What is the worst song ever to have gone platinum?
There’s nothing revolutionary in pointing out that commercial success doesn’t equate to quality. We all know that the nature of pop music is such that the singles looked back on with cringe are often propelled to gobsmacking chart heights off the trends and styles of the day, the eager music consumer grabbing at whatever latest Billboard Hot 100 splash as impulsively as a seashell necklace fashion disaster or “Live, Love Laugh” home decor horror destined for future embarrassment.
As certified by the British Phonographic Industry, home to the Brit Awards, the Mercury Prize and partners with the Official Charts Company, a single will win the coveted platinum award by selling 300,000 units, a fairly lenient figure to their American counterparts’ two million threshold. Lots of pop atrocities have won this lofty distinction over the years. Ed Sheeran’s soggy ‘Shape of You’ sold an eye-watering 6,600,000 units and was lavished with an 11x platinum credential. Elsewhere, you’ll find the likes of Black Eyed Peas, Tones and I, Calvin Harris, and OneRepublic clogging up the upper platinum echelons over the years.
This makes it hard to articulate some sort of a definition or standard of “worst”. Obviously, one could sift through the plethora of novelty songs that climbed the charts, but they’re too crassly commercially driven to be considered an egregious offence to music. Then there’s the gloop of coldly corporate EDM or dance-rock that finds itself selling by the millions to score fashy tech bros or dancing IDF soldiers, but its plastic muzak exists in a different universe of serious consideration.
To glean the worst, we have to look back at one skin-crawling terror that burst onto the pop charts under the tricksome guise of authentic, alternative rock during grunge’s heyday.
So, what is the worst song ever to have gone platinum?
Having slogged it around the San Francisco live circuit since the late 1980s, budding songwriter Linda Perry managed to ride the flannel-shirt neo-hippy wave that washed across the American charts in the early 1990s and attract the attention of hotshot label boss Jimmy Iovine and his newly formed Interscope Records to sign her 4 Non Blondes band.
Dropping their sole album in October 1992, Bigger, Better, Faster, More! would worm its way into the rock underground with a deeply grating mulch of funk bass dirge, wincingly earnest vocals, and grunge-lite guitar limp that should have been heading for the bargain bin where it not for the record’s second single.
Dropped five months later, ‘What’s Up?’ stands 4 Non Blondes in permanent infamy, a caterwauling shriek of tantrumy existentialism that breaks the listener out in a panic of sweats and rising blood pressure. It’s bad, bad, bad, God-fucking-awful. Triggering a nightmare of weepy Butlins karaoke or sour wedding discos, Perry’s strangled yodel and derivative grunge slurry irritates to no end, as if her tie-died sleeved arm reaches out the speakers and forces her teen diary lyricism firmly into your face until you develop bruises and welts. It’s punishing, and prayers for its end begin before it’s even half over.
A hideous relic of the early 1990s, but Perry enjoyed the last laugh, working in the music industry as a songwriter for hire and writing massive hits for other artists, including Christina Aguilera’s ‘Beautiful’ and P!nk’s ‘Get the Party Started’.
