I don’t think a lot of people are going to agree with me on this pick.

The first reason is obvious: it’s by a musical act that doesn’t receive the same level of criticism as Five Finger Death Punch, Theory Of A Deadman, or AJR.  In fact, the artist with the worst rock/alternative song of the year is a relative newcomer who just put out his first album, and hasn’t quite garnered a reputation for being good, average, or bad yet.  But the main reason is because this song doesn’t fit the usual mood that a horrendous song puts you in.

Some songs, like Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park,” Donny and Marie’s “Morning Side Of the Mountain,” David Banner’s “Play,” and Hinder’s “Better Than Me,” are terrible because they make you inconsolably upset.  Just hearing them makes your day that much worse, and it becomes excruciating just waiting for that final note to play.  Other songs, like Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” Soulja Boy Tell’Em’s “Crank That,” and 20 Fingers’ “Short D**k Man,” are so bad for the exact opposite reason.  Their mistakes are so obvious and baffling that they are impossible to listen to without laughing.  Finally, there are songs, like “Feelings” by Morris Albert, “Bad Religion” by Godsmack, or “Girls Like You” by Maroon 5, that are bad because of their tremendous lack of effort, as if the artist didn’t even try to make a good song.

Is this song anger-inducing?  Not really.  Is this song unintentionally hilarious?  Nope; there are no unbelievably bad lyrics or bad American Idol contestant-esque singing to speak of.  Does this song have a lack of effort?  I don’t think so.  I legitimately think this artist tried to create the atmosphere and mood he wanted to replicate for the song.  The reason this song beat out everything else for the number one slot is different.  

Listening to this song was outright shocking.

I first heard this song one evening, driving home from getting groceries at my local supermarket.  When I heard the song unfold, I was in shock.  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and yet I couldn’t change the song, because listening to all the bad aspects of this song was like watching a train with many oil cars crash and explode.  It was then that I realized, “is this the worst song of the year?”  Because it’s unfair to make such a judgement so early on, especially before I had even begun to listen to the Mainstream Rock list, I listened to it and the other songs on this list several more times.  But each time I re-listened to this song, the gasping returned, and my jaw dropped and never returned to its natural position.  And thus, my opinion never changed, and I got here.

Drum roll please.  The number one worst song on the rock and alternative charts in 2020 is…

“Cradles” – Sub Urban

Alternative
#1 peak (1 week, March 28, 2020)
#23 year-end

Before we start discussing why this is the worst song of the year in my opinion, we need to discuss how this song got big.

Sub Urban is the alter-ego of Daniel Maisonneuve, a 21 year old up and comer from downstate New York.  After releasing his first single in 2017, Sub Urban dropped “Cradles” in early 2019.  After the release of the song’s music video in October 2019, the song slowly climbed the Alternative charts, snatching the #1 slot in March for a single week.  How did it get this far?  Simple.  TikTok.

Much ado has been made about TikTok and its massive influence on music as a whole today.  Ever since the titanic success of some song called “Old Town Road,” fans, Stans, and everyone in between have been clamoring the site for the next big thing.  And that’s where “Cradles” comes in.  Fans on TikTok created a Fortnite-inspired dance to the song’s drop, which consists of doing kicks in a circle or some stuff like that (I’m so behind on TikTok Dances 101), and the song’s popularity exploded.  When researching the song, the first link I opened up regarding the song on TikTok’s website listed 889,800 videos relating to the song.  And there are, for some reason, other independent searches that list more thousands of videos for “Cradles.”  OVER A MILLION PEOPLE HAVE MADE VIDEOS TO THIS.  

I feel like such a geezer when I have to study TikTok and its influence on popular music.  I’ve been behind the times in pop music for a long time now, since 2012 at least.  But the least I can say about TikTok is… it’s at least better than the other niche media we had in the past that made songs popular.  “Old Town Road” was a good song, and it’s great to see “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac being exposed to a new generation who don’t understand the greatness of Rumours.  So TikTok has been better for music than ringtones or Vine were.  The main problem I have right now with TikTok, and other social media sites, is how songs have been getting popularity for dances and Stans and other random phenomena surrounding the song rather than the music itself.

That’s why we’re here, discussing this at the number one entry.  Before people get on me regarding this pick, let me state that I know what this song is trying to convey.  It’s trying to present a nightmare, in musical form.  The lyrics are discussing how Sub Urban’s character revels in this apocalyptic scenario and how he doesn’t care if he has to live like a child because of it.  The intent is not why this song is here.  It is because of the execution.

“Cradles” is a perfect storm of bad musical decisions over three and a half minutes.

Sometimes the worst songs are not the songs that are bad all the way through, but the songs that show promise before descending into full-on garbage.  And this song starts off promising.  “Cradles” kicks off with an arpeggiated sequence on electric guitar that succeeds in providing an effective opener that hooks the listener in before the lyrics begin.  At the point I first heard this riff, I was intrigued.  What were we going to get?  A song that slowly built up to a powerful, awesome chorus?  A sprawling, sweeping epic?  Heck, being me, I was hoping for that powerful rock song I’ve so desperately wanted for over a decade now.

My optimism lasted for approximately 11 seconds.  At this point, the percussion and vocals come in and starts drowning out the guitar, which gets further thrown off course by a stop-start effect that comes out of nowhere and disrupts the overall rhythm of the track.  Just after the halfway point, the guitar playing the opening riff is completely gone from the track.  The guitar playing the opening riff is the best thing about this song and it is treated like an outcast after the intro.  Sub Urban had a good thing going, and he smashed it Pete Townsend style before throwing it into a dumpster fire.

This highlights another key problem with the song: it is produced and mixed horribly.  “Cradles” is yet another song that demonstrates what I believe is one of the biggest problems in music today.  Real instruments are thrown to the wayside while the most artificial and programming-manipulated instruments take center stage.  Aside from the guitar being covered up, brief samples of strings are included – but they’re just for a few seconds while the synths and electronic elements are allowed to overtake everything.  And there are more awful-sounding synths we will get into.  Furthermore, it’s a key lesson in music for any genre: the percussion should not be the dominant instrument unless you’re doing a drum solo.  Because of how loud the percussion is in the first two verses, it’s hard to follow what’s going on musically.

And then we get to the drop.  Oh my God, the drop.

The drop consists of a tremolo synth repeating the opening riff I discussed at the beginning of the song.  Only that it’s 500,000 times worse than it was when it was being played on guitar.  First off, the tremolo effect is too fast.  This makes it really distracting and doesn’t allow you focus on the melody.  Furthermore, the high-pitched sound from the synths, intended to resemble a xylophone, becomes excruciating on the first note.  The end result is a horrific abomination of cluttered synths and trap beats that is annoying at best, and outright unlistenable on most days.  This sequence of badly mixed synths, is, simply put, the worst musical moment of 2020.  And it gets played three different times in the song.  THREE.  THERE ARE THREE DROPS WITH THIS OBNOXIOUS SEQUENCE.  The final time, the notes are changed up and it pretty much loses all melody it had.  Keep in mind – the opening guitar riff was not allowed to stay in the song, but this drop was.

The few lyrics here may not necessarily be bad, but they suffer from massively bad timing.  Just before the drop, Sub Urban tells us to “hush.”  BUT HOW?!  How can we hush when the part we need to be quiet for is the most obnoxious part of the song?  Adding to that is Sub Urban telling us to “Shh.”  No, I am not going to listen to you, Sub Urban!  Not when you tell me to be quiet to your musical filth!  

And this is the part of the song that people dance to on TikTok.  I have officially not understood a dance craze less since people danced to the noise that was the “Every day I’m shuff-a-lin’” breakdown in “Party Rock Anthem.”  HOW CAN YOU PEOPLE DANCE TO THIS?!  THIS IS ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE MUSIC!  HOW CAN THIS BE SO POPULAR?! AAAAAAUUUUUGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!

(One hour later, after I have calmed down from setting my back shed on fire)

(long sigh) Okay.  That was a bit immature.  Sorry about that.  

Honestly though, people.  If I was Todd in the Shadows or Anthony Fantano and had a video camera, I wouldn’t be describing this drop so much in detail.  My reaction would just be to play the drop and stare at the camera, slack-jawed in shock.

This drop alone would possibly be enough to top the list.  But the awfulness continues in the third verse.  As if the badly mixed music from the first two verses wasn’t bad enough, in comes a loud, obnoxious synth that dominates the instrumentation with no sense of direction, or worse, melody.  It’s literally noise.  And then the second half of the verse randomly features  this drum and bass percussion pattern after being trap for much of the song… why?  What about the instrumentation inspires you to put in a drum and bass track?  And it only lasts for ten seconds, so just as we start considering why it’s here, it’s gone.

I could go on.  Like how the song just kinda stops at the end, without giving you a satisfying conclusion.  Or how the B flat-F-G flat-D flat chord progression never changes throughout the song, making it surprisingly dull.  But you get the point by now.  You may consider this song a perfect encapsulation of a nightmare.  But for me, this is a nightmare for a different reason that Sub Urban intended.  This is a special kind of bad – the bad that just keeps getting inconceivably worse the more you listen to it.  Just when you can’t think the music could get any worse, it gets worse.  From the poorly mixed verses, to the drop, to the third verse, to the third drop.

And now for why this beat out the obvious suspects.  Say what you will about Five Finger Death Punch, Theory Of A Deadman, and even AJR… I wasn’t disappointed by them.  While “Inside Out,” “World Keeps Spinning,” and “Bang!” were bad, all three of these acts have done worse.  Five Finger Death Punch have “Boots and Blood,” “Fake,” and “Sham Pain.”  Theory have “Hate My Life,” “Little Smirk,” and “B***h Came Back.”  AJR have “No Grass Today” and “Netflix Trip.”  All of these songs are worse than the ones they released on the charts this year.  While their songs this year were all bad, I expected them to be bad and that’s what I got.  I didn’t expect “Cradles” to be so bad.  Even as the first song I heard from Sub Urban, I know as a fact he’s got a hard act to top to make a worse song, to make something more jarring in its failure.  

This may be a controversial pick, but It’s the song that offended me the most and I’m not sure if that is going to change.  “Cradles” by Sub Urban is the worst song of the year on the rock and alternative charts.

SOURCES

Daly, Rhian.  “Sub Urban is the TikTok-Conquering Star Making Horror-Infused, Macabre Pop.”  NME 15 April 2020.  Web.  1 January 2021.

IMAGE SOURCES

“Cradles” single cover from Alternative Press

Image of people doing the “Cradles” TikTok challenge from YouTube

Image of Anger from The Guardian