Fresh on the heels of my post about R.Kelly and Usher’s “Same Girl”, I was looking at the iTunes Top 100 today and I was so horrified that I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. Right now, the list consists of so many horrible songs that it actually made me start to question the society we live in. Is it possible that idiots have inherited the earth and real music is dead?While the Plain White T’s song “Hey There Delilah” is currently the number one song and there are a few real musicians on the list, some of the others at the top of the chart should make music listeners everywhere totally embarrassed.
The majority of songs in the top ten are by hip-hop artists who rap about hitting on women, partying, getting drunk and doing drugs. Timbaland and Keri Hilson made number four on the list with their song “The Way I Are”. Apparently using the correct verb and pronoun would be too much to ask.
Hurricane Chris also squeezed into the top five with his “A Bay Bay”, a song about yelling pick up lines at hot chicks. The title is the hip-hop way of writing “Hey baby”. Here’s a sample of the lyrics from songlyrics.com (spelling errors are intentional): When I see a bad chik I’m hollerin out ay bay bay/ I hope y’all ain’t wit ya boyfriendz/ cause I don’t care wat dey say” I’m not sure why it’s spelled out phonetically, but this type of thing is so common that it seems like most song titles and lyrics in the past few years were written via text message.
Coming in at number ten on the list is T-Pain featuring Yung Joc with “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’)”. This song is about a guy offering to buy a girl, or “shawty”, a drink, or “drank” if you favor the hip hop pronunciation. I’m not sure why rappers feel the need to play down to their moron demographic by misspelling everything, but apparently that’s how you make money in the music business these days.
Still, the biggest musical abortion on the list has got to be “Lip Gloss” by Lil’ Mama. This has got to be one of the stupidest songs ever written. The Mentos jingle has more creative integrity than this track. I would hesitate to even call it a song. Here is the chorus of this… thing: “They say my lip gloss is cool/ My lip gloss be poppin’/ I’m standing at my locker/ And All the boys keep stoppin” Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is an entire song written about how good Lil’ Mama’s lip gloss looks. (Watch the music video here…. if you dare!)
And I thought Fergelicious was bad!
Even the venerable king of ridiculous lyrics, R. Kelly, has more in his songs than just a cheerleader chant about make up. The worst lyric from “Trapped in the Closet” looks like poetry when compared with Lil’ Mama’s verses.
I’m not necessarily knocking hip-hop for it’s content, This genre has always been about women, booze and drugs, but it seems like new hip-hop songs are so insanely stupid and void of any creative or meaningful content that it’s hard to even classify them as music.
The first CD I ever bought was Snoop Dogg’s 1993 album, Doggystyle. I was ten years old and I loved Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and listened to that album and Dre’s every day. Even back then, I knew the songs were about “bitches and hos”, but the degrading content wasn’t as important as the artistry of the tracks. Each song seemed to be influenced by, or sometimes borrow from, 1970s funk artists like George Clinton. While the stories were raw, there still seemed to be more in each track than a commercial verse and a catchy hook.
Rap’s resident bad-boy Eminem was criticized by moral watchdog groups for his lyrics, but I defy anyone to listen to his tracks without recognizing his incredible talent. Each of his songs told a story, sometimes sad, sometimes comedic, and he crafted every word together with skill and precision. It didn’t matter how many cuss words were in every album, the music he made was exceptional. His most commercial and over-played tracks were still better than almost anything out there in hip-hop today.
The only tiny beacon of hope I found when browsing the iTunes top 100 was in the reviews for “Lip Gloss†by Lil’ Mama. I was intrigued that a song at number nine on the charts has only a two and a half star rating by users. When I clicked to read the user reviews of the track, I saw hundreds, of people blasting the song as garbage. One wrote, “The lyrics are completely infantile–it’s like a school girl pretending she’s tough” and “Listening to this almost made my ears bleed”. Another person disputed labeling the song hip-hop in the first place writing, “It is ridiculous to put this song in the same genre as artists like Tupac, KRS-one, Nas, and Rakim!!!!!” Yet another person joked, “Do we still offer public education in the U.S.?” Thankfully, most people seem to realize that this is not a song at all but an audio assault of vapid, childish rhyming and slang.
The iTunes Top 100 list seems to be like a battle between good and evil. While terrible Top 40 artists and hip-hop one hit wonders pollute the charts, there are the occasional true artists in there to fight the good fight. Good music seems to be outnumbered by crap in this chart war, but there’s hope. Perhaps in the future, there will be a backlash to all the rampant, content-less, ring-tone-selling junk and people will realize that music is supposed to be more than chanting a slang term to a drum machine for four minutes.
