Maroon 5's "Sound" It's a pipe dream to hope that a highly profitable group with mass popularity will stop making the music that's made them millionaires and return to a less lucrative (albeit better) sound from days gone by, but one can hope. Once upon a time in the 2000s, Maroon 5 released Songs About Jane, a commercially successful album that went multiplatinum in the U.S. and granted the band three Top 20 hits. It also included some solidly good music, particularly sleeper singles "Sunday Morning" and "Must Get Out."

Not since this time has the band generated a similar quality in music, despite subsequent records being even more successful than their freshman effort. On the last two, but particularly 2014's hit V, lead singer and full-time heartthrob Adam Levine sounds like he is perpetually being kneed in the gonads. Worse than his contorted falsetto alone is the fact that it is the only consistent sound the band makes. Without this horrible flag of identification, there is no distinctiveness to who this band is or what sound they make. Maroon 5, it's time to get back to your roots.

Eminem's Misogyny Okay, Eminem, we get it: pretty much every important woman in your life has been a piece of trash. Your mom wasn't exactly Donna Reed, and your ex-wife Kim was a crazy ho (note: any woman who wears black lipliner with light-pink lipstick is generally a crazy ho). We will give you that. But really, chill out with the woman-bashing already. It seems like every opportunity you get to tear down women, you take it...and this isn't exactly a new hobby.

You've been bashing successful women since the '90s: Britney, Christina, Mariah, etc. Iggy Azalea was your main target in 2014, and who will be next? Whoever threatens your chart success, apparently. Look, Iggy might suck as an artist, but it's clear that you were hating on her as a woman, not a rapper. What kind of message are you giving your daughter here? And Rihanna, quit doing those awful duets with him. You are an enabler.

p.s., "Monster" was atrocious and annoying.

Unlistenable Hip-Hop Let's get this out of the way: small positives can be gleaned out of anything bad, like Charlize Theron's great performance in the otherwise horrible movie The Devil's Advocate, for example. So sure, we could say that there were a (very) few hip-hop artists or songs in 2014 that were not totally awful (Schoolboy Q, Chance the Rapper, fill in the blank here with something you felt was decent), but on the whole, 2014 was one of the worst years on record for new hip-hop.

Stylistically, MCs all sounded like they were rapping through Novocain injections and a mouthful of pudding. Simply put, this year's hip hop was wholly unlistenable, filled from beginning to end with songs that validated the age-old proverb said by dads everywhere: "How do you listen to that shit? That's not even music." In 2014 we didn't, because it wasn't.

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