Most Wanted

Like Sedric I have heard the Most Wanted and Most Unwanted music both.  For both of them, really, I think of "good" or "bad" as beside the point.  The thing that this project is revelatory of to me is the limits of how people describe their likes and dislikes.  Avant-gardists tend to dismiss pop music but if anybody could write a successful pop song just by following a simple formula the charts would look extremely different.  I know the KLF claim differently about hits, but IDK, maybe they were wrong.  Maybe they got lucky and attributed their success to their Foolproof Plan.  Maybe, you know, they just KNEW THE RIGHT PEOPLE.

This is the part of success that gets ignored a lot by fans, that art is a social medium, it doesn't succeed or fail on its own merits.  The Most Wanted and Most Unwanted music were made by people who, I think, have a particular audience of people who are more generally interested in "Unwanted" music, the music that people don't like.  Because I often listen to weird music, the assumption people make about me is that I have no standards at all, and it's just not true.  My standards are weird and arbitrary and don't necessarily map well onto other people's standards, but I am an extremely judgemental person who has listened to a lot of music.  I can pretty quickly tell the difference between music I like and music I don't.

The Most Unwanted Music, honestly, the main thing to say about is that it's "overkill".  Not really that much different from any "prog epic", in truth, as it's a bunch of different things that people individually dislike, often for cultural reasons, combined in various permutations.

So we have, then, a rapping cowboy soprano.  It's not good rapping, but Dina Emerson is a pretty good soprano; it's not like she's Florence Foster-Jenkins or anything.  I'm not huge on opera music, but under the right circumstances I can take it.  Emerson sells it, and it's suitably absurd that I'm taken by it.  The presence of bagpipes and accordion is also actively appealing to me.  This is one of the limitations - all of the things people hate must be liked by somebody, probably a significant number of people.  I've heard some really great Midwestern polka music from the '50s, and for cultural reasons this music has been put down for a while now but if you go back far enough you will hear music that is fresh and vital.  The music here, as well, is fresh and vital and played with gusto. 

Other parts, on the other hand?  Not so much.  Someone yelling political slogans at me at length.  A children's chorus, one of the sorts where being in tune is a secondary consideration, sings holiday songs ending with exhortations to shop at Wal-Mart.  I skip these parts.  I should probably do an edit of the Most Unwanted Song to cut it down to the bits I actually like - the patchwork nature of the song makes this pretty darn possible.  I'm sort of envisioning a sea of versions, everybody's individual Least Unwanted Song.

The Most Wanted Song, I'm more uncomfortable with that.  The style of music has strong cultural associations for me.  Specifically it evokes being home from school sick and listening to the radio and "Captain of Her Heart" by the Swiss quartet "Double" was riding the charts that week.  So I heard it a lot, because I was too sick to do anything else, and I know there are a lot of minor key songs but for some reason this particular chord sequence, this particular implementation of the '80s pop ethos, has left me with a lasting hangover.  Hell, maybe if I heard the song today I'd like it.  I know I didn't like "Heroes and Villains" the first time I heard it either.  I do think it is definitely a strange piece, that the musicians set out to create a deliberately off-putting piece of music that still worked within the constraints of what people said they wanted.  What do people want out of music?  I mean in psychological terms, not in what instruments they like or don't like.   From what I can tell, a lot of what people want is to not be _offended_.  Honestly, I'm not sure that "The Most Wanted Song" fulfills that brief.

Ultimately projects like "The Most Unwanted Song" and "The Most Wanted Song" show, for me, the limits of data.  You want good data, you have to ask the right questions, and as far as I can tell there's nothing, nothing whatsoever, to support the idea that the questions Komar and Melamid asked people about music are in any way useful or valuable as a blueprint for creative work.  Garbage in, garbage out!  Same as it ever was.