Labor Day

"Labor Day, Labor Day
Schools are closed and pools are open!
Labor Day, all the way!
Do all your shopping...at Wal-Mart."

Music is usually a personal thing - one man's trash ("We Built This City") is another man's treasure (I love "We Built This City") - but a few years ago, there was a scientific poll taken of musical tastes and distastes. Komar & Melamid (see above, with hair) decided to take the list of these attributes and turn them into the most wanted and most unwanted songs. The most wanted features stereotypical attributes like love as the theme and saxophones and it's okay. But the most unwanted song, on the other hand, is a thing of wretched beauty. It combines everything the polled music listeners hated - tubas, accordians, jingles, holiday themes, children singing, opera - into one amazingly long, simultaneously revolting/appealing cacophony of weird. In between long cowboyish "dum da dee duh" interludes and someone surely in a Viking hat caterwauling are little ditties about odd holidays sung by children and all of them end with "do all your shopping...at Wal-Mart!". There's tributes to Veterans' Day, Halloween, Ramadan ("lots of praying with no breakfast!"), and Labor Day which is and forever will be stuck in my head during early September. Should you ever be so curious as to hear this song in its full 25 minute long glory, I will be happy to escort you down to the basement to the two giant Rubbermaid containers filled the with less popular CDs for your digging and eventual listening pleasure. Until then, console yourself by listening to the fodder of these wretched songs:
Richard Harris sings "MacArthur Park"!
the "Tootsie Roll Jingle"!
Captain and Tennille's inexplicable "Muskrat Love"!