It’s a Hit

It’s only April, but 2009 is shaping up to be the crappiest year for
pop music in living memory. You’d think the old line about a bad
economy being good for music would start applying at some point, but
not while these songs are playing.

by Creature

(Universal Canada)

“Who’s Hot Who’s Not” sounds like it exists solely because of
YouTube. Creature, a Montreal quartet, are gaining attention for the
clip, which sends up Daft Punk’s “Around the World”—sloppily and
not well, but compared to the song, it’s like someone found the missing
footage from The Magnificent Ambersons. The drums are big and
loose in a bad way, the disco-funk guitar is generic, and the vocals
are unspeakable. Not only does the chorus cry out for pitch correction,
but the song is a tribute to old-school hiphop, which with a band like
this invariably equals a ready-made excuse for how utterly pitiful the
“rhyming” is—as if any but the most fly-by-night of early rappers
would have allowed themselves to sound so stupid. “Wanna take you back
to the Brooklyn streets of the 1970s/Where kids played beats by
stomping their feet and became the first MCs/’Cause you know what they
were rapping about, positivity/Despite the fact that they were living
in a greater poverty.” Wrong borough, no they didn’t, fuck off and
die.

by Eminem

(Interscope)

Speaking of no-hope rappers, I didn’t honestly think Eminem had it
in him to debase himself even more than he did five years ago with
“Just Lose It,” a fart of a song whose explicit subject was how nobody
would care or really even notice how lame it was—except that
almost everybody did. But “We Made You” is even sadder, and not just
because on it he modifies his flow to a stern-clown rat-a-tat with
basically no dynamic range and basically no lyrics, either. If you’re
going to mock pop culture in 2009, try to mock some pop culture that’s
relevant in 2009. Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan? Rock of
Love? Jessica freakin’ Simpson? Even people who still care about
these things know they need to move on; I mean, the Marshall Mathers
LP skit depicting Insane Clown Posse sucking Em’s dick felt more
of-the-moment than this. The video just makes it worse. Like the song,
it’s “Without Me” 3.0, only more frantically paced, in order to
distract you from noticing how badly it sags.