Absolutely awful number-one songs of the 2000s

6. “Crack a Bottle” by Eminem (featuring Dr. Dre and 50 Cent) (2009)

I’m a pretty big Eminem fan. I love the early commercial blockbuster stuff. I really like some of the later stuff as well. But those middle years…. best left alone. When Relapse came out in 2009, it was billed as a major comeback. Problem was, it wasn’t very good. The rapper had been through some very tough times in the years leading up to Relapse and he had not really found his footing as a newly sober artist who used to be able to dazzle and offend with equal ferocity. Relapse sounds like someone trying to light a damp match. Trying to regain magic that was no more. It’s a struggle, and you can hear it in the tortured rhymes of “Crack a Bottle.”

Still, it had the man who launched him – Dre – and the man he helped launch – 50 Cent – pitching in. Like Eminem, both were in the midst of downward spirals but together, fans hoped for some kind of alchemy. That hope was strong enough to rocket the single to the top of the charts for one week upon its release. Then, it basically vanished into the ether.

Because it just isn’t a very good song. From its opening annoyed squeal to Slim’s boast about his rapes, assaults, and murders and some downright uninspired rhyming from one of rap’s best wordsmiths, we’re in for a slog. I mean, it’s not like he had run dry. A decade later he crushed a certain would-be verbal assassin with “Say you got me in the scope but you grazed me – I say one call to Interscope and you’re Swayze."

But in 2009, all he could muster was “I redeem my name and haters get mushed.” “Mushed?” Really?  I was on a hiking trip in Patagonia where a couple of young Americans passed the some time climbing through spectacular foothills by seeing who could do the best opening verse of “Lose Yourself.” Nobody was going to pollute beautiful Cerro Fitz Roy with “Crack a bottle, let your body waddle – Don’t act like a snobby model, you just hit the Lotto.”  Dre and 50 Cent add a couple of forgettable verses and we are through.

“Lose Yourself," Eminem's previous number one, was seven years earlier. I don’t think there has ever been as big a gap in quality for an artist with multiple number ones, though we will be testing that supposition shortly.