Top 12 Worst Hit Songs of 2000

Top 12 Worst Hit Songs of 2000

2000, the first year of the new millennium. Hard to believe the 2000s are going to be three decades ago in just four years. Anyway, as a year for music, 2000 was okay. Prominent genres included hip hop, teen pop, eurodance, country, alt rock, and everyone's favorite, post grunge. But none were as omnipresent as R&B, which dominated at least half the 2000 Year-End list. Yeah, this wasn't the most diverse year for the radio. But now, here are the worst songs radio stations played this year. Let's go.

#12: Eiffel 65- Blue (Da Ba Dee)

The one thing Eiffel 65's Blue (Da Ba Dee) has going for it is a good piano riff. That riff is insanely catchy, instantly memorable and serves as a great baseline to build a song off of. Unfortunately this song has nothing to offer beyond that baseline. The production is standard and nothing you haven't heard done better in a thousand other eurodance songs. The only thing that might set it apart is how low energy and downbeat it is, and I don't mean that in a good way. It's a surprisingly miserable song to sit through. Bland and dreary is an awful combination, especially for eurodance. Then there are the vocals. Jeffrey Jey gives an awful nasal performance made worse by the repetitive lyrics. Half the song is literally just this:

I'm blue, da ba dee da ba di
Da ba dee da ba di, da ba dee da ba di
Da ba dee da ba di, da ba dee da ba di
Da ba dee da ba di, da ba dee da ba di

It's not even just the chorus, the verses are just the narrator listing off things that are blue. By the way, about those verses, they're total nonsense. This song is literally just about a blue man who lives in a world where everything is blue. The only hint of anything more is the "blue are the feelings that live inside me" line they haphazardly throw in. It's a forced line which comes off like the writers wanted to make the song seem deeper than it is. With how repetitive the production and lyrics are, and how nasal the vocals are, this is a song that feels like something only a 5 year old could enjoy. Well, at least it isn't I'm Good (Blue) by David Guetta.

#11: Pink- There You Go

Pink famously lamented the lack of creative control she had with her debut album, Can't Take Me Home. R&B just wasn't the genre of music she wanted to make. It's not hard to see where she's coming from. Look, most of Pink's early work is pretty bad. There You Go is ordinarily the kind of song that'd be cut from the album because it sounds awkward and half-assed. It's striking how similar it is to No Scrubs by TLC, and it's equally striking how much worse it is. It's too fast, too tense, too jerky, and Pink's vocals sound oddly restrained. R&B works best when you utilize the full range of the singer, but Pink sticks to the same register for nearly the entire song, and anytime she switches it up it sounds forced. It very well may be the case that no one involved in making this song actually wanted to make it, and you can tell just by listening. Yeah, Pink made the right call switching to rock.

#10: Faith Hill- The Way You Love Me

The Way You Love Me by Faith Hill does not sound like a real song. This sounds like a 5 second ad jingle forcefully stretched out to 3 and a half minutes. The instrumentation is overprocessed, plastic and sounds weirdly heavy. All the guitars are highlighted by ugly, overly loud synthesizers. And Faith Hill's vocals are slathered with autotune, which sometimes gets to the point where I can not tell what she's saying. Some artists can and have made autotune work as a stylistic choice. Faith Hill is not one of them. In this song it's out of place and only makes it feel more artificial. This barely sounds like a country song, nor does it sound like anything else Faith Hill has put out. She's usually at least a competent country artist who can turn out 5 to 6/10 fluff, I don't know why she and her producers suddenly decided making this was a smart move. Thankfully, this was a mistake they only made once. But I'm still left baffled as to how this song exists and what they were even going for in the first place.

#9: Sammie- I Like It

A lot of child stars just flat out suck. You might retort that with "Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson started out as child stars", but those are the exception, not the norm. Most of the time you don't get the Jackson 5, you get someone like Sammie and his hit song I Like It. A big thing that sets Sammie apart from Michael Jackson in his youth is that Sammie can not sing. Not well at least. He sounds like he's really struggling to hit and hold these notes. He's backed up by cheap R&B production that sounds like it was put together in FL studio in 30 minutes. The chorus in particular is bad because the producers spam the mix with every annoying stock noise they can find. This whole song is pathetic, and as a love song, it's cringey as hell. But it's hard to expect much else from a 12 year old.

#8: Lil Bow Wow ft. Xscape- Bounce With Me

Speaking of child stars, here's Lil Bow Wow with Bounce With Me. Have you ever wanted to listen to a 13 year old brag about being a hot shit gangster? Have you ever wanted to listen to a 13 year old brag that when he's older he's gonna be rich, go to the best clubs and bang the hottest chicks? Apparently, to the music buying public of 2000, the answer was yes. I could go on about how absurd it is for a 13 year old to sing a brag rap song at all, but what gets me the most is that this is all played completely straight. The song proceeds as if it isn't embarrassing to hear a literal child rap about this. And the production is doing him no favors. It's a repetitive three or four note pattern with cheap sounding instruments. His flow is weak too. There's nothing to like here and I can not for the life of me imagine this being played at a club.

#7: LFO- Girl on TV

I'd feel like an asshole if I didn't mention this, but two members of this band: Rich Cronin and Devin Lima, have since died. R.I.P. to them. It's uncomfortable to talk about this song with that in mind, but I'll do my best. I don't usually use this word, but LFO was a lame band. Even their name, the Lyte Funkie Ones, was lame. Their hit from 1999, Summer Girls, is one of the worst songs of all time, and while Girl on TV doesn't quite reach that level, it's still an unbearably corny pop rap song with terrible writing.

Shooby-doo-wop and scooby snacks

Ew. The bulk of this song is about a guy falling in love with a female celebrity after shaking her hand once. I don't want to say any concept is an inherently bad idea for a song, but this one is really testing me. He shook this woman's hand once, then constantly obsesses over her and wonders if she ever thinks of him, to which the answer is obviously not. She's a celebrity, she shakes hundreds of hands each week. Oh and by the way, this song isn't just a narrative, it was written about an actual celebrity that exists in real life. In this case, Jennifer Hewitt. And apparently she liked the song enough to appear in the music video. So maybe I'm the asshole who doesn't get it. Still a terrible song either way.

#6: Savage Garden- I Knew I Loved You

The name Savage Garden would typically make you think of an alt rock band (partially because the name is so similar to Sound Garden), but nope, these guys were a sappy soft rock duo. They were basically the late 90s/early 2000s version of Air Supply, right down to being from the same country (Australia). Their big hit in 2000, I Knew I Loved You, is not quite as bad as Truly Madly Deeply, but it's close. With sappy instrumentation, an incredibly grating vocal performance from Darren Hayes, and the most clichéd lyrics you can think up, this is as bad as it gets for early 2000s soft rock. "I knew I loved you before I met you" is such a disgustingly sappy idea to base a love song off of. Worse than "love at first sight" because at least in that case you're seeing the person. Savage Garden broke up a year after this, only having released 2 albums. Darren Hayes went solo, and the other guy in this duo, Daniel Jones, became a real estate agent. Can't say I'm interested in listening to any of Hayes's solo work, but I'm happy he's been able to come to terms with his sexuality.

#5: Sisqo- Thong Song

It's easy to hate Sisqo's Thong Song solely for being stupid. And yes, this song is indeed mind numbingly stupid. Sisqo spending 4 minutes singing about how obsessed he is with thongs is not charming, funny, or endearing, it's just embarrassing. But more than that, I think the thing I hate most about Thong Song is how overdone it all is. Even if this wasn't about women's underwear, the production would still be weirdly tense and overdramatic, and Sisqo would still be oversinging it. The song is just trying way too hard on everything, especially with that forced key change toward the end. Also why the hell did they add a constant beeping noise in the chorus? Of course, the fact that this all for a song about how much Sisqo loves thongs only makes it worse. I wouldn't say ass anthems need to be laid back, but a half-assed orchestral sound does not work for this kind of song, especially when this is more about the underwear than the asses themselves. Is it inherently a bad thing for a man to sing a song about how much he loves women's underwear? No, but Thong Song tries its damnedest to make it seem like it is.

#4: Toby Keith- How Do You Like Me Now

When Toby Keith died, I said on twitter that my favorite song of his was probably the one about how much he wants to fuck a plastic cup. If that's any indication, I'd say that Keith was at his worst when he was trying to be sincere. How Do You Like Me Now, his breakout single, is a terrible attempt at being sincere. A song about a grown man still obsessing over a high school crush would already be pathetic, but this song goes the extra mile by having it be about a grown man spitefully obsessing over how great his life is and how awful the life of his crush is at the moment.

When I took off to Tennessee, I heard that you made fun of me
Never imagined I'd make it this far
Then you married into money, girl, ain't it a cruel and funny world?
He took your dreams and he tore them apart
He never comes home and you're always alone
And your kids hear you cry down the hall
Alarm clock starts ringing, who could that be singin'?
It's me, baby, with your wake-up call
How do you like me now?

Was the idea that the listener would be on the narrator's side? That we'd hear about how this woman made the ultimate mistake of turning this guy down in high school (this isn't even mentioning the fact that she, as the song describes, already had a boyfriend at the time), and so it'd be cathartic to mock her for being trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship with a neglectful husband? We don't even know for sure if this woman mocked the narrator, he only says he heard she did. There is nothing in this song that makes me sympathize with the narrator, he just sounds like an asshole. What makes it worse is that he's a famous radio star still obsessed over how shitty a middle class woman's life is. It's a blatant case of punching down, and beyond that certainly someone like him would have more pressing things on his mind, right? Thank God this is only a narrative and wasn't inspired by a specific woman that exists in real life, or else this could've had a real shot at #1.

#3: Creed- Higher / With Arms Wide Open

Going through all the 2000s Year-End lists convinced me that yes, post grunge really was that bad. The hate wasn't overblown. And while not every post grunge band was completely awful, it's a damning indictment of the genre that at least half of them were. Of them all, Creed was definitely the worst of the lot, which is no small feat when you're up against acts like Nickelback, Puddle of Mudd and Hinder. They had two major hits in 2000, both of which were awful. Higher is generic post grunge sludge with ugly, muddy sounding guitars and a terrible vocal performance from lead singer Scott Stapp. Much like nearly every other post grunge singer, he tries to imitate the slurred vocal style of 90s grunge artists. And much like nearly every other post grunge singer, he's terrible at it. He sounds like a discount Eddie Vedder drunkenly slurring through these lyrics on karaoke night. Stapp is probably the worst vocalist of the 2000s for how ugly and flat his singing is. Also for some reason this song is almost 6 minutes long. It's long to the point of self indulgence. Creed's other hit, With Arms Wide Open, is about becoming a father. But since it has the same ugly, muddy instrumentation and sound of every other Creed song, the message falls flat. Nothing about this is uplifting, it's miserable and puts me in a bad mood. There's another version of this song that adds strings, which make it sound a little better, but they can't hide how ugly it sounds. I can't say much else about With Arms Wide Open or any Creed song because they're all the same. Every song this band put out was terrible. Easily one of the worst bands of all time.

#2: Madonna- Music

For a song trying hard to be subversive, it's a shame that Music by Madonna doesn't give you anything that hadn't already been done before. Every production choice, every sound effect, and every vocal effect done here was already done by artists like Kraftwerk decades beforehand. The difference was that those people knew how to employ those effects to make them play off each other. In contrast, Madonna throws a bunch of techno sounding synths and beeping noises together, fills the mix with a bunch of annoying sound effects, and slathers her voice with autotune just to make the song sound cool. There's even disco strings at the back of the mix for some reason. It all ends up backfiring. Not only is this a nightmare to listen to, not only is this a mess of noise, but it sounds horribly dated even compared to other pop music at the time. This song sounds like a failed 80s experiment trying haphazardly to combine disco and electropop together. The fact that this was released in 2000 only makes it more embarrassing. Also that line in the chorus about music "mixing the bourgeoisie and the rebel" is forced.

Dishonorable Mentions

• Lonestar- Amazed
• Toni Braxton- He Wasn't Man Enough
• Destiny's Child- Jumpin', Jumpin'
• Montell Jordan- Get It On Tonite
• Macy Gray- I Try
• Ruff Endz- No More
• Jagged Edge- Let's Get Married / He Can't Love U
• Pink- Most Girls
• Next- Wifey
• Britney Spears- Oops...I Did It Again
• 98 Degrees- Give Me Just One Night (Una Noche)
• SoulDecision ft. Thrust- Faded

And the worst hit songs of 2000 is…

#1: Kid Rock- Only God Knows Why

If you're as online as I am, you might've heard that Turning Point USA did their own halftime show which featured Kid Rock. Let's be honest, I didn't watch it, you probably didn't watch it, and I don't even think Trump watched it. As easy as it is to hate Kid Rock's politics, it's important to note that he's always been doing this kind of cynical, pandering shit, ever since the start of his career. Take for instance his major hit in 2000, Only God Knows Why. The lyrics are about how "famous people have problems too", which is true and not something I'm going to deny, but the writing is so vague and generic that I don't buy Kid Rock's struggles. Also he wrote this before he even became famous, so basically nothing about this is real. And despite not having that many lyrics, this song still managed to find a way to be over 5 minutes long. Musically, this entire song is just Kid Rock mumbling over barebones, overprocessed country rock instrumentation as his voice is autotuned to hell and back. The autotune is applied so poorly that it makes the song almost ironically funny. Or at least that would be the case if it wasn't so boring. Out of every song on the 2000 YE, this was the most painful to sit through. It was the least appealing, most cynical crap put on the radio this year, and nothing would be lost if this was erased from history. Only God Knows Why by Kid Rock, easily the worst hit song of 2000 and it wasn't even particularly close.

If you made it to the end, thank you for reading! If I care enough I'll make another list like this. Can't tell you what year it'll be for. See you then!