Not our most disliked song ever, but awfully close…
[Video]
[1.43]
Alfred Soto: My skin started unpeeling from its bones the moment the opening acoustic guitar and piano announced their fealty to false cheer. No one’s going to sing “Wap Bap” because even three-year-olds know “it’s” not how it is.
[0]
Thomas Inskeep: I know I can sound like a cranky old man when I dis internet “fame,” but this reinforces all of those thoughts and prejudices. This German vlogger has inexplicably received over 37M views for this look-at-me-I’m-pretty barely-stringing-together-phrases video/barely-a-song, and it really does make the likes of Paris Hilton sound like, I dunno, Radiohead. I bet Bibi H went to the Fyre Festival.
[0]
Will Adams: With all the hate being directed at “How It Is,” you’d think Bibi was using her obscenely inoffensive song as a platform to sell you shitty iced tea. Sure, it’s a bad song — it’s an uphill battle when all you’ve got is a ukulele and cloying optimism — but its knee-jerk designation by many as being the “WORST SONG EVER” speaks volumes more about the detractors than it does Bibi. It sucks and it’s unfair: this gets pages and pages of YouTube reaction videos with all-caps titles and mouth-agape thumbnails, while the Mrazes and Marses of the world go multi-platinum for the same bullshit. “How It Is” won’t matter in a few weeks when the Internet finds something new to point and laugh at; my cynical hope is that when the cycle repeats, it’s for something far more deserving of this level of scorn.
[2]
Cassy Gress: This is a thoroughly confused concept: lyrics apparently written by a 12-year-old pretending to be an adult, orchestration courtesy of library music (that’s not the actual song but may as well be), video of sexy girl in sexy dresses rolling around in bed. One point for effort, I guess, no matter how incoherent it ended up. But this doesn’t deserve to be the 6th most hated Youtube of all time, not when there’s like, actual Nazis.
[1]
Iain Mew: I don’t know if I want to understand the forces that elevated this so quickly to the sixth most disliked video in YouTube history. Sure, it’s twee in a way that sounds like it might be on a weather forecast ident and its mundane lyrics take a puzzling turn at the end, but while I wouldn’t go out of my way to listen to it more, it’s harmless and I’ll take afectless vocals over plenty of the common alternatives for this stuff.
[3]
Micha Cavaseno: Europe needs to get every which way to the hell out with this nonsensical, Betty Boop-oop-e-doop ass bullshit right now. Hell to the Tom Green nauh buddy. I already struggle enough with the occasional returns to blithe twee Hallmark Card commercial soft-pop, now you’re doing this with some “Lemme just hit two notes for a whole song” type from the fjords blathering about things just being what they are, and who cares lol? NO. NO I CARE, OK?!? And I’ll take any sort of hyper-alarmed feeling of energy than this slow asphyxiation of sunlight and cotton candy and dullness. C’mon man…
[1]
Hannah Jocelyn: Look, there’s so much backstory to this song, involving Warner Music, colossally overpriced singles, and a German YouTuber whose entire existence apparently revolves around manipulating young children, so I’m just gonna hope other Jukebox writers cover that part. To my ears, this is not bad enough on it’s own merit to warrant the amount of dislikes, but it’s certainly bad. The backing track sounds like the production music in those 30-second Facebook news videos, Bibi’s voice is not just robotic in pitch but in delivery, and the lyrics remind me of the old Internet game of translating a song through Babelfish and seeing the results. In this case, the source must have been “The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby, and the attempts at making Bibi seem like a human being (I lost my job! My credit card was denied!) are somehow even shallower and clumsier next to Hornsby’s poignance. Maybe it’s not Bibi’s fault, considering she didn’t write it – she just doesn’t have the Range.
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