Day 2: Your Least Favorite Song
Ugh, another category based on picking one song out of many equally deserving candidates. There are a few difficulties particular to choosing a song for least favorite song. First and foremost it’s a choice that, by definition, should be hard to think of. Most songs that I find to be truly bad are songs that I won’t listen to enough times to stick in my memory. And what does “bad” mean, anyway? Terrible execution? Horrible song writing? Overuse of cliché? General douchitude?
When I was regularly reviewing music I believed that it was better to be spectacularly incompetent than forgettably boring. Practice can make you a better player, but true creativity can’t be learned. By this definition all of the worst songs I’ve ever heard are buried in the waste bin of music history, forgotten and unrecoverable.
But we’re not necessarily talking about “bad” songs when we talk about least favorite, are we? Something can be a least favorite without necessarily being the worst. Like a completely mediocre song that becomes mystifyingly popular to the point where it’s overplayed everywhere. Such force-feeding of an otherwise inoffensive song could certainly drive it into the realm of least-favoritism.
But what about a song that's boring, cliche, overplayed, douchey AND sports a general ideology that's completely irresponsible bordering on dangerous? What about a song that epitomizes a mindset that's as poisonous as it is cathartic and has led to ten years of disastrous decisions? Is that worth least-favorite status?
