Before writing this column, on a distant radio, the song Meant to Be by Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line played. This ruined the day of at least two people within earshot of the radio, especially me, because that song is the second-worst song ever recorded.
The worst song ever recorded is Beautiful Girls by Sean Kingston.
Earlier in the day, I had a conversation with a few coworkers about why the most popular bands are the ones who draw the most hatred. I have a theory behind that. Popular music gets hated because it’s harder to avoid, so being forced to hear a song you otherwise might merely dislike over and over again makes you hate it more than you would otherwise. A more obscure act, by contrast, won’t generate the same level of hatred because you can avoid it.
This is the reason why I hate Beautiful Girls. It’s not so much that the song is bad – though it is absolutely terrible – it is because it was bad but I couldn’t do anything about it. At the time I was working a job which piped in Top 40 radio, and because this was one of the 40 songs that the station had deemed acceptable to listen to at any given point, it got played. It got played a lot, in fact, at least two times a day, if not more. It was on constant rotation.
A song I merely disliked quickly became the worst song ever recorded, because I couldn’t just turn it off. It was constant, it was everywhere, it was bad.
That’s the same deal with Meant to Be. First time I heard it, I just found the chorus really annoying but that was fine, it’s not like I’m listening to it on purpose. But it got played a lot. It’s there at work, it’s there when I go to the store. A friend actually really likes it and insists on playing it a lot, which makes it worse. A mere annoyance has been elevated to the pantheon of awful music, sliding up above the Macarena because at least that was 20 years ago.
If I think of an obscure song I don’t like, it’s not going to raise the same ire. I think My Girls by Animal Collective is bad, for example, but if I heard it on the radio I wouldn’t have much of a reaction. It was never popular enough to get a lot of airplay, if I wanted to listen to it I would have to on purpose. I’m sure plenty of people reading this don’t know the band or the music, and they’re not going to have an opinion on it either. After I decided the song was bad, I didn’t listen to it again, and nobody was playing it in the mall.
Popular music isn’t worse than other music, as a rule, as much as there are people who want to claim that their taste in music makes them better in some way. Instead, popular music is harder to escape than other music, so the popular songs you hate you begin to hate with an intensity you wouldn’t feel for other music. A bad song from an obscure band? Turn it off. A bad song from a popular one? Well the grocery store is going to get very angry if you smash their PA system...
