Allamassal's Song Rants and Raves: What About Us

allamassal Hello once again! It's allamassal and welcome back to Allamassal's Song Rants and Raves. Another rant this time. You all waited for this one...

On August 10, 2017, Pink released a song called What About Us, which became the first song in 3 years to have a top 10 debut on the charts (!), and also the most overrated song of 2017 apart from Praying.

Now, I didn't mind this song at first, but on September 8, 2017, when we drove to Tampa to try to get away from the hurricane, we heard this song. There are other songs I associate with that day that I like, but not only is this song the most depressing out of all of them, but it came on at that time when my thoughts about the destruction of the house were at their height. For a while I associated this song with that day, but the association has kind of faded away.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get to the good part.
Later that month, the song started becoming popular and overplayed to the absolute max, not to mention it keeps getting stuck in my head. One time when it came on Nick Music, it was all I heard in my head for the rest of the night.

Let's start with the beginning of the song. There is, admittedly, a sense of dread I feel when I hear the melancholy opening. I always mishear the first lyric as saying, "We're such lights, we can see in the dark", when it really says, "We are searchlights, we can see in the dark". Then there is the lyric "We are rockets pointed up at the stars", followed by "We're billions of beautiful hearts", and then "And you sold us, down the river too far".

The vocals are fine up until the chorus which is where it really goes off the rails for me. "What about us? What about all the times you said you had the answers? What about us? What about all the broken happy ever afters?" UGH, I hate typing lyrics of songs I don't like, please let the torture end!

Then comes the most grating part, "WHAT ABOUT US? WHAT ABOUT ALL THE PLANS THAT ENDED IN DISASTER? OH WHAT ABOUT LOVE?". The singing on the parts with the high notes (like this) annoys me to the point where I feel like leaving the car, store, restaurant, or whatever.

The bridge is decent, up until the "I DON'T WANT CONTROL I WANT TO LET GO!" part, and then the transition back to the chorus. The last chorus is the most annoying for reasons I don't have to explain. And then comes the ending, which is calming, partly because I am relieved that this annoying song is finally over. That doesn't mean it won't keep repeating in my head though!

Now, the thing with this song is that mainstream radio just couldn't get enough of it. There was one day in mid-November when this song was on 4 different stations in 20 minutes, and even by April 2018 we were still hearing it twice in one outing. By now it is only overplayed on variety stations, but you'll probably hear it 10 times every day if you only listen to those stations. This song is also constantly playing in public places too.

And, of course, how can I forget that this song is the worst earworm I've had in a long time! After this song came on in a Forever 21 store one day in late March, I could barely get it out of my head for the next 2 days. Usually an earworm I have will be gone by the next day, but this one is an exception to that. One time, I listened to 7 songs and even that was not enough to remove this song from my head. Wow. At least Just Like Fire didn't get stuck in my head for 48 hours.

Bye!

Comments

I said in this post that by April 2018 we were still hearing it twice in one outing, but we heard it twice on June 30, so... - allamassal

Heard it twice on September 29 - allamassal