One & Done: 10 Trends From 2011 That We Hope Won't Survive The New Year

2. LMFAO

The most annoying, insufferable types of pop music are as follows: upbeat drinking anthems, soulless FM-radio hip hop, and thumping European trance/house. Before 2011, nobody had really attempted to combine the worst of these three styles. Then along came LMFAO, who with this horrible combo managed to burst onto the scene this year, in much the same way that a BLU-82 Daisycutter bomb might burst when dropped onto a middle school. While they were already somewhere on my shit list for the insufferably awful "Shots" song and other pre-2011 work, "Party Rock Anthem" very well might be the worst song I've ever heard in my life. By really ratcheting up the euro-synth, heavy bass, and blackout-friendly singing hook, they have established themselves as an actual-life combination of the Black Eyed Peas, Armin van Buuren, and Chumbawamba. They are everything that is awful and cynical and condescending about the prepackaged music industry, and the fact that they are directly related to Berry Gordy is both an extra twist of the knife and also strangely and depressingly appropriate. One of them did slap Mitt Romney on an airplane once. So there's that. [via] -Alex