I Keep Hearing The Worst Song Ever In My Office Bathroom

The first seven words on American Authors’ Wikipedia page are: “American Authors is an American rock band…,” but that’s simply not true. It can’t be true, you see, because rock bands are dead (as old dudes keep reminding us), but also because while they might’ve been a quasi-rock band earlier this decade when they were called The Blue Pages, now they’re not. Not any more than Mumford & Sons are (even with a sleek rebranding).

You can tell that American Authors are not a rock band immediately when their 2015 single “Go Big Or Go Home” begins, like a somehow even more grating version of the O’Reilly Auto Parts jingle or a radio spot for a sad bar with shitty wing specials. Or maybe the song is channeling the intro to “Bohemian Rhapsody” but, you know, badly? This is all I can think about when I hear it at approximately 11:36 a.m. every day in my office men’s room: This song is bad. And it has nothing to do with it not being a rock song. One Direction didn’t make rock songs either, but they embraced some key elements of rock performance: loud drums, sizzlin’ riffs, the almighty power of the “cool” label. American Authors don’t have those things, though they do have, no joke, a song called “I’m Born to Run,” because post-irony is the new irony, I guess.

But that’s OK! Their dearth of rock cred doesn’t make “Go Big Or Go Home” a bad song. It’s literally everything else about the song that makes it terrible.

Let’s zoom out for a second to get a few things straight. Astonishingly, a song called “Go Big Or Go Home” is indeed real, and in May 2015, it was released as single, which means executives considered it a viable means of selling music in today’s warped industry. (At this point, though, we all know it’s a completely hopeless enterprise—unless you’re Drake.) A quick glance at the song’s credits reveals it was written by seven (!) people, a stat so dizzying given its lifelessness that I may have to call out of work for the rest of the year. This is because, with all due respect to Gladstone, American Authors and their co-conspirators have officially written the worst song of all time.

It should be noted here that this song is, of course, “catchy”—the most bankrupt word in the English language because people have used to it say something nice about music they otherwise have no other means of engaging with. It’s like saying you like “the beat” of a song or “the rhymes” of a poem or “the set design” of the theater performance (these are inherent elements; try again). But catchiness is indeed its only merit, as it has no discernible genre. It’s got banjos, but they only come in at the chorus, making it a quick grab for lingering Mumford cred. I know American Authors are ostensibly a folk-tinged pop group à la The Lumineers, but this plucking is especially egregious as the lead-up to it is pure gospel-choir singalong and New Wave vocal manipulation. The banjos here are more unearned than the key change in Lady Gaga’s “Perfect Illusion,” a nightmarishly fun song that I enjoy (in spite of the obvious Madonna cribbing). What the banjos break through isn’t even special on its own merit, as it lifts Walk the Moon’s superior contribution to modern pop homogeneity, “Shut Up and Dance.”

I’m a proponent of valuing musicality over lyrical content by a thousand percent, but this song’s title—I mean, really? Another sample: “I’m passed out on the floor up in the hotel bar / But it don’t matter ’cause I’m feelin’ fine.” Intoxication doesn’t work that way. If you’re passed out, you’re not feeling a goddamn thing, and in all actuality, you’re likely starting to sober up, which means you definitely have the makings of a hangover.

So musically, we’re a mess, and lyrically, we’re struggling hard as well. The staccato “oh-ho-ho” that hits just after the chorus is a total recycling of their own “Best Day of My Life,” which was bad for an entirely different set of reasons (not least of all its incessant whistling). We’re also perilously close to the dreaded millennial whoop here, though I’ll need someone with a music theory degree to confirm if we actually reach it.

Here’s the takeaway: This isn’t even a poptimist/rockist thing. “Go Big Or Go Home” falls into the worst kind of subgenre: focus-grouped pop. It used to be trendy to attack pop for being soulless and commercial for its own sake (an argument with varying degrees of truth behind it), but this is different. This screams, How do we capitalize on carpe diem feel-good music that also hits all the right demos? That’s what’s soulless about it: an auto-tuned bridge stuffed between banjos/kick drums and chanted vowels. This is buying a mass-produced New York skyline postcard (but on Etsy!) and saying it captures the uniqueness of the city.

You know what the death of the American author is? Plagiarism. One way to prevent this is to create according to your own passions and desires, demonstrating your singular vision in a blaze of fierce originality. Another is to bleed all distinguishable hallmarks from your art and render it as bland and inoffensive as possible. Guess which one American Authors pursued.

I never thought I’d say this, but we need you, will.i.am. Come back.