The “Bad” #1 Hits – A Wrap-Up and Farewell (for now)

Our museum of the supposed worst #1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 is complete with 75 entries.  Now it’s time to take a look at a few extra achievements in this field.

Worst Opening Line of a #1 Hit:  Quincy Jones was a genius as a producer, yet he couldn’t talk Michael Jackson out of starting “Bad” with “Your butt is mine.”  The lyric was so awful that it reportedly caused Prince to forgo a proposed collaboration with Michael.  Given the quality of most 1980s superstars duets, this may have been for the best.

Worst Geography Mishap in a #1 Hit:  The English band Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died” tells us of a gun battle that took place on the east side of Chicago – i.e., in Lake Michigan.  They should have asked someone from this side of the Atlantic to review their lyrics.  Even a city boy who was born and raised in South Detroit would have caught this error.

Most Defamatory Verse in a #1 Hit:  In last year’s chart-topper “Carnival”, Kanye West hinted that he had something in common with R. Kelly, Bill Cosby, and P. Diddy.  This was outrageously unfair to those three men, who have done nothing so awful as to merit being likened to Kanye.

Worst Overall Lyric in a #1 Hit:  There are so many candidates for this award that “Marconi plays the mamba” probably doesn’t even make the top fifty.  Ultimately, I must defer to noted bad song expert Dave Barry’s opinion on this matter.  The late Mac Davis wins the trophy for these two lines in “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me”:

Girl, you’re a hot-blooded woman child
And it’s warm where you’re touchin’ me

Most Pathetic Ballad of Lost Love to Hit #1:  Long before James Blunt and Lewis Capaldi, there was Billy Vera.  In “At This Moment”, Vera practically weeps while begging his woman not to leave him.  ”If you stay I’d subtract 20 years from my life.”  I think she’d be happier if he would just subtract two minutes from the song.

Best Save of an Otherwise Bad #1 Hit by a Featured Guest:  Charli XCX, for “Fancy”.  Does anyone doubt that this track would have been intolerable if Iggy Azalea had handled the whole thing by herself?

Worst Political Statement in a #1 Hit:  Nelly’s “Grillz”, which peaked atop the Hot 100 in 2006, contained a guest rap by Ali & Big Gipp that name-checked the junior senator from New York:  “Got a bill in my mouth like Hillary Rodham.”  This makes Jason Aldean’s social commentary seem almost Dylanesque by comparison.

Worst Song to Hit #1 Twice:  Songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King have the winning composition, and it isn’t a close contest.  “Go Away Little Girl”’s baffling return to #1 in 1971 left everyone asking serious questions about where we went wrong as a species.  The planet was under better stewardship when it was covered by twenty-foot-tall fungus.

Lifetime Achievement Award in the Field of Bad #1s:  New Kids on the Block existed in an era in which lousy #1s were sprouting up like hairs on a hog, yet their three chart-toppers still managed to lower the bar.  As if that wasn’t enough, they helped Tommy Page make it to #1 too.  They deserve a special place of honor in our Hall of Infamy.

Worst-Rated #1s by Decade

These are the #1 hits that Rate Your Music users hate the most.  The overall lowest-rated #1 song of each decade is denoted by an asterisk (*):

Worst #1s by Male Solo Acts

1950s (mid-1958 through 1959) – “Why” by Frankie Avalon
1960s – “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by SSgt. Barry Sadler (*)
1970s – “Go Away Little Girl” by Donny Osmond
1980s – “Rock On” by Michael Damian
1990s – “I’ll Be Your Everything” by Tommy Page (*)
2000s – “This Is the Night” by Clay Aiken (*)
2010s – “Someone You Loved” by Lewis Capaldi
2020s (through 2024) – “Try That in a Small Town” by Jason Aldean (*)

Worst #1s by Female Solo Acts

1950s (mid-1958 through 1959) – women were not allowed to have #1 hits without a chaperone
1960s – “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You” by Connie Francis
1970s – “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone
1980s – “Wind Beneath My Wings” by Bette Midler
1990s – “Coming Out of the Dark” by Gloria Estefan
2000s – “A Moment Like This” by Kelly Clarkson
2010s – “All About That Bass” by Meghan Trainor
2020s (through 2024) – “Super Freaky Girl” by Nicki Minaj

Worst #1s by Duos, Groups, and Other Unfortunate Collaborations

1950s (mid-1958 through 1959) – “The Chipmunk Song” by the Chipmunks with David Seville (*)
1960s – “Hey Paula” by Paul & Paula
1970s – “(You’re) Having My Baby” by Paul Anka with Odia Coates (*)
1980s – “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever)” by New Kids on the Block (*)
1990s – “I’m Your Angel” by R. Kelly & Celine Dion
2000s – “Laffy Taffy” by D4L
2010s – “Girls Like You” by Maroon 5 featuring Cardi B (*)
2020s (through 2024) – “Savage Love (Laxed – Siren Beat)” by Jawsh 685 x Jason Derulo x BTS

Best-Rated #1s by Decade

Just in case you’re tired of the negativity, I’ll leave you on a more uplifting note.  Here are the #1 singles with the highest Rate Your Music scores:

1950s (mid-1958 through 1959) – “Sleep Walk” by Santo & Johnny
1960s – “Penny Lane” by the Beatles
1970s – “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac
1980s – “When Doves Cry” by Prince
1990s – “Doo Wop (That Thing)” by Lauryn Hill
2000s – Tie:  “Hey Ya!” by OutKast ; “Ms. Jackson” by OutKast
2010s – “Somebody That You Used to Know” by Gotye featuring Kimbra
2020s (through 2024) – “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar

“Try That in a Small Town” by Jason Aldean (2023)

One person’s view:  “[H]ere you have these violent and evocative lyrics, and the composers couldn’t even bother to give them a musically exciting vehicle?  …  Jason could’ve just as easily been singing a love song with the exact same instrumentation.” – Torches @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  0.79 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of all-time

Some passage of time is usually needed before we can judge the merit of an endeavor.  On rare occasions, however, we don’t need this historical perspective to know how things are going to shake out in the long run.  For example, it was painfully obvious by 2005 that President George W. Bush’s visage was never going to replace Lincoln’s on the $5 bill.  After only three or four episodes had aired, it was already clear that The Simpsons was destined to outlast its bitter rival The Pat Sajak Show by many decades.  Likewise, it’s safe to assume that Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” will still generally be considered a bad #1 hit in 2050 just as it is in 2025.  While I would prefer not to include any songs released after 2020 on this blog, Aldean has earned an exception to this rule.

Many people have slammed this hit for being nothing more than a right-wing grievance ballad.  I don’t think this is an entirely fair criticism, because conservatives need protest songs too.  They deserve better efforts than this, however.  Even with four experienced Nashville songwriters helping him out, Jason Aldean ain’t exactly a match for Woody Guthrie.  Guthrie proudly adorned his guitar with the slogan “This machine kills fascists.”  If Aldean’s guitar ever kills anyone, it will be by stereotyping them to death.

Aldean’s earlier songs had established him as a defender of rural America.  “Amarillo Sky” was one of his first singles, and he put some passion into that performance.  He sounded like he wanted to punch Jesus in the face for cursing the farmers of the Texas panhandle with drought and damaging hail.  On an artistic and emotional level, “Try That in a Small Town” doesn’t give him as much to work with.  The clanging, dissonant guitar chord is a great beginning, but the rest of the track is a three-minute exercise in cashing a paycheck.  I can’t think of many other #1 hits that work better as a slogan or a meme than they do as a piece of music.  Indeed, you’re more likely to see someone wearing a “Try That in a Small Town” T-shirt than you are to hear the tune playing anywhere.  “Don’t Worry Be Happy” at least had a melody – this song barely does.

In his 2012 country hit “Fly Over States”, Aldean derided two coastal city slickers who refuse to visit the wheat fields and funny-named villages of Indiana and Oklahoma.  Those two guys don’t know what they’re missing.  They will never see the two-headed calf at the Osgood farm, the 12-foot-tall egg beater outside of Debbie’s Daybreak Diner, or the plaque commemorating the birthplace of Orville Redenbacher.  But the “small town” described in Aldean’s later chart-topper is not a welcoming tourist attraction.  It is more like the setting of Deliverance.  This town is where your girlfriend’s best friend’s uncle mysteriously vanished after stopping for a drink at the local bar and asking if one of the TVs could be changed to a women’s soccer game.  The town sounds a siren at 6:15 every evening to warn anyone with red hair or a hard-to-pronounce name that it’s time to hit the road.  The speed limit here is 25 m.p.h.  Are you thinking of driving 26?  I recommend you don’t.  While “Try That in a Small Town” strikes a forceful blow against the flag-burnings and cop-spittings that are a daily hazard in large metropolitan areas, it fails to convince us that less populated locales are any safer.

This song’s effectiveness as a protest evaporates in the second verse when Aldean whines that Uncle Sam may someday try to confiscate the gun that his grandpa gave him.  Of all of the unlikely ways in which the government could trample on his rights, this is perhaps the unlikeliest.  Why not complain about one of the many things that the feds have actually taken from U.S. citizens?  Thanks to owl-coddling bureaucrats, I can no longer obtain the leaded gasoline that I need to keep my Edsel running or the DDT that I need to kill the ladybug that got into my kitchen.  I can’t purchase a box of Sudafed without presenting two forms of ID, a clean criminal background check, and a mucus sample that proves I am congested.  Worst of all, the safety-obsessed alarmists in D.C. have banned the sale of lawn darts, making it impossible to replace these enjoyable outdoor game sets after some of the darts get stuck in the neighbor’s kids.  Menthol cigarettes, high fructose corn syrup, and red dye #3 are the next everyday products that regulators have in their sights, but Aldean is more worried about the one possession that is specifically protected by its own constitutional amendment and hundreds of Federalist Society judges.  Paranoid much, Jason?

I will, however, defend the song from the accusations of racism that have been leveled against it.  Its video was filmed in front of a Tennessee courthouse where, in 1927, a violent mob hanged a young black man who had been misidentified as a rape suspect.  This has been a point of controversy for Aldean, as the lyrics seem to endorse this type of vigilante justice.  Also, the original version of the video included scenes of unruly Black Lives Matter protesters.  These segments were later removed for copyright reasons, and much of the remaining footage is of unrelated demonstrations in Toronto and Montreal.  Although these protest clips have nothing to do with the liquor store robberies and carjackings described in the song, they contain some of the most violent imagery ever to emerge from Canada outside of a hockey broadcast or the mosh pit of a Gino Vannelli concert.

Aldean says that he was unaware of the courthouse’s sordid history, and I believe him.  He selected this spot because it is where he renews his car tags, and he wanted us to feel the same joy that he does during that annual trip to the BMV.  (Maybe he’ll film his next video at his dentist’s office.)  He pointed out that there are no racial references anywhere in his song’s lyrics.  Aldean’s ideal small town is a color-blind utopia where lynching is an equal opportunity sport that can be enjoyed by people of all backgrounds and ethnicities.  And it isn’t like his video director could have found any footage of white Republicans assaulting police at a political protest, right?

This is the last hit that I will feature on this blog.  For those of you just now joining me, feel free to go back to the beginning and catch up on the history of “bad” #1 records.  Without the groundwork laid by Lawrence Welk, Tony Orlando, and Air Supply, we never could have had Lewis Capaldi, 6ix9ine, or Jason Aldean.

My rating:  2 / 10