The 25 worst pop hits of the new millennium

Rick Martin's 1999 Grammy Awards performance of "La Copa de la Vida" / "The Cup of Life" was as grand a star-making moment as they come, but it was the blockbuster single "Livin' la Vida Loca" that defined his career, as well as ushering in the entire Latin pop craze of the early 2000s. Ricky Martin had other goofball singles off of his English-language self-titled record (think "Shake Your Bon-Bon"), but "Livin' La Vida Loca" is what he was known for, so the lead single for his second album "Sound Loaded" was a rehash of that. "She Bangs", however, has only gotten even more cringe in the years that followed, aging like terrible cheese. Martin had no hand in writing the track, and in the years since Martin has come out of the closet, he may take issue with singing wildly derogatory lines like "She looks like a flower / But she stings like a bee / Like every girl in history." He may have felt it was the right move at the time, but two decades later, it's one of the most unfortunate tracks in his entire discography.

Following Madonna's groundbreaking 1998 album "Ray of Light", it made sense she'd continue working with dance producer William Orbit, and following the "Ray of Light" promo cycle, she dropped two soundtrack cuts she had worked on with her then-current muse. For "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me", she unleashed the original song "Beautiful Stranger", which is genuinely one of her all-time greatest (and still somehow underrated) singles. For her 2000 star vehicle with Rupert Everett, "The Next Best Thing", she, unfortunately, decided to drop her synthpop remake of Don McLean's "American Pie" as the soundtrack's lead feeler. It went #1 in several countries (and topped out at #29 on the U.S. charts), but it was rightly lambasted as being one of the worst covers ever conceived in the history of music.

The problem from the get-go was authenticity. The story of watching the American dream fade away is not best buoyed by shiny techno keyboards, and Madonna singing about how she "drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry" reeks of tourism because we believe McLean when he sings it but don't when Madonna dryly intones it. It felt gimmicky because that's exactly what it was. As with any controversy in her career, Madonna sustained and kept moving on, but it still stands as arguably her worst standalone track.

On the surface, Limp Bizkit's "Behind Blue Eyes" isn't bad so much as it is misguided. The rap-rockers have done successful covers before: their 1998 take on George Michael's "Faith" was a ridiculous recontextualization that made sense against all odds, largely due to the band's wink-nudge sense of humor about it. Yet The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" is a dramatic, vulnerable song, which assuredly didn't play into frontman Fred Durst's strengths as a vocalist. The band's cover is pretty straightforward, and Durst gives an ample but bland vocal take. It would be written off as forgettable in any other context, but what really destroyed everyone's listening experience was the bridge. Having a Speak & Spell actually spell out the word "L-I-M-P" slowly followed by the word "discover" was as inexplicable a choice as they come and makes for a jarring listen. It adds nothing to the song outside of some cheap, obnoxious branding, and we as a culture are off worse for having heard it looped four times. Despite the track's near-universal hatred, it remains to this day Limp Bizkit's last track to chart on the Billboard Hot 100. With any luck, it'll stay that way.

By the time we got to Eminem's fourth studio full-length, his albums had followed a certain release formula, in which the lead single would always be a jokey comedy-rap song. His debut had "My Name Is", "The Marshall Mathers LP" had "The Real Slim Shady", and "The Eminem Show" had his best one to date, "Without Me". Yet for 2004's "Encore", his lead single was one of the most head-scratching, unfunny, and unfortunate songs he ever released: "Just Lose It". Over the laziest beat, he and Dr. Dre ever put together, "Just Lose It" is a mishmash of terrible ideas: Peewee Herman voices, obvious fart jokes, an unhealthy obsession with Michael Jackson's child molestation accusations, and multiple instances of gay panic, all crammed into a cheap knockoff of a D12 single. While 2009's repugnant "We Made You" was a close runner-up for this slot, "Just Lose It" still manages to sound worse with each passing listen. "Just Lose It" is, at the very least, aptly titled, as this feels like the exact point at which Eminem lost the plot.

Right as Justin Timberlake was finding success with his solo singles in 2002, *NSYNC's other lead vocalist JC Chasez was as well, as his propulsive "Blowin' Me Up (With Her Love)" from the "Drumline" soundtrack managed to enter the Top 40. So for his 2004 debut album, Chasez decided to turn up his grown-up loverman persona on his lead single "Some Girls (Dance With Women)". Unfortunately, "Some Girls" is a creepy, misogynistic number that reads more psychotic than it does romantic ("The game is legal / You don't have to kill 'em though"). That wheezing synth on the pre-chorus can charitably be described as "a choice," but the song's real issue is in the refrains, in which Chasez posits that "Some girls dance with women / Knowing that it gets them attention / I wanna get in with them / So pass me a drink and let's roll." It's a deeply unfortunate song whether you're listening to the remix with Ol' Dirty Bāstard (then going by Dirt McGirt) or not.

What's even more unfortunate? Chasez's record "Schizophrenic" wasn't half-bad, featuring collaborations with innovative dance duo Basement Jaxx and sported a goofy '80s synthpop number called "All Day Long I Dream About Sex", which had all the swagger that "Some Girls" was missing. Chasez pivoted to reality TV judging after this, and we can't blame him: no one wants to be known as the guy who sang "Some Girls (Dance With Women)".

Gwen Stefani's 2004 solo debut "Love. Angel. Music. Baby." was an unconventional blockbuster, as its rock lead single "What You Waiting For?" stalled in the U.S., but each subsequent hit became a sizable chart entry all its own, including her era-defining solo chart-topper "Hollaback Girl". In fact, that album's second single was "Rich Girl", a pop song that amazingly incorporated the "Fiddler on the Roof" classic "If I Were A Rich Man" to bopping effect. Figuring she'd try to capture lightning in a bottle a second time, she worked with The Neptunes on "Wind It Up", the ŴTF preview of her second full-length.

This time interpolating "The Lonely Goatherd" from "The Sound of Music" over dry horse-clop percussion and one of the worst pre-chorus bass synths we've ever heard in our lives, "Wind It Up" makes a lot of noise without saying much of anything at all. It's kind of about partying and being original but also is a lame exercise in branding (she explicitly shouts out her clothing line in the first verse). All of this is done over canned horn blares, between-verse mumbling, and oh so much yodeling. While some may try and write this off as Stefani being her quirky self, this anti-party number only hit the Top Ten due to anticipation for the No Doubt singer's second solo offering. Just like her debut album, it was the songs that followed that helped define her era (like "The Sweet Escape" featuring Akon), as this blithering exercise in bling felt pawnshop ready.

While R. Kelly is now rightly recognized as the monster that he is, it's easy to forget that in the early 2000s, he remained insanely popular, delivering a string of chart-topping albums up until 2007 and collaborating with everyone from Jay-Z to Celine Dion. The last of those #1 records, 2007's "Double Up", featured what ended up being the last legitimate hits of his career, in the form of "I'm a Flirt" and one of the stupidest concepts ever conceived for a pop song: "Same Girl" featuring Usher. In the song, a casual chat between Usher and "Kells" sees them discussing a woman whom Kelly likes but, throughout the conversation, they soon realize is the same person. ("Went to Georgia Tech?" "Yep." / "Works for TBS?" "Yep."). They worry that this "potential wife" is the same girl playing both of them, and the song ends with them hatching a plot to meet up with her and both of them showing up to bust her scheme wide open.

It's an unfortunate amount of narrative for a song whose thesis is "women are deceptive." Even worse is that the song by itself differs from the music video, wherein they show up at a restaurant to trick her only to find out that they've been seeing identical twins (who, apparently, both went to Georgia Tech and both work at TBS). It adds a more light-hearted end to the narrative than if you're listening to the song by itself, but really, who actually cares? Outside of a since-pulled duet with Lady Gaga, "Same Girl" was the last time Kelly was in the Top 40, and no one has missed him since.

U2 is a "legacy band," as in a critical and commercial warhorse in the '80s and '90s who, in the eyes of some critics, can do no wrong. Yet in 2009, music journalism was going through a drastic change, as aging print media was losing ground to younger online publications, which means that aging print media's writers (who are largely white men) were no longer the gatekeepers of long-held music narratives, as online publications were employing young, queer, non-white writers to recontextualize the entirety of rock history. The split between these two realms was no more apparent than on U2's 12th studio album "No Line on the Horizon", wherein print media loved it ("Rolling Stone" and "Q" magazine gave it perfect scores), but online publications (Pitchfork, PopMatters) ripped it as for being the tired slice of melodrama that it is. "Get On Your Boots" was the record's lead single that everyone has already forgotten about (and, per drummer Larry Mullen Jr., releasing it as the single was "the beginning of the end; we never recovered from it"). It blares out hackneyed rock riffs, a big "let me in the sound" bridge that goes nowhere, and lyrics that alternate between telling someone to get on their "sexy boots" and some of the worst Bono-isms we've ever heard ("Here's where we gotta be / Love and community / Laughter is eternity / If joy is real"). As is the case with most of the songs on this list, it won't surprise you to learn that this is the last song U2 managed to sneak into the Top 40, a feat they haven't managed since.

As InfoMania's Sergio Cilli once noted , it all started so innocently. Lil Wayne, at the peak of his powers, started integrating guitar solos into his rap songs, most famously on his 2008 chart-topper "Lollipop". It makes sense: after rapping for over a decade, he wanted to try something new, expand his boundaries, and perhaps venture into rock music. Unfortunately, this led to his deeply misguided rock-rap release "Rebirth", which is as unlistenable a record as they come. By not having a Travis Barker or other scene veteran on board to give the project guidance and authenticity, this is just Lil Wayne blasting his voice through a million filters and hoping the chugging guitars do the rest of the work. On "Knockout", it's especially egregious. His voice stretches, cracks, and aches over a sub-SR-71 guitar riff, the Autotune alone having more time on the track than his actual voice does. His already-uninteresting lyrics get swallowed up by the production, and even an in-her-prime Nicki Minaj knows better than to give it her all, offering up one of her lesser verses in an era full of great ones ("Give 'em more head than toupees / That's the knockout"). Somehow not learning his lesson, Wayne attempted a co-headlining tour with Blink-182 in 2019 and frequently complained about the small crowd sizes. We admire artists wanting to stretch beyond their boundaries, but when it came to Lil Wayne vs. rock music, it was a real "Knockout".

In a world of increasingly strained attempts at pop dominance, many artists in the 2020s worried less about clearing unique and creative samples and instead paid for the big, obvious ones. Think Nicki Minaj sampling Rick James' "Super Freak" on "Super Freaky Girl", Drake lazily interpolating Right Said Fred on "Way 2 Sexy", Latto stealing the "Genius of Love" riff by Tom Tom Club, which was already famously used by Mariah Carey. Yet for all the accusations of creative bankruptcy, let's not forget in 2010 when Lupe Fiasco inexplicably spliced Modest Mouse's "Float On" in "The Show Goes On", a head-scratcher of a single that feels like it's trying to be too many things at once. It's a crossover hit that also wants to be an uncompromised rap anthem, an inspiring treatise that also finds Lupe stating he'd "start a world war" for the kids he's "rappin' around the world for." It feels calculated for consumption, which explains why it just oozes cringe. It's a song that exists only because the sample cleared, and given this was the last time Lupe was even near the Top Ten of the charts, it's of little wonder why this song was such a Fiasco.

After turning the Black Eyed Peas into an unstoppable hitmaking machine and producing popular singles for other artists, it's understandable that will.i.am would call in some favors for his new solo record. Yet "T.H.E. (The Hardest Ever)" is the "The Room" of pop singles, with will.i.am filling in for Tommy Wiseau. He thinks his lyrics about being "the hardest ever" hit powerfully, but too much time in BEP world has left him soft, coming up with banal punchlines like how he's "hard like a m---------in' bōner" and how "I get stacks of cash / You get cashews." Jennifer Lopez is wasted as the song's hook siren, and when the bridge starts ramping up to propulsive dance break (see: bass synths that sound like farts), in comes Mick Jagger for absolutely no reason, talking about how he's "Hard like geometry / And trigonometry," making for an awkward finish to a song so bad it can only be described as hilarious. Tommy Wiseau would be proud.

After placing fourth in the 2010 edition of the U.K.'s popular "The X Factor" competition show, it didn't take long for Cher Lloyd to come up with her debut album, dropping the lead single "Swagger Jagger" the following summer and scoring an instant U.K. #1. It was also her last song to be in the chart penthouse because while she scored a few more hits, "Swagger Jagger" was so universally hated that it rendered her brand toxic. A bloated, loud, and annoying synth-dance jam about dismissing your haters (because they don't have her patented "Swagger Jagger"), this instantly-dated remnant of the early EDM-pop crossover era features little in the way of innovation, flair, or even a sense of dumb fun. With a chorus that nicks the melody line to "Oh My Darling, Clementine" of all things, no less than eight songwriters are credited on this monstrosity, a warning flare of a song that taught a generation of listeners how not to do dance-pop. As Lloyd's lack of success in the following years proved, this lesson was not learned.

Resorting to using "la la la" as part of your hook is often a sign of lazy songwriting, but in the right hands, it can make for an effective refrain (if you need a good example in the last 22 years of pop music, Naughty Boy's 2013 smash "La La La" with Sam Smith pulled this off extremely well). Yet Nashville's own Hot Chelle Ray are not known as brilliant songwriters, and these days are hardly known at all. Yet for a brief, shining moment, they were truly partying "on the rooftop-top of the world" with "Tonight, Tonight", a song that somehow was not a cover of the iconic Smashing Pumpkins classic of the same name. Singer Ryan Follesé aims to have a song that's all hook with maybe some verses and gets in the "millennial whoa" as well as saying "alright, alright, tonight, tonight" ad nauseam. It's an earworm, but a volatile one: the entire second verse is done before the song hits the one-minute mark, leaving the next two-and-a-half minutes to be chorus, post-chorus, and endless vamping. When he keeps asking people to sing along and adlibs "even the white kids!" he fails to recognize that he's preaching to the choir, having just performed one of the most annoying songs ever penned. We'll take "Disco Duck" over this schlock.

Why? Why did she have to do this? Nearly a decade after she exploded onto radio with a near-endless stream of rock-crossover hits, Canadian pop-punk royalty Avril Lavigne was desperate for a hit. Her eponymous fifth studio album was preceded by the single "Here's to Never Growing Up" — which mistakenly thought Radiohead made a bunch of shout-along choruses — and by the time the fourth single "Hello Kitty" dropped, most fans were ready to jump ship. Co-written by then-husband and Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger, "Hello Kitty" has Avril going full dubstep for reasons scientists have yet to decipher. While the kawaii-indebted music video was derided for a variety of reasons, we still take issues with lyrics that felt reductive and vapid even in 2014 ("Let's all slumber party / Like a fat kid on a pack of Smarties / Someone chuck a cupcake at me!"). While the pop-punk comeback of recent years has, in turn, lionized Lavigne and given her a new audience, we're still left wondering how this toxic piece of digital candy even got manufactured in the first place.

It may seem like a cultural misnomer now, but when Macklemore & Ryan Lewis were breaking through in 2012, they did so on a massive scale, going over 20 times platinum off the strength of four unmissable singles, the biggest of the two being "Can't Hold Us" and "Thrift Shop". Following some controversial Grammy wins and many think-pieces about the group's cultural significance, reverence, and appeal, they were ready to come back in a big way and did so in 2015 with ... a song about buying a moped. Described by The Stranger's Larry Mizell Jr. as a song with "too many tabs open," "Downtown" is a pop song that throws every single idea at the wall in hopes that something will work. A piano-based hip-hop track about going to a moped dealership and investigating mopeds and then buying a moped? OK, sure. A rap throwdown with legendary MCs Grandmaster Caz, Kool Moe Dee & Melle Mel (spitting verses about mopeds)? That's happening. A rousing romantic chorus about running the streets with your girl as sung by Foxy Shazam's Eric Nally? Sorry, but it's already too much. While the song is brimming with good intentions, it failed to repeat the success of their previous releases and ended up having zero cultural impact. Maybe it did well enough for Macklemore to buy a moped, though.

In case you didn't know, Lukas Graham is not just one guy: it's a band that just so happens to be fronted by a guy named Lukas Forchhammer. The group are regular chart-toppers in their native Denmark, dabbling in light soul-pop and piano ballads that can best be described as "overly melodramatic." There's nothing wrong with an earnest sad song now and then, but few are as needlessly saccharine as Lukas Graham's "7 Years". Telling the story of Forchhammer's life at various ages before imagining what his future will be (including when he made a guy happy because he "wrote a letter once"), this endlessly looping sad piano number elicits the kind heart-tugging sap that only a theater kid could pull off, drowning in his own hero story while getting way too into his own dramatic crescendo at the end (saying the phrase "will I" like a cheap Michael Jackson imitator). While the song was a megahit, its deeply uninteresting musical structure and wallowing lyrics make it feel like a remnant of a more sentimental era. Forchhammer's group landed a few more hits since then, but even his recent collaborations with rappers like G-Eazy and Wiz Khalifa couldn't even hit the Top 10 in his homeland, meaning maybe he's done singing his songs and telling them stories.

Katy Perry's 2010 star-making album "Teenage Dream" was a rare kind of pop megahit, one that managed to spin off an astonishing number of chart-topping singles while defining Top 40 radio in the years that followed. While her post-"Dream" years still yielded monster smashes, the returns were diminishing, and by the time we got to her 2017 "Witness" era, things got weird. Truly unable to define what sound she wanted to go for, the lead single ("Chained to the Rhythm") felt like a poor imitation of what the best chillwave artists were doing, "Bon Appétit" was trying so hard to be sexual it forgot to be sensual in the first place, and the overearnest ballad "Save as Draft" and blaring "Hey Hey Hey" were her first singles in five years to not make any chart anywhere.

All of this context lets you know what "Swish Swish" was trying to be the name-taking, hater-dissing anthem that some KatyCats had been wanting for years to hear, but it ended up being an epic fail. Over a tired club beat and some light keyboard interludes, Perry says she doesn't need opinions from "a shellfish or a sheep" and that karma "keeps receipts," mixing metaphors to the point where it comes off more confusing than it does aggressive. Often interpreted as a diss towards then-rival Taylor Swift, the track pulls off the impossible feat of being desperate and lifeless simultaneously, with Nicki barely coming out unscathed in her verse. Since the release of "Swish Swish", Perry's career hasn't quite recovered, even after releasing a few surprise late-career gems (like the aptly-titled "Never Really Over").

Less of a rapper and more an event coordinator, DJ Khaled always manages to make his singles seem like can't-miss events, stacking his songs with all-star talent. At times, the formula is very successful (the legendary "All I Do Is Win", the underrated "We Takin' Over"), but as the years have rolled on and his brand awareness increased, it felt like Khaled was more worried about his image and perceived success than he was about the music himself, at one point even  threatening to sue Billboard when his album got beat out of the #1 spot by Tyler, The Creator. All of this serves as context as to why his 2017 monster smash "I'm the One" somehow became popular despite being one of the worst beats ever serviced to radio. The thumping bass tones and warped vocal samples are certainly something, but over the course of an entire song, it is a repetitive motif that none of the guest stars can do anything with. Bieber again plays bland hook boy, Quavo allegedly wrote his verse in minutes (and it shows), Chance gives it an honest go, and Wayne's decline in dexterity was pretty clear at this point. It was designed to have the bounce of a fluffy summer anthem, but listening back to it now, it feels like a bad sunburn of a single. Hell, even if you're nostalgic for this era, there are even better DJ Khaled songs you can play ("Wild Thoughts" with Rihanna came out a mere two months after).

During an absolutely chaotic 2022 interview on Logan Paul's podcast, former One Direction member Liam Payne was a little high on his own hubris, badmouthing his former bandmates and insinuating that his debut solo single, "Strip That Down" featuring Quavo, outsold everyone in the band. While it did take off at radio, his popularity was more of a fluke than fad, as his debut album topped out a #111 on the U.S. album charts. "Strip That Down" is the Xeorx of a Xerox of a club anthem, as his braggadocios lines are either self-involved ("You know I used to be in 1D / Now I'm out, free"), non-flexes ("One Coke and Bacardi / Sippin' lightly"), or just hopeful branding ("F1 type Ferrari / Six gear speed"). It's a song that tries so hard to be sexy, which is its own problem: people who are sexy know it and don't have to try to prove it to anyone. In addition, even if Payne claims that his song outsold the rest of his bandmates, the incorporated Shaggy melody (which incorporates a song by War) means the track's songwriting credits are split 15 ways. While Harry Style is out winning Album of the Year Grammys, Payne lives a much more "stripped down" life, recording a non-charting song for the 2021 animated flop "Ron's Gone Wrong".

"This song was No. 1 for 50 f----- weeks!" Bebe Rexha screamed at a crowd of industry vets who weren't singing along to her song "Meant to Be" during a 2019 pre-Grammy event hosted by Spotify. "I work too f------ hard for this s---, OK?" The less-than-professional attitude presented by Rexha was after years of hustling as a songwriter before breaking out as a performer. She scored hits guesting on rap songs and working with EDM producers, but with her collaboration with bro-country standard-bearers Florida Georgia Line, she finally had a best-selling hit all her own. The only problem? When you have a song that tops the US Hot Country Songs chart for 50 weeks, that leads to oversaturation, and when the chorus of your song says the word "be" 12 times and is repeated on what feels like an endless loop, that makes for a lot of hook saying a whole lot of nothing. It's as low-stakes a song as they come, and its unbridled success has rendered it toxic; it's no wonder no one wanted to sing along to the most overplayed track of 2018 during a fun pre-Grammy ceremony. Since then, her songs have found little-to-no success, with her 2021 sophomore record cratering on the charts with a debut at #140. After yelling at a room of industry execs for not singing along to her track, maybe her continued success just isn't meant to be.

The protracted rollout of Kanye West's 2016 album "The Life of Pablo" was annoying for fans and critics, but the strange album that came out of West's many revisions and reworks was by and large accepted as successful. Since then, West entered a deeply strange period of his career, where releases came and went, his association with the Trump White House irked many, and his own underwhelming presidential run ended in disappointment and later divorce from wife Kim Kardashian. During 2018 especially, he continued to release increasingly strange and nonsensical songs, from the jokey "Lift Yourself" (a.k.a. "swoopity poop") to what may go down as the single laziest track he's ever been associated with: "I Love It" with Lil Pump. Over a so-tired-it's-asleep bassline and some profoundly unimaginative verses, the rap duo swap lines about how much they like sex while calling a woman a "trifilin' ho" at one point. It's sophomoric even by West's standards for his era, and its meme-based success can best be described as fleeting. West himself even later expressed disappointment for his involvement in the track, and, to be frank, so do we.

"Justin [Timberlake] never sings anymore," quips Wanda Sykes' record executive character from the incredible show "The Other Two", "and when he does, it actually hurts his singing career." This amazing joke centers around the release of his 2018 album "Man of the Woods", which was a deeply confused, Neptunes-produced record that tried to go back to his Tennessee roots while also pushing pop music forward and ultimately satisfying neither aim. While the Timbaland-assisted lead single "Filthy" was its own misguided piece of robofunk ("put your filthy hands all over me" isn't as enticing a come-on as he thinks), it was the trap-leaning second single "Supplies" that proved Timberlake was absolutely off his game.

Over cut-and-paste vocal trills and a gondola guitar line, he affirms that he is a "generous lover" and that he can "be the generator, turn me on, when you need electricity," before apparently referring to his own package as "supplies." It is a deeply tortured metaphor that isn't aided by Timberlake's inexplicable shoutouts to "The Walking Dead", and as fans realized that this is what the album would sound like, it was of no surprise that "Man of the Woods" stalled, becoming his lowest-selling album to date (his profoundly uninteresting Super Bowl Halftime Show performance that followed didn't help matters either). As was so deftly pointed out, singing is just hurting his singing career at this point, so it's no wonder that outside of his contribution to the "Trolls World Tour" soundtrack and a few other dud one-offs, Timberlake is wisely reassessing whether or not he's got the supplies for a sustained career.

Taylor Swift may very well be one of the most self-aware pop stars of all time. Having mastered both her artistry and the commerce surrounding it, she's very knowledgeable about how she's perceived by both the fans and the media at any given moment. While her 2017 album "Reputation" was designed as a punch back to the sordid stories, rumors, and perceptions about her, the album's harsh electro tone turned off some, finding it self-serious despite being dotted with pleasant radio fare like "Delicate". She sought to course-correct with her brighter, more colorful 2019 release "Lover", but the lead single "Me!" was the sugar rush that no one asked for.

A Kidz Bop version of itself, "Me!" uses its marching band drums and bright horn sections to tell the story of a couple drunk on their own uniqueness, the song aims for effervescence but lands in the realm of cloying. Urie is a decent enough foil, but Swift's previous turns towards pure pop were rarely so annoyingly upbeat, as her lyrical cleverness is reduced to pablum ("You're the only one of you / Baby, that's the fun of you!"). Stopped from topping the charts by Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" in the middle of its record-breaking run, Swift seemed deeply aware of the sickeningly sweet number's divisive reaction, removing the line "Hey kids, spelling is fun!" from the final release and then dropping the song off late in the album's tracklisting in slot 16 ("Lover" had 18 songs). As much as "Look What You Made Me Do" was ridiculed for its drastic self-seriousness, at least that song was aware of what it was doing. With "Me!", Taylor seemed to forget that she's the one of her, and, wisely, course-corrected right after.

Two decades ago, Maroon 5 started as a pop-rock outfit with a knack for a killer hook. Their debut song "Harder to Breathe" was allegedly written quickly because the label "didn't hear a single" on their album, leading the band formerly known as Kara's Flowers to pen the fiery rocker, which opened the flood gates for their numerous chart-toppers that followed. While some artists have taken a break between album cycles, the only year that Maroon 5 didn't put out a single was 2003. While that kind of hustle is admirable, at some point, the group crossed the line from being a beloved pop-rock mainstay to becoming bland radio craftsmen, their songs written professionally but with no air and no punch to them. Nowadays, there are arguably too many Maroon 5 songs, with their output reaching a point of oversaturation that has proven insurmountable to some. Their widely panned Super Bowl Halftime Show didn't help matters, which is also why their 2021 album "Jordi" has underperformed by every conceivable metric.

That record's only hit was "Memories", a weepy dorm-room singalong that aims to honor "the ones we lost on the way" that unfortunately bases its main melody off of Pachelbel's "Canon in D Major". Its sparse production is a change for the band, but such bold minimalism doesn't prevent the track from sounding like something that Train would've passed on. Grammatically inscrutable ("Now my heart feel like December / When somebody say your name"), this seemingly earnest ode gets derailed by its "doo doo doo" sing-along portion, which incidentally leads listeners to drink in order to forget all their memories of this dreadful caricature of sentimentality.

In early 2021, footage leaked of Morgan Wallen, one of the bright new shining stars of country music, saying a racial slur. The incident became infamous and caused Wallen to be de-listed from multiple streaming playlists despite the reigning popularity of his new double album. While some felt his apology was sincere, others didn't forgive him, leaving Wallen in cultural limbo, selling millions while on the verge of cancellation. "Broadway Girls", which came out at the end of 2021, feels less like a song and more like a deliberate way to course-correct his image. Over a tired trap beat, both Wallen and Durk seem to be trying to out-bland each other with their bars ("She ridin' a bull like cars / She usually don't cool with stars," Durk spits), all while lamenting hooking up with girls from the Broadway strip in Nashville. However, you might find yourself agreeing with the chorus, wanting to leave these "Broadway Girls" alone.