How to Ruin a Day in Five Tracks (and Accidentally Save One)

Not every hymn belongs to God. Some belong to the grifters.

Music is supposed to be art, and art isn’t meant to be pretty. It is supposed to move, create, destroy, heal. You fuck to it, scream with it, and if it works, it unsettles. As cliché as it sounds, it "comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable."

These songs do none of that. They placate. They worship at the altar of mediocrity, money, and morality. This challenge asks for five songs that are shit and one exception, because even frauds stumble into honesty once in a while.

5. Jelly Roll – Save Me

Someone I had to survive introduced me to Jelly Roll with his earlier stuff like Train Tracks and Fall in the Fall. Back then the mix of Southern hip-hop and grit felt closer to real. But over time Jelly became tied in my mind to that man, and his incel ideas and outlook on life mirror what Jelly Roll was embracing. The music became something I loved to hate. By the time I escaped after Save Me was out and overplayed, Jelly Roll had fully crossed into mainstream country rock, leaning on plaintive singing, gimmick lyrics, and safe themes anyone could swallow. I tried to take the music back, really tried, but between the off-stage persona and the sellout shine, there was nothing left to salvage.

4. Alice in Chains – Rooster

Every note drags like wet cement. The guitars just loop the same slow figure until it feels less like heaviness and more like boredom. The vocals moan one long complaint rather than a melody. Even the drums sound tired, like they’d rather be anywhere else. The whole song mistakes heaviness for depth. It is sludge dressed up as wisdom. Listening feels like drowning in sand and wishing it was the ocean so the slow release of death would at least be beautiful and end quicker.

3. Shawn Mullins – Lullaby

The verses whisper smug and thin, like a man who thinks mumbled observation makes him profound. The chorus becomes nasal noise that is just filler and nothing more. The melody barely moves, just the same few notes circling until it feels like background music for a bar no one wants to drink in. The production leans on that lazy acoustic strum and paper-thin drums, as if “understated” automatically equals “deep.” The song reeks of someone who thinks philosophy only needs confidence and thirst traps to pass as truth. It is shallow, and he was a one-hit wonder for a reason.

2. Michael W. Smith – This Is Your Time

A song that monetized a national tragedy, what else is there to say? It targeted teens, weaponized collective trauma with gimmick lyrics and a nauseating whine, and helped launch a movement that taught youth to believe through manipulation instead of truth. The story it sold was misrepresented, built on something that never happened, yet it became altar-call fuel. It was the precursor to Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue manipulating the same audience by leaning on collective effervescence to wring tears and loyalty out of kids who should have been told the truth rather than have our high school and early twenties “once in a lifetime” events make millions for others while our peers were murdered.

1. Jason Aldean – Try That in a Small Town

This is not a song. It is a billboard for cheap beer and poverty wages. All I hear in my mind when it plays is Bo Burnham’s Pandering. It is small-town cosplay for people who peaked in high school. It doesn’t deserve a musical breakdown because who the fuck could listen to it long enough to notice.

Bonus: Machine Gun Kelly & Jelly Roll – Lonely Road

This song borrows heavily in lyrics and theme from John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads. Whether Jelly himself momentarily remembered how to tell the truth, or whether it is just John Denver bleeding through, the fit works. His voice lends itself to this song and hints at what he could have been. If he had chosen authenticity over money and political image, Jelly Roll might have stood with the greats instead of prostituting at their feet.

That's the playlist. Five hymns for the grifters and one accidental confession that doesn't bow to the excuses they built for themselves.

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This was written for the prompt by Sam Spinelli Unofficial challenge: Do Your Worst! (unbearable music recs)