What was the worst song of 2023?
Picking the best song of 2023 is a tricky prospect. This year delivered so much talent, with new artists coming out of the woodwork to dominate or old artists returning from retirement. Hell, even The Beatles put in a contender for track of the year. But with all the good came a whole lot of bad. So, if picking the best song is difficult, rifling through the bottom of the barrel to pick the worst feels even harder.
It was certainly a less enjoyable process than the ‘Best Of‘ list. Sitting down to listen to a year’s worth of TikTok viral hits designed to keep your attention for only 15 seconds is brain-rot-inducing. Over on the top 40, the same five artists seem to have music in a chokehold of cookie-cutter regurgitations.
There were some standouts in the competition for the worst song. Mae Muller’s failed Eurovision entry ‘I Wrote A Song’ should be unwritten. The Lathums ‘Struggle’ sounds like the result of asking an AI generation to create a dusty, boring indie track. Fall Out Boy’s 2023 version of ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ is too horrific for words. Dermot Kennedy, Tom Grennan and Tom Walker feel like mass-produced clones selling watered-down emotion to the masses. That’s just to name a few.
But no one offended quite as much as David Guetta. 2023 saw the producer enact an absolute reign of terror on music. He was prolific in it, releasing over 20 tracks this year alone. It seems no one can make him stop.
They’re all pretty terrible, but none more so than ‘I’m Good (Blue)’, featuring pop and dance vocalist Bebe Rexha. Hit play and listeners are met with the familiar piano of Eiffel 65’s ‘I’m Blue’, a song that wasn’t good in 1998 and still isn’t good now.
Rewriting the lyrics of the annoying kids’ song, the classic lyrics of “I’m blue (Da ba dee da ba di)” have been through the girlboss industrial machine. Instead, Rexha sings, “I’m good, yeah, I’m feelin’ alright / Baby, I’ma have the best fuckin’ night of my life,” which is about as equally poetic as the original nonsense.
Earbleedingly upbeat and optimistic, it’s the audio equivalent of that scene in A Clockwork Orange in which Alex’s eyes are pinned open; instead, we’re being forced to appreciate scenes of fake joy and summer fun.
Seemingly on a mission to revive 1990s club classics in the worst way possible, David Guetta didn’t stop there. In 2023, he also reworked Haddaway’s 1993 track ‘What Is Love’ into ‘Baby Don’t Hurt Me’ featuring Anne-Marie. He also managed to ruin one of his only good songs as the 2009 hit ‘When Love Takes Over’ featuring Kelly Rowland gets an infinitely uglier makeover in 2023 on ‘One In A Million’.
Maybe David Guetta is having some kind of midlife crisis and desperately attempting to make himself and his glory days cool again, but redoing already bad ‘90s club hits into worse packages isn’t the way to do it.
It’s a fascinating pattern as the trend of reviving old sounds into new songs seems to have come full circle or caught up with itself. As producers seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel or even coming so close to modern times that they’re redoing tracks from 2009, maybe they should simply figure out some way to make actual new music.
We pray his reign of terror might end in 2024, but either way, we plan to maintain our blissful ignorance and stick to the good stuff.
