Worst Albums, 2020
I heard some bad music so now y'all have to hear about it
It should come as no surprise that I listen to a lot of music in order to gather all the finds I share on here. Unfortunately, they can’t all be good. I don’t like to be a hater and talk down on people’s music, but I thought it would be fun to point out the projects I liked the least this year. If you enjoyed any of these, I would love to talk about it and hear why!
See You When I am Famous!!!!!!!!!!!! - KYLE
About halfway through the first track on KYLE’s album, there’s a beat switch that includes producer Hit-Boy’s tag “Hit-Boy on the beat, so bitch, you gotta go bezerk.” Kyle follows that tag up with what is apparently his version of going bezerk:
He follows that with a verse that’s bland and forgettable. The way you could describe most of this album. It sounds like music that was made by someone more concerned about being famous than having music good enough to warrant the fame.
Worst Offender: Money Now
Artist 2.0 - A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie
I’ve never been a huge A Boogie fan, but his prior projects all had at least a few songs I enjoyed. Artist 2.0 however takes all his worst qualities and highlights them. There’s little to no variation in any of the song topics or production. Production in particular is a sore point, as every beat just sounds like they took a guitar/piano loop off of Splice, added some reverb and the same trap drum/808 loop then called it a day. That kind of redundancy doesn’t interest me in the first place, let alone over the course of an hour (1 hour 24 minutes for the deluxe version).
Worst Offender: DTB 4 Life
Changes - Justin Bieber
Again, have to preface this by saying I’ve liked some of Bieber’s work in the past (don’t want people to think I’m hating for no reason, I go into every project with an open mind!). But this album feels like wanting to have an album that’s open, honest, and vulnerable without actually doing any of the work and reflecting required to create that kind of music. It’s funny that Bieber and Chance the Rapper are now promoting a new collaboration, because Changes suffers from one of the core problems Chance had with The Big Day: making an album about your wife that reveals little to nothing about her. For an album that Apple Music bills as “an arms-wide-open tribute to [Hailey Bieber],” we don’t really come away knowing anything about her, besides the fact that she has “that yummy yummy.”
Worst Offender: Changes
Walls - Louis Tomlinson
Every instrumental on here sounds like it was made for a car commercial. Grant it, he’s somewhat better at vulnerable lyrics than Bugatti Biebs, but he’s trying to make a type of music that could top the charts during the height of Daughtry’s career. Unfortunately, that’s not the case in 2020.
Worst Offender: We Made It
Look For The Good - Jason Mraz
If you remember Jason Mraz from his adult contemporary radio hits I’m Yours and Lucky, he’s apparently gotten a lot more…reggae since then. Without outright saying it, a lot of the songs have All Lives Matter energy. That, coupled with Mraz’s standard ‘Jean Shorts at the Beach’ energy, made this a bad experience. There's a super strange Tiffany Haddish feature that isn't so much bad as much as it is confusing? And to cap it all off, a painstakingly long seven minute Thank You track closes out the album.
Worst Offender: DJ FM AM JJASON
A-Team - Lil Keed, Zaytoven, Lil Gotit, & Lil Yachty
I didn’t expect this to be an exceptional album, but it also had no business being as forgettable as it was. Zaytoven is the only one of the four credited on every track, and while he has made legendary productions in the past, his contributions here sounds like nothing more than type beats with < 100 views on YouTube. These are all artists that I have enjoyed individually, but they come together in a way that makes you wonder whose idea this project was. Because despite the name, no one brings their A-game. Keed leads the way with his C+ game at best.
Worst Offender: Hightop Shoes
King Soulja 9 - Soulja Boy
I don’t think anyone is going into a project called King Soulja 9 with high expectations. Except for someone like me that is, who found a gem off of Soulja Boy’s 2019 mixtape Fuego with She Love Me Not. That project was not great outside of said song, and King Soulja 9 picks up right where that left off. But this time around, there aren’t any redeeming tracks. Most of the mixing sounds like the project was dropped immediately after recording the vocals.
Worst Offender: Slide
Everything’s Strange Here - G-Eazy
There’s really nothing redeemable about this project. The genre transition feels like when Logic made Supermarket to go along with his book (Supermarket was not a good album, but I do feel like it got overhated since Logic is an easy target for criticism). Everything’s Strange Here deserves all the criticism Logic got, but I guess not enough people were paying attention to G-Eazy to give it to him. Except me. Eazy is a terrible singer. The production is bad, it’s just guitars and synths drowned to shit in reverb to the point that it barely feels present. It feels like he thinks his lyrics sound deeper because he’s singing them instead of rapping them, but if anything it just gives us more time to sit with what he’s saying and realize how stupid it is. Not sure what possessed him to take this career turn, when he was doing just fine churning out a club or radio hit each album cycle, but this was a terrible idea with an ever worse execution. I thought the ‘Where Is My Mind’ interpolating track was the worst, but somehow this one was able to beat it.
Worst Offender: Free Porn Cheap Drugs
Americka - Ricky Bascom
The production throughout this project sounds like if Fisher-Price released a “My First Trap Beat” keyboard. And that could have worked if given to a better artist like Playboi Carti or Charli XCX, someone that could have had fun with it and elevated the songs to new heights. Bascom cannot do that. At all. It often sounds like he’s trying so hard to be a meme, with a bunch of shitty repetitive bars, inconsistent vocal mixing, and just bad everything. In fact, you’re going to have to take my word on how bad this album is because since first hearing it back in February, it looks like it was wiped off the internet and all streaming services. And that’s for the best.
Translation - The Black Eyed Peas
The Black Eyed Peas have struggled to maintain any kind of relevancy since Fergie’s departure after their 2010 album The Beginning. In this attempt to regain the spotlight, the B.E.P. hop onto the trendy reggaetón wave. There’s little to no originality on here, as almost every song samples another hit you’ve probably heard before. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but the samples don’t really change or add anything new to the original source. And sure, the producers and features can make the individual songs sound fine, but listening to the album from start to finish makes it hard to hear anything other than the group screaming “WE FOUND A NEW MARKET TO TAP INTO!”
Worst Offender: RITMO (Bad Boys for Life)
Ok that was fun! Tomorrow we get serious and go through my favorite EPs of 2020. You won’t want to miss this