I think Neil Young's "Weight Of The World" is the most hilarious shit I've listened to this week. The song itself is catchy, but the clunky, dated production, from the cheesy synths to the odd drum machine percussion makes it feel more like a shitpost than an actual song made to be taken seriously.
I'll start: The Human League's Trainwreckord, Crash.
You have an adult contemporary ballad (Human) about cheating with not-really-good lyricism carried by some gorgeous production from Janet Jackson's collaborators, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. It reaches #1 on the Hot 100. And then you buy the album because you love then song and then realize that the whole album is filled with The Human League trying to make late-80s R&B, including a misguided attempt at using AAVE.
In other words, a guilty pleasure. A song that you'd get flack for publicly saying you like it on Reddit because general consensus is that the song is shit.
There are tons of songs I can name on here, but my pick for "everyone hates it, but I love it" is "Shape Of You" by Ed Sheeran. Is it his best song? No. But it certainly doesn't deserve vitriolic reactions thrown at it. I actually kind of like it.
It could be great in your opinion or a song that's very well known, yet wasn't a Top 40 hit.
I'll start: Tiny Dancer by Elton John. Fucking great, and one of Elton's best known songs, but it peaked at #42.
What I mean is an album that was seen as one among the band/artist's best, if not their best, but has suddenly been retconned as a terrible album despite critical reception upon release saying otherwise. Or an album that just had its reception gradually change in general.
Let me do the inverse of this; Pinkerton by Weezer. Basically, Rivers Cuomo's attempt to write deeper, more personal music was critically mixed upon arrival, causing Rivers to take the band in a more sillier, accessible direction, but as time went on, it got perfect ratings from music critic circles and it influenced a bunch of bands that would go on to do bigger things like Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional. Just like the Velvet Underground, Weezer's sophomore album saw mixed reception at the time, but everyone who loved it formed a band.
I'll start: "We Built This City" by Starship.
I'm not saying it'll be better; I think it's a fine song, actually. But it might be better recieved. A bunch of the negative reception comes from people that loved Jefferson Airplane, and to a lesser extent, Jefferson Starship at their peak, seeing their band sell out to the 80s pop machine. If this were done by some other band, I think people might see it as a catchy, innocuous banger rather than the epitome of hardcore selling out.
I'd say the same for Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now, but I don't think even the crowd that hated "We Built This City" would call this the worst song of all time. I don't think it even has the same dogpile reception as that song. I'm pretty sure they saw it as a fine ballad.
The digitized audio is nowhere on YouTube, so this is the best video I could find of this song ("Wings To Fly") existing.
I wouldn't call this an attempt at staying relevant more than I can call it a throwaway soundtrack cut that was never released as a single. But the mix of Giorgio Moroder synthwork (yes, Moroder worked on this track) with the vocals of someone who started off in a British Invasion band and eventually had a legacy in a folk rock supergroup doesn't work well. The song isn't abysmal, but I just wanted to share this song in all its glory.
Before you say anything, his highest-charting single that wasn't "What You Won't Do For Love" peaked at #42.
But what I find interesting is the mythos built around his race. Multiple blue-eyed soul singers like Michael McDonald and Rick Astley have recognizable faces off of multiple factors, but Bobby Caldwell is so faceless that it leads people to believe he's black. People recognize who's singing "What You Won't Do For Love", but not what he looks like. Even if someone didn't think that, they'd see posts about it and believe it. And then when people search him up on the internet, they'd be shocked to find out he's white. In fact, people being shocked that Bobby Caldwell is white might be a whole industry of its own, alongside true crime and Watergate documentaries.
That's not to mention the amount of royalties that he got from sampling despite having only one crossover hit, just like Brenda Russell. Acts like Common, Biggie, Kendrick Lamar, Lil Nas X, A$AP Rocky, and Aaliyah have sampled so much of his music that he didn't need to stave off of nostalgia circuit tours up until he died.
And how can I forget to mention that he wrote "The Next Time I Fall" for Peter Cetera and Amy Grant, a song that Todd loathes dearly?
I saw a post on Twitter that said that .38 Special was essentially a band that dressed and looked like Lynyrd Skynyrd and sounded like The Cars. I don't know the original post, but that's what I remember.
So what are some bands that you can accurately describe just by saying "what if this band had the aesthetics of this band and the sound of this band" or "what if this band and this band had a baby?".
I'll start: Culture Club. They're basically a band that dressed like Duran Duran and sounded like Michael Jackson (more specifically, around the Off The Wall era to the release of Thriller). While their contemporaries were making exciting synth-pop, they primarily made songs that appealed more to the soul and adult contemporary crowd than the youth, who liked bands such as the aformentioned Duran Duran and the Human League.
Obviously not 24kGoldn. "Mood" may have been a lightning-in-a-bottle hit with the way it combined trap instrumentation with guitar driven instrumentals, but he's done that shit way before "Mood" became big.
It's obviously not Momoland either. While they're possibly the only pop group I know to incorporate electro-swing into commercial K-pop, "Baam" was at least a decent hit in South Korea.
So my pick goes to Rednex. "Old Pop In An Oak" essentially sounds like their big hit, "Cotton Eye Joe", but with different lyrics. (Yes, I watched the Todd In The Shadows video on them.)