“Someone You Loved” by Lewis Capaldi (2019)

One person’s view:  “A bland, drippy piano ballad that would have been boring if not for Lewis Capaldi bellowing every line like he's at the bottom of a well; unfortunately, that just makes it insufferable instead.” – Cosmiagramma @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  1.32 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 2019

Every so often, the world’s eardrums are rattled by a white male singer-songwriter howling his lungs out while lamenting a lost love.  This type of ballad is just begging to be bullied.  You might as well dress it in a Cub Scout uniform, give it a My Little Pony lunchbox, and put it on a school bus with some guys from the football team.  “Someone You Loved” is probably expecting to get its head knocked in by this blog, but I’m going to let it off with just a wedgie.

“Someone You Loved” is one of the most basic, unsophisticated tunes to reach #1 in recent decades.  The instrumentation is mostly just a piano playing the same simple riff over and over again, varying only slightly during the bridge.  Likewise, the lyrics repeat themselves like a local TV newscast that tries to milk a city council meeting, a house fire, and a slight chance of rain for 90 minutes of air time.  Even a terrific top-of-the-crop singer – someone like Ann Wilson or Adele – would struggle to make this track interesting.  To catch the listener’s ears, it needs a performer who is a decent vocalist but who also sounds kind of weird.  Just as James Blunt’s odd bleating was enough to distinguish “You’re Beautiful”, Lewis Capaldi’s imprecise diction rescues “Someone You Loved” from oblivion.

Some have speculated that Capaldi was drunk when he recorded this song, but I have a different theory:  he was Scottish.  Of course, “Scottish” and “drunk” are listed as synonyms in some thesauri.  (It isn’t the Scots’ fault that their whisky tastes so good.)  Regardless of whether and what he may have imbibed, Lewis’s slurring tugs at our emotions:  “And you’re not here / To get me froo it all.”  I actually enjoyed his histrionics enough to listen to the song four times before hitting my lifetime limit.  In other words, I liked “Someone You Loved” less than “All About That Bass” but approximately four times more than “Shape of You”.

Lewis has said that the song is not directed to an ex-girlfriend, as most people assumed, but to his late grandmother.  This raises some uncomfortable questions about the level of intimacy that is suggested by the lyrics.  Maybe it’s best not to open that bottle of Glenfiddich single malt when Grandma Capaldi comes over.

Let’s abruptly change the subject to something more appetizing:  toilets.  Much like Meghan Trainor, Lewis Capaldi is brimming with anecdotes about everybody’s favorite variety of plumbing fixture and its usage.  My favorite is the time a grocery clerk recognized him and permitted him to relieve himself in a staff restroom that is normally off-limits to the public.  Capaldi realized at this moment that he was now a celebrity, and that the best perk of fame was that he could now pee wherever and whenever he wanted.  If you get a front row seat to one of his concerts, you might want to bring an umbrella.

With that, we are now done with the 2010s.  I bet you never thought we would get froo it all.  I’m running out of steam but I still have a few more “bad” #1s to subject you to before this blog calls it quits.

“Girls Like You” by Maroon 5 featuring Cardi B (2018)

One publication’s view:  “Cardi B’s verse is the only saving grace of this inexplicable chart-topper, which sounds engineered to soundtrack department-store commercials.” – Time

The public’s view:  1.09 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of the 2010s

I’ve relied heavily on Rate Your Music scores when deciding which songs to feature on this blog, and Maroon 5’s “Girls Like You” excels by this metric.  Its rating (1.09 at the time of this writing) is, by far, the lowest I have encountered up to this point.  I didn’t even know that a score this bad was possible to attain.  Ed Sheeran could remake “(You’re) Having My Baby”, with a minute-long armpit-fart solo after the first chorus, and still probably manage a 1.25.  Clearly, there is something about “Girls Like You” that gets under people’s skin.

But it isn’t just this one song that raised the collective dander of the universe.  Adam Levine and his anonymous bandmates had been careening toward this outcome for a decade.  Judging by the reviews that I’ve read, there are many people who adored the group’s early music but became disenchanted and even angry when hearing their later material.  If we’re going to pinpoint the moment when things started to go wrong, it was probably when the act changed its name from Kara’s Flowers to Maroon 5.  It was all downhill after that.

Yet Maroon 5’s commercial success has soared in inverse proportion to its critical reputation.  This is one of several paradoxes about the group and its leader.  For example, Adam Levine looks like he should be an MMA fighter but sings like a castrati.  He judges other singers’ vocal talent on a TV show despite smothering his own nasal falsetto with generous amounts of Auto-Tune whenever he records a track.  There are also stylistic contradictions in Maroon 5’s music.  This band has developed a recipe that awkwardly merges the bland ubiquity of adult contemporary with the edginess of rap and alternative rock.  “Girls Like You” is probably the purest incarnation of their hit song formula.

Adult contemporary’s goal is to appeal to ladies ages 25 to 54.  Radio advertisers love these household-heading females who buy tons of groceries and baby supplies, and who undergo expensive electrolysis treatments any time they grow a stray beard hair.  “Girls Like You” scored points with these women by addressing them directly, using the second-person.  None of them wanted to hear Levine singing about how some other type of girl runs around with guys like him.

Both sonically and lyrically, Maroon 5’s hit is reminiscent of a chart-topper from 11 years earlier:  Akon’s “Don’t Matter”.  This evokes nostalgia for the happy-go-lucky time before the 25-to-54-year-old listener had four lazy kids, two worthless ex-husbands, and a stressful position as a Senior Restroom Break Timer in the HR department of a mid-sized bank.  Akon recognized the similarity to his work, and responded by making his own version of “Girls Like You”.  This was kind of a smart-ass move, albeit entirely justified.

But a successful AC song can’t have any indelicate content that will drive away all of those timid radio advertisers, and Maroon 5 likes to push the boundaries.  They usually toss in a profanity or two, and “Girls Like You” also suggests that Levine and his woman will “roll that Backwood”.  A Backwood is a brand of cigar whose purchasers frequently discard the tobacco filling and replace it with a more potent herb – just as Akon threw out most of Maroon 5’s lyrics and replaced them with better ones.

Cardi B’s rap is the most risqué part of “Girls Like You”, but it did not stop the song from topping Billboard’s adult contemporary airplay chart for a stultifying 36 weeks.  I’m not sure why her jarring remarks about playing with herself weren’t a deal-breaker for AC radio.  Censoring the rap interlude wasn’t a viable option, because it is generally considered to be the best part of the song.  Any listeners who sit through four minutes of Adam Levine’s coma-inducing prattle are going to be pretty darn upset if they don’t get to hear 30 seconds of Cardi near the end.  They might even sue.

Although Maroon 5’s formula was overused by this point, I am impressed that they adhered to it with such professional rigor.  They calibrated all of the parameters perfectly to maximize this song’s chart endurance.  It reminds me of how McDonald’s uses the ideal amount of calcium lactate to extend their food’s stay in the human digestive system.  Much like a McNugget plodding through the large intestine on a weeks-long trek, “Girls Like You” got stuck in the slow-turning gears of American radio for far too long.  Even with Cardi B’s spicy dipping sauce helping to make the experience more bearable, most people were glad when the track finally completed its voyage and came out the other end.

“Look What You Made Me Do” by Taylor Swift (2017)

One critic’s view:  “This sounds like the Black Eyed Peas.  And not one of the middling [songs] either, one of the really bad ones.” – Todd in the Shadows

The public’s view:  1.71 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of 2017

Highly respected, generation-defining musical talents are not immune from making an appearance on the Bad #1 Hits blog, because there’s always the risk that one of their hits will later be deemed unbearable by a public that once adoringly accepted it.  For example, Elton John is a pop music legend, but that doesn’t mean that people want to hear “Island Girl” anymore.  “Go Away Little Girl” is probably the reason that Donny Osmond has never been nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.  And Taylor Swift will be remembered a millennium from now for “Blank Space”, “You Belong to Me”, and the 522-minute long Taylor’s version of Taylor’s version of “All Too Well” that she plans to release in 2036, while “Look What You Made Me Do” will be but a sad footnote in the history books.

In my last post, I said that I didn’t enjoy writing about someone as over-exposed as Ed Sheeran.  So, you can imagine how I feel about this entry.  While I have welcomed maybe a dozen of Taylor Swift’s songs into my MP3 library – which is an incredibly high honor for her – I pay little attention to her love life, her political pronouncements, or the stunned facial expressions that she exhibits upon winning a trophy for Best Female Video That Cost More Than The International Space Station.  I am really not a very good Swiftie.  Therefore, my opinion of this chart-topping single comes from a certain level of detachment that may not perceive all of the nuances involved.

With its atonal chorus, “Look What You Made Me Do” is devoid of the pleasant melodic qualities that usually characterize a Swift tune.  It didn’t cruise to #1 on the basis of musical superiority over its competition.  Its primary appeal is that it poses a mystery for the listener.  The lyrics are clearly about a conflict between Taylor and some unspecified person, but we are left to wonder who she is singing about.

A few onlookers have suggested that “Look What You Made Me Do” is about Kanye West, because Taylor and Kanye got into some kind of argument back around 2009.  No one really knows the details of their dispute, but I think it had something to do with footwear.  Apparently, Swift loathes people who promote overpriced sneakers.  It’s the same reason why she and Donald Trump don’t get along, and why Michael Jordan was never invited on stage during the Eras Tour.  But do you really believe that she would hold this grudge for eight years?  Or that listeners would care enough about it after all that time to send a single to #1 on that basis?  Pop culture is pretty stupid, but is it that stupid?

Of course it is, but there’s a detail that undermines the Kanye hypothesis:  the unknown person in the song once asked Taylor for a place to sleep.  Kanye isn’t exactly homeless, so I don’t think this could have been him.  This sounds more like one of the minor celebrities whom Swift has dated.  It’s a relatable complaint that she is expressing, because every successful woman has had a similar uncomfortable moment with an impoverished boyfriend at some point.  It’s always awkward when Tom Hiddlehopper, or whoever, asks to borrow one of your spare penthouses or beach mansions because he can’t afford a room at the Days Inn.  However, it would be quite uncultured and gross to write a song that publicly airs petty quibbles about an ex, and I find it hard to believe that Taylor would operate in that fashion.

Regardless of who the target of this track is, I take issue with the idea that anyone has made Taylor Swift do anything.  She is among the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world.  If she commits some vengeful act that is detrimental to all parties involved, it is because she wants to do it – not because some lesser personage is forcing her.  I would respect this song more if it was called “Look What I Felt Like Doing and So I Did”.

People still ask Carly Simon and Alanis Morissette who they were singing about in their mystery records, decades after the fact.  I doubt anyone asks Taylor Swift about “Look What You Made Me Do”.  The song just isn’t memorable enough for anyone to care who it was trying to embarrass.