When Records Aren’t Just Irksome, But Annoying

I really didn’t like the trap pop that made the second half of the decade such tough sledding for CHR: busy midtempo-to-slow songs that were sonically aggressive, but not much fun. For a while, it seemed like there was nothing else. I looked forward to each new name-artist release, and each time it was a 79bpm song that began with a squeaky, chopped-up vocal.

I was long out of the CHR demo, so I would have happily conceded that Top 40 just wasn’t for me anymore if this was a sound people loved. But Top 40’s ratings were plummeting in that era, so I wasn’t willing to attribute it to being merely out of touch. 

The bottoming out moment for me might have been “Never Be the Same” by Camila Cabello. I like her as an artist. I loved “Havana,” in part because it was uptempo (enough) and broke up the monotony of the format. This one progressed even more glacially than every similarly sludgy song out there, punctuated by yet another sampled yelp. 

I’ve never really liked “your love is like heroin addiction” as a metaphor, and somebody has a hit with it at least once a decade, from “Hooked on a Feeling” to “Your Love is My Drug.” But Cabello singing about “hero-ween” was an extra provocation. So was the deliberate top-of-her-range squeakiness of the vocal. 

I didn’t just dislike “Never Be the Same.” I found it annoying. I had a hard time sitting through it even if I had made a specific choice to listen to whatever station was playing it, particularly while working. The only other record that had quite bothered me the same way was “Don’t Let Me Down” by the Chainsmokers & Daya, which had all the things I disliked plus the grating repetition.

But it’s hard to know what will trigger other people the same way. I love “It Takes Two” by Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock. It is funny and audacious. It was playing everywhere in New York shortly after I moved back in 1988. Two close friends helped make it. I mentioned it in another column this week and was surprised when ROR editor Ken Barnes described it as a least favorite record because of the yelp that punctuates it. 

I’d never even thought about that yelp as an annoyance. On the other hand, the similar sample in “Jump Around” by House of Pain was harder to ignore. When it was a hit, if it came on in public, the person next to me might comment on if it. Barnes didn’t like that one either, although it bothered him less than “It Takes Two.” Also, he disliked “It Takes Two” for the yelp alone, there was nothing else that bugged him about it.

If you do already dislike a song, however, there are certain provocations that can push you over the edge. If you don’t like “Don’t Bring Me Down” by Electric Light Orchestra, whatever the hell they’re trilling on the bridge (Bruce? The made-up word “groose” that they claimed?) makes it unbearable. I like “Don’t Bring Me Down.” The bridge isn’t my favorite part, but it’s not a stopper either.

I asked Ross on Radio readers about the songs they found annoying — not just songs they didn’t like, but those with sonic elements, and there was usually some combination of the following:

The artist’s voice: Andrea Dresdale is still irked by the controversial-at-the-time “Dance Monkey” by Tones & I, citing the “tone of her voice,” and Keith Naftaly adds “times one zillion.” Ben Reed mentions not just the long-provocative upper register of Mariah Carey but also the “breathiness” of Billie Eilish. Guy Aoki specifically goes for the squeakiness of Carey’s “We Belong Together.”  

Mannered pronunciations/phrasing: Shania Twain is no “hero-ween” to Tony Pizza, who doesn’t like the stretched out “long lonely nights” on “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” Jeanne Ashley bemoans “cursive singing”—e.g., Tate McRae’s “you bwoke me forst” or Lewis Capaldi’s “fell bouy the woysoid.” Mike Watermann cites the falsetto on John Legend’s “All of Me.”

The artist went pop: “There are so many plosives at the beginning of ‘I Will Always Love You’ by Whitney Houston that even as somebody who wasn’t into audio yet, I was bothered by it,” says Michael Erickson. “The sibilance on ‘Should’ve Known Better’ by Richard Marx was painful,” says Dave Stewart, who notes that it sounds better with radio processing.

Repetition: Personally, I’m happy that Bill Withers’s “Lovely Day” has become more of a modern-day standard than it was in 1977, but I do hear complaints about the extended coda, including Tim Lethlean, who says, “I’d cringe when it came on at the grocery store I worked at in high school and college.” Eventually, repetition in songs became far more aggressive (again, see “Dance Monkey”).

Attention Getting Intros: For J.J. Dulling, it’s still the “ooga-chaka” opening of Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling.” Marty Glenn Siegel cites the first 25 seconds of “Wild Boys” by Duran Duran. Ken Bays feels the same way about the way the opening of their “The Reflex” flex-flex-flex-flex-flexes.

Some other sonic element: Tom Mitchell mentions the “repetitive set of tones” in MGMT’s “Kids,” but even the “deranged fiddles” of “Come On Eileen” bother Mike Weithorn. Richie Bing is bothered by a squeaking sound in “Counting Stars” by One Republic, first heard about 25-30 seconds in, he says. “Anything with Autotune released after ‘Believe,’” says Don Bleisse. “Wishing Well” by Terence Trent D’arby “is a great song, until the whistles” says Dave Solomon.

Tony Waitekus “never liked records that sampled other records by including pops, clicks and scratching sounds from a beat-up record. Even more silly, I’m guess many of those pops, clicks and scratching sounds were put there intentionally,” he adds.

Silvio Pietroluongo mentions the birds from Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You,” which used to be a common complaint. But he also doesn’t like the sampled baby cries of Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?” William B. Radley and Leigh McNabb agree. In general, though, the most memorable (for better or worse) punctuations are like “the high pitched noise in Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ that makes me hate it,” per John Moug.

Some combination of the above: Chris Duffy didn’t like either the “frantic synth” of Human League’s “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” or the “semi-drunken ‘hey heeeeyyy hey hey,” although “naturally, I adore it now.” J.J. Duling still doesn’t like “the effing effect of the record being pressed off-center.” 

The guitar solo: “Apart from the fact that it ruined two perfectly good songs, the guitar solo in [Kid Rock’s] ‘All Summer Long’ is in a completely different key,” says Creighton Walker. Aoki felt the same way about the “screeching, seemingly distorted” guitar in John Lennon’s cover of “Stand By Me,” but “I love it now.” For Cassie Wilson, it’s Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra” where the “discordant guitar just grates on me.”

Overprocessed: Reed cites Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive,” which like many recently produced hits is “clipped to the max” to the point where “the whole song sounds dirty.” Bill Schultz cites a non-hit (James Bay’s “Pink Lemonade”) whose “deliberately distorted/overmodulated sound” was “emulated stylistically” by bigger hits from Harry Styles and Benson Boone.

But engineering complaints go back to Dave Stewart and Paul Ciliano flagging “the wide-band compression” on the Raspberries’ “Go All the Way.” Keith Mitchell cites the aggressive overall feel of “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” by Dead Or Alive, which is shared by some of the most enduring hits of the ’80s–particularly Billy Idol’s hits and the meant-for-Idol “[Don’t You] Forget About Me.”

General Noisiness: Peter King mentions Gary U.S. Bonds’s “Quarter to Three,” with its famously crude production. “It sounds like it was recorded with the mics in a zip-loc bag covered by paper and a pillowcase.” Vinnie Marino mentions the Rolling Stones’ “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby (Standing in the Shadows)” for similar reasons.

There are also songs that are overly kinetic. Scott Holt cites “Rockafella Skank” by Fatboy Slim. Tom Lawler doesn’t like the pumping rhythm of Capitol Cities’ “Safe and Sound.” Many years ago, it was common for PDs and MDs to describe a record they didn’t like as “too busy.” I don’t know if any label person has heard that complaint recently, but a lot of the irritations detailed above make their songs feel sonically overstuffed. For “Never Be the Same,” it was the sum total of the affectations in a song I was already disinclined to.

Some of the songs readers find annoying are ones that I’ve been hearing about for years—“Lovin’ You,” “Hooked on a Feeling,” etc. Other provocations have faded with time. “Dance Monkey” still rankles, even though it didn’t create a career for Tones and I. But readers and research respondents have long gotten past any initial reservations about Cyndi Lauper’s voice, even on “True Colors.”

That there can be so many complaints about songs that others liked shows how customized annoyances are to individual brain chemistry. Context also matters. “Blue Strips” by Jessie Murph reminds me a lot of the late ‘10s songs that made radio draggy. It’s clearly a hit by every early indicator, perhaps because there aren’t as many similar songs now. To be clear, I’m not complaining about anybody playing “Blue Strips,” but I sure don’t want A&R people to copy it thirty more times. 

That we’re writing about these songs also indicates that their provocations worked to some extent. I actively disliked “Never Be the Same,” but I could undoubtedly find some No. 17 song from the same time that used all the elements I didn’t like, but less memorably. A year ago, in Top 40’s moments of early summer optimism, there were certainly people who actively disliked “Espresso,” particularly the “I’m a singer” line. So maybe what radio needs now is bouncy, uptempo songs that a lot of people like, but which are just polarizing enough to propel them into the national conversation.