1)Ke$ha, “Tik Tok”
SONG: Yeah, this pretty much confirms what I said in last week’s post about 2009, it seemed like this is where viral meme culture and pop music were so badly intertwined that there was no going back. Musically, what I think I’m hearing is a girl much younger than Gwen Stefani trying to carry on the Stefani legacy to a ridiculous extreme, with the miserably overmodulated vocal trickery and the blonde-white-pixie-tries-to-deliberately-overappropriate-hiphop-party-culture-when-you-wouldn’t-even-need-to-guess-she’s-putting-you-on thing smeared into your face so harshly as to make a song whose deliberately viral opularity exists solely based on how much everyone immediately hates the song for being as obnoxious as it is. Am I wrong about that? Maybe that’s the big sea change I was getting at in that 2009 post. Maybe this thing really was the beginning of the whole AI takeover (and reactions to this song on this board back in the day were indeed immediate middle fingers)–but then again, not only is Ke$ha still with us, her lyrics make baited references to CDs and Mick Jagger (let alone the “woke up feeling like Diddy line” which has aged quite baldy)–in 2010?!? Kill us now, AI. Kill us good. /christgau
VIDEO: She wasn’t really very hot, was she? She looks like a swimsuit model’s drug addicted tatooed kid sister.

2)Lady Antebellum, “Need You Now”
SONG: Gee, I wonder if this “country” song will save me from the beginning of the AI music takeover. Well…it’s better than time Faith Hill topped the charts, I guess. It doesn’t sound like something the redneck crowd would go for, either. I don’t recall hearing it back in the day, but I never go anywhere near country music because it sucks my fuckballs, bruh.
VIDEO: The band’s mildly sexy sub-Carrie-Underwood female vocalist and mildly scruffy male vocalist on opposite sides of a hotel room pining for each other. The “mature, 30 year old” version of a Taylor Swift video.

3)Train, “Hey Soul Sister”
SONG: DIE. DIE. DIE. If it weren’t for “A Thousand Miles” about ten years prior this would be the worst song in any of these top 10 lists. The worst song by a band whose hit songs all sucked ass (ALL OF THEM) anyway. The stupid lyrics (not just the “gangsta” bit, but the “like a virgin, you’re Madonna” line–was Pat Monahan trying to imitate how the kids write lyrics, because he got ripped on for rhyming “life” with “life” in “Meet Virginia”?), the constant “heeyy eyyyy”s…I’m not alone, I know that SNL made terrible fun of this song in a sketch just a few years ago. I’d call this song deeply laughable but seriously this is the first time I think I’ve ever made it through the whole thing.
VIDEO: Words in a painted black font scrawl over the video. A very visually unappealing gimmick from a band whose logo, for some comical reason, looked like a 3 year old scrawled it with a broken pencil. Pat Monahan overemoting a lot too. You know, I thought this song came out a lot earlier than fucking 2010 anyway–shit, now I’m ROOTING for the Ke$ha-AI takeover.

4)Katy Perry featuring. Snoop Dogg, “California Gurls”
SONG: Reddit feeds alone are enough to inform me that everyone hates her now and that she tried to go to space or some shit? I try to avoid celebrity news a lot of the time but sometimes you just sort of absorb it by osmosis. Isn’t there another song with a near identical hook to this song’s chorus? The “daisy dukes” bit? I’m probably confusing this with about three other songs, which officially prevents me from even being able to like it. The millennial whoop doesn’t help either–this wasn’t the first song to have THAT, was it? Should somebody go back and check my other posts to see if I mentioned the millennial whoop in reference to another song? I don’t feel like doing it myself.
VIDEO: Somebody spent a lot of money making poor naked purple haired Katy look like she’s in Candy Land. Most of the rest of the video is a skinfest and I was embarrassed to watch it. When was it people officially stopped putting lots of money (and skin) into MTV videos? When did MTV stop playing videos?

5)Usher featuring. will.i.am, “OMG”
SONG: More viral shit. Autotune from hell, Internet acronyms…is there a name for the chord sequence exploited by this song’s opening verses and so many others? Where he goes “there’s so many ways to love ya”? That minor chord rising into a major chord at the end of a hook? I mean, the Katy Perry song I just got done listening to did the same thing in the daisy dukes hook. So do about a zillion other songs. It’s as ubiquitous as the millennial whoop. The yammering synth bass lines in this song sound very cheap and I don’t like them. Nor, as you can guess, the song. “Oh oh ohoh, oh oh oh ohoh, oh oh oh ohoh”…shaddup. “My my my mymy my my my mymy…oh my gosh”…who writes this shit? Reminded of Eddie Murphy’s bit about James Brown: “I need a word…HAEEEYYYY”
VIDEO: Usher in front of lasers, then Usher in front of scantily clad girls in a dance line, then Usher in an orange room in front of some window light. Fiddle dee dee.

6)B.o.B. featuring Hayley Williams, “Airplanes”
SONG: Who featuring who? Don’t remember this song, or either of these people by name, or what they looked like, or anything. I guess the pianos in it are okay. Mister B. lowercase o. B. is a rather obnoxious rapper, putting way too much “bite” into his words so that it sounds like he’s chomping his teeth about an inch from my ears. Sounds like he really means what he’s rapping about though?
VIDEO: Typical hip hop club fare. Lots of stars spinning around.

7)Eminem featuring Rihanna, “Love The Way You Lie”
SONG: I find him generally bearable but only really liked a couple of songs. This is okay but it’s no “Lose Yourself.” I’m reminded of Alpha Hammer saying that “if there was EVER an example of a guy peaking, resting on his laurels, and never effectively coming back, it’s him.” Was that true? Rihanna doesn’t add much to the song.
VIDEO: 38 year old Eminem in a cornfield with his look left over from 8 Mile which had been out nearly a decade by then. A couple fight and make out in a crummy room somewhere. Shit catches fire. Dramatic stuff. Oh wait, the girl is Megan Fox, remember her? If you don’t, there was a hilarious picture posted on this board by Jamie or someone pretending to be Jamie that read “In which Pugeye attempts to woo Megan Fox with his schoolboy charm” where some fat dorky kid holding a flower attempted to give it to Megan Fox at some red carpet movie premiere, while she ignored him because she couldn’t possibly have seen him anyway.

8)Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance”
SONG: Hate this shit. Always did. One of the most annoying hooks ever. I will note again that she seems to be combining neo-80s synths with 90s pop orchestration but that doesn’t make the song much less awful. And when it isn’t hitting you over the head with the annoying hook, it drifts into boring verses. I don’t like any of her songs that I know of.
VIDEO: The opening bit with people in white bodysuits emerging from cryo pods reminds me of Spinal Tap’s stage disaster. Seemingly aware of this, it takes Mrs. Gaga about a minute to whip out the leotards (is this where leotards became the de facto outfit of mainstream female pop superstars? Probably not) and start showing skin. For some reason, the video ends on a charred skeleton in a bed. In case you’ve forgotten this was at one point the most viewed thing in Youtube history.

9)Taio Cruz, “Dynamite”
SONG: I recognize the piano hook…okay, yeah, heard this song a lot back in the day. I guess I’m pretty neutral on it. Probably because, as said before, it blends in with other millennial whoop/Autotune party songs from the era. I did not remember him by name, this one’s in grocery store playlists a lot.
VIDEO: Dude looks like Wayne Brady’s hipster kid brother. For some reason this video seems to be taking place mostly outside of an auto garage. The shot where a big blast of fire hits behind him while he’s performing is weird.

10)Taio Cruz featuring Ludacris, “Break Your Heart”
SONG: Boring synthesizer sparkles over a generic neo disco beat, Autotune nad one of the most obvious chord sequences you could possibly imagine. A computer could have spat this generic hip hop dance song out of its own accord, which fits in perfectly with this year’s theme. I’m starting to miss all those interchangeable R&B ballads from the 90s that I ran out of things to write about.
VIDEO: The “Dynamite” guy trying for a “plot,” telling some girl he’s gonna break her heart. This is mostly dropped after the intro to the song for the usual truckload of girls and clubs and people out on the waves.

SONGS FROM THE REST OF THE TOP 100 THAT I’M GLAD I DON’T HAVE TO LISTEN TO BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT IN THE TOP 10:

Jason Derulo, “In My Head”
Katy Perry, “Teenage Dream”
Bruno Mars, “Just The Way You Are”
Ke$ha, “Your Love Is My Drug”
Justin Bieber & Ludacris, “Baby”
Taylor Swift, “Mine”
Miley Cyrus, “Party In The USA” (this was probably the song I had confused with the Katy Perry song above)
Britney Spears, “3”
Sugarland, “Stuck Like Glue”
Alicia Keys, “Unthinkable (I’m Ready)”
Any of the other Usher songs in the list

SONGS FROM THE REST OF THE TOP 100 THAT I WILL CONFESS TO LIKING:

Taylor Swift, “You Belong With Me” (already mentioned that this one was kind of nice before it got beaten to death)
Orianthi, “According To You” (sorry)