Fair warning, this will be a long read. Everyone has some guilty pleasure music. It’s even more guilty when you know the artist is lacking, their career derailed, or the music is straight up not good. That doesn’t stop your own enjoyment. It certainly hasn’t stopped mine. Time is the most precious resource we have, and so many listeners are only devoted to what’s “the best” or “most popular.” I get it, wasting 40+ minutes and never getting that time back is as bad as a $17 sandwich you didn’t like. It takes true vulnerability and looking inward to realize you enjoy wasting those 40 minutes listening to some unpalatable drivel. We’re going to walk through my 5 truly guilty pleasure projects, the singles that make me adore them, why I think they’re bad albums, and why even still they’re in my rotation. Many of these retrospectives will sound negative, and I love these albums for those faults.
Three Day’s Grace – One-X (2006)
I do not think there is a single song on here that even is remotely creative. The second song Pain is so insanely on-the-nose with it’s lyrics; you need a kindergarten reading level to understand it. The bridge sounds like Brendan Urie wrote it, and the verses have at most 10 unique words. Lyrical delivery was clearly not a focus and Adam Gontier was not talented enough to try and sing more than one note. Unironically, that really sets the stage for the entire album.
So why do I like it then? Call a spade a spade, Animal I Have Become rips. It’s probably my favorite butt rock song and radio single from this absolutely horrid era of music. Turn the bass up and just nod your head, don’t think about anything. Riot is a borderline call-to-arms for the biggest chuds you’ve ever met in your life. Those guys from your hometown that bought gunner-sunglasses, the massive box vape, may or may not have a baby (nobody, including the guy we’re talking about, knows the situation), listen to Riot when they’re in the garage avoiding responsibility. None of that matters. The opening riff? C’mon. Unironically, I love both songs more than enough for nostalgia tinted remembrances of One-X.
Latter songs on the album also pack in the little creativity the band had in the late Bush years. Get Out Alive has a genuinely really quaint riff; in 2025 I could see the-next-up-and-coming emo rapper going ballistic over it! Let It Die has an attempted harmony, and has some really not exciting lyrics:
“It’s not fair when you say I didn’t try, I just don’t care about you anymore”
One-X is bad. It’s really bad. I find most listening experiences to be pressing play, and bouncing through a few of the deeper cuts until I endlessly skip back to Animal or Riot. All of the lyrics have been adopted by dudes that drink monster (unseasoned) and punch holes in the wall. There are so few interesting moments instrumentally and it’s incredibly formulaic. Guitars sound identical on every song with the very rare and fleeting outlier. However, when you lean into it… I continually find myself nodding my head or humming along. Riot and Animal I Have Become are genuinely awesome. With the clarity of history, I think this thing was supposed to be marketed towards the being emo & sad & upset & lonely in the mall crowd, but as the calendar turned it’s really been absorbed by chuds. That really sucks because it was written about Gontier’s crippling addition to oxy, and so many of these songs are about addiction.
The only other band in this style I’ve ever been fond of is Staind, and I cannot recommend a single full project from them.
Machine Gun Kelly – Tickets to My Downfall (2020)
I’m gonna save you some time, this album has some skips. They’re not just “oh you should skip that” — it’s “you like, should not even bother listening to that song.” We’re looking at 15 songs, 36 minutes of audio. Let’s get the jokes out of the way too: mgk was coming off a disastrous rap career with no good releases, a bad public image, and a feud with Eminem where he lost horribly. Not many things interesting or noteworthy there, other than Tickets to My Downfall being the first full release since Eminem said “how you gonna name yourself after a damn gun and have a man bun?” mgk hasn’t rapped since, this was his first foray into pop punk, and was a full collaboration with a Kardashian (Travis Barker).
Many of the tunes here are one-dimensional. They’re striped down with few layers: one guitar, one bass, one drum pattern. It sounds much like there was no care or dedication put in. There wasn’t. Who cares. Sing the chorus! title track changes speeds & mgk genuinely uses his vocal inflection to add something to the song. kiss kiss and drunk face are your standard Great Value™ pop punk songs. Addiction’s clearly at the forefront of the lyrical content, so much so you end up wondering if anyone in mgk’s life checked in on him. drunk face is a full-frontal confession of bad behavior and backsliding into all of your dark days.
There is some really good stuff: bloody valentine is *awesome* — the pre-chorus & chorus are both incredible. I love the pacing of the verses. Travis Barker clearly cared when he put this one together. concert for aliens is incredible, and pays a direct & near perfect homage to early Blink-182. jawbreaker is a test-case for rapping over a rock beat, and I genuinely love it. I love hearing “LA-ex is in Miami” for some reason. Halsey’s on this album! She’s featured on forget me too! She’s the only good part on the song, delivering a genuinely awesome verse & chorus. WWIII is the stereotypical “fast & short” punk song every outfit did from 1996 – 2007, it’s genuinely funny. kevin and barracuda (interlude) is mgk ripped off mushrooms on the phone with Pete Davidson, who is actively stimming. That’s every moment I enjoy on the standard release. It’s about 10 songs, but I also don’t mind lonely.
The deluxe edition features an incredible song: body bag ft. YUNGBLUD, which is probably in the top3 of both mgk & YUNGBLUD’s career. They play off each other so well, and the flow of the tune is sensational. can’t look back is a pseudo-Lil Peep song, and I enjoy the instrumental. The misery business cover is… awful. In the big 2025, mgk released the “All Access” super-deluxe with 5 more songs. Each of them are so incredibly stupid, so much to the point they’re funny. If you really wanted to venture this deep, listen to secrets or love race which somehow features Kellen Quinn. Revisiting this era validates my theory of Tickets to My Downfall was the last time mgk remotely enjoyed making music.
Pop-punk has seen its fair share of classics. Tickets to My Downfall is not one of them. Every single song on here is a bad Blink-182 throwaway with lyrics embracing how genuinely cringe you can be at your lowest. Travis Barker’s production is mostly one-dimensional and provides no new air to a room that’s already suffocating under it’s own tightness. You know what Tickets to My Downfall does do well? It’s… very fun. The highs truly feel like Travis Barker is using mgk to write the Blink-182 songs Tom DeLonge never did.
I don’t think we’ll be able to summarize the 2020s without a footnote of the odd pop-punk revival from 2020 – 2022, almost entirely spearheaded by Travis Barker’s production. Tickets to My Downfall has some genuinely awful songs on it, and is outclassed by all of it’s peers. However, this era brought us all of the aforementioned songs, I Think I’m Okay ft. YUNGBLUD, and acting like that. If anyone involved in any of these projects knew how to market themselves, we would have had some combination of a mega-tour composing of mgk, YUNGBLUD, blackbear, and anyone else working with Travis Barker. Obviously, that never came about. Instead, we got a tour with carolesdaughter — who made 3 insane rage songs before pivoting to uninspiring indie rock — and KennyHoopla — who fell off the map after he stopped working with Travis Barker. mgk learned all of the wrong lessons from this cycle and released mainstream sellout in 2022. It is one of the worst albums ever released by a major-label artist. The only remotely listenable moments are the 22 seconds Willow sings over emo girl and the Tickets to My Downfall tribute, 5150. My ideal tracklist, from this absurd amount of releases from mgk’s phase is:
- Title Track
- Kiss Kiss
- Drunk Face
- Bloody Valentine
- Forget Me Too (just Halsey)
- Kevin and Barracuda (interlude)
- Concert for Aliens
- Jawbreaker
- Body Bag (ft. YUNGBLUD)
- Acting Like That (ft. YUNGBLUD)
- I Think I’m Okay (ft. YUNGBLUD)
- Emo Girl (just Willow)
- 5150
- Ay! (chorus only, 10 minute version)
That’s 12 songs, 2 of which aren’t his, out of about 50 that were formally released. Rough.
Asking Alexandria – Stepped Up and Scratched (2011)
Asking Alexandria sucks. The band sucks, all of their old music sucks, individual members suck, and all of their current music sucks. Stepped Up and Scratched is a remix album, sampled from the group’s first 2 albums. I do not know how much anyone involved remotely provided feedback in releasing this thing. Almost all of the material is from Asking Alexandria’s record Stand Up and Scream, which sucks, and this project has mostly been forgotten to the sands of time.
I’m happy to have started the largest period of my music fandom in a genre as silly and carefree as metalcore and this weird scene music. There’s was so much freedom to do whatever you wanted in the studio, and throwing synths and electronic breakdowns into metal songs was/is kinda fun. Stepped Up and Scratched is what happens when you turn the electronic section up to 10 with mostly no-name producers high on youtube comments.
Wikipedia is our all-knowing source of truth, and the project is mentioned for exactly one sentence. On the page for this release, there are only 4 producers with blue links. If you google search “Big Chocolate Wiki” you get a page about multi-national chocolate production agencies, and a write up of one of our producers on the Lessthanjake fandom. There is really nobody notable on this project whatsoever, and I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone involved has been publicly outed as a bad guy.
Every modern EDM style was attempted at least once. I unironically think this is the blueprint for Sullivan King to badly copy. Many of these remixes are horrible; Reckless & Relentless is actually unlistenable. Some of them are actually kinda fun: I Was Once, Possibly, Maybe, Perhaps a Cowboy King has some interesting choices with vocal chops and chords. However the lows are as deep as some of the drops, and many of these remixes gave all-the-way into the brostep craze of the early 2010s. Those songs are easily, easily the worst ones on here. Boregore’s remix of Final Episode is genuinely some of the wildest 4 minutes ever recorded, it makes a Crankdat remix seem tame.
Remixers leaving their ego at the door and actually respecting the original material provided a few memorable (and dare I say upgraded) songs. If You Can’t Ride Two Horses at Once… genuinely is a better version than the album version, entirely because Noah D did close to nothing. Both Big Chocolate remixes, I Used To Have a Best Friend and A Prophecy are so over the top it’s actually endearing, even if his production sounds like mud. Morte et Dabo got remixed by Sol Invicto, and it sounds like the blueprint for a riddim song. Closure tries to be a drum & bass remix over a house song while also incorporating breakdowns, it’s truly not worth your time — BUT the final chorus is! Lastly, I hate to admit the two best songs are the first two on here — A Single Moment of Sincerity (KC Blitz’ remix) and Another Bottle Down (remixed by Tomba). They’re easily the most interesting and fleshed out songs, with fully chopped choruses and attempt to do something exciting with drops or synths. The former genuinely sounds like a Rezz demo.
Asking Alexandria, as a band, is not worth a remote second of your time. They haven’t put out a single song I would describe as “good” — they haven’t put out a single song I’d describe as “fine.” At most, I am enamored and enjoy Stepped Up and Scratched because this type of stuff almost never happens, and it’s so far out of left field. You have to be pretty vulnerable as an artist to let a gaggle of degenerate bedroom Ableton users flip your songs, and you have to be in on the bit to formally release it. Music’s meant to be fun, and sometimes it’s meant to be carefree. Stepped Up and Scratched just so happens to be both.
DaBaby – KIRK (2019)
Oh we going baby on baby. We can be straight up too, nobody ever discusses DaBaby albums for a reason. You can really only stomach so many “Lets gooooooooooooo” or “Huh it’s baby” ad libs before you go mad. I can stomach a lot. I’m different. I also need me some s**t with some BOP in it.
We’re going to take a minute to discuss BOP specifically. I absolutely adore the music video. I find myself, in the year of our lord 2-0-2-5, still saying “dang bop on broadway” at pretty odd times. There are so many moments in the music video that are absurd for the sake of it, like twerking in a headstand. Seeing a dude at the peak of the rap world, in a Charlotte Hornets jersey doing an open-arm DX Chop kills me. Someone in the crowd has a cooler for some reason too. It’s awesome.
There’s some songs on here that are pretty awful. I find GOSPEL to be exceptionally annoying, and I still have it saved on numerous playlists. Chance the Rapper, at the lowest point of his career, is featured on that song and it’s easily the only highlight. REALLY is terrible, with maybe the worst beat DaBaby’s ever rapped over (which is saying a lot). I can’t help myself but loving how stupid every one of his lines are. PROLLY HEARD sounds almost exactly like BOP, but without any of aura of music video cred. The 808 is fragrant, and for whatever reason there’s a lute or something over it. Scatted bad piano notes litter the beat on RAW SH*T, and Migos cashed a check to rap nothing for a little over a minute. The last song on here, XXL, is genuinely terrible. You cannot hear the beat and not laugh.
Package the all of the below: cartoonish medieval production, DaBaby’s unfaltering confidence in himself, brainworm stims, “Lets goooooooo”, “We going baby on baby”, a countless amount of memorable bars together and you’ve got one of my favorite hip hop albums from the new golden era. KIRK is the coughing baby and literally any other hip hop project from 2017 – 2020 is the hydrogen bomb. I do not care. This was the peak of DaBaby (which is really just a small mound); before he was the first person ever rightfully cancelled and giving out BOGO concert tickets. He was the first to come out of Charlotte, and I cannot help but look at this collection of renaissance fair-ahh beats with sun-blushed memories before he had to discuss the LGBTQIA+ community on stage in Miami.
Stevie Wonder – Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants (1979)
It’s nigh impossible to describe the heater Stevie Wonder was on in the 70s. His prior 3 releases were, and I am not kidding about this, Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974), and Songs in the Key of Life (1976). I will pretty comfortably put that up against anyone else for a 3-album run, and there’s very few artists in the history of the medium that can even compete.
“As” by Stevie Wonder – it’s the greatest song ever written, bro
-J.I.D.
Then came the end of the 1970s — in the dying stages of the decade, the great Stevie Wonder did a soundtrack for a documentary. The documentary, The Secret Life of Plants, is literally about what plants do when people aren’t looking or whatever, I don’t really care because Planet Earth clears. Coming off of three straight classics, you can imagine the hype and potential being astronomical. The documentary was not widely released. It is not available on VHS or DVD. It’s borderline lost media, with the exception of CAN I PLEASE GET A PIXEL youtube rips. Stevie Wonder is blind. Stevie Wonder’s last release was Songs. In. The. Key. Of. Life, an album so incredible its name is synonymous with greatness. There is nothing available to compare the absurdity of this release to.
“I think my favorite song by another artist would have to be Superstition by Stevie Wonder”
-Nick Jonas
It’s mostly fluff. It’s an hour and half of fluff. It’s a double album where half the songs are instrumentals and the instruments sound like they’re covered in mud. It rules. The First Garden is so ungodly stupid I can’t help but laugh when I hear it, it samples monkeys and random nature sounds. Almost every song on here is that dumb; so many of them have no point. You are hearing an artist near their creative peak who discovered sampling, and is borderline singing about plants for the sake of it. I love it. I love how dumb the harmonicas sound, how bad the pianos are tuned, how all of the songs are named after nature, and I love how absolutely unnecessary this entire release is.
“I’m not trying to compete with what’s out there now. I’m really trying to compete with Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life”
-K***e W**t
I can only describe the entirety of Secret Life of Plants as Stevie Wonder playing around with digital recording, sampling, and mailing it in. I really don’t have anything to compare a release like this to, and I absolutely adore how borderline wild it is he approved to do it. The whole album really does not have many good songs, but every song is memorable for some reason: jungle samples, pianos played badly, Stevie singing in a bad way, a harmonica that sounds modified, or random animal noises. Somehow he weaves in the politics of the time — with an obvious focus on ecology & environmentalism — and the overall package lives in my head as one of my favorite panned releases from a superstar. It has genuinely no reason to exist, except to remind us sometimes music can be fun for the sake of it.
“Stevie Wonder, he was in a party. They introduced me to him. I didn’t know that he had like a accent… or that is just how he talks. He was real cool. Kinda chopped it up… It was cool, good experience”
-N.L.E Choppa
Words fail to inspect the individual songs. My recommendation is to listen with no expectation, and lean into it like Lebron. Who cares, shuffle it. Go ahead. If you’re an oddball that enjoys field recordings or nature sounds, you might actually end up liking this more than you think. You might get lucky and make it to A Seed’s A Star/Tree Melody, which is about exactly what you think it is, and an exceptional juiciest bass lines and choral backing to remind you who you’re listening to.
If you’re like me, and put Stevie Wonder’s name next to Ladecky, Mays, and Nolan, you’ll find the glimmers of Stevie’s greatness stretched so thin across an environmentalist’s creative dream. If you’re really listening, you might actually get scared at how similar it sounds to prime Animal Collective. I’m not much for critiquing soundtracks as albums, but reaching this far out of the realm of pop, soul, and r&b is so exceptionally daring I find myself respecting Stevie Wonder even more. Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants is easily the worst project from prime-Stevie, yet I adore it as much as Innervisions.
“Nobody mentions Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants in Stevie Wonder’s greatness.”
-Drew Lamp
If you end up listening, or have thoughts on any of these bands/albums, don’t ever hesitate to tell me them. If you listen to Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants and make it to the imperial march wedding song, please let me know. It’s one of my favorite songs from the 70s.
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