A year ago at this time, if you’d have told us that Van Morrison would be single-handedly responsible for nearly a third of a worst-songs-of-2020 list (and that this would not be some kind of weirdly perverse, contrarian view, but something that had wide public agreement)… well, we would’ve assumed you’d dipped a little too much into the mystic Christmas edibles. Yet here we are the end of this anything-can-happen year, with Van the Man having written not one but four horrific anti-lockdown songs, three of which he recorded himself, assigning the last to Eric Clapton, whom we can only assume was the victim of a blackmail scheme.
Was Morrison’s quartet of conspiracy theme-driven anti-quarantine tunes really as bad as, or worse than, the mind-bogglingly bad work of fellow worst listees like Jake Paul, Tory Lanez, Mike Love and Lil Pump? Listen through this list of an unlucky 13 songs that made a bad year worse, if you dare, and judge for yourself. (Click on the photos accompanying each entry to watch the music videos for these regrettable entries.) If it gets to be too much to bear, you can always turn to our list of the 40 best songs of 2020 as an immediate antidote.