December 22, 2010

Is This The Worst Song Of the Year?

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The Village Voice just put up its list of the 20 worst songs of 2010, and…it’s pretty compelling. Trade Martin’s impeccably named “We’ve Got to Stop the Mosque at Ground Zero” is #17; Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” clocks in at #1:

There is less soul in the entirety of Train than in the palest single member of Collective Soul. “Hey, Soul Sister” is soul for people who refer to peanut butter and jelly as “soul food.” It makes the California Raisins look like the second coming of Sly and the Family Stone. It’s so white, Sarah Palin just named it her running mate for 2012.

Snap, crackle, and pow!

Anyway, having spent a quarter of the year driving around aimlessly in a car, I feel somewhat qualified to offer my opinion on the horrible sounds that came from FM radio. So here’s one they missed: “Way Out Here,” by Josh Thompson. Thompson mixes the mandatory checklist of a pop country hit—truck, truck being fixed, truck with girl standing next to it, yeoman farmers, yeoman farmers with trucks—with an aggressive “Real American” streak; unlike other kinds of people who shall remain nameless, Thompson croons, “We won’t take a dime if we ain’t earned it.” With apologies to Train, if any song of 2010 were to be Sarah Palin’s running mate, it’d be this one.

So is it worse than “Hey, Soul Sister”? You be the judge:

Not to be an insufferable fact-checker or anything, but what’s up with the flag in this video? It’s got the requisite 50 stars, so why does it look like it survived Washington’s Crossing?

Update: South African rappers—and friends-of-the-blog—Die Antwoord check in at #10. Check out their Riff interview with Michael Mechanic from back in October.

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From the desk of Mother Jones CEO, Monika Bauerlein...

Newsrooms can be funded in many ways. One of the most controversial (and volatile) ways is by a for-profit corporation or a billionaire owner. We see it across the headlines on a weekly basis: the claw backs in public media, the gutting of The Washington Post, the bending over backwards to appeal to Trump and his allies.

But not here.

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And so, we’ve been reader-funded for half a century. We rely on contributions from our readers—readers like you—whether it’s $50, or $15 a month, or whatever fits your budget. People give what they can, and every donation makes a difference for our newsroom, which has grown tremendously—in size and reach and renown—since its inception in 1976.

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Every donation Mother Jones receives from readers fortifies our newsroom, whether we’re covering underreported scandals out of Washington, DC, or the most important news of the day. And right now, each donation will be doubled because of our $50,000 match. So when you make a donation—$5, $50, any amount—it’ll go twice as far.

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