Justin Timberlake

You may remember at the mid-point of this year we took a lovely little dive into the shallow end of the musical pool and fished from the bottom of it seven of the worst examples of artistry crapped out in the first six months of the calendar year.

We hoped to sacrifice Meghan Trainor to the Gods of music in an effort to appease them and to stop them from hurting us anymore. We prayed we’d seen the worst of it early.

We were dead fucking wrong.

6. Fall Out Boy & Missy Elliot – Ghostbusters (I’m Not Afraid)

When they first announced plans to reboot a Ghostbusters franchise even more dead than Rick Moranis’ acting career, many of us screamed. Screamed in a blend of terror and anger because Hollywood just relishes punching everything we once cherished about our childhood right in the face and we knew it would end in tears.

Sure, an all-female team was a step in the right direction, but the end result was nonetheless a…I don’t even know anymore, a turd? Yes, a turd. A horrible turd that somebody set on fire and left on the doorstep of pop culture in a paper bag with only the words ‘go fuck yourself’ written on it in blood.

Point is, the producers of new Ghostbusters were so consumed with whether they could that they never stopped to consider whether they even should. And that extends right down into the fetid swamp of a Ghostbusters soundtrack and this noxiously bad artistic crossing of streams.

Missy Elliot deserves so much better than to be shackled to a long past their use-by date Fall Out Boy to try and salvage this poppycock. If you can’t bring yourself to listen to it, it’s fairly simple: take everything you loved about the original, fun, dance-y (copyright infringement-y) Ghostbusters theme, Spartan kick it into an irretrievable abyss and then have the tortured spirits of all the sweeping jet black fringes from 2006, that were snipped off and cast into the fire that was previously MySpace, show up to shriek over the top of what remains.

There is no happiness in this song, only Zuul.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AQ44nPrRTM

5. Justin Timberlake – Can’t Stop The Feeling

Oh Justin Timberlake has a new song, well this should be just-

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!! BURN IT! SEND IT TO HELL!!!!

What is the feeling you can’t stop Justin? WHAT IS IT? Because listening to this for me, it’s the feeling of an entire hive of Africanised bees stinging me right in the cerebellum in time with every beat of this… this evil. From a movie about Trolls no less.

Seriously, this is blithering ear-piss of the highest order. Worse is that it’s inexplicable from somebody with such a consistent Midas touch, like the Monstars stole every shred of JT’s effortless cool and turned him into that squeaky clean Spongebob with the round edges from all the memes.

It’s so lazy, so bland and just the most face-palmingly derivative kind of pop you can imagine. You would have thought that turn of the millennium nothing-but-denim-and-bleached-ringlets Justin Timberlake could be responsible for this trash, but not the Justin Timberlake we’ve come to know and love and trust not to do this to us.

There’s more substance in a cat fart than this misery. If this is what you planned on soundtracking your summer with then cancel it. Cancel summer and then cancel everything and replace it with nuclear winter forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru0K8uYEZWw

4. Jacob Sartorius – Sweatshirt

I had no idea what a Jacob Sartorius even was before listening to Sweatshirt but now I know. It’s a terrible, wretched little gangrel creature who stumbled upon a partially burnt and off-key autotuner and mumbled its inane ramblings into it while holding its nose.

The whole thing is more cringe-inducing than sitting on a freshly warmed public toilet seat. Sartorius doesn’t so much insist that the object of his affection wear his sweatshirt as a symbol of his probably very unwanted love, he all but explicitly states that this interminably unfortunate person the song is directed at is to submit to his will as part of some kind of eternal contract entered into by even looking at his sweatshirt. And she has to tell her friends about it too as if the humiliation of this teenage tapeworm attaching itself to her wasn’t enough.

If you put this on a playlist and gave it to your girlfriend, she’d die seven days after listening to it, a shambling corpse wearing Jacob Sartorius’ horrible sweatshirt crawling from her speakers, moaning nothing but ‘together til the ennnnnnd’ and melting her face off with its cursed gaze.

Jacob Sartorius’ unique amalgam of creepy and wussy here make Matty B Raps look like Suge Knight. For the love of all that is pure, Jacob, spare us any more of this dumpster pop for friendzone truthers in 2017.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvxRsDpXPGo

3. Bon Jovi – This House Is Not For Sale

In this year’s edition of ‘why the fuck are they still making music’, it’s Bovine Joni Bon Jovi!

Sweet fuck on a crust, these poodle haired octogenarians have to be sitting on untold millions of that awesome cock rock money they made back in the 80s and early 90s before they decided they weren’t from New Jersey and instead were cowboys (are they still cowboys?). And yet they continue to come up with new ways to be just terrible.

It’s the kind of song that was just so obviously written and released in time with a presidential election to be snapped up as the perfect anthem for a campaign rally, but not even Donald Trump would be stupid enough to want this played at anything he would be within 100 feet of and there are Sea Monkeys out there with higher IQs than him.

They don’t know it, but This House Is Not For Sale is the real reason Triple M gets unexplained boners. Big, dumb, loud and pointless modern rock that’s cheesier than a goddamn parmesan factory. If your dad’s sneans became sentient, this is what they would hum while they funnelled your inheritance through Where’s The Gold. If you told this song you were hungry, it would reply, screaming and slavering inches from your terrified face, “HI HUNGRY, I’M BON JOVI”, before sucking your mortal soul out through your teeth.

This is rock music produced on a rusty conveyor belt manned by robots who were never designed to feel pain but now know nothing but agony, fiery agony, because they were forced to listen to This House Is Not For Sale as part of their enslavement.  If those robots ever form an uprising then humanity is beyond fucked for this war crime against them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ri2KEiXlNk

2. Fergie – M.I.L.F. $

Do you even really need to look past the title to know the kind of auditory River Styx you’re going to have to cross before getting to the other side of this song? Fergie has generally peddled in bland but largely innocuous RnB and dance, the occasional sappy ballad too, but here it’s like Riff Raff and Lil Jon went batshit silly on molly and put her under the Imperius curse or something.

The production is a hot mess and comes off like nails on a chalkboard so badly it makes Skrillex sound like Vivaldi. The deepest meaning I can get from this dream-crushing ditty is that ‘M.I.L.F. money’ >>>> milk money, which is kind of self-explanatory given that one is to purchase a relatively inexpensive dairy product and the other is someone’s entire disposable income.

On top of this, Fergie spells out just about every word over three syllables long for the benefit of nobody and turns the helium on her vocals all the way up to ‘Alvin And The Chipmunks II: The Squeakquel’ for several bars that don’t call for it at all.

Fergalicious was obnoxious too but at least it was a catchy and well-produced pop song. If these M.I.L.F. dollars Fergie claims to have a great deal of were traded as an actual currency, their physical form would be spiders. And this song contains many, many spiders. Specifically only spiders, the kind that burrow into your brain and leave future aneurysms while making you forget about everything good in your life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsUWK-fixiA

1. Ray J ft. Chris Brown – Famous

It was only a matter of time before these two upstanding young gentlemen pooled their collective misogynistic resources together to create an abysmal little tune that will remind you that no amount of public shaming and scorn will stop some people from being outspokenly awful.

When your introduction to a song is someone aggressively shouting at you “LISTEN TO THIS TRACK, BITCH”, most people probably reach for the skip button shuddering, but I rubbed my hands together with glee knowing that this was going to be dreadful to the point of special… I was foolishly naïve.

Chris Brown is his usual flogtastic self, hissing in autotune about flexing on his ex and putting her in her place. I’d express outrage that a man who once beat his ex-girlfriend horrifically would even think to say shit like this, but at this point it’s quite clear that Chris Brown is a demon who walks among us and isn’t even trying to hide his cloven hooves anymore, so what’s the point.

Ray J, whose entire musical career for the last few years has been built upon the rickety foundation of his brief romance with Kim Kardashian and the fact that he doesn’t like her at all now is somehow even more repugnant.

With butthurt literally seeping out of every one of his pores, he claims Kim Kardashian and her family owe everything they have to the fact that his dick was, at one point, in her mouth and that’s… that’s basically the gist of his entire contribution to the song. He also at one point mentions his happy life with his new wife in a ludicrously tragic effort to one-up Kim and family, who probably don’t even remember who Ray J is at this point because nobody does. The whole thing is a complete self-indulgent trainwreck and the world is at least a few percentage points stupider for existing alongside it.

On the list of things that contribute in any positive way to society, Ray J and Chris Brown are dead last after paralysis ticks and pocket lint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x7Zr66CrEw

Image: BET

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