The Worst Fucking Songs We've Heard All Year
We bemoan clunkers from Willow, Tom Morello, Kacey Musgraves and MUNA
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him), Eric Bennett (they/them), Michael Brooks (he/him) and Miranda Reinert (she/her). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. On Substack, we’re also a weekly roundup of songs. Our format is simple: each of our four hosts picks a song they love and writes about it. There will be one free post every week, and more at the end of every month for paid subscribers. For the sake of your wallet, don’t start a paid subscription on Substack. Instead, sign up at the 2$ tier or higher on Patreon and we will gift you a subscription.
WILLOW, Avril Lavigne - “Grow” (Feat. Travis Barker)”
Eric Bennett:
2021 was both the year that the so-called pop-punk revival took off, and one of the least inspiring years in recent memory for pop music. The former was perpetuated not just by mainstream press enamored by couples like MGK and Megan Fox or Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker, but by the lack of skepticism among music writers. Amongst the crowd of albums spuriously called pop-punk was lately i feel EVERYTHING, the latest record from Hollywood scion Willow Smith. The album straddles the line of both of my musical pet peeves from this year. It’s not really a pop-punk album, and it's a profoundly joyless pop record.
Why are so many of my fellow writers interested in swallowing the narrative that this could reasonably be called pop-punk, let alone considered good music? So much of EVERYTHING feels half-finished and devoid of all personality. Smith is not the most gifted vocalist, which isn’t as great a sin as some might think. A lot of pop stars can’t sing that well and have had fruitful careers. What strikes me more is her utter lack of charisma. What is compelling about her as a figure other than her famous last name, and that she’s making music with its own baked-in nostalgia? While many laughed at her first foray into music, “Whip My Hair” is at least a shamelessly catchy song. Nothing on EVERYTHING comes anywhere near that already low watermark.
Perhaps the most egregious moment comes with “GROW” — a song that feels so rushed that its verses are nearly identical, its chorus sounds phoned in, and its big feature comes off underwhelming. Ostensibly an empowering song about how we all have room to grow, it proves its own thesis immediately with its heavy-handed writing barely filling a two-minute runtime. The song features Avril Lavigne, who sings approximately 50% of the song.
Lavigne’s presence here is interesting. On our bonus feed, we did a detailed deep dive into her discography and looked at her “pop-punk princess” framing. That narrative is almost entirely a fabrication. While Lavigne certainly dressed the part, her music rarely strayed from the formula being used by her more straightforwardly pop contemporaries. It’s fitting, having the former false icon of pop-punk give her blessing to her successor like this. Nothing Smith is doing is more pop-punk than anything Lavigne did. The music industry recycles its artifice once more.
Tom Morello - “I Have Seen the Way” Feat. Alex Lifeson, Kirk Hammet, and Dr. Fresch
Eli Enis:
I think Tom Morello has found a new hobby in railing ecstasy. The Rage Against the Machine co-founder, Audioslave axeman, guitar innovator, and mainstream commie who’ll occasionally pop up as the token lefty on a CNN panel has recently been embarking on a musical journey, of sorts, that’s confounding to the point where I’m questioning if it’s some kind of psyop. I’m not talking about Prophets of Rage, the unfortunately corny and unsatisfying supergroup of rap dinosaurs trying to fill the void of Zack de la Rocha with the other three Rage dudes. After RATM and Audioslave respectively disbanded, Morello started making troubadour protest folk under the name The Nightwatchmen. You know, the kind of music that X’ers in Che Guevara shirts who happily voted for Biden think is cool. The kind of thing you’d expect a guy like Morello to start making as he aged into a Willie Nelson-esque figure for people of his generation. However, somewhere in the last seven years or so, a flip switched, and his solo music suddenly took a turn for the bizarre.
In 2018, Morello, under his own name, put out an album called The Atlas Underground that was 12 songs that each featured at least one other artist. The guestlist is fucking stupifying. Tim McIlrath, frontman of the soft-shelled poli-sci punks Rise Against, shares a song with millennial frat party regular Steve Aoki. Big Boi and Killer Mike hop on a song with now-disgraced serial rapist and one-time cult-adored dubstep producer Bassnectar. Marcus Mumford square-dances in for a tune, and two tracks later it’s K. Flay’s turn to boogie with Morello. Pretty Lights and Knife Party are there as well — two artists I listened to at a time in my life where I was sucking on sopping wet juicy j’s that were smuggled into a nightmarish foam party. Two artists I would never in a million years expect Tom Morello to know existed, let alone enjoy to the extent that he wanted to collaborate with them.
In October of this year, Atlas Underground Fire arrived, featuring a similar smorgasbord of illogical pairings (everyone from Mike Posner and grandson to Bruce Springsteen and Bring Me the Horizon make appearances). Then, two months later, the dude dropped another one of these fuckers, The Atlas Underground Flood, which employs the same type of Noah’s Ark curatorial approach — X Ambassadors, IDLES, Manchester Orchestra and San Holo are all welcome aboard. I’m not going to waste my time describing what this stuff sounds like to you. It sounds exactly what you think it would sound like. It’s like listening to a conversation between two strangers at a party who are so coked out of their skulls that they think they’re going to get up the next morning and co-found the next silicon valley startup. It sounds like something that shouldn’t actually exist. Not in the way that it doesn’t deserve to exist, because I suppose all art is at least of some value to its creator, if not anyone else. But this sounds like the musical equivalent of two people who are trying to meet up, but are stuck on either sides of a flash mob in a crowded train station. It’s just not gonna happen and the universe is giving them a perfectly upsetting excuse for why they can’t join arms. But in this instance, Tom Morello whips out a chainsaw and starts mowing down people in front of him — just chopping mercilessly through hordes of men, women and children — until he finds his pal on the other side and boards the train together. Just some monstrous defiance of law, order, nature, and human morals to force these completely useless, fiendish clatterings from Pandora’s box into existence.
Then there’s the artwork. The artwork is somehow the worst part. The three Atlas Underground’s that have emerged thus far (with elemental titles like Fire, Flood and the original Atlas, I suspect there’s a Wind one in the works) have similar covers. The original Atlas pictures some sort of winged hippo creature floating in the heavens, and the other two depict elephants with butterfly wings for ears trotting through landscapes that look like Windows 7 desktop backgrounds. They’re so hideous that they make me think Morello is pulling our legs. They look like posters you’d see in one of those awkwardly large and weirdly empty vape stores that have infected every city in America. They look like they smell like the dorm room of a guy who collects his vaped weed ash in a jar next to another jar of weed stems, which he’s saving because, “You know you can make tea out of those, right?” The tea never gets made, because eventually he stumbles into the jar in a drunken stupor and knocks it to the ground, where it lays for weeks, congealing into a tumbleweed of sock lint and Dorito crumbs that lingers until the maids come in to clean the vacant dorm after move-out week. Why is this the image that comes to mind when I’m looking at an album by the dude who wrote the “Bulls on Parade” lick and the solo on “Know Your Enemy”? How is this possibly the same guy?
If I had to pick one song that demonstrates just how brain-numbingly stupid, artless and dull these projects are, it would be “I Have Seen the Way,” which features Rush’s Alex Lifeson, Metallica’s Kirk Hammet and some imbecilic French trap producer named Dr. Fresch. On one level, this song is like The Avengers for 45-year-old YouTube commenters who say shit like, “Dude, what if Rush, Metallica, and Rage Against the Machine were on a song together?” and then make some homophobic slur about electronic musicians who’re defiling the good name of popular music with their remedial button-pressing. Sadly, there are a fuck-ton of those types of guys, and a halfway decent rock song with Lifeson, Hammet and Morello — objectively three of the greatest guitarists of all time — would blow their minds and probably even mine, too. However, what makes this so bafflingly clumsy and emblematic of the exact type of idiocy that Morello has succumbed to, is letting the soy-facing beep-boop dork, Dr. Fresch, put grating trap bass beneath the solos, essentially making it sound like a sloppily stitched-together remix of a song some dude dreamt of one time. It’s the exact type of guitar homerun derby-ism you’d expect from these shredders, but home plate is stationed on the dancefloor of the Ultra Music Festival, and the balls are smacking into the skulls of white people donning Native American headdresses and tripping on molly that’s been collecting dust in a bedside ash tray since 2014. Yeah, it’s probably the worst fucking song I’ve heard all year.
MUNA - “Silk Chiffon” (Feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
Michael Brooks:
There’s a tweet from Polo G, posted in September of last year, where he asks “I just wanna know how could Tik Tok ruin a song????” which, to be fair, is a great question! It’s a question that I couldn’t have even answered until earlier this year, where it felt like the line, “And life's so fun, life's so fun / Got my mini skirt and my rollerblades on,” was being presented to me like the aversion therapy scene in A Clockwork Orange. If I could have discovered “Silk Chiffon” on my own terms maybe things would be different, y’know? MUNA, who signed to Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory imprint earlier this year, spoke to Rolling Stone about “Silk Chiffon” and said that, “We hope the powerful sapphic energy of this song summons the ghost of Lilith Fair,” which certainly sounds like something that could be in my wheelhouse. But it’s not. Almost nothing about this song works for me!
Is “Silk Chiffon” supposed to be read as tongue in cheek? I don’t know and also I don’t really care! Even the production, which harkens back to pop hits of the 2000’s and is nearly on the verge of VH1 You Oughta Know-core (AKA the best stuff on earth) feels sterile and dull to my ears. I could have just as easily picked any song released by Silk Sonic this year, the duo of Anderson .Paak and Bruno Mars who make joyless R&B for people that are too scared to have sex with the lights on, but at least on the surface level I could see myself enjoying a song like “Smoking Out The Window” at somebody’s wedding in the next twenty years when I’m old and gray and completely washed. Maybe I’m already washed and I just haven’t realized it yet. Or maybe 2021 was just a bad year for silk. Anyways, Happy Holidays to all of the haters out there!
Kacey Musgraves - “good wife”
Miranda Reinert:
There are few songs I hate. I have pretty middle of the road reactions to most things. Picking a song for this week’s newsletter was difficult, but don’t worry, I settled on something.
When we talked about Kacey Musgraves’ new album I was less than a month out from a break up. The worst break up I’ve ever had. The promise of an album about divorce appealed to me. I’d never really been all that into her music, but I always liked “High Horse” and remember a couple other songs on Golden Hour, so my mind was open. I do try to like the stuff we listen to for the podcast.
But this song, from beginning to end, leaves me confused. When I first listened to it, it made me laugh out loud in pure confusion. I guess I really just have two main gripes with this song. I hate the auto-tune they put on her voice the most. The song grooves fine, just leave her voice alone. It’s not adding anything to the track. It doesn’t feel like an artistic choice. It feels random.
The second gripe is specifically one line. I can understand the content of the song being about being in a certain “Stand Behind Your Man” type headspace. Maybe it’s a comment on how women are traditionally expected to put their feelings aside for the good of a relationship. That’s fine. But I’ve been thinking about the line “And if he comes home stressed out, I could pack him a bowl” since September. Maybe it’s my problem that I think the corniest thing you can do is reference weed in music. I don’t know why, but I think it’s the goofiest move possible and I hate when people do it. Am I nitpicking? Yes. But I just hate it. I think it alters the tone of any line it could be inserted into and I just hate it.
At the end of the day, I like my divorce records a little more Mike Kinsella and a little less … This.. But really I just hate music that talks about weed, I guess.