Why 'Descendants' “Queen of Mean” does not deserve its royal status
Back in May we published our ranking of all the Descendants songs. Given that our kids had been playing the songs non-stop during quarantine to the point where I had started thinking about stealing fairy wands and turning wicked, we considered it a fun exercise considering the diversity of music styles featured.
We figured our list would get some reaction and disagreements; everyone hears songs differently. Some of the criticism was fair, and most of it was interesting. However, the #1 complaint received was about the song “Queen of Mean” by Sarah Jeffery (Audrey) in Descendants 3. We ranked it #16 out of the 20 songs and didn’t bother to write about it in detail, because we thought it was a pretty forgettable song and our kids always skip past it.
Little did I know ranking “Queen of Mean” that low was apparently the equivalent of telling a PETA meeting that you had a hamburger last night. It was lower than low! We should be banned from writing on ‘Descendants’ forever!
Let’s get into it then; because while we did probably have “Evil Like Me” too low at #10, we are standing by the ranking of “Queen of Mean” at #16.
(Warning, we are going to get super serious about this because most of the reactions received were serious comments from serious adults. Yes, we know these are songs geared towards kids. We are all clear now.)
We listened to “Queen of Mean” another 10 times to prepare for this commentary. You can also listen to it below.
Let us be clear: we don’t care how viral “Queen of Mean” went on YouTube. We don’t care the number of plays it gets on Spotify. Objectively speaking, it’s a boring song by any standard, and there isn’t a single impressive lyric in it.
Don’t believe us? Let’s look at the lyrics of the chorus in plain form:
“I never thought of myself as mean
I always thought that I'd be the queen
And there's no in between
'Cause if I can't have that
Then I would be the leader of the dark
And the bad
Cause the devils on my shoulder
Where the angels used to be
And he's calling me the queen of mean (calling me, calling me)
The queen of mean (calling me, calling me)”
Is there a single thing clever about those lyrics? Keep in mind, most Descendants songs have some measure of ingenuity to it, utilizing wordplay from villainous vocabulary.
These are incredibly straightforward lyrics, invoking only a basic angel/devil metaphor. There’s nothing that makes you expand your mind as you sit back and listen to a classically good girl choose evil.
Ok, so what if the lyrics are boring, you might say? It’s not like the rest of the Descendants catalog is musical Shakespeare, right? Fair enough, so let’s get to the actual music of the song.
Is there even a hook to speak of in this song? Nope.
Is it a song you could dance to, even a slow dance? Nope (but have fun trying to dance to that at your senior prom).
Is the song basically spoken word with a bit of rhythm and musical inflection to it? Yep.
We will say there is a cool moment towards the end where Audrey gets angry and coverts the song to a yell.
“The price that I'm willing to pay is expensive
There's nothing to lose
When you're lonely and friendless
So my only interest is showing this princess
That I am the queen
And my reign will be endless (endless)”
That was interesting and notable, but is that what we’re hanging our hat on? There are so many other songs with better musical hooks and more fun lyrics that we should be celebrating instead of “Queen of Mean.”
So why is it celebrated? Why does the YouTube link I shared above stand at over 288 Million views?
The best we can figure, based on our own analysis as well as the reader feedback, is that the song is a great illustration of how a good girl can go bad with a pretty typical teenager experience. To that, we say, great! But we thought music notes still mattered for a song? Or no?
This seems like an example of giving great reviews due to low expectations. We’ve certainly had characters that turned bad due to bad circumstances, even Disney characters for that matter. Maybe we’ve never had a child of a Disney Princess make that turn, but even so, we shouldn’t throw musical standards out the window because of the surprise element, right?
If we haven’t convinced you yet, consider that even the Sarah Jeffery of “Queen of Mean” was surprised this was a viral sensation. Consider this quote from a billboard.com 2019 interview:
“I didn't expect ['Queen of Mean'] to gain so much popularity so quickly," Jeffery tells Billboard. "You don't really know how people are going to react to it, if it's going to land, and it's just impossible to predict.”
She goes on to attribute the popularity to its subject matter:
"I feel like people can relate to it because it's this song about never being seen and being forgotten about and wanting to change that."
That’s not exactly a quote from someone who knew they had something special on their hands when they recorded the song in studio.
As Jeffery describes, the popularity had absolutely nothing to do with the song’s music itself, or even the lyrics itself, just what the song is about. (If that’s all there is to songwriting, then we all should get into the business!)
In wrapping this up, I’ll just repeat what we wrote in our rankings. Everyone is free to like whatever song they like, but if we are going to try and be objective about songs aimed at 6-12-year-olds, can we at least be honest and say it was a fluke “Queen of Mean” got to be this popular and its not objectively better than a dozen other Descendants songs?
If you still disagree, that’s okay; you can look at us as the real “Queen of Mean.”