Note: This was edited in December 2025 to remove a stack of broken embedded YouTube links. If you really super duper want to listen to anything in the list, there’s a Spotify playlist for you to listen along.
Things are dire.
World peace is under threat as temperatures rise above and beyond – both literally and figuratively. The Saudi oil barrens are taking the piss on fuel before their time expires, and the battery moguls move in and charge up. The Australian supermarket duopoly is taking the piss on groceries with significant increases across the board. Rents are flying higher than Qantas, burned to the ground by a Leprechaun. But none of the above matters when you can’t find somewhere to live.
As people continue to get fucked left, right and centre – this year I’m taking the high road back to the full circle… or something. Drama has reached such a critical mass that I’ve decided it’s necessary to get back to the basics of 2009. Right back to where this movement of hating everything began.
I’m rebooting. I’m cherry-picking from the past, and yet somehow, still moving forward. That’s right – it’s time for a guttertrash clickbait listicle developed entirely for your toilet scroll, because it’s the medicine you didn’t know you needed.
For your listening displeasure, I’m proud to bring you this list outlining a range of my least favourite songs of all time. Tracks that are sometimes forbidden from broadcast in my ear shot. Tracks which caused me to sprint to the Nightlife venue music controller and furiously smash the skip button during my hospitality days. Tracks that transport me back to fraught, but simpler times. Tracks which increase my blood pressure in nanoseconds.
I have selected things that you will definitely probably like. I have no regrets about this. In fact, I extend my condolences and sympathies towards you, and implore you to consider making better choices.
Apart from The Bottom 5, I present in no particular order:
(If you would prefer to listen in on Spotify rather than negotiate the fraught seas of blocking YouTube pre-roll advertising, I have prepared a convenient playlist of the selections below – including a number of extra dishonourable mentions.)
James Blunt – You’re Beautiful
I’m in tears, but only because James has properly reassured me that, even as a beacon of hatred, I too am beautiful. James, thank you so much for your utterly bland contribution to The Bottom 20.
That intro had probably as many words as exists in the entire song. It says so little in a literal sense that a third of the three minutes is just toddler calls. The writing is bland, the video is bland, the singer is bland. This is the Coles Radio anthem of our days.
It reminds me of walking through the aisles in better times; picking up goods and thinking for a moment, and then placing them back down on the shelf and walking away. It gives nothing, and yet nothing would still be better.
If this nothing means something to you in your life, I am so sorry, but it is absolute shit. As YouTube’s #98th most viewed music video, it really helps to paint a clear image for me in terms of just how many NPCs truly are out there.
Eskimo Joe – Black Fingernails, Red Wine
If ever there existed a more appropriate anthem for the decades-stagnant playlists of one of Australia’s most serialised and common FM radio brands – this is it. Triple M flogs/flogged the ever living shit out of this song only, I assume, to soak up portions of their ACMA-mandated Australian content quotas. I actually suspect those very same quotas are responsible for some of the worst shit that’s seen wide promotion campaigns far exceeding the quality of the product.
The ongoing low quality of Australian-made output in the entertainment space is a direct result of the brain drain caused by successive federal governments intent on strangling arts funding until the fingernails on the corpse really were blackened. To the business sympathetic out there, our cultural output seemingly isn’t “worth” anything in a literal sense.
That said, I imagine radio and television networks are constantly on the lookout for Australian content to blast, because junk still counts – even if it Steven Bradbury’s its way to the top by being the best of a barren wasteland. Black Fingernails, Red Wine is the peak of this specific type of junk.
Shakira – Whenever, Wherever
For all of her hips and hits, even those assets couldn’t help Shakira lie her way out of multiple accusations of tax fraud from the Spanish government. That said, I’m sure her tears are being sufficiently mopped up by all the cash stashed under her various pillows.
The selection for this slot was actually a close tie between Hips Don’t Lie (featuring Wyclef Jean, who is not at all good) but ultimately this trill-filled hit won out.
This number was a hit with teenage boys on mute at night, which, frankly, is probably the correct method of consumption. Look, I know she can’t do anything about this, but I think the core of my disdain lies somewhere in the 459 occurrences of excessively rolled-R’s over the three minutes and 17 seconds, which hits a real crescendo somewhere towards the end. Shakira, kindly shut up.
Drapht – Jimmy Recard
Did you ever just wake up with a dry mouth and a thumping headache on a Saturday to the whirring chorus of a neighbour’s air blower? Well get excited, because you too can relive this nostalgia on-demand, simply by firing up Australian rapper Drapht on your favourite streaming service or platform.
This is just another empty, three-minute Aussie content quota stuffer on Triple J, rammed down the throat once an hour by presenters who say “like” a lot and tremble when Richard Kingsmill enters the studio.
Every song by Drapht just mimics the tone of a maxed out air blower for its entire duration. No stars.
Coldplay – Viva La Vida
As another Brit simply and completely bereft of talent, Chris Martin headlines a bunch of absolutely forgettable, basic bitch pop songs served stone cold. This song is a bit like a really boring roller coaster forging along at 30km/hr. It just kind of meanders slightly up and down for about four and half years.
In one of life’s many perfect pairings, it makes sense that a person this medium would marry and divorce someone just as nothing behind a microphone. Like so many other bland hacks, when Gwyneth Paltrow realised her vocals weren’t going to get her anywhere, she simply made like an Egyptian and gooped into the MLM pyramid of pseudoscience for gains ill-gotten (for defamation lawyers: in my opinion). I digress.
This Coldplay song is so bland I couldn’t even focus on it for three paragraphs.
Nickelback – Rockstar
Nickelback is a band which truly spoils me for choice, and criticism of them is certainly a dance done to death on the internet. That said, I don’t even know where to begin if I’m being perfectly honest. This was actually another tie situation with How You Remind Me, but I think it was the MiniDV proto-digital music video peppered with 2000s-era celebrities and nobodies that really cherry-topped the song as a package for me.
Nickelback is an atrocious blend of religion, country music and low quality pop which has inexplicably sold millions, I assume, to deadshit Americans desperate for a competent public education system. Chad Kroeger is cursed – firstly, by his parents who decided to call him “Chad” – and secondly, he’s a Chris Cornell as shipped by AliExpress (shit).
There is nothing redeeming about the band or any of their “music”.
Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah
I like Jeff Buckley. But even winners shit, and this winner shat.
I am not a man of faith (clearly), and while I respect that other individuals make decisions in this space which are appropriate to them, what I can’t stand is being smacked over the head with the mighty chair of religion while I’m soaking in my bath of heathenism.
The only saving grace – if you will – is that this horrendously self-indulgent ballad is the final track on side one of the record. I would prefer to get up 6 minutes sooner than listen to this shit, and I praise the Lord Zombie Jebus for this small convenience.
It otherwise drags on for so long that by the end, I feel like I can see the light closing in to whisk me off to another dimension. By the sixth minute, I welcome the sweet embrace of death.
Enrique Iglesias – Hero
Like an ice pick perfectly pierced into an ear drum, Enrique’s vocals are visceral by virtue of the microphone having been inserted and contained entirely within his mouth during the recording sessions for this song.
This is kind of like the Shakira track I guess, but for teenage girls instead. It paints a painful love story between Enrique and, in the video, Jennifer Love-Hewitt (for some reason), with some bullshit about being chased by Mickey Rourke (a killer, for some reason). Sex, desire, and crime – whatever, I don’t give a shit.
A few years ago I popped in to the Lifeline Bookfest and they had a 100m long table of double and triple stacked copies of “50 Shades of Grey”. Hero got the job done like this too, and then it was tossed out like worn undies.
It’s a horrendous love song. Be a Hero and skip it.
Shania Twain – Man! I Feel Like A Woman!
If you’ve ever thought one exclamation mark simply wasn’t enough for emphasis in a title, you might just have a friend in Shania.
This one reminds me of a specific era of Mortimer-family existence. One where it was a nuclear two parent-two child kind of deal, containing at least one ignorant offspring who didn’t think it would ever end. During this era, compact discs were a real hit at home, and let me tell you, Mum ran this one hot in the Mortimer household.
Man! I Feel Like A Woman! came at a time where women were emerging from decades of structural sexism, and I understand how that timing impacted its success. That, however, doesn’t help to liberate me from the permanent damage (hearing and brain) inflicted by Mum’s CD spinning at Warp 10.
Red Hot Chilli Peppers – Snow (Hey Oh)
Stairway to Heaven. Thriller. Enter Sandman. This post. These mega tracks all have one thing in common – they are not the best thing ever produced by the act, but like bees to a queen or bears to a hive (all I know is shit metaphors), they were the one all the bores gravitated towards the most. Snow has nearly a billion listens on Spotify.
Luxury cars have a hierarchy, right? A Lexus is a poor man’s BMW. A BMW is a poor man’s Mercedes. A Merc is a poor man’s Aston Martin. An Aston Martin is a poor man’s Bentley. And so on and so forth. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers are the Toyota of pop rock (a poor man’s Lexus, of course) and Snow rusted it out while the Stadium Arcadium fell around it (hey oh).
Snow (Hey Oh) is like the seventh season of The X-Files when David Duchovny was bored shitless and wanted out of the series that made him. Hey, oh the production is boring, oh. Hey, oh they sound bored oh. Hey, oh I’m bored to death too oh.
Celine Dion – My Heart Will Go On
What is it about the Titanic wreck and eccentric rich kids? The unsinkable sank with a bunch of inflation-adjusted millionares in 1912, then the OceanGate submersible followed with a bunch of billionares in 2023. Today, we as a society have to live with having not seized the opportunity to send the masters for this song back to whence they came at that time.
Life is full of second chances, and it’s fitting that one might still be provided by eccentric billionare Clive Palmer and his Titanic II project. Because (wait for it) even a ship of that size couldn’t possibly keep a cunt of that magnitude afloat.
Thank you so much.
Big & Rich – Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)
I’ve written about the insular fishbowl of Samford, Queensland many times, and here I am yet again. For the uninitiated, I grew up there and then I worked there for maybe a thousand years. You might say that I’m familiar with its many small town matters and intricacies. Though I see less of them now – having sensationally quit their horrific community page on Facebook because I couldn’t take the shit posting anymore (literally: “What animal is responsible for this shit left on my $2500 outdoor dining table?”). I still get the goss from the local barber and friends.
For all it’s greenery and cute livestock, what was once farming country is now an elite, upper class and snobby shithole of a suburb which aspires to be like Ascot, while being tighter than your pair of jeans from high school and leveraged heavier than the accompanying wedgie.
A constant tension permeates between the bush-seeking city slickers, and the town’s original core of low-budget country folks with IQs lower still, who like their tunes how they like their lives – basic. The former might ride a horse around town, and the latter might post about it’s Main Street shits on Facebook.
When I hear Save a Horse, I spare a thought for that town.
Adele – Rolling In The Deep
In the early 1980s, Larry Tesler casually changed the world forever while he was working at Xerox’s research and development division. He was looking at how to improve text editing on really primitive old computers, and was the guy who created the concept of Command-Z, Command-X, Command-C and Command-V – aka undo, cut, copy and paste.
Fast forward to 2011, and you have Adele’s Rolling in the Deep. Adele hits Command-C and Command-V and slaps out broadly the same ballad over and over again. Some (me) say she’s still doing it to this day. They all follow the same general progression of ups and downs over roughly four radio-friendly minutes. I can’t deny – the lady can sing – but if you’ve heard one you’ve heard ’em all. Next.
Evanescence – Bring Me To Life
The early-2000s was weird, man. And coming directly from an era where weird mash ups were constantly in the charts, Evanescence brings us a jank nu metal one-hitter with faux-Fred Durst and faux-Fergie. It’s equal parts jank and weird.
Linkin Park and Jay-Z were weird. Limp Bizkit were weird. Evanescence were weird. And like DVDs, I think each of them and their respective output(s) have aged terribly. In the case of the Linkin Park and Jay-Z, the latter operates a bit like Dr Dre – he has always known a good opportunity when he sees it, but mostly just in a commercial pop sense. Congrats on the cash in.
It was a strange, forgettable era and I’m glad we’ve woken up inside (hell).
Plain White T’s – Hey There Delilah
I have a sincere disdain for drony ballads, and by golly does this ballad drone.
Who is the target audience for this kind of shit? Is it sad teenagers crying in bedrooms? People wallowing in their own crapulance? Folks who had a bad day or a bad interaction with a loved one, and who then need to follow it up by doubling down in the strings of an acoustic guitar? Truly, I don’t understand.
I think the saddest element of this song’s success (again, almost one billion listens on Spotify) is that every other track on the album barely cracks a few hundred thousand listens a piece. Anyway, here’s Wonderwall.
Ed Sheeran – Shape of You
Ed Sheeran is a bit like Game of Thrones – everyone was rock hard for the series, and then Ed appeared in it for some reason. What a strangely prophetic crossover too, because the quality of the storytelling that went on in the final seasons was abhorrent. In short, I don’t think Ed Sheeran is really all that and a bag of chips, and Shape of You is basically the Game of Thrones finale.
The failure of the final seasons of Game of Thrones was so catastrophic that billions of viewers forgot it existed almost overnight as a sort of group coping mechanism. I genuinely can’t think of anything as huge that also failed at such a scale. Maybe Star Wars?
At anyrate, I don’t want to say Ed was the reason for sinking that series, but he did indeed appear on it at the same time. Shape of You begins exactly how Game of Thrones ended; with Caribbean drums (as I am now choosing to remember it) and repugnant writing.
Pink – U + Ur Hand
Pink wasn’t joking when she said she isn’t here for my entertainment. I think it’s fitting that Pink should join this list in some capacity, given she was the target of my first shit post to Sam Hates Everything in 2009 (it’s really not good, which is why I haven’t linked it, but I stand by the general gist of not liking her output).
I get it – dudes are bad and awful and have been since the dawn of time. I don’t need to hear it again and again, because I understand the words that are coming out of the aforementioned blow hole. If you take a look at a bunch of Pink’s output that’s the obvious theme – dudes are shit and should be used. Here’s an alternative take: maybe we should all do better than encouraging toxicity. Cya.
Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, The Bottom 5:
Michael Jackson – Come Together
#5
You should have stuck to your day job of mixing strong sedatives Michael, because this is the worst cover of all time.
Fun fact: Michael Jackson bought the rights to The Beatles library in the 1980s after Paul McCartney had suggested investing in lucrative music properties. I imagine Paul did not expect the King to buy the rights to his music. Anywho, that pot of money floating around resulted in this monstrosity.
Was this horrible cover borne out of the substance abuse resulting from the pain he experienced during the Pepsi ad accident? Maybe – because the time periods do add up. Michael burned his skull and acquired the substance issue in ’84, and the rights were purchased in ’85.
This track is a god awful “new jack swing” conversion of a solid Beatles track and it shouldn’t exist.
Katy Perry – Firework
#4
This is a real one right here. This is the one I put on when I’m having a day where I feel worthless as a human being because Katy, with a good dose of autotune, really makes me feel like I’m a cracker waiting to go off. In some respects, she’s right.
This is an anthem for the most basic of the basic. People with no redeeming qualities, skills, talents or interests. They feel shit because they have none of the above, and by listening to Katy’s song, for a minute they feel like they have something to offer. Then the song ends.
And they still don’t.
MIKA – Grace Kelly
#3
You know who else barely cracked three minutes? The Beatles. You know who made some pretty weird-but-good shit? The Beatles. Do you know who’s still around? The Beatles (kinda). Where’s Mika now, you know?
He’s no where – exactly where he deserves to be, and the reason is enclosed in the above package. You might be a shocked Pikachu to hear this, but I admit – from time to time I am not a purveyor of happiness or enjoyer of things. It’s true.
This track does not bring me joy, and in fact, by the time he gets to “Ka-ching” in the closing seconds, you best believe I am not in a joyous state.
Wheatus – Teenage Dirtbag
#2
The mission: to create a piece of music accurately resembling a greasy, shit-talking teenager with dog shit priorities and first-world problems held to a value far exceeding their actual impact(s). This is just the pits. A dirty teenage armpit.
To really drill down to the core of my disdain – it’s everything. It’s the story. It’s the flashbacks to awkward teenage times. It’s the entire delivery of the vocal and production of the track.
I hate the style of the singing, I hate the contents of the lyrics, and I hate the lead singer of the band. Kill me now.
John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John – The Grease Megamix
#1
I got chills; the bar was 5 deep and multiplying. Rovics Karaoke were losing control, ’cause the power they’re supplying – to the amplifier – was horrifying. I had to shape up. Really, I needed a ban (on the song), but Rovics’ heart was set on you (the Megamix). I understood, and to my ears, the hearing loss was true.
With a four-channel amp on the floor, Rovics were waiting at the Samford Hotel. And they ain’t braggin’, the Megamix is a real drag (on my will to live).
Rovics Karaoke, had me a blast; bartender lovin’, happened so fast. My days were drifting away; to (uh oh) those decibels. Well-a well-a well-a – I’ll tell you more. Was it love at minus-one-hundred-and-eighty decibels? (No; I’ll tell you more, tell you more) My ear drums never put up a fight.
My ear drums; ripped at the seams, but oh, that Rovics Karaoke (I’ll tell you more-, tell you more-).
Some of you had to know. You had to know this was the one. For the uninitiated, every other Saturday at Samford Pub to this day, Rovics Karaoke (now known as something else) made sure to queue the Grease Megamix at about double the volume of everything else. You could set your watch and haircut to it. And if I got really lucky, sometimes I even got it twice in a night. What a Scientological blessing!
Rovics inflicted legitimate hearing damage on me and my co-workers with their enthusiasm for this song, and it’s one of the most endearing memories I have of my time as a bartender. Samfordites don’t need much in terms of a catalyst to complain, but I imagine the flood of noise complaints mostly reflected the volume of this atrocious number. If I could get away with never hearing it again, the seams of my summer dreams would be stitched up once more.
Oh, those summer nights.
.
Panic! At The Disco: I Write Sins Not Tragedies
Bonus encore shitter
I hassled my sister relentlessly during her emo phase, and just like the justified hazing of my sibling, I am quite comfortable in standing by my dislike of Panic! all these years later. This track brings a specific twitch to my left eye.
Emo was an even worse time than the weird genre-fusing shit that came before it, because it also brought along it’s own way of living – the hair; the outfits; the disdain for life.
Leave the latter on my doorstep, but put the rest in the bin.