Maroon 5, Please Don’t Ruin Cardi B

Maroon 5 have released a new song called “Girls Like You”— and it’s awful. It’s really, really bad. I’m actually upset about it, but unfortunately I’m a “music” “journalist”, so I have to cover news stories of interest––journalists serve the people, or something, although I’m not sure if that counts for culture writers––and, unfortunately, this satanic new video is of interest. It’s of interest, sadly, because it features Cardi B (rapping) and about every other famous woman ever (just standing around). It’s like an intensely white version of Drake’s “Nice For What” video.

“Girls Like You” (featuring Cardi B) is a remix of “Girls Like You” from Maroon 5’s latest (terribly titled) album Red Pill Blues. Apparently the band didn’t know that was an MRA term, as if they’ve never even spent a half-second on the internet. “Girls Like You” is the kind of horrible, bleached-white acoustic-guitar-loop love song that’s going to make twenty billion fucking dollars, because apparently a lot of people really enjoy this kind of song. I actively resent these people, these awful masochists who keep driving demand for songs like “Girls Like You”–– horrid, weird, marshmallow-soft songs sung by dudes pining after a ‘good girl’ who will finally fix all of their problems through the power of love. This song will probably get played at roughly ten thousand weddings this year, and to the wedding DJs about to add this song to their playlist, I beg of you: please, just play another Bruno Mars song instead.

I don’t hate Maroon 5. I am, after all, a human being with ears and a heart, so of course I think “What Lovers Do” is a jam and “Don’t Wanna Know” is pretty damn catchy and “Moves Like Jagger” is, unfortunately, absolute fire. But I wish Maroon 5 weren’t so damn fond of releasing songs like this, deformed 3-and-a-half-minute pieces of low-carb low-fat gluten free sludge that make me question whether we, humanity, deserve music at all.

“Girls Like You” is very bad, yes, but even the most toxic chemtrail clouds have silver linings: Cardi B is on this track, so you know that at least one verse isn’t going to make your eyes roll into the back of your head and never come back. Cardi’s verse is this song’s saving grace, because it’s basically the antithesis of Adam Levine’s whole weird muscular robot thing. She raps about how she’s less interested in a white horse and a carriage than she is, say, a sick car and diamonds, which I very much support. At one point she says “You need someone to spice it up”, probably a line pulled direct from an internal memo written by Maroon 5’s A&R about the original version of this track. Cardi looks fucking resplendent wearing an oversized mustard yellow jacket in this video, and honestly, I’m pretty pissed that this excellent look was wasted on such a heinous song and video.. I hope Cardi got paid one billion dollars for this song, because realistically, that’s the only amount of money that would have made this brand association worth it.

The rest of the “Girls Like You” video is similarly unfortunate: most of the actual content is just digitally-inserted footage of a bunch of famous and semi-famous female stars, including Mary J Blige, Gal Gadot, Millie Bobby Brown (Who’s a minor, by the way! Please, Millie Bobby Brown’s agent, don’t let Millie Bobby Brown become associated with Adam Levine!), Tiffany Haddish, Jennifer Lopez and Camilla Cabello. It’s fair enough that none of these people wanted to actually film in close proximity to Adam Levine, but honestly, the editors responsible for these digital insertions probably need to be fired. (That being said, if I had to work on a Maroon 5 video I’d probably try to tank it too.)

Anyway, I guess my point here is: Maroon 5’s new video is bad. Very, very bad. It’s not a good song and it’s not a good video and, apart from Cardi B, there’s very little actual content here. And even then, there’s about a million other videos of Cardi B on the internet that you should watch before this one. It’s just another piece of debris floating around on the internet. If “Girls Like You” makes me certain of one thing, it’s that when the end days come, I will look into whatever inferno is about to devour me, and smile. With death comes nothingness, and nothingness means that all my memories of this god-awful song will finally have been purged. I can’t wait.

Watch “Girls Like You”, if you must, below:

Shaad D’Souza is Noisey’s Australian editor. Follow him on Twitter.