for this year, Christmas songs and songs that were in last year’s Year End list are disqualified. Importantly, this is a subjective list meaning it’s my opinion and that it isn’t based on fact, same will apply for my best list. With all this said, let’s get to the ten songs that I thought were bad to awful.

10- Carnival by ¥$: Kanye West & Ty Dolla $ign feat. Rich The Kid & Playboi Carti (Hot 100 Peak: #1): Once one of the biggest figures for the past 20 years, Kanye West has proven himself to be quite the controversial figure even during his early years of fame. Despite that, he was a respected artist with a devoted fanbase who saw him as a genius. Now, it seems like he can never know when to shut his mouth up and has leaned very hard to the right with his politics. This lead to critics turning against him and in this song from his new 3 part music project Vultures, he keeps painting a target on his back and doesn’t know when to put down the paintbrush. Kanye raps like he’s nervous and can’t keep his flow consistent and relies on rage bait by mentioning controversial black celebrities such as Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, Chris Brown and the now disgraced Diddy for cheap shock value with no weight to it. The rest of the artists aren’t better with Playboi Carti attempting a mumble rap type voice that sounds dated, Ty sounds checked out like he doesn’t want to be there and Rich The Kid admittedly sounds okay with his delivery but could’ve been better. The writing is hokey and the production with the electronic synths and crowd vocalizations sounds limp and derivative of his previous work. The one quasi positive thing I can say about the song is the football/soccer chant in the chorus sounds catchy and would fit more in a better hype anthem. With the second album from this project underperforming on the charts and the singles from it going nowhere with the added bonus of his fanbase slowly turning against him, it seems like Kanye’s days as a mainstream artist are behind him as he keeps digging the hole that he’s in. If they played this in a carnival, I’d leave immediately.

9- Gata Only by FloyyMenor & Cris Mj (Hot 100 Peak: #27): This is a song that came out of nowhere and that nobody expected would get big, a reggaeton song from two Chilean artists that blew up on Tik Tok and became a huge hit globally. Tragically, despite the numbers it racked on different country’s charts, the song itself is not good at all. Translated, the lyrics are about the two falling in love with a girl and wanting to be with her, to the point of fantasizing of stealing her and caressing her all over. Doesn’t that writing sound romantic and doesn’t bring a lump in your throat at all? The performances aren’t better with the two drowning in autotune that sound unbearable and warbling through their delivery like they’re high on cough syrup and forgot to sober up before recording. The reggaeton beat with the synthesizers sounds barely passable, I didn’t find it awful how the music sounded but it really could’ve used some fine tuning to make it at least sound decent. The fact that this got big while other better Latin songs such as Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido by Karol G didn’t get too high up is a travesty. Though despite all this and my criticisms for it, I find the song to be a guilty pleasure, I found myself listening to it a lot because I don’t know, I guess I just liked how it sounds and because I can be biased towards Spanish language music. Still, I think this is a really bad song and deserves its placement at the bottom of this list. Chile, if you want to get recognized in the global music market, don’t do it with drivel like this please.

8- High Road by Koe Wetzel & Jessie Murph (Hot 100 Peak: #22): Next up with this we have one of two terrible collabs with a country artist who straight up cannot sing to save her life. Jessie Murph reached her breakthrough earlier this year by hopping on songs from other country artists and doing terribly at them. Her and fellow newcomer Koe Wetzel do a collab where they play a couple in a dysfunctional relationship where they can’t stand each other and resort to arguing and cheating with each other to get through being together. Honestly, I really can’t stand songs like this where both partners are miserable and always whine and bitch about each other and I constantly scream “Just break up already!” This song is a perfect example of a song like this where they’re better off splitting apart because both come across as unlikeable pricks and whom I can’t root for. Besides the aforementioned bad singing from Jessie, Koe’s singing isn’t anything that special and the processed country instrumentation is both generic and tuned way too loud that it takes off any catharsis that the song is trying to convey. So yeah, a bad duet and both should just call off the relationship, easy as that.

7- Get It Sexyy by Sexyy Red (Hot 100 Peak: #20): One of the worst female rappers to ever become big thanks to Drake we have Sexyy Red. To say that she has no talent or charisma is an understatement and this song perfectly encapsulates. First off, that’s a really bad song title, really scares away any potential of the song being good. Always judge a book by its cover because the writing is what you think it is, a self bragging song about how sexy and great she is, rapped in the most nasal voice possible like she has a cold. The writing is very bare bones with no substance to it and the beat that samples the ringtone rap song “Halle Berry” by Hurricane Chris is obnoxious as all hell. For being a tribute song to the ringtone rap/snap era of rap music, it executes the worst aspects of that era and makes me glad that this subgenre is dead. Just another show how Drake has become the laughingstock of this year, more on that later. A very unsexyy song, more like an uglyy song, ugh.

6- Cowgirls by Morgan Wallen feat. ERNEST (Hot 100 Peak: #12): If you remember from my list of last year, I included a song from Morgan Wallen from his double album on my worst list. Well guess what? He has another bad song from that album become a hit this year because of course it did. Thankfully this one isn’t as heinous as Thinkin’ Bout Me but it’s still bad and shows how creatively bankrupt that bloated album was. The lyrics where both show their appreciation for cowgirls is surface level thin and doesn’t have any detail to them on why they find them attractive, it sounds more like an album filler track rather than a single ready for commercial consumption. The production is not good with the trap beat and guitars meshing badly with each other and sounding muddy in the mix and while Morgan sounds like his usual self, the guest artist Ernest is especially bad with how he slurs his singing and goes offbeat on the chorus, like he recorded his vocals in one take rather than doing another one. Thankfully, this is the last single from this album and it seems like Morgan is working on his next project, hopefully it’ll be much better than this.

5- Beautiful Things by Benson Boone (Hot 100 Peak: #2): One of THE biggest hits of this year, and easily one of THE worst hits of the year at the same time. Benson Boone started off as a contestant on The Voice but didn’t advance too far, but decided to pursue music anyway and this year was when he won the lottery and got the biggest hit of this career. It’s too bad the title is ironic because this is one of the ugliest power ballads I have ever heard. Let’s start with the obvious, his vocal performance is atrocious with very offkey singing and how he tries to hit the high notes in the chorus but just couldn’t do it and instead opts for trying to sing like he hit his elbow nerve really hard. The lyrics where he gives thanks about the life he has and tells God not to take it away does have a nice sentiment to it, it’s too bad the singing ruins the sentimentality of it and the rock production which sounds mechanical and like it was genetically crafted in a music lab doesn’t help either. It’s just baffling how a song like this would almost go to number one and become of the biggest hit songs of this year. Gee, I wonder why he didn’t perform well in The Voice…

4- IDGAF by Drake feat. Yeat (Hot 100 Peak: #2): One of the biggest music news stories of this year besides Diddy being ousted as a creep is the rap beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. We all know it by this point and how KDot wiped the floor with Aubrey and how devastating it was with Drake seeing who was at one point the biggest artist in the planet become a laughingstock overnight. This song isn’t about that and instead is from his previous album before the beef started and what will likely be his last big selling record. Even without the beef, this song shows just how overexposed he is and how people have gotten sick of him. It comes with all the trademarks of a bad late stage Drake song: Awful beat that sounds like background music for a bad sci-fi show, empty and vapid lyrics about his success that we’ve heard a billion times and him rapping like he drank two bottles of moonshine with the way how he badly slurs his delivery, now with the added bonus of being upstaged by a terrible rapper who raps like a robot AI trying to learn human English and malfunctioning, so the worst of both worlds. It’s a tragedy because the beginning with the female vocalist sounds nice and tricks you into thinking that you’re listening to something decent until the beat switch up. IDGAF about this song at all and thank goodness for Kendrick knocking him down twenty pegs if it means stopping the rush of mediocrity from him.

3- Everybody by Nicki Minaj feat. Lil Uzi Vert (Hot 100 Peak: #24): Man, this year was not good for rappers who used to be popular 15 years ago, first Kanye, then Drake and now we have Nicki Minaj. Just like the other two, she’s also been heavily scrutinized for going crazy and having younger better rappers be more successful and better than her in every way. Just like with the Drake song, this song shows how everybody is getting sick of her and how low a rap sample can go. The obvious sticking point is the poor sampling of Move Your Feet by Junior Senior by clumsily adding it to the chorus and it taking about 90% of the song which makes me question if this is even Nicki’s song at all. The original parts don’t do the sample any justice with Nicki trying and failing to sound badass with her sparse writing that doesn’t sound convincing in the slightest and how badly delivered her verses are. Guest Lil Uzi Vert’s part is whatever, it’s your typical guest rapper verse that doesn’t do much to stand out amongst other guest rapper verses, at least they sound like they’re at least trying with their performance. The fact that it only clocks in at 3 minutes shows that they didn’t have material for a song like this and should’ve just discarded it. Really, it’s a song that shows how something as sampling a dance song from Y2K can go horribly wrong and trying to go for nostalgia doesn’t always work out for you. Silver lining to this is that her other song from this year Big Foot didn’t get big, now THAT song is a dumpster fire, makes this one sound like a masterpiece.

2- Wild Ones by Jessie Murph & Jelly Roll (Hot 100 Peak: #35): And now for the other terrible country duet song from Jessie Murph, and the one where her problems as an artist really rears their ugly heads. Her atrocious singing is unbearable here and sounds more like she’s whining on the microphone trying to pass it off as singing. Bizarrely enough, she decided to collaborate with fellow country music star Jelly Roll to do a country trap song about how rebellious and badasses they are. One glance at the both of them exposes that lie very blatantly and it’s insane how nobody in the recording booth thought that this was a bad idea and didn’t put a stop to it. Jelly himself raps like he did in his early stuff and doesn’t sound that great, the writing is poor and the country trap production is annoying and is badly mixed on top of it like the producer just discovered rap music for the first time and tried to replicate it. It’s a bad idea of a song with an even worse execution and shouldn’t have made in the first place, how anybody fell for this is beyond me because this is just straight up garbage. Wild ones my ass, more like the mild ones.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Miles On It by Marshmello & Kane Brown (Hot 100 Peak: #15): A bad fusion of EDM and country that does a poor job of blending both with a subpar performance and poor writing about having sex. Was this something we needed after critics hated their previous collab?

Lovin’ On Me by Jack Harlow (Hot 100 Peak: #1): A weak rap song with an okay rap sample behind it, not one of the worst I’ve heard but I don’t think it deserved the success that it got.

Save Me by Jelly Roll & Lainey Wilson (Hot 100 Peak: #19): A very wangsty song that sounds more like an emo teenager writing a blog post about how much their life sucks, it’s juvenile and doesn’t have anything deep into it other than just “Woe is me, nobody can help me”. Lainey Wilson’s part is fine though.

FE!N by Travis Scott feat. Playboi Carti (Hot 100 Peak: #5): Not one of Travis Scott’s best with the annoying beat and how repetitive the chorus on how it repeats the same word over and over again. Travis himself is meh in his part, but Playboi Carti’s part is just really bad with the mumble rap voice that he puts on. Also, the music video is bad as well, a great way to lose your lunch.

Lies Lies Lies by Morgan Wallen (Hot 100 Peak: #7): Compared to his previous songs from his previous album, this one isn’t as terrible as a lot of them, but it still isn’t that good on how tired the whole formula he’s been relying on has become. He really needs to switch things up in his music if he wants critics to respect him again.

Facts by Tom McDonald & Ben Shapiro (Hot 100 Peak: #16): A non Year End song that made the Top 40. All I can say for this is that I am BEYOND happy that this didn’t become a hit but just the fact that it charted for one week is inexcusable. Ben Shapiro rapping is one of the funniest things ever, it’s so pathetic.

Big Foot by Nicki Minaj (Hot 100 Peak: #23): A non Year End song that made the Top 40. I hate this, I really really REALLY hate this so fucking much. One of the worst diss tracks I have ever heard in my life and the ending is one of the most unpleasant experiences I’ve ever had in a song. If this made the Year End, no doubt this would’ve topped my list because I hate this with every fiber of my being.

11- Act II: Date @ 8 (Remix) by 4Batz feat. Drake (Hot 100 Peak: #7): This is an example of a remix utterly ruining a song. The original version that’s just 4Batz I’ll sheepishly admit I like because I like the sparse sound and how romantic it is for its simplicity. The problem is as you can see, Drake getting his teen diddling hands on it and ruining the song with his presence where he sounds like he’s about to fall asleep. He should not have hopped onto this song at all because he adds nothing, he subtracts from it and destroys it.

1- Truck Bed by Hardy (Hot 100 Peak: #27): Terrible, just utterly terrible. It’s a song about how Hardy got broken up by his girl and drowns his sorrows in front of her yard and even goes so far as threatening to SHOOT her for it. The absolute audacity for this man to think that murder is the best solution to having his heart broken for reasons that we don’t even hear. Really doesn’t make me sympathize for him and there’s no catharsis in the song if he stoops this low and sing about it so cheerfully and aggressively like he’s Kid Rock or something. This is combined with a piss poor vocal performance and an ugly country rock production that haphazardly mixes it with trap and really highlights the ugliness of the lyrics. If in this scenario he does kill her and he gets arrested, I will be shouting out “Yeah you DID get what you deserve” for being an unlikeable prick. With that, I rank Truck Bed by Hardy as my least favorite Year End hit of 2024.

And that was my list for the worst hits of this year, stay tuned for my best list coming soon which again despite my feelings for these songs, this was a great year for music. You’ll see which ones I liked eventually so stick around.

@Mr.Myoozik
Those all stunk to high hell.
“IDGAF”‘s intro actually sounded pretty good, ethereal and atmospheric at first, but Drake just had to come in and ruin it with his jarring vocals… Also, how dare Nicki Minaj desecrate over Junior Senior’s “Move Your Feet” like that! It is perfect electrofunk, not meant for Nicki’s “I’m an easy s___” vocal purr.
Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh there. But anyway

Not to get too deep into it, that’s another well-written and well appraised list from you, with some great and thoughtful critique! hough you know what they say: “You can’t polish a turd”, not even with chart hits it seems

@♬𝕸𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖔𝖜 𝕽𝖍𝖞𝖙𝖍𝖒♪
The fact that Everybody is almost entirely Move Your Feet makes me think why they even bothered adding new parts when straight up covering it would’ve been the better option.

Thanks, I’ve been honing in my music critique skills ever since I joined a Discord server of other music enthusiasts/critics and following the Hot 100 weekly has also helped.

@Mr.Myoozik
Ah, nice. It’s good to have positive influences and learn from them.

@Mr.Myoozik
There’s one in the dishonorable mentions that I 100% disagree with. But other than that. Very good list as usual. A lot I agree with here. Very well thought out!

@♬𝕸𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖔𝖜 𝕽𝖍𝖞𝖙𝖍𝖒♪
Definitely

@LeoNero
I think I know which one it is and thanks

What were your best musical discoveries of 2024?

@DerpyFast
A lot of songs and artists on the Billboard adult alternative chart

@DerpyFast
A lot of great music from both the past (60s-2010s) and the present (early 2020s to now) of various genres and subgenres. Too numerous to mention specifically. But altogether, this year was amazing one for me in terms of musical discovery!