“Crack a Bottle” by Eminem, Dr. Dre, and 50 Cent (2009)

One critic’s view:  “‘Crack A Bottle’ wasn’t the first terrible Eminem song, but it does find wild, psychedelic new ways to be terrible.” – Tom Breihan @ Stereogum

The public’s view:  2.19 / 5.00, in the bottom 25% of #1 hits of 2009

Bleach, vinegar, and napalm are useful products on their own but should never be mixed together.  In 2009 we endured the hip-hop equivalent, with Dr. Dre and 50 Cent joining Eminem to make a track that was supposed to leave everyone in awe of the triple dose of charisma.  The awe wore off within minutes.  Today, “Crack a Bottle” is mostly regarded as a blot on the catalogs of all three rappers.

Collaborations such as this are, of course, very common in rap, but “Crack a Bottle” relies on the look-at-us-we’re-stars approach a little too heavily.  Eminem announces each of the rappers’ verses as if he’s emceeing a variety show, and he calls himself and his friends “the platinum trio”.  Too bad he didn’t write some platinum-level lyrics for this event.  The main plot of “Crack a Bottle” is that the trio (or perhaps just Eminem) is riding in a Chevy Tahoe that is jammed full of naked women who are offering themselves up.  It’s a sex brag that is led by perhaps the only top-shelf rapper who is inherently incapable of pulling off a successful sex brag, and somehow it gets stretched to almost five minutes.

Rather than reviewing the track in detail, I have a better idea.  I’m going to envision an alternate scenario in a parallel universe, one in which Eminem decided to give this rap away to a different trio who had already scored a major hit together.  I’m talking about Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart, and Sting.  The ill-advised combination of these three superstars led to one of the most poorly rated #1 hits of the 1990s, “All for Love”.  Let’s imagine them reuniting in the studio to record “Crack a Bottle”.

Bryan:  Guys, thanks for coming back to Vancouver for the “Crack a Bottle” project.  This song is a little different from the last one and I don’t think we can scream in unison this time.  We’re going to have to divvy up the work.  Rod, this line is for you:  “With a record of 17 rapes, 400 assaults, and 4 murders, the undisputed most diabolical villain of the world!”

Rod:  What the bloody hell?  I get in one bar fight and now I’m the Boston Strangler?

Bryan:  Sting, I want you to handle the part about the bitches in the Tahoe.  The key lyric is “Now where’s the rubbers?  Who’s got the rubbers?  I noticed there’s so many of ‘em and there’s really not that many of us.”  You’re going to have to emote on that line.

Sting:  Indeed, I shall imbue some melancholy.  It is disconcerting that the quantity of promiscuous females has surpassed the supply of prophylactics, but it is just as Malthus foresaw.

Bryan:  Whatever you say, dude.  I call dibs on this line:  “Kiss my butt / Lick fromunda cheese from under my nuts.”  That’s exactly the emotion I was trying to express in “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?”, but I couldn’t find such graceful words.

Sting:  Bah!  That verse is mere Hallmark card sentimentality!  I prefer the more elegiac allusions to fromunda cheese in the poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Christina Rossetti.

Rod:  Another shite song for another shite movie.  Ah well, at least Disney’s checks always clear.

You have to admit, you’d tune in to hear what those three musketeers could do with “Crack a Bottle”.  On the other hand, a version of “All for Love” by Eminem, 50 Cent, and Dr. Dre would be really, really bad.

“Crank That (Soulja Boy)” by Soulja Boy (2007)

One person’s view:  “‘Crank That (Soulja Boy)’ is one of the five worst songs to ever reach the #1 spot on the charts.  …  It’s just a bunch of random shouting that barely maintains a pitch, layered over lyrics that are entirely pointless.” – dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.60 / 5.00, in the bottom half of #1 hits of 2007

Soulja Boy’s fifteen minutes of fame have been forgotten by most people, but for me they were a life-changing moment.  This was when I first realized that I was officially old and that my tastes would never again be accommodated by the music industry.  There had been #1 hits that I didn’t quite appreciate, and some that I actively despised, but “Crank That” was the only one in my lifetime that left me completely baffled.  To my aging ears, it seemed to lack any positive qualities whatsoever.  Now I knew how my grandparents must have felt the first time that they heard Bobby Goldsboro.

After a few listens, however, I found one little thing to like about “Crank That”.  It was the line in the chorus in which Soulja Boy yells “Superman that ho!”  I had heard plenty of performers bragging of their toughness, and some who even maintained that they were fly or hot, but none of them had dared to insult the Man of Steel.  Unless Soulja Boy owned a kryptonite mine, he was gambling with his life.  I admired his bravery if nothing else.

But then I discovered that I had misinterpreted the lyric and that he was not really calling Superman a “ho”.  Instead, this line was an allusion to a bizarre and ungratifying sexual act known as “the Superman”.  The details are inappropriate for this G-rated blog, but I will say that the act ends with one of the participants wearing a cape and the other one calling the Daily Planet to tell Jimmy Olsen what just happened.  In my opinion, even Fergie’s stretched-out granny panties from “London Bridge” are more of a turn-on than the Superman.

Soulja Boy later denied that he meant anything lewd by the “Superman” reference, claiming that this was a myth propagated by “white people”.  The lyric actually came from a dance move that he and his friends liked to do, during which they called out names of comic book characters.  “Superman that ho!  Batman that ho!  Garfield that ho!”  This is a silly explanation but I believe him, especially because he’s casually lighting up a fat one in the interview in which he talks about it.  I would not be surprised to learn that recreational substances were also used during the grueling ten-minute-long songwriting and production session that gave us “Crank That”.

Although hatred of “Crank That” is abundant, the track has more defenders than you might expect.  One of them is Tom Breihan, who gave it a favorable review in his Stereogum column and even included a chapter on it in his book about #1 hits.  Breihan seems to admire Soulja Boy’s unconventional internet marketing efforts, which provided a roadmap for other unsigned acts to get noticed in the years ahead.  One of Soulja Boy’s tactics was to upload his songs to file-sharing services and mislabel them with the name of someone popular so that users would be tricked into listening to them.  Can you imagine the letdown that people experienced from double-clicking on a freshly downloaded Hanson MP3 and hearing Soulja Boy instead?  It’s like biting into a chocolate chip cookie and discovering that the chips are actually raisins.

Even if you don’t like “Crank That”, you have to admit that its associated dance is kind of fun to do.  Just be sure to sing along:  “Beetle Bailey that ho!  Hagar the Horrible that ho!  Jughead that ho…”

“This Is Why I’m Hot” by Mims (2007)

One person’s view:  “I wish he really had said nothing on this track.  I’d have enjoyed a hip hop version of 4'33" more than this festival of circular logic.” – Axver @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  1.95 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 2007 & 2008

“This Is Why I’m Hot” purports to tell us why Shawn Mims is hot, but the explanation it provides is less than satisfying.  Mims asserts that he is hot because he is fly.  Everyone knows that flyness implies hotness, so this would seem to be a straightforward application of modus ponens.  The problem, however, is that Mims can offer only flimsy evidence of his flyness.  He tells us that there are unspecified Chicagoans who deem him fly based on his choice of clothing, but his reliance on anonymous hearsay suggests the possibility that he is neither fly nor hot and is simply blowing smoke up everyone’s butts.

Although you can listen to “This Is Why I’m Hot” all day and still not know why (or even if) Mims is hot, that doesn’t mean it lacks all informational value.  The track reveals Mims’s chameleon-like ability to blend in with the local hip-hop community in any region of the United States, and it incorporates samples of other rappers to illustrate this special talent.  When Mims mentions L.A., we hear a melody that is associated with Dr. Dre and Snoop.  As he name-checks the Bay Area, a wisp of the beat from E-40’s “Tell Me When to Go” plays.  In his line about the Midwest, he references Houston (“The H”) and uses a warped voice to mimic the slow-tempo style of rap that is popular there.  Mims’s definition of the Midwest is a little loose for my tastes, but he’s a rapper, not Rand McNally, so I’ll cut him some slack.

It’s quite clear from these lyrics that Mims is a utility player in the world of hip-hop, a man known for his versatility rather than his originality.  This absence of a unique persona – along with his lack of any prior or subsequent hits – undercuts the effectiveness of his boasts on “This Is Why I’m Hot”.  For example, does anybody really believe that stores close to let Mims shop without other people around?  I’m wondering why this would even be necessary.  It isn’t as though Mims’s fly apparel, which is so admired by the residents of Illinois, is a closely guarded trade secret.  He wears it in his video that anyone can watch!  More likely, Mims wants the privacy so that no one sees his credit card being declined.

Perhaps I shouldn’t joke about Mims’s finances, because they are a sore spot for him.  He has spent much of the past 17 years complaining that Capitol Records cheated him out of almost all of his “This Is Why I’m Hot” royalties.  Kanye West probably made more money from the track than Mims did, because of the 6-second sample of “Jesus Walks” in the first verse.  But at least Mims is now recouping his losses by selling $40 T-shirts, the flyness of which is not guaranteed.

I can understand why “This Is Why I’m Hot” irked people.  No one wants to hear an obscure rapper with average skills crowing about how he’s hot and you’re not, and how he’s hogging all the women and how you can’t go to Walmart right now because he’s in there picking out a new baseball cap.  Yet, I think the song works if you consider it as sort of a parody of the brag-rap genre.  Maybe you disagree with me and believe that the lyrics are just too stupid and annoying to tolerate on any level.  If so, you’re really going to love the next exhibit in our museum of “bad” #1 hits.

“London Bridge” by Fergie (2006)

One person’s view:  “I think this song has gotten us all desperate, searching for weird roundabout ways in which this might have been ‘good’ in some strange sense of the word.  Anything but having to accept we let something so aggressively and unabashedly miserable rise to the top – and then ordered seconds.” – standbytheseawall @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.58 / 5.00, in the bottom half of #1 hits of 2006

Scholars at the Institute of Applied Fergalicious Studies have been debating the meaning of “London Bridge” since 2006.  One theory is that the “London bridge” in the song is a metaphor for Fergie’s underpants, which slide down in anticipation from under her skirt whenever her boyfriend is nearby.  The panties stop at her knees and form a “bridge” between her legs.  This forces her to waddle around like a person who has belatedly discovered that all of the toilet paper is in a closet on the other side of the house.  The “London” descriptor may be an allusion to the nursery rhyme in which the beloved London Bridge falls down in the same manner as the singer’s intimate apparel.  Or perhaps the panties form a “London” bridge because Fergie embroidered a caricature of the Queen on them in an effort to stimulate the boyfriend.  That guy is into some weird things.

The opposing view is that “London Bridge” is just made-up stupidity that was intended to ride on the coattails of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl”.  Like “Hollaback Girl”, “London Bridge” relies on a cryptic lyrical theme, an angry cheerleader-style chant, and the incessant use of the word “shit”.  Fergie does not, however, equate excrement with bananas as Stefani did in her song.  She didn’t want to permanently wreck her chances of signing a lucrative endorsement deal with Chiquita.

“London Bridge” has also been compared to Fergie’s previous single with the Black Eyed Peas, “My Humps”.  Both hits present themselves as sexy, yet any use of either song’s lyrics in an actual bedroom scenario is likely to result in involuntary abstinence.  (Praising your girlfriend’s skin tags and warts as “lovely lady lumps” is rarely taken as a compliment.)  Sociologists have measured a decline in sexual activity that began around the mid-2000s, and we can probably blame Fergie for this.  I think 50 Cent may have contributed a bit too, though, with “Candy Shop”.

The most surprising thing about “London Bridge” is that it isn’t hated more than it is.  The beat is catchy enough to earn it a number of devoted fans, some of whom praised the track on a Reddit thread.  However, no one leaped to the song’s defense when it was attacked on a message board for sports journalists shortly after it was released.  The best that any of the journalists said about “London Bridge” was that it was not as bad as Paris Hilton’s new song, but even that was not a unanimous opinion.  Eventually, the Fergie debate simmered down and the sports guys returned to arguing about whether baseball would be more exciting if it added a three-point line.

“London Bridge” was the first oozing tentacle of the Black Eyed Peas biomass to reach the #1 position on the Hot 100.  It served as a warning of what was in store for chart-watchers for the next four years.  I suspect that another Pea-affiliated song will eventually make an appearance on this blog.

“Do I Make You Proud” by Taylor Hicks (2006)

One critic’s view:  “The two craptastic songs that American Idol 5 finalists Taylor Hicks and Katharine McPhee performed Tuesday night were, unbelievably, the best two songs in a pool of 150 possibilities.  …  All five [of the writers of these two songs] deserve eternal scorn and shame, or at least membership in the Diane Warren Hall of Mediocre Pop Songs.” – Andy Dehnart @ reality blurred

The public’s view:  1.79 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of 2006

Winning American Idol in the 2000s was like boarding a spaceship and blasting into the outer reaches of fame.  The champion soars through the atmosphere at Mach 10, watching through the window as the Earth’s mighty cities, mountains, and rivers bow down before his greatness.  He is living his dream for a moment, but then the booster rocket malfunctions as it is supposed to lift his celebrity status into a stable orbit.  He opens the door to the engine compartment to see what is wrong, and discovers that someone has emptied a trash can into the space where the ignition module is supposed to be.  Amid the gum wrappers and orange peels he finds the script for From Justin to Kelly and the sheet music for “This Is the Night”.  Gravity soon does its thing, and he ends his brief flight by splashing down into the Pacific.  He never quite becomes a pop star, but he goes back to his hometown and his job at Winn-Dixie with a great story to tell for the rest of his life.

Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood were able to avoid this scenario, as both of them escaped the shadows of the mediocre adult contemporary ballads they were forced to perform for their first singles.  However, neither had to contend with “Do I Make You Proud”, which was assigned to Taylor Hicks in season five.  This was debatably the worst coronation song for any Idol winner (or second-place finisher) up to that point, and it was some fairly heavy ballast to bring along on a career-launching rocket ride.

“Do I Make You Proud” starts out as a standard soft rock gewgaw, but then builds to a powerful chorus with a memorable hook.  Unfortunately, the reason the chorus is memorable is that it sounds like a previous #1 hit:  Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”.  Now, I am sure that music experts can point out dozens of ways in which the two songs are different.  “Taylor Hicks’s bass player employs an innovative left-handed tuning scheme that elevates the rhythmic feel of the piece.  Also, Hicks’s melody has a tilde over the A-flat in the second measure – a jarring contrast from Aerosmith’s arpeggio.”  But to my uninformed ears, these are essentially the same choruses with different lyrics.

Let’s talk about those lyrics, which focus on the singer’s one nagging concern:  he needs to know if the listeners are proud of him.  It’s unreasonable for him to expect that of us.  Unless I’m Taylor Hicks’s singing coach or his mother, why should I be proud that he got a trophy in a televised contest?  His fans may have felt contentment, relief, or even sexual pleasure when he won Idol, but I doubt that any of them truly took pride in an achievement that wasn’t theirs.  Perhaps he’s talking about pride of representation, as with Black Pride or Gay Pride.  Hicks isn’t black or gay, but he is an ambassador for the Men With Prematurely Graying Hair movement.  However, as a card-carrying member of the MWPGH community, I can report that we used up all of our representational pride on Steve Martin and Phil Donahue back around 1980.  We don’t have any left for Taylor Hicks.

The first verse contains the line “My heart is full of endless gratitude.”  Logically, I expect the next line to be “That I got to see you in the nude.”  (“And I’m a handsome gray-haired dude” would also work.)  Instead, the line is “You were the one, the one to guide me through.”  Maybe I should be pleased that the songwriters didn’t go for the obvious rhyme.  Instead I’m annoyed that they didn’t bother to rhyme the line correctly at all, yet still came up with something boring and trite.

Hicks’s performance on “Do I Make You Proud” gives me the sense that he is not just a technically proficient singer like all of the other Idol winners.  He also has some soulfulness and passion, and I might enjoy listening to him in another context.  Too bad that the song demotivates me from wanting to seek out his other music.

“Bad Day” by Daniel Powter (2006)

One person’s view:  “There is no word or phrase – no matter how derogatory or boldly offensive – that can describe how much I despise this song with every fiber of my being.  …  It feels like the fucker is mocking you.” – Ambishi @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  1.85 / 5.00, tied for the third-worst #1 hit of 2006

Daniel Powter was once an aspiring violin virtuoso.  That dream ended when an angry mob attacked him outside of a talent show and his violin was pulverized in the ensuing affray.  This brutal incident established Powter as British Columbia’s definitive expert on bad days.  It also motivated him to start playing the piano, because pianos are one of the hardest musical instruments for an angry mob to hurl across a parking lot.  (Pipe organs are even more mob-resistant, but Powter couldn’t afford to buy a cathedral.)  From this moment, he was destined to write a piano ballad called “Bad Day”.

“Bad Day”’s greatest strength is also its Achilles’ heel:  a catchy, sing-song chorus that needles the listener for being at a low point in his or her life.  It’s the sort of taunt that is designed to be played at a sporting event when the visiting team is getting its ass handed to it in a metal bucket.  Indeed, the song became famous by being used as a parting jibe against losing contestants on American Idol.  When you are having a bad day, the last thing you want to hear on the radio is “Bad Day”.  Unfortunately, this is exactly what many millions of people heard on the 365 bad days that comprised 2006.

“Bad Day” was not the first chart-topper to take a poke at the unfortunate.  Remember Bobby McFerrin, the guy who made all the body noises back in the 1980s?  (No, not the kid who sat next to you in algebra – the other guy who made all the body noises.)  His hit “Don’t Worry Be Happy” described a bleak scenario, but it also conveyed a hopeful message:  your financial, legal, and medical problems will all disappear if you simply pretend that they don’t exist.  McFerrin’s unsound advice ruined countless lives, but there is something to be said for optimism even when it is misplaced.  “Bad Day” doesn’t offer any such optimism, beyond the vague implication that a “blue sky holiday” might occur at some point in the distant future.  It’s a depressing song from start to finish.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad song, per se.  Daniel Powter’s singing and musicianship remind me of Supertramp, a band that was popular in the 1970s and early 1980s and continues to be well regarded.  Like Powter, Supertramp had a hit song about someone going through a rough time:  “It’s Raining Again”.  However, that tune was not nearly as overplayed as “Bad Day”.  If “It’s Raining Again” had become Billboard’s biggest single of its year, as “Bad Day” later did, the public would have been calling for Supertramp to be forcibly exiled to the South Pole.  (“You guys want to bitch about the rain?  Well, rain won’t be a problem for you at Amundsen-Scott Station.”)

Sudden deportation to Antarctica was certainly a possibility for Powter, so he wore his warm knit hat 24/7 for the next three years just in case.  Ultimately, though, he was permitted to fade away without punishment and become the most obscure person ever to top the year-end singles chart.  (The previous holder of the obscurity title was fellow hat-wearer Acker Bilk, whose “Stranger on the Shore” was Billboard’s #1 song of 1962.)  It was quite the decline in fame for someone who was praised in 2006 as “arguably one of the hottest singers in the world at the moment.”  Then again, that accolade came from MTV News, and MTV was about as culturally relevant in 2006 as Daniel Powter is in 2024.

“You’re Beautiful” by James Blunt (2006)

One journalist’s observation:  “[A]sk anyone about it now and they will tell you it’s annoying.  It’s a terrible song.  No one wants to hear it.  A former colleague who had it as the first dance at her wedding says that is now her ‘greatest shame’.” – Issy Sampson @ The Guardian

The public’s view:  1.64 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 2006

Many people once enjoyed “You’re Beautiful” but then grew to passionately hate it after it was overplayed.  My view of James Blunt’s chart-topping record has followed the opposite trajectory.  Upon first listen, I interpreted it as a pathetically fawning ode of praise for a woman.  It was like something Lionel Richie might have written in a bout of intense depression after going four months without getting a gold record.  Later, however, I realized that I hadn’t given the song enough credit.  It is not a miserable love ballad, but a contradictory internal dialogue taking place inside the drug-addled brain of a disturbed young man.  On that basis, I kind of like it.

The turning point in my opinion of the song came when I was on a vacation in another country several years after it hit #1.  I was riding in a vehicle in which I had no control over the radio, and the opening strains of “You’re Beautiful” came creeping into my ears.  The first few mournful notes have always reminded me of the sad music that was played at the end of each episode of The Incredible Hulk.  This is appropriate, because “You’re Beautiful” has been known to provoke listeners into Hulk-like rages in which they turn green and destroy everything in sight.  I tried to ignore James Blunt and think of more pleasant things, like the colossal spider I had seen scurrying around my hotel room which was probably now intermingled with my belongings.  But then one of the lyrics grabbed my attention:  “She could see from my face that I was fucking high.”  Until then, I had always heard a different version in which Blunt was “flying high.”  Without U.S. censorship, I was finally getting to appreciate “You’re Beautiful” as it was meant to be.

This one change affects the entire meaning of the song.  Now I know that the singer is not just “flying high” from seeing a pretty girl on the London Tube; he was already stoned halfway to Glasgow before he boarded the train.  Perhaps this is why he keeps shifting back and forth between addressing the woman directly and speaking of her in the third person.  His thoughts about the situation also veer from one extreme to another.  Initially, his life is brilliant and he has a plan to somehow woo this woman away from the dude she is with.  A few seconds later, he is dejected and has no idea what to do.  (The video suggests that he ultimately kills himself by jumping into the sea.)  And what was the moment they shared that will last ‘til the end?  She probably asked where he buys his weed, and he erroneously thought she was flirting with him.  Never mind that her boyfriend was right there.  This moment might not last ‘til the end, but it will last until James Blunt gets punched in the face.

This delusional narrative wouldn’t work without Blunt’s unique voice, which is a mix of Dave Matthews and Grover.  It’s exactly the type of voice you would associate with the weird guy on the Piccadilly line who reeks of cannabis and who giggles uncontrollably every time the conductor announces that the train is headed to Cockfosters.  I think I would break out in a rash if I heard a conventional romantic balladeer like Julio Iglesias or Barry Manilow singing “You’re Beautiful”.

I keep a copy of “You’re Beautiful” in the low-priority folder of my computer’s MP3 library, and it pops up randomly in my listening sessions maybe once every six months.  This is just often enough to remind me of how this dark story was so widely misunderstood as a mushy love song.  I am amused that it managed to sneak its way into environments such as proms and weddings where it was completely inappropriate.