Spreading Around Today’s Bad Mood: The Worst Song I Know

jharv | September 11, 2007 12:15 pm

In my bleaker moments–like say, every time I dwell on the current spluttering state of what we keep hearing from the media is now everyone’s favorite “niche” interest, popular music–my best friend will remind me that if I do choose suicide, he will show up at my funeral only to play this song on his accordion*:

After he shouts it directly into my dead face, he will then pass the funeral director a five dollar bill to install a speaker in my coffin so I can be haunted by its yucky yodelling yarl for the rest of eternity, or until the CD player breaks. Sometimes, when I am feeling low and/or drunk, I do like to marinate in its stripey-socked-and-dreadlocked evil, because it reaffirms that keeping on kicking is worth avoiding the alternative. This is not VH1-style secret-ironic-enjoyment. This is some kind of Catholicism-bred penitence for the fuck-ups of my generation; no pleasure can be wrung from it. I know that my feeling this song is the worst is not necessarily a minority opinion among music fans–there are many Google hits from fellow haters also declaring it the “worst song ever” to prove this, as well as the canon-building cable TV list show schlock–but if you do know of something more heinous, I’d almost certainly like to know what it is, if only so I can change my funeral plans.

*Not kidding about the accordion part, either.