Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of the 2010s So Far

The Black Eyed Peas may be a group that routinely embraces style over substance, but taking the chorus of a song from “Dirty Dancing” and adding a shrill unrelated beat sequence to it was a new low. Not satisfied in sampling a classic eighties tune though, BEP’s lyrics in this top 5 single also include some misquoted lines from other songs like Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” and even somewhat impressively reference “Snow White”! However, with critics questioning the shoehorned-in “Time of My Life” sample, and one in particular calling it “a low quality attempt to satisfy listeners”, the reality is that the group’s latest party track is just not very good.

Nelly did appear in a Honey Nut Cheerios commercial, so we can’t be too surprised at his willingness to endorse certain products. But his crafting of an ode to a car brand was truly an awe-inspiring move. That’s not even talking about the song itself, which was clearly created to be as radio-friendly as possible. The result is a track as lightweight as any song not aimed at children could be. The songwriters may have thought it was witty to write lyrics that could apply to both a car and a woman, and “Hey Porsche”’s top 50 placing might support this, but we must boo their ultimately forgettable efforts here.

That this song only really became a hit based on the meme videos it spawned, rather than through its own musical quality – or lack thereof - may not surprise many, but bass, hip hop and trap track is remarkable none-the-less. Cited by a New York Times writer as perhaps being “the moment when hip-hop, as a construct, begins to lose meaning”, Harlem Shake’s beat may be satisfying at first, but the song essentially has one trick that it repeats over and over. Despite the amusing nature of the videos that spread far and wide almost a year after its initial release, if we never heard the “Harlem Shake” again, we’d gotta admit we’d be happy for it.

Wait, wait, wait, we know it may seem like an impossible pill to swallow that Pitbull released a song that isn’t very good, but bear with us on this one. Ripping off or paying tribute to the Miami Sound Machine - depending on your point of view - Pitbull and Chris Brown tamely sing, or rap, over a beat deserving so much more. In fact, the track’s best parts, far and wide, are the few seconds where the vocals drop out and we are treated to the beat alone – and that truly says everything you need to know about “Fun”.

Florida Georgia Line is one of those bands, like Nickelback, that is hated by many but somehow it still sells tons of records time and time again, and the bro-country track “Cruise” continued that trend. First found on their It’z Just What We Do EP in 2012, the single was given the Nelly remix treatment the next year, with the collaboration somehow giving the rapper two hit songs in the last decade about vehicles, as it reached Billboard Hot 100 top 5 in 2013. With this version, the trio created a song that is one hundred percent boyband material. Seriously though, when you hear a song with the lyric, “Baby you a song,” just turn it off and walk away, nothing good can come of it.

Set your mind back to the dark days when the spawn of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith seemed to be taking over pop culture …thank god that we made it through that trying era. A relic of our struggles still exists in the form of this awful song that we’re not going to take it easy on just because it appears to have been meant for kids and is by a kid. Listening to a child who, to that point, had done nothing but share DNA with two famous people, boast incessantly over a ceaselessly annoying beat is cringe-inducing no matter how you look at it. We’re sorry, Willow, we will not whip our hair back and forth with you, even if your debut single reached the Hot 100’s top 20.

Bjork is undeniably one of the most respected figures in modern music, but listening to the lead singer of this UK three-piece trying to sing like her just makes us want to sigh. A trumpet, miscellaneous various electronic noises that are supposed to be cool and that voice make us long for all the noises to stop shortly after “Bom Bom” starts. A song so irritating that it manages to make its almost 3-minute run time seem torturously never-ending.

When artists sit down to record an album, a lot of the time the first tracks they pump out are superficial and are more likely than not, exercises in recording to start their creative process. And as such, they are never released to the public. This song gives off the feeling that Nicki and her producers were just screwing around and you can just imagine laughter at the end of each line she spit - but instead of locking it away, they included “Stupid Hoe” on Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded and made it the album’s second promotional single. A song that is grating and absolutely “stupid,” there’s no denying Nicki has skills, but she just didn’t bring them to bear here.

When The Chainsmokers noticed how big of a trend the word ‘selfie’ had become, they decided they wanted to take advantage of that and recorded a song that was supposed to be more a joke than an actual single release. But it soon caught the interest of record label Dim Mak, which released the EDM track for the DJ duo, and instead of standing apart from the world they meant to lampoon, this ode to the superficial world we live in wallows in the deepest part of that pool. Making the “Harlem Shake” seem like a magnum opus, #SELFIE lacks any unique elements that would have given it anything resembling personality or memorability.

Before we reveal our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.

“Glad You Came” (2011)
--The Wanted

“Teach Me How to Dougie” (2010)
--Cali Swag District

“Talk Dirty” (2013)
--Jason Derulo feat. 2 Chainz

“Rack City” (2011)
--Tyga

“Brokenhearted” (2012)
--Karmin

“Work Bitch” (2013)
--Britney Spears

Oh Auto-Tune… why must you be used by so many so-called artists in almost every single they release… you know, like Ke$ha. Perhaps ironically about people who talk without anything to say, Ke$ha herself might do well to look in the mirror as she doesn’t seem to have much to say in this electropop dance track, notably repeating “blah, blah blah” and “nah, nah, nah” over and over again to diminishing returns. Then you throw in the guest artist’s segment that feels utterly disjointed from the rest of the song (though that’s arguably a good thing), which seems to have no point here or anywhere else, and what you get is an awful song that somehow became a top 10 hit.

Do you agree with our list? Which hit from the 2010s so far do you think is the worst? For more terribly terrific Top 10s published daily, be sure to subscribe to Watchmojo.com.