The Singles Jukebox

Today’s theme is YouTube video sensations! Beginning with something whose like:dislike ratio is reaching Ark Music Factory levels…

[Video][Website]
[4.50]

Katherine St Asaph: If we Farrah Abraham this I am going to be so mad.
[3]

Anthony Easton: God this is fun and bouncy (and maybe a bit Bouncy) with some flighty, boomeranging elasticity. And just when you think it is getting too samey, it makes a slight, formal shift — it goes quicker, or it slows down, but not enough to make things to different. The tension between that straight, taut percussion, and the slightly undulating vocals: that’s smart. 
[9]

Alfred Soto: The plainspoken vocal reminds me of Nancy Whang, but the program is so resolute about its chintziness that I almost awarded points. Give Bernardina a real house track in which she can play psychotic cheerleader.
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: For the most part, I believe in learning as much about music from countries I’m not that familiar with before trying to tackle them. Yet sometimes it’s refreshing to turn on a song with little to no background knowledge about it or the culture around it and be blown away by how bad sounding it is. This sounds like it was made in two hours, featuring someone who wasn’t sure she would be singing over it until the last minute. 
[1]

Abby Waysdorf: How to even judge something like this? Like, obviously it’s not very good, but you can’t really leave it at that, can you? It’s not even on the same level as songs that aren’t made by Big Brother contestants and advertised by the cheapest video this side of TV Oranje. There’s something almost charming in its shoddiness, to be honest: the amateur-yet-enthusiastic dancers; the chanted refrain that they somehow stretch into five minutes; how it was obviously filmed on some random street corner. It’s genuine incompetence that somehow also reminds me of the rarities on post-punk compilations I used to obsessively collect (like a novelty pop version of this). It’s obviously bad, yes, but it’s still entertaining at least.
[4]

Will Adams: Hideous in every aspect, from the tinny, out-of-the-box drums to the fake, ambivalent horns to the clueless singer leading the proceedings. Any lingering hope of novelty is quickly dashed when you realize that it stretches on for five unlistenable minutes.
[1]

Iain Mew: In 2007 I visited Belgium and heard the Yelle-featuring comedy hit “Parle à Ma Main” everywhere, and went from being baffled to enjoying its gleeful brattiness. I’m pretty sure that the simple horn loops and grating conversational vocals of “Minha Xuxa” aren’t meant to be taking the piss in the same way, but the song achieves much the same effect. The musical level it best works at, possibly the only one it works at, is being funny. The way it manages to be so repetitive and yet continue to sound so incongruous and slip away from expectations so often is a close relative to being terrible, but it’s not quite the same. The perfect comic timing of the confused stumbling away of the brass after Bernardina departs is a case in point.
[6]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Ringtone thump turns to demo-version kuduro, pleasantly flails about for far too long, its odd appeal transformed to an incessant throb.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: Seemingly designed to be as irritating as possible, thanks to those tinny synthetic accordion doodles chasing the affectless title chant around in unending, unchanging circles. There’s nothing remarkable about the rudimentary construction either; it’s just plain incompetent. I’m not quite sufficiently versed in the cultural context to fully understand YouTube comments like “R.I.P. Portugal,” but as with nonsense like Crazy Frog or “Mr Blobby,” the apparent notoriety of this seems another instance of too many people thinking that bathos is proper grounds for entertainment.
[2]

Megan Harrington: I shared a dorm room with a girl who absolutely loved Paris Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind.” She didn’t own headphones. “SexyBack” was everywhere, we were all so young, and the give/take of “I will play you my Camera Obscura records and you will play me your Pussycat Dolls singles and we will both listen to the Pipettes” was probably my intoxicating induction to poptimism. Bernardina desperately needs whatever recon was performed on Hilton’s vocals, but in all its unsavory rush, “Minha Xuxa” has me nostalgic for a time we mixed our lime vodka with Tab soda and let the music play. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: Because of my recent listening forays, the careless production values and toy-factory thump sound like Western-Hemisphere happy hardcore. It’s a decent document if you think of it as similarly scrappy. But man, that melody goes nowhere.
[6]

Tara Hillegeist: What frightening magic is this? Can there be such a thing as outsider house music?  The horns rub against the borders of the uncanny valley of synthesizer sound, the line delivery is several degrees below emotive, the vocals are mixed so badly in relation to the rest of the track it’s like they were recorded on an entirely different planet, but somehow these seeming abominations against common musical sense combine, vuvuzela-like, to command the interest of every neural misfire the hindbrain can conspire to throw at them. Everything has gone so wrong, but so compellingly, like some sort of Shaggs of the discotheque: earnest, naive, and greatly impossible to dismiss.  This is what art can be when it makes no concessions to sensibility. And it is, genuinely, beautiful in its purity. I weep for anyone so hidebound by derelict notions of taste that this could offend them. 
[8]