10 Popular Songs That Are Actually Terrible
You'll sing along with your mates at the pub, but deep down you know it's all a farce.
Music is weird isn't it? You can take a song that is truly terrible and it will still be stuck in your head for the entire day, just because of a catchy little hook or a clever lyric.
Take the Crazy Frog for example. No one is going to herald that album as one of the greatest of all time, yet just the mere sight of the name probably has brought hack all those chilling "bing-bings" from the pits of your mind where you buried it (for which I apologise).
This conditioning though is what the industry thrives off of. Somehow they've managed to identify a correlation between success and irritation. This for me is the only reason I can see how The Ketchup Song by Las Ketchup was number one in 27 countries or how Linkin Park are still together.
This list then is not just a collection of bad songs as that'd be too easy (I'd just fill it with Nikki Minaj's entire discography). What this is instead is a series of songs that managed to trick you into thinking they were/are good.
They're the songs that you sing along to at the work parties or request on karaoke night whilst your subconscious quietly asks you "why are you like this?"
10. Owl City - Firelies
Somehow a staple of everyone's favourite "emo" phase despite having no similarities or connections to emo music or lifestyle, 'Fireflies' was the debut single from one-man electronica project Owl City. The result of discovering a loop pedal, the song draws you in with its bleep-bloop riff and singer Adam Young's baby skin-soft voice almost reaching ASMR levels of calm.
Lyrically though, the song just doesn't know what it wants to do with itself. Seemingly jumping at random from talking about bugs to insomnia and then to summer, it's like asking David Attenbrough to do a documentary after you've replaced the water in coffee with Red Bull. The music video's the same too, whilst other songs of this ilk do tend to have videos that air on the side of peculiar (hi Gorillaz!), 'Fireflies' is scattered with retro toys, figures and electronics that would make most modern hipsters blush.
Still, it occupied the number one spot of the Billboard 100 for two weeks and charted at the top in nine countries, and all came from his parents' basement so there's still hope for you yet. 'Fireflies' helped launch Young's music career which has seen him create music for films such as The Smurfs 2, The Croods and Wreck-It Ralph. Success is weird.