Day 2 – The 30 Day Song Challenge – My least favourite song...

Song 2 - My least favorite song - 'My Humps' - Black Eyed Peas

Black Eyed Peas

It’s harder to nominate a least favourite song as these are the songs that you spend all your time avoiding rather than listening and comparing.  However after a little reflection one does spring to mind.

There are lots of songs I don’t think are very good and lots of songs that I find annoying on the radio.  That’s not really enough to earn the title ‘least favourite song’.  For me to really dislike it then it has to inspire something more than just plain irritation. 

I think this record is vile. It’s vulgar, bovine, charmless and utterly cynical. I’m prepared to put up with a lot of inarticulacy, a lot of cliché and a lot of clumsiness if something is written from the heart and with honesty.  This record completely avoids any of that.  It seems to have been put together by a committee targeting the lowest common denominator.  Its ‘naughty’ lyric seems designed to cause outrage in middle England or middle America and to make a pre-teen think that it’s somehow grown up.  And how many records did ‘Black Eyed Peas’ already sell? Enough not to need to put their names to this sort of nasty grunting tat.

It panders to a consumerism devoid of taste and aspiration.  It plays to the sort of idea of female ‘empowerment’ that suggests having men lusting after you is a positive thing.  It plays to the sort of male fantasy that women are just there to be stared at in as frank a manner as you like.  It cheapens both genders.

It must have launched a thousand joyless lap-dances in a hundred tawdry clubs and countless desperate drunken ‘nitespot’ gropes in cattle markets across the world despite being utterly unsexy and totally passionless.  This record is just horrid.

So for the utter lack of artistic ambition.  The cynicism.  The oafish vulgarity.  The joylessness.  The contempt it shows for its listeners.  ‘My Humps’ by Black Eyed Peas is my least favourite song.

I’ll let the late, great, Bill Hicks have the last word.  He wasn’t talking about ‘Black Eyed Peas’ of course,  but the similarly calculated and soulless ‘New Kids on the Block’ (the Justin Beiber of their day) back in 1992.  This clip contains swearing...

David Millington

2^nd April 2011

Nottingham