The Most Unwanted Song

"The Most Unwanted Song" is an avant-garde novelty song created by artists Komar and Melamid and composer Dave Soldier in 1997. The song was written to incorporate lyrical and musical elements that were disliked by most respondents to a poll, including bagpipes, cowboy music, an opera singer rapping, and a children's choir that urged listeners to "do all [their] shopping at Walmart!"[1][2]

"The Most Unwanted Song"
Song by Komar and Melamid and Dave Soldier
from the album The People's Choice: Music
Released1997 (1997)
Genre"Unwanted":

"Wanted":
Length21:58 ("Unwanted")
5:09 ("Wanted")
Label
Composer(s)Dave Soldier
Lyricist(s)Nina Mankin

Along with its counterpart "The Most Wanted Song", it was released on the CD The People's Choice: Music in 1997, which was sold at the Dia Art Foundation bookstore and later through Soldier's Mulatta Records.[3][4] In 2019, The People's Choice: Music was remastered and reissued on vinyl, CD, and cassette by Needlejuice Records.[5]

Background

Beginning in 1994, Russian-American graphic artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid created a series of "most wanted" and "least wanted" paintings ("Выбор народа"), based on visual aspects found to be most "wanted" and "unwanted" by the public according to professional opinion polls. These paintings were published in the book Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art in 1997.[6]

Asked by an art gallery owner to make a CD for him, Komar and Melamid approached American neuroscientist and musician David Sulzer (known in his musical career as Dave Soldier), with whom they were working on the opera Naked Revolution for The Kitchen in Manhattan. Soldier suggested adapting the concept of The People's Choice painting series to music, to be titled The People's Choice: Music. This project again used the opinions of the public, as measured by polling surveys, to determine which elements of the medium were "most" or "least wanted". The polls were written by Soldier and taken via the Dia Art Foundation in the spring of 1996.[1][3]

The online survey of approximately 500 Dia visitors and participators revealed that the themes, instruments and other musical and lyrical aspects that people least wanted to hear included cowboy music, bagpipes, accordions, opera, rapping, children's voices, tubas, drum machines, and advertising jingles. The artists then incorporated all of these elements into "The Most Unwanted Song", which lasts almost twenty-two minutes as recorded.[7]

Soldier wrote "The Most Unwanted Song" and its companion "The Most Wanted Song" with lyricist Nina Mankin. They debuted the songs at a 1997 performance in New York with soprano Dina Emerson, a large ensemble conducted by Norman Yamada, and a children's choir; Soldier played banjo, while Komar and Melamid jointly played a bass drum.[7]

"The Most Unwanted Song" and "The Most Wanted Song" were performed live for the first time since 1997 at a concert to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Manhattan arts venue (Le) Poisson Rouge in June 2023, alongside other works by Soldier.[8]

Lyrics and music
Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (pictured in 1929) is mentioned in both "The Most Wanted Song" and "The Most Unwanted Song".[9]

Lead vocals on "The Most Unwanted Song" are provided by Emerson, whose high-pitched, operatic rapping is largely Western-themed (though one verse describes reading Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, followed by an interlude where she sings a brief excerpt from it over pipe organ).[1][2] A children's choir sings verses about holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Yom Kippur, Ramadan and Labor Day, each ending with a call to "do all your shopping at Walmart!" Near the end of the song, Mankin shouts various non-sequitur political phrases through a bullhorn–culminating in blaming the audience for slavery, imperialism, and genocide–followed by a "folk song" refrain sung in unison by her, Emerson, the choir, and "with luck, [the] audience".[1][2]

Musically, "The Most Unwanted Song" veers suddenly and frequently between drum machine and tuba-driven hip hop, atonal harp and organ interludes, bagpipes, "elevator music", polka, and country, interspersed or simultaneously with numerous segments of dissonant free improvisation which Soldier terms "slams".[2]

"The Most Wanted Song"

For The People's Choice: Music CD, "The Most Unwanted Song" was paired with "The Most Wanted Song", which incorporated the musical elements that were "wanted" by listeners according to the surveys. Instruments such as saxophone, electric guitar, bass, piano and drums, and lyrics about love were "most wanted" by the survey respondents, and are thus included in the "Celine Dion-esque" song, whose duration of approximately five minutes was also the "most wanted" according to the poll.[10] The only instrument to appear on both songs is the synthesizer.[11] Furthermore, since "intellectual stimulation" was voted both wanted and unwanted, Wittgenstein is mentioned in both songs as an inside joke.[9] The vocals for "The Most Wanted Song" were provided by Ada Dyer and Ronnie Gent; Vernon Reid of Living Colour is featured on electric guitar and provides a solo.[3]

Ironically, many critics preferred "The Most Unwanted Song" over "The Most Wanted Song". Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired considered "The Most Wanted Song" "horrible" and "a way rougher listen" than "The Most Unwanted Song".[12] Jordie Yow of The Tyee felt that "all of the elements [of the song] mish-mashed together into something bland, boring and completely terrible", and preferred "The Most Unwanted Song".[13] Sarah Vowell of Salon wrote that she did not "want to be seen as a flaming contrarian apologist" for preferring "The Most Unwanted Song".[11]

Notes
  1. Mankin, Nina. "America's Most Unwanted Song". Archived from the original on March 11, 2012. Retrieved September 3, 2010.
  2. Soldier, Dave (June 2, 2008). "The Most Unwanted Music: Full Score" (PDF). davesoldier.com. Retrieved March 11, 2023.
  3. "Dave Soldier and Komar & Melamid: The People's Choice Music". Dia Center for the Arts. Retrieved 26 March 2013.
  4. "Komar & Melamid and Dave Soldier "The People's Choice: Music"". Artists : Release. Mulatta.org. Retrieved 26 March 2013.
  5. "The Most Unwanted Song coming vinyl/CD/cassette". Needlejuice Records. 8 January 2019. Retrieved 26 July 2019.
  6. JoAnn Wypijewski, ed. (1997). Painting by Numbers: Komar & Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-22880-9.
  7. Wolk, Douglas (December 1997). "The Most Unwanted Song: Focus Group Rock". CMJ New Music Monthly (52): 12–13.
  8. "LPR 15: Dave Soldier Orchestra". LPR. Retrieved 2023-09-14.
  9. Colton, Michael (January 21, 1998). "'People's Choice': The Ears Have It". Washington Post. Retrieved May 2, 2021.
  10. Soldier, Dave (2002). "Eine Kleine Naughtmusik: How Nefarious Nonartists Cleverly Imitate Music" (PDF). Leonardo Music Journal. 12: 53–58.
  11. Vowell, Sarah (December 12, 1997). "Survey Says...Give the People What They Want". Salon. Archived from the original on August 17, 2000. Retrieved May 2, 2021.
  12. Van Buskirk, Eliot (May 19, 2008). "Survey-Produced 'Most Wanted Song' Sounds Horrible". Wired. Retrieved May 2, 2021.
  13. Yow, Jordie (September 18, 2008). "When Science and Research Are Wrong". The Tyee. Retrieved May 2, 2021.

References
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