The past few days have had me swamped with stuff preventing me from finishing this and the best as soon as I’d have liked to but in the end, nothing can ever stop me from torturing myself and the one reader here. Here are the worst songs of 2023.
Before we get to the meat of things:
- Eligibility period: December 25, 2022 until December 24, 2023. Yes, I might be the only person in the world to think so but there is actually a possibility that something good will come out in the first three weeks of December.
- Qualifications: music video or at the very least a proper live stage. Some songs this year happen to stretch those pretty thing but you just got to wait and see.
- Stuff which has videos but is still inelligible: OST songs, Christmas music, covers too close to the original so they don’t have much of a reason to exist at all.
- The honourable mentions are in alphabetical order, which I don’t think is the point I’m trying to put here every year and forget, but it is something. Main lists are ordered by preference.
- If you disagree with what I’ve got to say, you must cry about it and punch a hole in the wall, otherwise Amber Liu might visit you in your dreams. Choose carefully.
- Have fun.
- Or not.
25. Xikers – Koong
Although it would seem that I focus on just about anything except for the music while writing the reviews, the deciding factor on if a song is going to appear here in the first place is purely just the music, everything else is just a way to make this a bit more fun than repeating „hey this sucks in that generic autotuned R&B/stomping boygroup/chanting nonsense etc. type of way”. However, what got me to notice „Koong” shortly after it was released, was actually one of the outside factors. In case you’re unaware, there’s this dude called TheBiasList who reviews pretty much anything and everything that comes out in the kpop world, with much more passion and dedication than I do, and he even sprinkles in some jpop and Western stuff if you’re sick of someone yelling meoributeo balkkeutkkaji right into your ear. He’s often right on the money with his opinions too, the only thing that I don’t really agree with him on is the unnecessarily positive ratings he usually gives out. Half of the text will be dedicated to how a track supposedly sucks and follows a bunch of crappy trends – and those would be the correct observations – and then it will be a 7/10 in his books, come on now. That’s what made „Koong” stand out more than anything else, a 3/10 from TheBiasList? Now that has to be some bullshit, given the other few songs that ever received low ratings on the site. Therefore, I was actually a bit surprised to hear that while this song has an incredibly dull slow beat, a mind-numbingly repetitive chorus, and way too much screaming in place of any reasonable singing, it doesn’t also strike me as something world-shatteringly altogether. Just the regular type of boygroup trash that places it right at the very bottom of the list instead of its higher echelons.
24. NMIXX – Soñar (Breaker)
It’s not everyday that I get to say that but I might owe Red Velvet an apology. See, I wasn’t doing these lists in the year 2014, I didn’t even know or care much about kpop at that time, but if I had, I probably would’ve put the song „Happiness” pretty high up on the worst list. I wouldn’t be entirely off either, the track does have that pretty annoying repetitive beat, there’s little harmonic variation and instead a lot of pretty random melody that doesn’t fit well at all, and the chorus is obviously just quite stupid. However, years have honestly been pretty kind to that song, it doesn’t sound quite as disjointed to me now, and it certainly perks up when you realize how many other groups were trying the template out and failing much harder, including Red Velvet themselves. NMIXX are the latest to have a crack and it’s just sort of as if you threw „Happiness” in a blender, as if it needed to sound any messier and chopped up. The random vocal bits are pretty horrible too, and once again there’s a change-up part which doesn’t add jack shit, but at least this time it’s not too far off the rest of the song rhythmically so it doesn’t fully throw it off. See, I’m not biased against NMIXX – I can admit that they fixed one thing, it’s just that they messed up seven others in the process. Maybe next time.
23. X:IN – Keeping the Fire
I’ve had this entire bit right here about how one of the members of this group is nonbinary and how they made it their selling point which is a good change in general, but ultimately meaningless when the music is this faceless and conservative but somewhere along the lines, I found out it’s actually QI.X and not X:IN who are that group, now you can’t really blame me for messing it up, can you. In any case, that just makes X:IN even more uninteresting in my eyes, and „Keeping the Fire” is just getting in your are for the 3427th time the past few years, and it’s worse than almost any of the other variations, just of how incredibly rough everything about it is. High polish is heavily synonymous with Blackpink’s brand, and even that can’t save their weaker songs half of the time, so anyone less fortunate is already at a large disadvantage from the get-go. The only part where any interest might perk up here is the rap breakdown, which is a little different from what Blackpink do, but the childish voice used for it is just genuinely unlistenable. Real gay people would surely do a hell lot better than this.
22. Cherry Bullet – P.O.W! (Play on the World)
In a truly shocking turn of events, FNC managed to suddenly develop brain cells in amount higher than three and after noticing that people really quite liked „Love So Sweet”, they decided to actually follow it up with something similar, and hit it pretty well with „Love in Space” again. Amazing how some sound consistency can help you build a following and a strong portfolio, isn’t it. Of course, just like they fucked up everything else under their roof, Cherry Bullet wasn’t meant to last, and their successful streak was brutally ended with a truly puzzling 180 turn. „P.O.W! (Play on the World)” is a collection of pretty much everything wrong with girlgroup music from the last few weeks, right from that sub-bass intro you may as well guess how the rest of it goes, and what do you know, soon you’re subjected to a crappy dance beat, completely random mismatched major scale melodies (just listen to those horrid ooh-ooh’s), some chanting in place of any chorus melody, and some silly rapping over a trap beat to top it off. It’s not like copying „Love So Sweet” for the rest of their career – which by the looks of it, might just be the next 5 months – was the only right move but this isn’t anything like what the remaining few Cherry Bullet fans would like to listen to. Hopefully the next half a dozen survival shows they’re sent to work out better for them.
21. Rejen, Plein – My-Oh, My-Oh
Something that Rejen does right here and what I believe more people should be doing is listing out the entire crew who helped to make the song and video at the end of it. It’s great, different parts of creating a video require different sets of skills, and some of them you don’t even ever think about until you once come down to them, and suddenly realize it’s some tough stuff, actually. It also makes me think there may have been someone in her crew calling in sick that day, missing their name being put into it altogether. You might think that’s unfortunate and shitty to exclude them, but that dude is the clear winner here. Whenever I churn out something way below my usual level, I don’t exactly feel like attaching my name to the result either, and who knows, maybe Rejen has a ton of extremely talented friends, who all preferred not to have their name eternally tainted and sit this one out. Work smarter, not harder.
20. Le Sserafim, Nile Rodgers – Unforgiven
Hey, this has a pretty cool guitar sound… for about five seconds until you realize that’s all there is to this track, and everything else is either going to be a repetition of the exact same motif or some small variation of it which doesn’t really bring anything to the table either. It’s just kind of going in circles and whenever you feel like it might actually develop into something a bit more exciting, it just loops back into some bland slow section or some handclapping, as if that could considered acceptable tension building in a song in 2023. It’s sort of like reading my texts, you expect to see something new and fresh but each year passes, and it’s the same shit every time. I guess me and Hitman Bang are similar in many ways, I don’t have to try cause nobody checks my shit out, he doesn’t have to try cause nobody with a critical thinking ability checks his shit out. Maybe we should swap our seats one day, I could pull out some of his better stuff he keeps hidden in his locker for some of the older women he’s creeping on and give Le Sserafim a proper comeback, and he would drown himself in his own shit having to actually execute a merger rather than just deciding one would be done. The whole bus would clap for sure.
19. Jeon Somi – Gold Gold Gold
Songs about being rich and how awesome that is are honestly some of the most puzzling thematically to me – it’s either absolute losers who have to stock shelves once the cameras stop rolling, in which case it’s just ridiculous and silly, or the 1% who are probably earnest and genuine, but that just makes it even worse. Somi definitely falls into the latter group, drawing unicorns all over her Louis Vuitton bags and being able to make it both into JYP or that YG label that isn’t YG but is, and I guess it’s trendy to hate her now that she supported the children-bombing coffee, so this is definitely very hateable just on principle. However, even if this was lyrically altruistic and awesome, and Somi was the coolest, least problematic person in the world that kpop stans expect everyone around them to be if they don’t want an expose thread on Twitter, this would still be completely musically worthless. For about 70% of the track, almost all the sonic information is weirdly placed in the sub-bass frequencies so beside a boring drum machine, you don’t even get to hear much of anything, and when the chorus hits, it’s just some terrible xylophone nursery rhyme melody that just makes you wonder if Somi is really spending all that money on the right things.
18. Stray Kids – Get Lit
Unlike what many people seem to think, Bang Chan is an undeniably talented producer who almost always gets exactly the results he sets out to accomplish. The problem is that his taste is often just a little bit shit, and his recent interests seem to be focused mostly on NMIXX style mash-up tracks that make no sense. You actually won’t get to see „S-Class” on this list because of what I’d said in the first sentence. Sure, it sucks but it’s also about as good as it ever could be, and it even has a cool rap section in the second verse, meaning you get about 20 seconds of decent music more than you usually do in this type of style. There’s no saving „Get Lit”, however, a song that doesn’t seem to follow any particular trend, except maybe „riffs that don’t necessarily count as music”, as that constant going up and down is seriously nauseating, and they squeeze it into as much of the song as possible so if you don’t like it, too damn bad. All the other elements of the track are not too bad, or at least not completely unlistenable, so here’s hoping someone at JYP knocks some sense into Chan and the next time he proposes a song like this to be released, someone higher up laughs at him and puts it on the backburner for the next three years again.
17. EXO – Cream Soda
For all the deserved shit we have given Loona fans over the years, I have to say I respect how committed and organized they turned out to be. Of course we all know Chuu was completely fucked over by the old company, and in fact, so were all the other members, but I somewhat expected their fans to just ignore it and carry on as if nothing happened the second the next comeback is announced. As we know now, they all stuck by their words, and now Loona are free from their old label, and even get to do some stuff together again, that’s awesome. Now let’s imagine if they didn’t do that and instead started drooling all over themselves, completely embarrassing themselves, the group, and showing no amount of disrespect can stop them from sucking corporate cock. Oh wait, you actually don’t have to imagine that at all, that’s exactly what happened when some of the main money-making EXO members announced they’re not getting paid well at all and that they kinda don’t like that very much. SM probably handled the situation better than BBC, as it’s not the first time they’ve been swamped with such a controversy, but all the anger the fans had evaporated as soon as a song release was announced two days later. It’s really enough to hate this purely because of what it represents but it doesn’t help much that it sounds geriatric enough to get rejected from a Super Junior album.
16. Taeyang, Lisa – Shoong!
Remember when Lisa released „Money”? What a terrible song that was. There were only really two aspects of it that didn’t suck flat-out, and those were that the tempo was reasonable so at least it didn’t feel like a snore, even if it was one, and the sax sample sounded alright on its own, it’s only after it was repeated about 235 times by the track’s finish that let it down. So now we’ve got „Shoong!”, a track which is basically someone asking a unique question of what if you slowed „Money” down to some unbearable, sub-ballad, funeral speed, and removed the sample and replaced it with some horrid R&B „ooh-ooh” crooning? Now that’s something I never wished to get an answer to but I guess I now have it. With how Bigbang seem accustomed to being in jail by now, maybe this guy should join as well.
15. Soyou – Farewell Everyday
A few years ago Hyolyn released a song „Summer or Summer” with one of the other Sistar members that nobody really cares about. Much like most of what Hyolyn’s done as a solo artist, it was a bucket of complete shit, an incredibly awkward song trying to match bossa nova, trap and the usual shrill Sistar summer stuff, and it’s not something anyone had ever thought about doing prior just because it’s pretty clear why nobody should ever think about doing that. I mention that, as while the track was definitely horrible, I actually completely forgot about it while compiling the worst list for that year. I have since taken it upon myself to closely monitor what Hyolyn, as well as other Sistar members, put out, never to make such a mistake again. Much to my shock, „This Love” released by Hyolyn this year was actually very decent and easily the best thing she’s ever done as a solo artist, and the real Sistar-related stinker came from the courtesy of Soyou. I’ve got even less to say about this than the random Hyolyn song from ages ago, it’s the usual depressing ballad stuff that doesn’t steer away from the tired kpop ballad formula in any way whatsoever, and if you think I’m being too harsh on Sistar on purpose, maybe I am, but they did have those two sort of alright songs about 87 years ago, so I’m allowed to put them into a bit of a higher standard now, aren’t I.
14. Bryan Chase, A Boogie wit da Hoodie – 2U
At some point of this song this guy directly asks „So tell me what you hatin’ for”. Let’s see:
- The song is called „2U” and features someone named A Boogie wit da Hoodie. Come on now.
- The entire video is some pretty ugly animation which means I don’t even get to see Bryan Chase, which may have pulled my attention away from the song. You never know, some of these rappers have that weird unwashed appeal.
- The track is slow as shit and the video goes well above 5 minutes, when there’s hardly enough content here for a short teasing clip.
- Crappy R&B melodies all over the place here. Just because some notes are on the same scale, doesn’t mean they won’t sound dull and crappy together. Especially since some here are stretched clearly beyond this guy’s vocal abilities.
- And speaking of, why would you ever pursue R&B, a genre which for a change requires at least some vocal ability? By the copious amount of autotune, it’s clear he can’t sing much at all, and it’s really grating against the laid back backing track.
- The track is entirely in English so I can safely say that neither of these guys can rap either. Now that’s a tough sell.
- I have now seen what Bryan Chase looks like and I can safely take point 2 back. Sorry for that one, I’ll only keep hating for every other one, bro.
13. Kash Bang, Saggypants Shimba – Round 2
One of the comments under the Youtube upload of this song is Saggypants Shimba (seriously, what the fuck is going on with these rappers’ names) himself saying „Past is past I don’t give a history Me & kash making new era & New history” with a bunch of emojis in there, also adding that Korea multiplied by Japan equals two fires and two hearts, I don’t know. Of course, it’s not exactly hard to know why Koreans are being sort of dickheads towards the Japanese, but then, they’re also dickheads towards just about anyone else, including their own if they’re female, one shade darker, disabled, mentally troubled, bullied, overworked, ever used drugs (alcohol is fine though, let’s get that bitch lit up), dare to say something as controversial as „date rape is not that great guys”, or against adjusting yourself to a conservative societal standard. So maybe this really is the way to get the two countries back on better terms, one shitty rap collab showcasing how abysmally low the standards for this type of music are in either country, at a time.
12. XG – New Dance
There are a few songs this year that stretch the eligibility criteria, and that’s no easy task given usually „being in any sort of proximity to Korean entertainment” is enough. XG are the first of those, and maybe I should just not cover them from this year onward indeed, I would probably save myself about 15 minutes of my life. It’s not all bad with them, I guess, at least their music videos are always bleeding money and look fantastic, and the girls get some fantastic thematic styling almost always, even if some of it is much more racially ambiguous than any of the members appear to be. Both of those are bizarrely missing from „New Dance”, however, which looks like a low-tier agency in every sense of the word, and sounds even worse. The cheap guitar sound driving the track forward, the generic dance beat, nor the terrible lyrics (fully in English so you aren’t spared the secondhand embarrassment this time) help matters any, but what truly sinks this one beyond any acceptable song material level, is the weird little high-pitched sampled noise happening at the end of each bar in the chorus, pushing it from „hmm this is a bit bullshit” to „I’m gonna drill a hole inside my brain so this can stop”. You may not notice it from the get-go but I’m sure you will now, and I may owe you a lifetime of therapy now, I truly am sorry.
11. Young Posse – Macaroni Cheese
Some songs get on the worst list for following crappy trends and doing a particularly bad or bland job at it. Others get here when there is an element or elements multiple, that is/are just completely wrong and messed up about it, even despite being slightly more ambitious sometimes. And then every once in a while comes a track which is just less or more intentionally comical, one that will have screaming „what the fuck is going on” at your screen the entire time. Right from the title of this one, you might guess which group I’ll talk about here with probably pretty decent accuracy, and I mean, how could I not. Right within the first 15 seconds of the video, you can see a logo made out of three macaroni, a text stylized in a way that makes it look like someone’s poured hot cheese over it, girls dressed in some hideous clothing that’s supposed to look like holes in cheese, and then there’s also a fat guy advertising an instant mac-n-cheese machine, and that’s the least weird this video gets. Honestly worth a look just to experience the utter bewilderment, even some of the intentionally sexually provocative lyrics don’t really register here as such, everything else is just so outlandish that I’d be willing to believe someone earnestly wrote „put it in your mouth” to refer to the pure ecstasy of getting to down some empty calories. The only thing that doesn’t really go into any crazy directions here is the crappy trap music but maybe that’s for the better, my head is already aching from trying to take it all in.
10. SMTown – The Cure
Hello Uncle,
How are you doing! I’m pretty good myself since leaving the label and just getting to stream some games for maybe 80 people at a time. Less stressful, y’know? I heard you got fired as well. That sucks, I mean, releasing a song about how to save the environment sounds rather dumb to me, but what they went with instead is some drama-ma-ma-ma nonsense, so it’s not really any better, and planting a city of weed would be dope, I’d advocate. Maybe you can now rekindle with Rachel, that wasn’t very nice of us to just let her kick the bucket like that, and her surgery settled in much better than Mina’s, who just looks and sounds really awkward these days. What was the last thing to tip me off, you ask? Well, that anniversary song we did last year was pretty damn awful, like, what a way to show the world we’re washed-up and not really up to the golden standard we used to represent back in the day. Then there’s also the possibility of getting lumped into millennial whoop world-bothering midtempo ballads that sound like the worst charity jingles, are you kidding me? I heard they were gathering up leaders of all active groups for something like that, I saw Boa put on that terrifying fake smile and could hear some faint sounds coming from the speaker, and I think I may have passed out from the sheer terror. It’s just not worth exposing myself to that stressful environment, nobody thought of my organizational health and safety. I’m doing just fine now and don’t worry, when the next EXO case comes out with detailed records of how they’d got a combined three cents between all
12111098 of them while you were still their manager, I’ll probably be playing some Fortnite and will pretend I haven’t heard a thing.Best regards,
Sunny
9. N.Ssign – Wormhole: New Track
I strongly believe in listening to a song in full before forming an opinion. Yes, even the shitty rap ones where you know they’re not going to change in any meaningful way. Who knows, maybe you’ll get the one in a million track that actually becomes completely amazing and ass-kicking after the first minute of sucking, it’s certainly more possible in a post-NMIXX world. However, sometimes a song will pop up where it’s just clear as day right from the start that something is wrong with it, and the feeling never goes away. In „Wormhole: New Track”, cause I guess songs can’t have normal names these days either, the slow beat to kick things off immediately feels like it’s missing some pretty crucial meat to it, and in a truly puzzling turn of events, it remains just as bare bones through the song’s entire running length, only occasionally dropping some barely audible low frequency for a split second. Paired with the pretty generic and predictable vocal melodies, it’s almost as if someone spilled coffee over the mixing desk but instead of fixing it immediately, decided „oh well, whatever’s lost is lost”. The result is unusual and weird, in the same way that removing your every other tooth would be, but that would probably have great story potential and be very effective in scaring trick or treaters off, the most this can do is allow you to take a shit in between any two things happening in the track.
8. Agust D – Amygdala
If you try to boot this video up on Youtube, you’ll get the following warning: „Viewer discretion is advised, the following content may contain suicide or self-harm topics”. What it doesn’t tell you is that it’s not referring to Agust D holding up a paper knife to his eye in the thumbnail, it’s a trigger warning for you to run as far away from this song as possible. What seems hard to believe now is that BTS had some sense of a musical identity at some point, and for Suga/Agust D in particular, it was always at best adding traditional Korean instrumentation to a pre-existing average rap beat and posing in hanbok to trick the audience that they’re experiencing some sort of deeply culturally enriching art, but it was an identity nonetheless. I guess nothing really matters when you’re making bucks feeding your fans any stinking shit but the least I’d expect from a Hybe release is some decent level of production quality, meanwhile this could be ripped straight off Soundcloud and I wouldn’t be able to see the difference. Between the outrageous amounts of autotune, all hooks being just the same word repeated ad nauseam, and the tinny production, this really could just come from DBO, and I kind of just wish it would have, it would save me writing any of this, being able to just copy last year’s write-up like I always do with DBO, and none of the comments would be talking about how deep it supposedly is.
7. Raon – Like Like
One thing about kpop trends is that the people who set them are never actually the ones who do the worst job at them – there must be some level of demonstrated competence for anyone else to consider the style worth copying, or so you’d think. Think of the worst Blackpink clone track you know – it surely didn’t come from Blackpink themselves. Despite my constant bitching and moaning about NMIXX and the disasters they brought onto the kpop world, the same rings true for them as well. At least when they’re doing their switch-up thing, you can reasonably expect the individual parts to be somewhat polished, the JYP trademark isn’t entirely meaningless. Now that we’ve got nugus do that, that isn’t exactly guaranteed. Raon here does the NMIXX change up even worse than NMIXX themselves ever did, with every singular part of the track sucking equal amounts of ass, and all the transitions jumping at you out of the blue, with no regard to how it works – or doesn’t – within its context. It’s a bit like all my writing where I constantly go on random tangents because my attention span can’t handle it so maybe Raon is just suffering from ADHD, in which case I might be ableist for putting the song here but then maybe I also have ADHD, now that would be a true reclaiming the slur moment, or whatever bisexuals on Twitter are doing this week. Maybe me and Raon could figure out global warming in about a lunch break’s time together, it definitely seems like neither of us have found the right calling currently, at least.
6. Taeyong – Shalala
Taeyong has had a nice year, with some decent NCT songs that I might talk about later, and some public appearances where he looked great and probably had more fun that he’d ever been allowed to before that point, now that his military service is fast approaching, I guess it’s cool he managed to have some good time elsewhere. He did also have „Shalala”, however, which is significantly less fun, and in fact, might even be the most awkward song SM have done ever since the infamous „Zimzalabim”. It’s actually pretty sonically tame compared to that and a lot of other more forward-thinking SM productions, you only really get a couple of rather basic beats with only just enough chord changes for it not to be completely one note, yet the wah-wah’s all around the place and the slight beat changes not really benefitting the track in any meaningful way make it far more disorienting than it has any right to be. Maybe it’s in relation to the visual concept being about Taeyong being some sort of a green-haired demon messing up god’s plans or whatever it is that they’re doing there, and maybe there’s some hidden genius in here that I’m not getting, and I sure hope that is the case, as no person this pretty should ever be making music this boring and messy at the same time.
5. Toromillion – Skrr!
I’m Vilppu Thoughts. WordPress servers have given me this time to talk to you about something both we really care about. Kids. Kids are the reason WordPress sponsor the „Say no to SKRR” program, a national shitty trap awareness effort. Think about this; many of you yelling skrr now, are under 18. Do you realize that at 18, you have only lived one fourth of your life? When you’re yelling skrr, you’re only cheating yourself out of the chance of who you really can be. And believe me, if you don’t yell skrr, you can just be anything you want to be. Listen, you got at least three fourths of your life to go. That’s three more lifetimes to you, so don’t blow it. Don’t yell skrr. If you’re doing it, stop it, get some help. WordPress want you to give yourself a chance. A chance to find out all the wonderful things you really can be. And so do I.
4. Lionesses – Papyun
X:IN might not have been the LGBT representation I thought they would be but these guys definitely are gay as fuck, in case you haven’t noticed, they are very eager to remind you at every turn. Really, they’re actually cool as shit, with lyrics promoting self-acceptance and self-love but also not shying away from gay sex, promoting Jack’d and wearing those theatrical masks which are a clever dog-whistle – masking the identity in a country as homophobic as Korea and winking at the audience more familiar with Asian gay porn. It’s truly a shame that these guys are so bad at making music at the same time cause I would love to talk more how awesome they are, meanwhile, I’m stuck with this song which just sounds like someone set a particularly bizarre alien style alarm on their phone and never remembered to turn it off. It’s one of the worst rap beats I’ve heard all year, it doesn’t even make use of the usual trap hi-hats, and it must be bad if I’m missing those. Of course, it also features the usual issue with Lionesses’ music, which is the complete inability to write a decent vocal melody. If it was just a rap song, it would still suck but at the same time, wouldn’t really stand out as anything too offensive, but the castrated vocal parts which rub against the backing track much less pleasantly than Lionesses would normally approve of sink this one fully. I don’t know if these guys ever get it right, I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but for now, this one is just gay [derogatory].
3. Jon Batiste, J.I.D, NewJeans, Camilo – Be Who You Are (Real Magic)
Collaborations with oversees artists where the kpop act isn’t the primary performer have always been accepted by me, no question, but with this one, I was actually thinking for a while if it really should be included. Out of all the artists included, NewJeans have by far the shortest part of the song, clocking in at only 17 seconds, and their contribution is fine, nothing all too wrong with it. Everything else about it is, however, starting off with the production style which is tough like some of those insane bench presses that only Wonho can do, a baffling choice for the reggae rhythm which requires something a lot smoother and lighter. Then there’s the wall-of-noise of synths in the chorus followed by an equally busy gang-vocal hook which sounds every bit as messy as it seems on paper, with every frequency fighting for space in the mix. Even the quieter parts, such as the NewJeans one, have something stupid going on, with some baby’s first keyboard melody thrown in for zero reason. It’s one mistake after another, a remarkable feat considering you only really need a nice groove, laid back vibe and a hit of weed to make decent reggae, but it’s almost like everyone involved was dead set on doing it wrong. After this and Tri.be’s devastating cover of Queen’s „A Kind of Magic”, I think it’s safe to say the company producing the worst kpop songs in 2023 is not SM, not YG, not even Hybe, but Coca-Cola.
2. Niziu – Love & Like
The third and final „hm it’s barely kpop when you think of it for five seconds” is Niziu, the fully Japanese group marketed for Japan but managed by a Korean label and generally operating close to the Korean model. I should probably stop covering their stuff altogether and I just might if they never come close to this level of awfulness again, but then I thought they’d never do anything worse than „Chopstick”, and yet here we are. One of those „more is more” type deals, there is way too much going on here, with every single space of the track being filled by some overbearing orchestration, completely diluting the song’s melody and harmony. It’s hard to make out what you’re even listening to here and if you try to focus on any element for too long, you’re probably going to get jumpscared by some new brass section, or the endlessly repetitive love and love and love and love… hook where each further mention of the world signals the loss of additional brain cells. Then the song also hits you with some vocal improvs because it wasn’t overcooked enough already, and in what has to be the most shocking turn of events of the entire 2023, the half-time rap breakdown is actually by far the song’s high point, as everything else fades out even for just a few seconds. Maybe this is something Japan likes and wants from their music, judging by how they usually make pop, that is even somewhat likely, but for the rest of us, this may as well just be the worst song of the year.
Or second. If everything everywhere all at once is the second worst song of the year, then the first one must be…
1. V – For Us
…nothing never at no time. Before we proceed any further, let’s congratulate V, as well as BTS as a whole, here. Never before have they entered any of the lists, making music that was consistently average and unable to evoke any sort of emotion from me but this year, they finally did it. Wait, it’s the bad list? We sure? Oh well. Let’s finish before I get a call from someone telling me I would die in Seven days.
The last few years of BTS’ musical journey have honestly been a rocky disaster. Even if they were never truly terrible – at least not quite like this – it was crystal clear to the less one-eyed of us that the group were burning out right in front of our eyes, delivering less fire and passion with each Americanized release they’d churn out every few months. Once an actual force to be reckoned with, it felt like there was never a bigger disconnect between the groups’ rabid fans and the public. Most of us could probably hum „Dynamite”, or at least we could have done that while it was still charting, but does anyone recall a single one of their last fifteen supposed huge hits? With the military service right around the corner, Hybe decided to let the group stuff rest for a while and moved into solo releases. What was unusual about it was that every single member got to release and promote one. How did that go down? As expected, J-Hope did alright for himself, Jungkook appears to be the obvious star, the other rap guys also did some things, or so I heard, Jimin and Jin also showed up.
What all of those songs had in common was that each member got to show a bit more individuality, and they seemed to actually somewhat enjoy what they were doing, something that hasn’t applied to any group release since about 2019. And then there was V. Always one of the least musically involved members who seems to have done the album purely out of contractual obligation, and there truly is just nothing here. Passionate people can suck at whatever it is they’re passionate about but their admiration and dedication to their craft will always shine through, and spread out to the audience. This is the exact opposite, a piece – because „song” feels rather generous – completely devoid of any sign of life, emotion or care, slow and cold in how it creates and presents itself. Halfway through it, someone must have realized they’re basically creating a corpse of a song, as they added that high pitched voice and changed the key, but it’s way too late and not nearly enough, we all see it for what it is at that point. Is it the most obnoxious, annoying or technically poor song released this year? No – but it’s unquestionably the most lifeless, most thoughtlessly put-together, and most soulless one.
kpop for the average joe 