A decade of writing about music teaches you a lot of things. You learn to separate “not for me” from “genuinely problematic.” You learn that taste is personal, charts are strange, and that some songs earn their backlash honestly. Most bad songs fade. Listeners forget them by the next release cycle, and critics move on to the next outrage. But then there are a handful of tracks that stick around in the memory for all the wrong reasons, not because they were controversial in an interesting way, but because they crossed clear lines in craft, ethics, or basic human decency.
These eight songs are the ones that still come up in conversations about where popular music lost the plot. Some caused immediate firestorms. Others crept under the radar before critics finally caught up. What they share is a kind of lasting bad-taste energy that time hasn’t softened one bit.
1. “Literally I Can’t” – Play-N-Skillz feat. Redfoo, Lil Jon & Enertia McFly (2014)
“Literally I Can’t” by production duo Play-N-Skillz featured Redfoo, Lil Jon, and Enertia McFly, and the song was received negatively by critics, with the artists and the video also accused of being misogynistic. Complex called the song “everything wrong with EDM,” describing its production as “predictable electro house for the chorus that leads into a generic, bouncy trap beat during the verses,” and found the concept “so one-note” that the only apparent solution was to tell women to shut up and get drunk.
In 2015, Billboard ranked the song first on their list of “The 10 Worst Songs of the 2010s (So Far).” In the video, the women refuse any offer to dance or drink with “literally I can’t,” with the men telling them to “shut the fuck up” in response, and as the video progresses, most women from the group “succumb to Redfoo’s boozy proposal” until only the sorority president is left. The video was criticized by several media outlets as misogynistic soon after its release. Redfoo called it satire. Critics, and a Change.org petition demanding consequences for his role on X Factor Australia, largely disagreed.
2. “Stimulated” – Tyga (2015)
Ebony called “Stimulated” “the worst song anyone has ever created,” citing the track’s lyrics being about rapper Tyga engaging in sex with an underage girl. Many publications took issue with specific lines in the track and also noted that the song samples “Children” by Robert Miles. The combination of the subject matter and the sample choice struck critics as either oblivious or deliberately provocative, with neither reading reflecting well on the artist.
The song arrived at a moment when Tyga’s relationship with a then-minor was already drawing significant public scrutiny. Releasing a track that appeared to directly reference and even celebrate that situation was widely considered a serious lapse in judgment. It wasn’t edgy. It was, by most critical accounts, simply indefensible.
3. “Carnival” – Kanye West & Ty Dolla $ign feat. Rich the Kid & Playboi Carti (2024)
Released as a major single off the Vultures 1 album, the track wasn’t necessarily outright trash by conventional standards, but critics found it bewildering that it achieved the popularity it did, considering how grating its group chorus was. The track reinforced the argument that as long as something is packaged as coming from Kanye, audiences will engage with it regardless of its actual musical merit.
The song’s problems were not purely musical. By the time Vultures 1 dropped, Kanye’s public persona had become so entangled with genuinely harmful rhetoric that separating the art from the artist felt nearly impossible for many listeners. Critics pointed out that it was further evidence of how creatively bankrupt the industry had become, with major labels regularly offering rehashed ideas rather than genuinely new ones.
4. “Woman’s World” – Katy Perry (2024)
Laura Snapes of The Guardian gave “Woman’s World” one star out of five, lambasting it as “garbage,” while Shaad D’Souza of Pitchfork called the track “unfathomably tepid.” Alim Kheraj of Dazed felt the song was reductive and creatively bankrupt. Variety also included “Woman’s World” on their Worst Songs of 2024 list. Almost every major outlet took a swing at it, and none landed softly.
Critics pointed out the irony of “Woman’s World,” which Perry branded as an ode to female empowerment, being produced and written by a team of mostly men, with a male director helming its music video. Fans further criticized Perry’s collaboration with Dr. Luke, the producer Kesha accused of sexually and emotionally abusing her, making the supposed female-empowerment anthem even more difficult to defend. Perry later said the video was meant as satire, but her explanation failed to convince music critics, who believed the quick release of behind-the-scenes footage showed she had been anticipating an unfavorable response all along.
5. “Big Foot” – Nicki Minaj (2024)
Nicki Minaj’s “Big Foot” emerged as a diss track pointing a mocking finger at Megan Thee Stallion’s shooting injury. The decision to reference a real and traumatic shooting incident as an attack vector in a rap beef struck critics and fans alike as a clear crossing of lines, not just bad taste but something closer to cruelty.
The track makes no good hard-hitting points for the entirety of its run-time, and the whole end of the song is taken up by a whispery series of ASMR threats that Nicki didn’t even follow through on after the beef transpired. It was such an awful, ineffective diss track that Megan didn’t truly bother to respond in any formal or expanded way. The song was so off-target that not even Nicki’s core fanbase was defending it.
6. “Karma” – JoJo Siwa (2024)
JoJo Siwa, the Nickelodeon alum, tried hard to shed her image as a childhood star by experimenting with a variety of things all at once, hoping something would stick. Unfortunately, it seemed nothing did, and her lead single “Karma” from her EP Guilty Pleasure didn’t help in her reinvention and was critically panned.
The song didn’t help in her reinvention and was critically panned. On her YouTube page, the comments were equally harsh, with viewers reporting they experienced secondhand embarrassment watching the video. The rebrand raised real questions about authenticity in pop music. Reinvention is a legitimate artistic move, but it works better when the new version feels genuine rather than assembled from trend reports.
7. “WW3” – Ye (2025)
The worst songs of 2025 included AI-generated slop, corny rap failures, MAGA worship, and songs critics described as the final boss of co-worker music. Rising above all of that in pure bad-taste terms was Ye’s “WW3.” Paste Magazine described it as “easily one of the ugliest and dumbest songs” their critics had heard in a long time.
Lyrically, the track plays like a Twitter spiral with a half-hearted beat underneath it, including custody complaints, Trump name-drops, and provocative imagery, all delivered with the confidence of a man who thinks saying something outrageous automatically makes it meaningful. Ye’s “WW3” topped multiple worst-of-year lists, and critics paired it with other releases from the same period as part of what they described as a one-two punch of some of the worst music in recent memory.
8. “Ordinary” – Alex Warren (2025)
Sonically, the song was described as stodgy and colorless, and critics were blunt in their assessments of Warren’s vocal abilities, while the lyrics, with their somewhat churchy undertones, were called uninspired and off-putting. In the UK, “Ordinary” became the longest-running number one hit single of the decade so far as of 2025. That fact alone seemed to unsettle critics more than any argument they could construct about its quality.
Critics noted that a song literally called “Ordinary” becoming the song of the summer was particularly troubling, especially because there was so little to say about it. The most plausible explanation offered was that people treated it as sound rather than music, something consumed passively on TikTok or in the background of daily life without most listeners even fully registering that it was there. That might be the most damning verdict of all: a song so empty that it succeeds precisely because nobody is actually paying attention to it.
What connects most of these tracks isn’t pure musical incompetence. It’s something harder to name: a gap between ambition and self-awareness. Some of these artists swung for empowerment and landed on hypocrisy. Others reached for edge and hit cruelty. A few simply released work so hollow that its popularity became its own kind of indictment. Bad taste in music isn’t always about wrong notes. Sometimes it’s about knowing exactly what you’re doing and doing it anyway.
