Britney Spears

By God, it is already June. That means we are halfway through yet another year, and what a year it has been so far in terms of good music. And while it is important to reflect on the good times, and we here at Howl and Echoes like to think we cover as much of the good as we possibly can, it is equally as important to reflect upon the bad. Music that is just silly with awful actually. So as we hit the midpoint of 2015, we’re taking a look at the worst of the worst thus far. Be warned. Be very warned. Here are six of the worst songs of 2015 so far.

6. Meghan Trainor – Dear Future Husband

Meghan Trainor means well and all with this insipidly cheesy little jazz number, I’m sure. It’s vomit-y to be as nice as I can about it though. She has written and recorded it as some kind of simpering instruction manual for any would-be suitors to follow should they wish to spend the rest of their (probably significantly shortened) lives with her, but what she has unintentionally done is provide men everywhere a good reason to never call her, ever again, purely because of how terrible this song is.

It sounds like a dreadful original Christmas carol and is twice as infuriating. There’s a good chance Meghan Trainor is a succubus. Or a nest of spiders wearing the skin of what used to be an innocent woman. Nothing that wasn’t on that level of hellish could have produced this, it just isn’t possible.

5: Waka Flocka Flame (feat. Good Charlotte) – Game On

When it comes to unadulterated obnoxiousness, few combinations conceivable to mankind do it quite as well as this. Waka Flocka and Good fucking Charlotte, together at last for the theme song to an Adam Sandler movie so ridiculous in premise that it makes Jack And Jill look Oscar-worthy.

This is rap rock that even Fred Durst would find offensively bad. The Madden brothers, taking a break from being utter nitwits on Australian television and making me seriously reconsider not having a ‘Fuck Off, We’re Full’ bumper sticker on my car, sing as though they physically can’t hear how shitty they are, and Flocka raps absolute nonsense like:

Ah, bought the tour bus like a spaceship
I’m racin’ against nothin’ but time
Probably wouldn’t be so lost if you was watchin’ the signs
They gon’ play me like a PlayStation from playin’ on that station

The Genius annotation for that can be surmised as follows;

4: The Wombats – Emoticons

This whole song is an utter clusterfuck of mess. It’s saccharine to the point of giving mouth ulcers to everyone who listens, over-produced and with lyrics that are just abominably stupid. Sweet fuck on a crust, nobody but a 15-year-old girl is listening to a song that opens with dreadful imagery like ‘it’s tough to stay objective baby, with your tongue abseiling down my neck’  and finding it enjoyable. The chorus:

You need to find a different boy’s heart to chew
Chew
And all these emoticons and words
Try to make it better but they only make it worse

Is about as relevant for those who have seen the last of puberty as sex education is. It’s a musical Jay-Jays t-shirt. If you tried to print the lyrics for this song off you would end up with next month’s issue of Dolly magazine (they still make that right?), featuring a centrefold quiz on how miserable a person you are.

If you liked Emoticons, go straight to incredibly. You are an incredibly miserable fucking person.

3: Kid Rock – First Kiss

I’ll admit it, Kid Rock in his Devil Without A Cause heyday was one of my guilty pleasures. He just had so few fucks to give and I was a teenager who thought his hillbilly-fried rap metal was real neat. I recoiled in horror then in 2007 when he tried to revive the festering corpse of southern rock by bastardising Warren Zevon and Lynyrd Skynyrd in the interminably soulless All Summer Long. 

He’s continuing in that vein here, and the results are sickening. I won’t dance around it, he now sounds like Shannon Noll, only if Nollsy had a 20 pack/year history of smoking naught but Marlboro Reds and gargling moonshine after meals. He sings about such nostalgic redneck delights as listening to Tom Petty on the radio and owning a pickup truck, as well as remembering his first kiss from his high school sweetheart, who probably did nothing to deserve such cruel and unusual punishment.

I’m not sure she’s quite as wistful for old Kid Rock, who dresses and smells like what a bottle of Jim Beam would if it gained sentience. Fun Fact: Kid Rock is in an unreleased sex tape with Scott Stapp and I would rather experience that then this horseshit paint-by-numbers country drivel one more time.

2: Eden xo – The Weekend

I’m really, really sorry to do this to you, but I have experienced Eden xo and I’m pretty sure I have to pass her video along to someone else or I’ll die a terrible, terrible death in seven days. I’m so sorry.

The Weekend goes for two minutes and fifty-two unbearable seconds, and I think I’d rather be electrocuted while magpies swoop at me for that amount of time than deal with this kind of emotional torture. Eden xo’s grasp of lyrics makes Rebecca Black look like Tracy Chapman. The chorus of this clown-dick appalling ditty:

Oh my God it’s the weekend,
Hands up for the weekend!
Oh my God it’s the weekend,
Hands up for the weekend!

If the weekend was exactly how Eden xo wanted it to be, I would spend mine working in a Russian labour camp. And if you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Lil Jon is here to poke his stupid little dreadlocked head in and prove you stupefyingly wrong:

God is dead.

1. Britney Spears (feat. Iggy Azalea) – Pretty Girls

This song is unspeakably crass. It is a turkey slap to the face of good taste. It is pure, blinding, vanilla white trash of the highest order. It could kill every single one of the Avengers, it is so unforgivingly toxic.

Christ, it boggles my mind how anyone in charge of a record label sat down and pitched this as a fine idea. Whoever did could sell fire in hell, because they successfully convinced the producers of this… this evil,  to flush their tattered souls straight down there via this musical toilet.

Britney delivers her lyrics like she’s having a seizure after inhaling a balloon full of helium and the regrets of strippers. Iggy is at her culture-appropriatingly grating best. She might as well just cut to the chase and run with blackface already, it’s getting that bad. You would have to be an actual parasite to find anything even remotely good about any of this. Playing the lyrics backwards is an incantation that summons poisonous snakes. Only poisonous snakes. All of the poisonous snakes.

Here’s to the rest of what 2015 has to bring!