With 2015 on the way out the door, the internet is currently drowning in “Best Of” lists recapping every shining accomplishment and subjective appreciation the year had to offer. And while we’ve enjoyed looking back at the Best Albums of 2015, there’s also a grotesquely rancid pop-culture underbelly to all the hype and froth.
As our obsession with beating the same buzzword horse into a puddle of TMZ-brand glue edges ever closer to outright fetishism, we’ve been helped along the way by a few completely inescapable cultural phenomenons – ones which, for better or worse, will be the defining milestones of one weird-ass year in music.
Crave has compiled the year’s worst offenders, the stories and celebrities we’d love to collectively put in a box and shoot into space, in our list of 2015 Music Memories We’d Like to Forget.
2015 Music Memories We'd Like to Forget
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T.I. Claims Women Aren’t Fit To Be President
“Not to be sexist but, I can’t vote for the leader of the free world to be a woman,” T.I. said in a recent interview. “It’s kinda like, I just know that women make rash decisions emotionally – they make very permanent, cemented decisions – and then later, it’s kind of like it didn’t happen, or they didn’t mean for it to happen. And I sure would hate to just set off a nuke.”
Let that sink in for a moment. We’ve all undoubtedly heard off-color jokes about a woman president blowing up the world in an emotionally compromised state - but those offensive tropes are indicators of low-minded male-chauvinist douchebags, not a general reality. Yet T.I. chose to make these comments in front of a microphone, before giving a half-hearted endorsement to bloviating orangutan windbag Donald Trump, the Kanye West of old white assholes.
He went on, saying that other leaders “will not be able to negotiate the right kinds of foreign policy; the world ain’t ready yet. I think you might be able to get the Loch Ness Monster elected before. It’s not right, but I’m just saying…”
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World’s Worst Person Martin Shkreli Bought Wu-Tang's $2 Million Album
Today Bloomberg revealed that the bad boy monstrous asshole pharmaceutical executive and former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli was the mystery bidder who won out on the one existing copy of iconic rap group Wu-Tang Clan's latest album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Shkreli, whose pharmaceutical company purchased the drug called Daraprim in September and raised its price 5000% from $13.50 a pill to $750, paid $2 million for the album, but it's unlikely that he'll ever be known as the guy who bought a rare Wu CD - as opposed to one of the most greedy pricks ever to walk the Earth.
The only potential silver lining? A too-badass-for-Hollywood caper clause, in which any original member of the Wu or Bill Murray can make one attempt to steal the album back from the buyer. No, we're not kidding.
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Madonna Tongue-Rapes Drake at Coachella
Madonna shoved her tongue down Drake’s throat in her erotic velociraptor act back in April at Coachella, reviving memories of her gross Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera tongue-twister from years prior. The cry for attention was poorly received by everyone, including the recipient, and nobody gives a damn about this narcissistic human Muppet anymore.
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Nine Inch Nails / Carly Rae Jepsen Mashup Opens a Portal to Hell
Steer clear of open flames or pentagrams when listening to this mashup between Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like a Hole" and Carly Rae Jepsen's "I Really Like You," because we’re pretty sure it opens a direct portal to the seventh circle of Hell. A human bag of NutraSweet poured over greying industrial rock leaves one with a really, really, really, really, really strange feeling.
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Someone Cut Up U2’s Joshua Tree
Sure, their last album absolutely sucked a fat middle-aged wrinkly one, but U2 used to be a powerhouse of sociopolitical anthems, and should be respected as such. Yet according to a U2 blog, the Joshua tree that appears on the inside cover of the iconic album of the same name has been vandalized.
A member of the band’s fan forum photographed the chopped tree lying on its side. They write: “This past Sunday, I made my proverbial yearly hike out to the tree with my dog to reminisce, only to find that some hack, and I do mean hack, decided it was a bright idea to take a hacksaw to one of the tree’s limbs – evidently to remove an inch thick cross section as a souvenir.”
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Justin Timberlake Dressed as a Moldy Lime to Sell Tequila
Tequila makes you do weird things. Some of us dance naked, some of us sleep with anyone who’ll have us, some become human firehoses of bile-beer. As for Justin Timberlake, well… thanks to Sauza tequila, he looks like an anthropomorphic lime.
Nightmare fuel for days at first sight, but the parody docu-drama clip is actually pretty hilarious. Timberlake is a lime named Rick "Sour" Vane who’s fallen on hard times after reaching the highest heyday peaks of rockstar lifestyle - because he’s a lime, and limes are always a bar necessity (as long as there’s Corona or, in this case, inferior tequila).
But the days of high-living limes, according to Sauza, are gone forever.
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Some Asshole is Selling Kurt Cobain Suicide Note T-Shirts
Just viewing the eBay page leaves you wiping a cheap mucosal grime of vapid exploitation off your computer screen.
Leave it to the vampires of pop culture to find a way to take iconic tragedy and turn it into a product. At least now the rest of us can clearly see who the assholes of fashion are - beyond Kanye and his mission to make everyone look like homeless illuminati. We'll go ahead and (safely) assume that if a person is wearing one of these shirts, they've not only been shielded from any genuine tragedy in life, but are the kind of doucheball idiot who killed little animals while watching those horrible Bumfights videos back in the day.
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Yahoo Publishes Mad Libs Rihanna ‘Anti’ Review Without Hearing The Music
The anticipation for Rihanna’s upcoming album Anti, her first full-length record in nearly three years, is reaching a fever pitch among fans. But equally enthusiastic are the publications looking to corner the dialogue about the music before it's even released, as evidenced in the first “review” of Anti, courtesy of Mic. While nobody at the publication has heard the record, which doesn’t even have an official release date, a glitch in Yahoo's system has revealed that they've already written a Mad Libs-style review of the album, riddled with blanks yet to be filled in.
Skeleton drafts aren't uncommon for anticipated stories, but it's the search-results grab that stinks here. As is the case with album releases, masses will soon be searching “Rihanna Anti download,” “Rihanna Anti lyrics,” and “Rihanna Anti streaming” - clearly no titular coincidence with the Mic piece. With quality writing devalued to the point of disgust in the meme-tastic culture of our modern age, publications are left to fight - in the least ethically valid ways - for any leverage they can get. This is why my Mic is breathlessly celebrating an “edgier, freer” Rihanna, and of course, the unforgettable line [LYRICS] from [TRACK NAME], with their heads deep in their own colonic chasm.
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We actually almost liked the new Nickelback disco song
What's worse than soul-sucking chart-humper milky-bland rock superstars Nickelback? If you guessed ISIS, or police militarization, or even Kanye's latest shitty rant, you'd be wrong. But on a technicality, one answer might qualify as legit: Disco, the demon byproduct of en era plagued by white powder recreation, terrible fashion and dudes with no business on the dancefloor thinking they're John Travolta.
To hell with everything about disco's coked-out glitter-shitting fashion-music holocaust. Music lovers are universally thankful it died a bloated death on the dance floor decades ago. So naturally, Nickelback - a staggeringly successful band despite their best efforts - doubled down on their bid to have the world bomb Canada by making a disco song. And while it's quite clearly the sonic equivalent of the sticky mung-funk residue off a rusty tongue-scraper dragged along a fat homeless guy's bare ass, I'll be damned if they don't somehow beat Muse at their own honky-funk space-disco game.
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50 Cent, Flagrant Cash-Bragger, Files For Bankruptcy
50 Cent filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, just days after a jury directed the rapper to pay $5 million to a woman who sued over a sex tape. The irony is pretty thick, however, when one considers the fact that few musicians have trumpeted wealth as flagrantly and gaudily as 50. He's constantly seen flashing expensive jewelry, vehicles and more, while his Instagram account has been brimming with cash-and-gold braggadocio for years.
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Scott Weiland, Clearly On Drugs, Badly Butchers STP Song ‘Vasoline’
The late Scott Weiland was known for having an impeccable voice and the charisma of Satan in a sexually-charged rock star body. When he wasn’t on drugs, that is. We'll let you decide for yourself what frame of mind the former Stone Temple Pilots singer was in for this clip, dated back to April, as he positively butchered his former band's smash hit "Vasoline" with his new band The Wildabouts - but suffice to say from the slow-drawl intro and performance, something was definitely awry.
"This is a new song, we just worked it out today," Weiland mumbled with deadpan disinterest before launching into the worst version of the song anyone has ever heard.
Rest in peace, dude.
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McCartney, Bon Jovi, Caillat Team For Atrociously Bad ‘Love Song to The Earth’
Goddamnit, hippies. If you want people to care about climate change, you can’t go making ridiculous “We Are The World” style songs. But that’s precisely what Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow, Fergie, Colbie Caillat and more have done, resulting in the environmentally conscious charity collaboration track "Love Song to the Earth”. The lyric video for the track is right out of South Park, spouting lyrics like “Heaven’s poetry to us” and “a diamond in the universe” as the collective pleads with listeners to “Keep it safe” in the chorus.
In other words, this incongruent mishmash of stars, has-beens and hanger-ons makes no sense - nor does its aim seem at all potent. Those who would tolerate such bombastic sonic drivel are deep in the crowd of ecological awareness, and those who aren’t are going to laugh their asses off at this terrible, terrible song.
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Slipknot Guitarist Stabbed in The Head by His Brother
Being a member of Slipknot seems to carry a particular extra risk of life and limb even offstage, as guitarist Mick Thomson and his brother Andrew Thomson were rushed to the hospital with injuries following a knife fight early on March 11.
Both brothers were reportedly drunk at Mick's residence in Clive, Iowa, when the altercation took place. Mick reportedly suffered a stab wound in the back of his head, though none of the injuries are reportedly life-threatening.
