I never cared for One Direction. I don’t care for boy bands as a unit. I rarely care when their members pursue solo careers. And if Zayn Malik’s bland attempt at R&B was any indication, I shouldn’t have been able to deviate from that. What I did not expect was that Harry Styles had raided his dad’s vinyl collection and decided to make rock music. And I mean classic rock sounding music, like the stuff of the ‘70s. More than that, rock music that sounds nothing like what goes on in the head of a pop star. Instead, this sounds apocalyptic. It sounds dark, like the tone of a man on the ledge ready to jump, yet it’s cleverly coated by a shiny, somewhat upbeat thing of instrumentation. If this is the direction Harry Styles has chosen to go, I await further music from him with open ears.

One day, Kristoffer Rygg will stop surprising me. This, is not that day. Ulver quietly came back with a new album, where as usual they threw everyone for a loop by, in the year of our Lord twenty-seventeen, making new wave. And only Ulver could have made a new wave album that didn’t sound dated as all hell. “Nemoralia” sounds immense, poetic, and (strangely uncharacteristic of Ulver) catchy as all hell. I can honestly go back to listening to this pretty casually, which is very weird for an Ulver song. Whether or not this is a positive or negative development in the band I think only time will tell, but I’m glad that such a curve ball came out this year.

Despite thoroughly ramming Kendrick’s head into a pole as a critic this year, he didn’t totally disappoint. The first peep we got out of him musically was easily his best joint all year, and demonstrated just why I and many others fell in love with his work – The man is a prodigy (no pun intended) on the mic. Kendrick has amazing rhyme schemes, uses multiple flows and beats, and even openly throws out bars that would’ve been top tier in the minds of a lot of people, many of which are on the radio right now. It’s just a shame that this ultimately wasn’t indicative of his new album in any way, because this just demonstrates why people call Kendrick the heir apparent to ‘Pac.

When I think of Missy Elliot, I think of a big, bombastic, colorful rapper with fun flows and an ear for dope beats. What I do not think of is boring paint-by-numbers sounding beatwork, a druggy sounding featured guest on the hook, and an emcee who cannot seem to do anything except imitate the boring flow of mumble rappers (albeit more intelligibly). The name Missy Elliot, next to Busta Rhymes, is synonymous with bright, flashy songs. It’s a given that when Missy spits you’re going to get pumped, a bonafide banger is about to hit your ears not… good God whatever this sleep-inducing dreck is. Missy kept a relatively low profile musically this year, and thankfully this song never got airplay so my coming across it was pure chance. Hopefully whatever this is a lead-up to is way more animated and interesting.

Despite being the worst song of the year, this is going to be much shorter than most of the other songs on this list because I have already discussed in length why DAMN. is a garbage album.. It was, without question, the worst album I heard all year. It may in fact have been among the worst albums of the decade in my opinion. “YAH.” is the perfect microcosm of everything wrong with it. It is repugnant in it’s message, the flow is boring, the beat sucks, Kid Capri is completely wasted, and most notably, Kendrick does understand what ethnicity is. I say this because he felt the need to say:

I’m a Israelite, don’t call me black no more. That word is only a color, it ain’t facts no more.

First, racial colorblindness is an aid to white supremacy. Second, black Jews are a thing. I didn’t think I needed to say that to Kendrick Lamar of all people because he has on more than one occasion collaborated with a black Jew, but apparently that’s a thing. And further to the point black Israelis exist. These two things are not opposed. It requires Kendrick to either reject blackness or erase Jews to think that it is. And ordinarily I would not feel the need to lecture Kendrick of all people on this subject, primarily because his last album dealt very explicitly with the experience of Black America, but holy God what part of you heard that line and thought it was acceptable? Kendrick, for all that is holy, never say anything this fucking uninformed again, and never let there be a year where I have to put you above Taylor Swift for “Worst” in any category.

With the MeToo movement and the general rise of feminism throughout these last few years, some of you may have heard the term “white feminism”. It’s a term that is used to denote racism within the feminist movement, specifically a mixture of anti-sexism and white victimhood. If this sounds like white nationalism mixed with feminism, it’s because it largely manifests that way, to one degree or another. I bring this up because Taylor Swift is the epitome of it. “Look What You Made Me Do” is an unpleasant, ignorant, and historically revisionist song, made even worse by it’s dreary beat lifted straight from ‘80s dance music. It paints Taylor simultaneously as victim and cut-throat. It attempts to make Taylor look like a poor, helpless individual when in fact she’s a socially and economically privileged white woman who has been able to bully people at every turn, and the last time this narrative was true was almost a decade ago.

Perhaps most deceitful is that line we all made memes of at one point or another “The old Taylor can’t come to phone right now. Why? Because she’s dead”. The trouble with this is that this is patently untrue. Taylor never stopped being a cut-throat with a victim complex. She’s just made it far more open, because her sweet country girl persona went away. Katy Perry, Kanye West, and others did nothing to make provoke her. She just realized that the only way for her to be remotely relevant after throwing a faux-feminist temper tantrum was to attempt to rework her image – except that this was already her image. The result is an ugly, self-indulgent act in redundancy that has thankfully died off the airwaves at the time of writing (at least in my neck of the woods).

For the past couple of years, I have politely declined to make any serious declaration on modern hip-hop. That ends now, because it’s technical deterioration has officially gone too far. Now, to be clear, one can totally like a rapper for their beat selection. One can like the way a rapper sounds. One can enjoy this thing or that thing about a rapper. However, what will ultimately matter to critics such as myself above all is the technical aspect. And on a technical standpoint, Lil Pump is the most incompetent rapper alive, tied only by Desiigner. Gucci Gang is the pinnacle of everything wrong with modern hip-hop on the airwaves. Hive-minded, uncreative, murky, unexciting, thoughtless, dull, bullshit. The apologists will of course argue that it’s just turn-up music. To that I say two things – Firstly, I have been wasted before.

To put this on during that process would be a waste of my time, and a waste of the money I used for the liquor, which was ultimately wasted on this. Secondly, there is much better turn-up music (see anything made by Hov, ‘Ye, Pitbull, Nicki Minaj, Juicy J, or Tha Alkaholiks). Mainly because those songs are competent enough to not have a verse where a hook should be, and because those songs are not generally product placement. And that is what this is at the end of the day – Product placement. This must be advertising. No one else would bother to look at something as abundant and overexposed as the Gucci line and feel the honest need as a human being to declare themselves so loyal to it. No, this is either product placement or just patent nonsense.

Lil Pump says nothing new, either in subject matter or delivery. He is quite frankly just the latest in the factory-line assembled rollout of modern hip-hop that is so alienating I’m surprised it gets radio play. And to be entirely clear, I do not require a deep message (what I chose for the worst song of the year should prove as much). What I do require is some basic creative ability in a trade that demands such. Lil Pump is a garbage fire, and Gucci is overpriced shit.

I genuinely missed Fetty Wap. I know that’s strange because I’m an admitted elitist, but Fetty Wap was fun and quite a positive character. Then this song caught my ear and reminded me that I filed Fetty Wap into the same category as Lil Yachty and Uzi Vert – Wonderful person, shit-tier music. This is not helped by DJ Envy, who’s presence is so minuscule as to be forgettable, and DJ Slink who is quite frankly wasted here, since this beat is actually pretty great. Then we get to Fetty Wap, who has somehow lost the kind of energy and spark that made him likable in the first place, unable to hold the most basic of narratives in a song (trapped between bragging about money and quasi-flirting), he says the most ridiculous thing I think I may have ever heard – “Text Your Number”. I feel the need to say this now, but it tends to hold true that to text someone, you have their phone number already. And that is really all I should say. That and the lyric video for this is a gigantic example of what not to-do with motion graphics.

Before you ask, yes, it is about that line. Antisemitism is antisemitism, and in a year where the fucking Nazis are roaming around, it is the most irresponsible thing one can do. So let’s get to the meat of the issue – First, Jay knows this is bullshit. He knows this because he is of the American bourgeoisie. He knows this is an economic myth. He chose to say it anyway, on an album that had immense amounts of hype, that millions of people, probably not nearly as informed on antisemitic dogwhistles, would hear. Jay’s defense of this line is fundamentally bullshit, mainly on the grounds that reclaiming slurs and imagery is not tantamount to allowance to spread racist myths. Anyway, while I’m ripping into Jay, I’m also going to link this video wherein Boots Riley of The Coup talks about the link between capitalism and racism, because I am frankly sick of the liberal notion that Jay spreading the idea of “Black capitalism” is woke. (Capitalism is white supremacist folks, I need you to grasp this.)

Chris Brown is a horrible human being and he should not be rehabilitated by society at large. That has nothing to do with the rest of this, I just felt it really needed to be said because as a person he hasn’t much changed and someone decided making a biopic of a 2nd-rate Usher Raymond was a good use of time. Anyway, Chris Brown is middle of the road insofar as R&B has ever been concerned. I would wager that if not for his vicious assault of a woman, he’d probably have been (rightly) forgotten. Yet here we are – post-legal trouble Chris Brown has tried for years to shape himself into a bad boy, a much edgier, and more explicit artist. The core problem with this, besides the existence of The Weeknd, who can actually convey that kind of person, is that he’s bad at it.

“Privacy” is generally uncomfortable throughout. Starting with Breezy’s terrible attempt at a Jamaican accent that makes Drake look good by comparison (in which he demands a woman get in bed with him, charming), says in an exceedingly explicit song the term “private parts” like a fucking fifth grader to scared the word “vagina” or “pussy”, and honestly wants a girl to “suck [his] dick with ice”. That last one, by the way, is the main reason this song stuck in my head – because either Chris Brown does not understand that you can’t keep a hard-on when it’s cold, or he has the most specific fetish in the world regarding jewelry & a blowjob. Either way that’s ridiculous. All made worse, by the way, when you consider that he has the flow of a lawnmower that won’t start properly.