Worst Songs Ever: Beyonce’s “Run the World (Girls)”

Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.

“Run the World (Girls)”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #29 in June 2011.

Before essaying Serious Albums and using social media for creative marketing, Beyoncé still recorded pop-R&B albums. 2011’s theme-free 4 was her most uneven — often it was leaden in unexpected ways — but it contained more bangers than any collection with Ms. Knowles’ name since the first Destiny’s Child compilation. “1+1,” “I Care,” I Miss U,” “Countdown,” the almighty “Love on Top,” the almighty-er B-side “Schoolin’ Life” — on lung power, commitment, and imagination alone these tracks when playing rendered superfluous the rest of her output.

But we have to deal with “Run the World (Girls)” as first single. A frantic, joyless reprise of “Independent Women,” “Survivor,” and the last album’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” “Run the World” replaces jouissance with kinetics; when your rockist friends accuse Beyonce of caring more about dancing instead of songwriting, here’s ground zero. It begins with piano run through echo, followed by parade ground drums, Beyonce’s call and response chant (“Who run the world?/GIRLS”), and chipmunk harmonies. Those drums are the main element. And that’s it (The-Dream, Switch, and Diplo produced, among the most anonymous jobs ever helmed by the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin of early ’00s pop). Yes, she dedicates the song to the ladies in the club — token solidarity — but the song is about Beyoncé running the world. In the last six years as Beyoncé has become the pop star with the world’s biggest bully pulpit her songs have become more intricate, conversant with sounds from other lands; she’s a spokesperson without foregoing her identity or becoming a pedant. These developments reduce “Run the World” into innocuousness if not a gesture of unwitting condescension.

I have no knowledge if changing public taste coincided with changing consumption habits. After 2009’s I Am…Sasha Fierce watched two other singles precede and follow the immortal but okay “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On it)” into the top ten, Beyoncé evaporated as a Billboard Hot 100 presence. The collaboration with her husband “Drunk in Love” and 2016’s “Formation” aside (I won’t count the current #1, an Ed Sheeran duet in which she vests an unbecoming dignity), she became the pop Radiohead, an album presence. In retrospect “Run the World” was a dead end dressed as a warning — had she not re-constructed her hermeneutics of pop with 2013’s eponymous triumph “Run the World” might’ve been titled “World Leader Pretend” if the title weren’t already taken.