Listen To The Most Unwanted Song Ever, Scientifically Created By Three Russian Artists
Eisenstein would approve
You probably have heard music that bores you to death, think about any music you hear while shopping or while waiting for the dentist, it’s usually awful! And worst that boring, this music can be really, really annoying, a pollution of the brain like no other!
A few years ago, Wired magazine had a funny article, that I just read today, about annoying music. In the 90s, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, two Russian artists worked on concepts like ‘most wanted’ and ‘least wanted’ paintings of countries, based on the results of surveys. They also got the idea to use the same process to create ‘The Most Wanted Song’ and ‘The Most Unwanted Song’ in collaboration with composer David Soldier. Of course, the second one, ‘The Most Unwanted Song’ is the subject of the Wired article!
According to the online poll, the most unwanted elements in a song are ‘cowboy music, bagpipes, accordions, opera, rap music, children’s voices, tubas, drum machines and advertising jingles’. If I can agree with bagpipes, it all depends on the context for the rest! Anyway, they managed to incorporate all this into a 22-minute-long song, and this is where they cheated a little bit, any track lasting 22 minutes isn’t really a song per se, rather a mosaic of different things.
According to Wired, the most unwanted song contains little dissonance, but the long collage of accordion, cowboy music (tip toe harmonica), drum machines, operatic vocals of a crazy woman over tubas, harps or vampire organs, chorus of children voices, bagpipe concerto, mad banjos, Christmas song, and some vague rap-opera, is quite a wild trip, it is a surrealist composition – and according to the picture above, these guys actually look like mad scientists. It’s not so bad after all, I have heard some Boulez compositions which were much more annoying than this. The most unwanted song even sounds cinematic, like the soundtrack of a forgotten black and white flick, watched in an old movie theater. Hey, there’s even the commercial interruption with Walmart…. Actually, like for an old movie watched on a bad channel, those interruptions are coming back a little too often toward the end, and if you are courageous enough to go through the whole track, I don’t think you will ever want to listen to it again.
