Hot Chelle Rae

I see that Hot Chelle Rae has just released a new single.  I implore of you, do not buy it.  Do not watch it on YouTube or listen to it on Spotify or Vevo or any other website.  Call into your local radio stations and personally request they play anything else.  If you are wondering why I hate them so much, do not indulge your bile fascination by looking them up, as it is not worth the .0001 cents it earns them.

Perhaps I should elaborate.  I hate this band.  I truly despise them.  In case you couldn't gather that.

I first became familiar with Hot Chelle Rae thanks to a very poor choice in song from whoever controls the speakers in the dining hall.  Their single "Tonight, Tonight" struck me as particularly awful, first of all because it was being played so loudly I could hear it through my headphones, which I specifically use to drown out the sounds of the obnoxiously loud, talkative, screechy-voiced people that seem to populate the campus quite thoroughly and the aforementioned awful musical choices.  The other reasons are quite a bit worse.

Hot Chelle Rae is the Pauly Shore of music.  I went there.  They have no talent, instead relying on being able to copy the basic outline set up by other performers, although not the particularly skilled, whom they lack the talent to emulate in even the loosest sense; worse, they don't even copy the poor format well, instead just taking the basic cheap tricks with none of the context that makes it passable.  The only reason they have careers is because of nepotism.  They contribute absolutely nothing except a hollow, empty shell, distinguished only by being even worse than the dull, boring middle mark by which their media are judged.  "Tonight, Tonight" is a party song, but unlike other party songs, it has absolutely no energy or flow or any of the other things that make good party songs.  They have the absolute bare minimum amount of talent to qualify for a local talent show and get a "Participant" ribbon.  They do not want to make music, they just want to be musicians.

Other performers repeat words in their chorus because they are thematically relevant or at least fit the song ergonomically well.  Hot Chelle Rae constructed a chorus consisting primarily of "Tonight" because they clearly could not think of anything else.  "Tonight" is already the most overused word in the pop lexicon outside "love", so much that it has become white noise.  I don't hear it.  By the time "Hey Soul Sister" hit, it was pretty clear the definition of "tonight" had become "n., too-NITE; a word with two syllables and no meaning".  Constructing your hook out of it strikes me as lazy.

Hot Chelle Rae probably chose their name so it would sound awkward when critics inevitably labelled them "lukewarm".  Listening to their music is the auditory equivalent of drinking flat soda.

I beg of you, force their careers into the ground.  You, as an audience, have the power to drive these hacks out of business and into the dead-end jobs pumping gas they so clearly deserve so that actual good musicians, or at least those whose existence is merited by literally anything, can sell a few more songs.