10. JESSIE WARE: Wildest Moments
Every music critic and his mother appeared to go inexplicably ape-shit for Jessie Ware in 2012; heralded as 'the saviour of R 'n' B' by NME, Pitchfork, Drowned in Sound and Arselicker's Monthly, the London-born soulstress was promptly propped up on a pedestal so high you'd need a thirty foot crane to knock her off. This particular nugget of super-saccharine cowshit was typically singled out as proof that she's the next Whitney Houston (or something) when in fact, she isn't even the next Des'ree. Chocked to the brim with useless cliches and irritating in the extreme, 'Wildest Moments' deserves nothing other than your unwavering contempt. No offense.
9. SPECTOR: Friday Night, Don't Ever Let It End
Okay, so this isn't actually a terrible song in itself. Taken on its own, set apart from everything else about the band and excluding all social and cultural context, 'Friday Night, Don't Ever Let It End' is a fairly passable, if disappointingly inoffensive, indie tune. It earns its place in the list, however, by being such an unashamed attempt to replicate the success of The Vaccines. Everything about Spector just reeks of record industry desperation: the slightly oddball look, the meaningless lyrics, the half-arsed hooks. This is the sound of a label, and a band, who've eyed up the competition and decided they want a quick and easy slice of the pie. Instead of carving out their own place in the weird and wonderful world of pop music, Spector try too hard to occupy everyone else's, and in so doing, fall hopelessly flat. If they bothered to write some halfway decent songs (actually, you know, PUTTING SOME EFFORT IN), then perhaps we'd all wake up to their charms. As it is, their woeful laziness is sending us to sleep. Wake us up when they disappear off the face of the planet in a year or so, okay?
8. AWOLNATION: Kill Your Heroes
While Spector yearn to be The Vaccines, the members of the appallingly-named AWOLNATION pray to their respective Gods each and every night that they'll wake up in the morning and be 30 Seconds to Mars. Thankfully, God or time or whatever's controlling this messy ol' world we know and love has better sense than to elevate these guys (although whether Jared and co deserved global success in the first place is a debatable point for another time). No, AWOLNATION will forever meander along at their own turgid, bloated pace, recording unlistenable tripe that doesn't quite know what it wants to be and consequently ends up sounding like nothing at all. 'Kill Your Heroes' is a perfect illustration of the validity of that age old adage 'too many cooks spoil the broth'. Everything is thrown into the pot and barely stirred, resulting, frankly, in a colossally unpleasant mess. Another one to consign to the bargain bin in, oh, six months.
7. BLACK VEIL BRIDES: The End
Oh, how we all wish it were, pfnar, pfnar. All joking aside though, isn't it about time that Black Veil Brides stopped punishing us all for whatever terrible offense we've clearly committed to be deserving of having this garbage rammed down our throats and just retired to those mansions they've (probably) bought in Pacific Palisades? We just can't take much more.
6. NO DOUBT: Settle Down
Eleven years, guys. ELEVEN GOD DAMN YEARS. That's over four thousand days, 96,000 hours... and this is the best you could come up with? Really? Look, no one's denying the fact that bands change, their sound evolves, and that you can't really expect them to churn out the same sort of urgently anthemic ska-punk tunes that they did when they were wee 'uns. What we can (and do) expect is that this 'progression' is not equal parts inane and vomit-inducing. 'Settle Down', sadly, is exactly that; a track so achingly monotonous, it wasn't even a D-side to Rock Steady. Unsurprising, then, that the follow-up single only managed to shift 680 copies in its first week. Exit No Doubt, stage left, with tumbleweed.
5. LMFAO: Sorry For Party Rockin'
They're not though, are they? LMFAO really do not want to apologise for their penchant for 'partying' and 'rocking'. In reality, they're rubbing it in our faces... and not in a good, Andrew W.K.-type way. No, these walking toilet bowls of diarrhetic human excrement take great pride in making music so unremittingly awful that even your 3 year old nephew would rather chew his own face off than listen to it. They want you to squirm at those auto-tuned vocals; they want your skin to crawl when those meaningless grunts, gargles and various other bizarre noises kick in; and they want your head to explode whenever the lazy beat begins. LMFAO take pride in their shittiness, so the best thing we can do is ignore them and, like an irritating six-year-old repeating everything you say, hope they tire and just go away. Probably best not to write too many missives on how terrible they are then... whoops.
4. NICKI MINAJ: Stupid Hoe
While Nicki straddles the line between bubblegum pop and super serious artiste (she was on the bill for T in the Park after all, but there again, so were The Proclaimers), this particular crapfest was just so unbearable that we simply couldn't ignore it. A song with virtually no redeeming features whatsoever, 'Stupid Hoe' careers along on a trajectory of ever-increasing awfulness, using THE WORLD'S WORST BACKBEAT to catastrophic effect while Nicki whines on about someone or other being a 'stupid hoe'. You spend the first minute of the song hoping, praying for a change of direction, for the music to do something else, the next 30 seconds awash in a sea of despair as you realise IT ISN'T GOING TO CHANGE and then next 2 minutes vomiting up your insides while desperately clamouring for the 'off' switch. But hey, at least it gave us Tranny Minaj...
3. KID ROCK: Cucci Galore
Oh come on, Kid. You can do better than this, surely? Where previous efforts have made their mark on the Worst Singles of the Year list by virtue of their mind-boggling awfulness, 'Cucci Galore' is here because, well, it's just so damn half-arsed. And that's not something we ever imagined we'd write about the former American Bad Ass. Even during his 'All Summer Long' phase, at least Kid was making music so painful that you longed for a full-frontal lobotomy right after listening to it. Whether he was murdering Lynyrd Skynyrd with a chainsaw or rhyming 'punk rock' with 'hip hop' with 'Fort Knox' with 'Kid Rock', at least there was a desire there to be the absolute worst. With 'Cucci Galore', it feels like Kid just can't be bothered; the ingredients are there - the lyrics about himself and, er, nothing else, the bland mix of tired rock riffs with outdated hip-hop beats, hell, he's even wearing his cowboy hat and, um, cowboy bling in the video, but there's something desperately, desperately lacking. The rhymes just aren't as laughable, and if anything, this makes the whole thing that much worse. Instead of a hilariously bad Kid Rock, we have a boring Kid Rock... and that's something too horrible to contemplate. It's probably time to hang up your hat, guy. You can't be a Kid Rock forever... oh wait...
2. THE OFFSPRING: Cruisin' California
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Clearly reeling from the relative indifference that met 2008's 'Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace' (notably, their best record in years), The Offspring decided that, instead of being content with the millions they've accumulated over the years from their impressive back catalogue, they would throw their artistic integrity right out of the nearest window and record something so hopelessly, laughably desperate that it would ruin their reputations forever. All in the name of hoping to make a quick buck. 'Cruisin' California' is a textbook lesson in selling your soul and will doubtless be used as a prime example of when not to listen to your record company in years to come. The lyrics falling vacuously out of Dexter Holland's mouth are asinine, hollow, empty, striving for some sort of 'instant party vibe' (perhaps a la later Weezer) but actually sounding like your Dad, nay, your Grandad, trying to talk in text-speak. The rapping (Heaven help us, I actually typed that) is unlistenable, the 'party girl' backing vocals woeful, the music a turgid trawl through all of the cliches that 'Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)' so expertly parodied. If 'Cruisin' California' was an attempt to replicate the successes of that particular gem, it got just about everything wrong. A misfire so bad, The Offspring's career may never recover. Truly, truly shocking.
1. MUSE: Madness
It pains us to write these words, it really, truly does, but 2012, among other things, will forever be remembered as the year in which Muse completely lost the plot. Not content with writing just the one painfully embarrassing cliche-fest for the Olympics (stand up 'Survival', you so very nearly made this list), Matt, Chris and Dom proceeded to pen 12 more gargantuan shitfests and released them all as one diabolical album. September's 'The 2nd Law' was the biggest disappointment since The Stone Roses's 'The Second Coming' (or, for fans of controversy, Radiohead's 'Kid A'), for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which was its oh-so-depressing blandness. Never before had Muse sounded quite so MOR and 'Madness', the first single proper, was the perfect encapsulation of that. Sounding not unlike something you might be subjected to on an early Sunday afternoon on Radio 2, the song saunters along on the back of a terrible Craig David beat, Matt warbling about 'memories' in 'his mind', while Dom and Chris quite literally do nothing for the majority of the song's four minutes. Oh wait, no, Chris gets to make that fingernails-down-chalkboard 'warb warb' noise with some hipster instrument or other. The whole thing is an exercise in mundanity and not even the all-too-temporary mid-song guitar riff can save it. And while 'Cruisin' California' and even 'Cucci Galore' may be worse songs in themselves, 'Madness' tops the list because Muse can do so, so, so much better than this. This is the band who gave us 'Stockholm Syndrome', 'Knights of Cydonia', 'New Born', 'Uprising', 'Sunburn', 'Plug-In Baby', 'Hysteria', 'Time Is Running Out', 'Starlight'... the list is endless. The band who made us believe in British rock again, whose music threatened to rip our faces off with its sheer intensity. In 2012, they could barely make us shrug a shoulder. What happened, guys? What happened?
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