The 10 Worst Albums of 2019
The Bottle is Ready to Blow…
10. Bad Habits — NAV
There is a difference between being laid back, and completely disengaged. While it’s easy to call Nav yet another in the vein of Gunna or Lil Baby as disciples of Young Thug, Young Thug at least has some personality. Nav is completely devoid of this, and he unleashed 16 of the most boring, lifeless tracks of the year. “Price on My Head” is one of the few tracks that gets carried to something decent, but it’s almost entirely thanks to The Weeknd; when Nav is left to his own on tracks, his inability to offer anything new is exposed with these sparse instrumentals. Not to mention, the dude on Bad Habits is autotuned to the point where I’m not even sure if it’s being done for an artistic purpose or if Nav just can’t hit a single note. Pass.
9. HIXTAPE: Vol. 1 — Hardy and Friends
Imagine if everything that’s hurt modern country music was thrown into a single album? Michael Hardy essentially grabbed 17 of his friends and told them “Eh, just do whatever”. Seriously, listen to “Boy from the South”, and tell me if there’s anything you haven’t heard before. Except now, the guy responsible for the success of Florida Georgia Line and perpetuating the absurd “country that wishes it was hip-hop” movement that has left the genre devoid of any personality has amped that up to 11. The “HIXTAPE” is just a pointless exercise in shooting a dead horse, and singing in lament of such.
8. Songs for Carmella — Christina Perri
Ultimately, I understand that this was a very cute idea, with Christina Perri writing a short album for her young daughter’s first birthday. And on the surface, this is in no way nefarious or terrible. Heck, it’s even harder to discuss this album knowing that Perri, at the start of 2020, announced she had suffered a miscarriage at 11 weeks, something not worth joking about, and I certainly hope that she and her family are doing well.
It’s just boring. Really boring, and not in a way that makes you want to do the album’s intended purpose of falling asleep. Perri’s voice just doesn’t have the smoothness required to at least make this album work as a low-key enjoyable listen. I’m not going to lump on her conceptually but I am going to say, that by the time we get to her cover of “Remember Me”, I’m just wondering why this got a full album release at all. Most of the songs don’t even go the full distance, either. Just…did the rest of the world really need this?
7. Harverd Dropout — Lil Pump
If NAV is a husk of a person with no personality, Lil Pump is just too much personality. It’s ultimately to his detriment; if Pump had the chops as a rapper to carry a full album, that would be one thing, but it’s just song after song of Pump being obnoxious. Enough has already been said about “I Love It”, but “Be Like Me”, “Drop Out”, and the above “Vroom Vroom Vroom” are equally awful, making one wonder if Lil Pump is in on his own joke or not. I’m becoming more and more afraid that he isn’t.
6. The Black Album — Weezer
When I was finishing up this list, at first, I didn’t really want to lump on Weezer. The Black Album couldn’t be that bad, could it? It was just an overreaction due to this being not enough like “old Weezer”, right?
And then I gave it another spin, and if this is Rivers Cuomo’s umpteenth attempt to make his real “Great American Pop Album”, he failed, again. There’s nothing to say, there’s nothing interesting, it’s just a slog to get through with weird production choices and lame hooks that kill any momentum. I understand that I’m not supposed to take Weezer serious, but I’d think at some point the band would start to look in the mirror and realize things like “I’m Just Being Honest” are taking their own legacy backwards.
5. The Owl — Zac Brown Band
I’m not saying the Zac Brown Band can’t expand their sounds and continue to grow, but…what boundaries does this push? The answer is zero. It’s just Zac Brown singing over production from EDM artists, and it doesn’t suit him, or them, in any way. The end result is an album that falls apart upon arrival. “OMW” is clunky, “Warrior” is a lifeless Imagine Dragons ripoff, and “Shoofly Pie” is a joke I don’t think anyone listening was supposed to be in on. This still sold, but even their most ardrent fans thought this was a confusing mess, and they’re darn right.
4. 93PUNX — 93PUNX
I like Vic Mensa. His tracks working with alternative rock influences, and his forays into EDM, really hit a chord. The problem is, Vic has desperately needed to reign it in to remain focused and successful, and his 93PUNX project is not. It’s supposed to be a raucous punk album with a lot to say, but it’s just songs that are decidedly unpunk, lame, and go nowhere, do nothing, and say nothing. Even uniting with Good Charlotte and Travis Barker goes nowhere. It’s not even an album that can stand on its own by nostalgia, but rather one that completely flies past anything that could’ve made it work.
3. NEOTHEATER — AJR
AJR is a band I feel was focus-grouped to be marketed to millenials, and thus, NEOTHEATER is an album focus-grouped to be listened to by no one. It’s mopey with awkward production and I’m so ready to move on from this group having a weird vice-grip on alternative rock. Full stop.
2. Indigo — Chris Brown
It’s hard to not keep lumping on Chris Brown at this point; he’s certainly an easy target to hate because of his past and the fact that he’s unleashed some truly awful music on the world. However, Brown, off this album parlayed a true number one single in his collaboration with Drake, “No Guidance”.
Here’s the thing: “No Guidance” is just a Drake track. Guided entirely by the style and whims of the guest artist. And Indigo just keeps following this trend the whole way through; there’s nothing on this album that allows Chris to stand on his own feet, as it’s just poignantly underdeveloped ideas that could be album filler on his guest’s albums without Brown’s presence. Solid example being “Lurkin”, which is a Tory Lanez track, and “Wobble Up”, a Nicki Minaj solo song that was clearly stolen. Then when Chris does decide to venture on his own, it gets back into the usual grossness we’re used to (see “Sorry Enough” or “Take a Risk”).
On the positive, unlike Heartbreak on a Full Moon, the complete edition isn’t 57 tracks. Nope. It’s 43. I don’t have the time or patience to keep allowing Chris Brown to coast to success anymore. So who out-did this disaster?
1. Father of Asahd — DJ Khaled
DJ Khaled is not a musician. Let’s be clear on that. Khaled hasn’t made beats in years, and since his transition into an internet personality, he’s just a music curator. Even then, I can’t lie; Khaled has had some moments where his curation and collaboration ideas have led to some legitimate success. “Shining” was arguably his magnum opus in this, recruiting Beyonce and Jay-Z to turn in one of the most underrated mainstream hip-hop songs of the decade…that he barely produced.
That said, I think we all must ask: what does he even offer anymore? A good meme or two? Using the word “they”? Snapchats that make you sympathetic for his wife?
Khaled’s interjections ruin songs (the end of “Wish Wish” might be the worst moment in music of the year, hand’s down), and his desperate attempts to remake his past successes lead us to Father of Asahd, an album that hasn’t just been critically panned, but also a failure commercially as it didn’t hit Khaled’s “guaranteed” number one spot and led us to him showing how much of his positive attitude was just a play as he threw a temper tantrum.
Father of Asahd plays like a greatest hits of Khaled’s worst traits. Let’s sample a popular late 90's-early 00’s song (“Just Us”), throw together artists that we’ve heard together many, many times to minimal success (“Jealous”), run back a barely functional version of “Shining” (“Top Off”), plenty of references to God and holiness (“Holy Ground”) meshed with cut-and-paste money-and-bitches rap lyrics (“Weather the Storm”), lazy lyricism (“Won’t Take My Soul”), exploitation of an artist’s passing (“Higher”), and hell, let’s just re-do “I’m the One” while we’re at it (“No Brainer”) and try to cash in on music trends (“Holy Mountain”).
None of the artists here need DJ Khaled’s help; there’s no young gun hiding in the track list that needs the name-value of Khaled to become bigger. This is Post Malone, Justin Bieber, Chance the Rapper, Rick Ross, Nas, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Cardi B. People know who they are, and they already can coordinate to much greater success on their own, because save maybe for John Legend’s inspiring hook on “Higher”, nobody cares here. It’s phoned in, maybe just to get Khaled off their back. So why does this exist at all? It’s not like Khaled made these beats; he clearly didn’t. There’s nothing owed to his own creativity, only his ability to put people on a track, which, in 2020, we flat out do not need anymore.
DJ Khaled allowed himself to embrace his own status as a meme in the past decade, with a debatable self-awareness to his own shortcomings. Maybe it’s time we leave this meme like most; forgotten, just like his album tribute to his child.
Or we can give him a Grammy. Whatever you wanna do, RIAA.
