Everyone has an opinion about pop music. Former Smiths frontman Morrissey shared his, calling out Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith in an interview with Boulder Weekly. When Morrissey was questioned about the success of current pop stars, his response caused quite a stir.
First, he recognised an obvious fact – “There are no bands or singers who become successful without overwhelming marketing.”
“There are no surprise success stories. Everything is stringently controlled, obvious and predictable and has exactly the same content,” he added.
Then he slammed the current state of the pop music industry. “So, we are now in the era of marketed pop stars, which means that the labels fully control the charts, and consequently the public has lost interest. It’s very rare that a record label does something for the good of music.”
Normally in a situation like this, names wouldn’t be used. Morrissey, ignoring the basic rules of etiquette, used the names of two of the biggest stars on the radio to prove his point. “Thus we are force-fed such as Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith, which at least means that things can’t possibly get any worse. It is sad, though. There’s no spontaneity now, and it all seems to be unsalvageable.”
When Sheeran heard about this, he was quick to respond. He responsed to an article on the interview via Twitter, saying it is “absolute bollocks” and Smith “was the least predictable success story of the last year.”
@NME even you guys should think this is absolute bollocks. Taking me out of the equation, Sam was the least … http://t.co/QMLhbqZTkS
— Ed Sheeran (@edsheeran) July 10, 2015
Smith, who is about to be featured on Disclosure’s upcoming album, is staying out of this argument for now. Good idea, Sam.
Morrissey, your move.
I was already in the foulest of moods today, and then I heard Rihanna‘s latest spite shit on the very notion of good taste:
It’s a miserable little ditty about a bitch who owes Rihanna money (and had better have it). The trap beat and overall sound of the song are abysmal enough as it is (and it hurts me to say that because it was produced by none other than Kanye West) but it’s the lyrics that take the cake. Such insightful musings including:
‘Turn up to Rihanna while the whole club fucking wasted’
‘Don’t act like you forgot, I call the shots shots shots’
‘Who y’all think y’all frontin’ on’
And, of course, ‘Bra, bra, bra’, because sound effects are lyrics now. As expected, she sounds like the most uncouth kind of Maury Povich guest imaginable.
I find it grossly unfair that this woman can be worth 90 million dollars and a global superstar and still be permitted, nay, encouraged, to release godawful, poorly-written crap like this. To enrage myself further I decided to take a look at the shitty, shitty lyrics of some other inexplicably famous artists.
The only stipulations here were that the song must be from a platinum-selling artist from the 21st century and meet one or more of the criteria of being nonsensically stupid, cringe-inducingly cheesy or horrifyingly offensive The results were blinding and full of reaction gifs.
5. Beyoncé – Run The World (Girls)
Cheers Bey, I’d spent countless hours wondering just who runs this little old world of ours before you let me know that it is, in fact, girls. Girls run this motha (x4).
What’s really going on at the United Nations
When your chorus and half of your song is a variation of the same terrible line repeated over and over again, it doesn’t strengthen the message behind it, it just makes you look like a lazy shit. Your inexplicably tangential verses don’t save this monstrosity either, whether you’re rambling about being from Houston, working 9 to 5 (spare me) and:
‘I think I need a barber, none of these niggas can fade me’
Your lyrics are worse than that dad-est of dad jokes, Beyoncé. Cut the shit.
4: Ed Sheeran – Wake Me Up
I’ve made no secret of my distaste for every single thing Ed Sheeran has ever done, and this vomity little love song my girlfriend no doubt loves is one of those things. Some of the more egregious lyrical skidmarks are:
‘Would you make me a cup of tea, to open my eyes in the right way?’
You can just open your eyes, Ed. You don’t need a cup of tea to do that. Nobody does. In truth, only a British man would include lyrics about being made cups of tea in a love ballad. Prince Charles and Camilla might be getting their weird royal fuck on to that but I can guarantee you nobody else is.
You’re welcome for that terrifying image.
‘And I know you love Shrek, cause we’ve watched it 12 times’
That’s entirely more than the recommended dosage of Shrek, Ed. You’re a grown-ass man and that’s a ridiculous movie about a giant green ogre and his African-American donkey that you’ve spent an inordinately creepy level of time watching. There are other movies out there that aren’t Shrek, thousands of them. You need to get out of the house.
There’s no soul behind those dead eyes.
The rest of the song is a similarly shoddily-written little stroll along the line between being disgustingly romantic (‘Cause maybe you’re loveable. And maybe you’re my snowflake’) and irritatingly quirky (‘And if your DVD breaks today, you should’ve got a VCR. Because I’ve never owned a Blue ray, true say’).
You’re fooling nobody, Edward, you’re just a terrible songwriter.
3: Nickelback – Something In Your Mouth
Look, I hate Nickelback as much as the next man, but at least they usually peddle in inoffensive albeit bland corporate wuss rock and-
Oh.
Gotcha.
I’ll spare you the verses, which are a lengthy and lecherous description of some poor woman Chad Kroeger has spotted in a drinking establishment, and skip straight to the seedy, seedy chorus.
‘(you naughty thing)
Your ripping up the dance floor honey
(you naughty women)
You shake your ass around for everyone
(your such a mover)
I love the way you dance with anybody
(the way you swing)
And tease them all by sucking on your thumb
Your so much cooler when you never pull it out
Cause you look so much cuter with something in your mouth’
It’s dicks. It’s dicks you’re talking about, isn’t it Nickelback?
It’s a small miracle that women even talk to the members of Nickelback with their profound lack of both talent and dress sense, that they can be this outrageously misogynistic in return is mind-fuck baffling.
2: Metallica – Purify
Purify comes from Metallica‘s St. Anger album, a maligned piece of shit completely eschewing guitar solos and anything cool made when they were all in therapy and, by God, is it fucking awful. You can almost hear what’s left of James Hetfield’s mind committing seppuku with a rubber chicken while shrieking at the moon.
Pictured: All of the crazy
‘Tear it down
Strip the layers off
My turpentine’
That’s the opening three lines. Not even a minute in and he’s used the line ‘my turpentine’. It gets worse.
‘Ghost white
Ultra clean
Wanna be skeleton
Clear eyes
Diamond eyes
Strip the past of mine
My sweet turpentine’
I don’t know what this is supposed to be about, but keep in mind the stupidly loud nu-metal guitars and Hetfield straight screaming gibberish like ‘wanna be skeleton’ and it’s even more ridiculous. This goes on for an entirely unneccessary five minutes and fourteen seconds, not without the cherry on top of this clusterfuck cake:
‘ I can find the dirt on anything’
Early 00s-Metallica everybody; heavy metal NapiSan.
1. Pitbull: Various
This fucking guy:
The Grand Wizard of godawful lyrics, nobody will make you facepalm faster or harder than Mr. Worldwide. The man is a moron, and his Eurodisco shit rap is of the stupidest caliber. You are scientifically guaranteed (probably) to lose one IQ point for every syllable of Pitbull lyrics.
Whether it’s rhyming the word Kodak with Kodak (Kodak hilariously filing for bankruptcy a year later), alleging that his adulterous exploits are some misogynistically biblical combination of Tiger Woods and Jesse James
I know you want me
Or, in a feat of insensitive fuckfacery without rival, announcing his ambition to pour so much vodka into whatever salty, godless little club he and T-Pain are presently occupying that it becomes flooded like post-Katrina New Orleans. You know, just that natural disaster that killed over a thousand people.
Keep it classy, you raging dickhead.
At least he reveals his back up plan to his fans, in the highly unlikely event that his record label is anything but a success:
“Label flop but Pit won’t stop
Got her in the cockpit playin’ with his (como?)
Now watch him make a movie like Alfred Hitchcock”
I don’t ever want to witness Pitbull’s directorial debut, which would probably be an hour and a half of sexual assault innuendo disguised as product placement and dick metaphors spliced in with closeups of his soul patch. That there is a market for this man’s music is a global travesty.
What a fantastic year 2014 has been for terrible music. Triple J have put out their list of best albums yesterday, but we find ‘Worst Of’ lists to be infinitely more fun, so we here at Howl And Echoes would like to present our inaugural Album Anti-Awards for 2014!
Our lucky winners include:
The Tylenol ‘Cure For Insomnia’ Award
Coldplay – Ghost Stories
‘Coldplay are boring’ jokes are as old as Yellow, I know, but if they’re going to keep putting out musical sleeping pills like they have once again with Ghost Stories then I’m going to keep making them. Not one track on here is exciting in the slightest. Fitting that it’s called Ghost Stories, because I’m pretty sure we could get Chris Martin declared legally dead after this piss poor effort.
Furthermore, when Sticky Fingers walked through downtown Newtown for Australia Street, it was cool. When these assholes shamelessly ripped them off for A Sky Full Of Stars, with their lame-as-fuck fans filming the whole thing on their fucking smartphones like a bunch of pre-teen twats, it was a floating joke.
The Soulja Boy Award for Shittiest Contribution to Hip Hop
Riff Raff – Neon Icon
Riff Raff is an amalgam of burning garbage and bad facial hair. Open this album up to have your olfactory senses impossibly assaulted by the distinct smell of a trailer park. I can’t verify this with 100% certainty, but I have it on good authority that for every copy of Neon Icon sold, an endangered panda was punched in the face.
Sweet fuck on a crust, Riff Raff sings with the sweet, slithery lilt of somebody who masturbates in public and he raps like he’s reciting your order at a McDonalds drive thru. If you bought this album you are telling the world that there is a good chance that you are poorly educated. Enjoy this GIF of his internationally-televised humiliation:
The 2014-15 Philadelphia 76ers award for Worst Output by a Group
5 Seconds Of Summer – 5 Seconds Of Summer
This is ear-scaldingly bad boy band music. 5 Seconds Of Summer create music to initiate a gag reflex to.Their vanilla-ness makes their forefathers in groups like Boyzone and Westlife look like a bunch of Hells Angels by comparison and the irritating way they abbreviate their name to 5SOS and cite people like Blink-182 as an influence when clearly their influences were just monkey shit and the lost souls of 12-year-old girls is especially grating.
This was Australia’s completely unnecessary, shit-haircutted answer to One Direction, scorch the Earth if they ever get anywhere near that level.
The Scott Stapp Award for Biggest Affront to Rock and Roll:
Nickelback – No Fixed Address
I don’t know what’s more annoying, the fact that Nickelback were pretentious enough to name this album No Fixed Address as though they’re some ‘children of the Earth’ motherfuckers or that they aren’t actually homeless and broke like their rivals for ‘most talentless people to ever pick up guitars’, Creed.
Edge Of A Revolution is Nickelback’s neckbearded attempt at writing an anti-establishment song and it’s so unintentionally funny you might break a rib laughing. The whole album is icepick lobotomy level dumb, because their fans are all shameless morons and are somehow that easily impressed. They should stop loving Nickelback and start loving themselves, shit.
The Michael Richards Award for “Biggest Fall From Grace”
Robin Thicke – Paula
Last year Robin Thicke gave us a terrible song with date rape lyrics and also Emily Ratajkowski from atop Pharrell Williams’ shoulders and people loved him for it. This year he gave us his first album post-divorce and named it after his ex-wife in what may be the least efficient way to get yourself a restraining order. Also, you can rearrange the entire track list to make perhaps the creepiest stalk-iest, threaten-iest letter ever, here look:
Worst Album by a Female Artist:
Taylor Swift – 1989
1989 was regarded as Taylor Swift’s departure from country pop into just regular pop, the difference between the two probably like comparing two puddles of urine to see which one contains less sexually transmittable diseases per square inch. She could have called this album Pumpkin Spice Latte Roshe Run Butterfly Tattoo and nobody would have batted a fake eyelash.
From the incessant whine that is Blank Space to the pantomime twerking nightmare of Shake It Off, this entire album was so fucking boring, so fucking terrible, and yet pretty much the majority of the female population continue to eat her shit up like it’s Froot Loops and MD. Inexplicable. Not even God can help you if you’re a fan of Taylor Swift in 2014.
Worst Album by a Male Artist:
Ed Sheeran – X
Apparently this album is called ‘X’ but pronounced ‘Multiply’. To that end, I propose that ‘Ed Sheeran’ now be pronounced ‘Utter shitbag’ for such pretentious assfacery. The fact that Ed is a soulless ginger aside, have you ever heard something as interminably bland as this album?
It’s like eating cardboard cereal with water instead of milk, for fuck sake. Don’t was apparently not everybody’s simultaneous reaction to Ed Sheeran announcing this album, but about Taylor Swift. If they ever reconcile their differences and collaborate for a joint album I will put my hand up for a rocket ride directly into the sun, just to be sure that monstrosity couldn’t ever hurt me.
Worst Album of 2014
U2 – Songs Of Innocence
Fuck you, Bono. Fuck you, the rest of U2. And fuck you, Apple, for giving my iTunes the digital equivalent of a surprise prostate examination and then leaving the rubber glove in there in the form of U2’s clownfuck dreadful free album. An album that every person on the planet with iTunes suddenly found in their library, regardless of whether they wanted it, and which IS STILL JUST SITTING THERE LIKE A SMUG PRICK BECAUSE I CAN’T GET RID OF IT NO MATTER HOW HARD I TRY!
Understandably, a lot of people were as pissed as I am. Apple then put their pathetic spin on the whole farce, claiming that 81 million people had ‘experienced’ U2’s new album, which was about as impressive as claiming that they were responsible for 81 million people experiencing the human papillomavirus.
Make no mistake about it, there is a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for people who pull the kind of dick move Apple did on consumers in foisting this album upon us, but the fact that U2 did so and simultaneously used the good name of Joey Ramone, an old school punk who would have exactly zero time for this kind of commercialistic bullshit, is what makes me the angriest.
And fuck me if Rolling Stone didn’t give it five stars and lose any and all respect from me.
God is dead.