Missouri Classical Music News

• The Most Wanted Song (5 min)
  a musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably liked by 72±12% of listeners
  
  
• The Most Unwanted Song (21 min 59 sec)
  fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population will enjoy this

The first is a mid-tempo rock love song of blistering blandness that "will be unavoidably and uncontrollably 'liked' by 72 ± 12% of listeners," as Soldier explains in the sleeve notes. Vocalist Ada Dyer squirms her way through Nina Mankin's "likeable" lyrics ("Lying in my silken sheets/I think of ways that we might meet") and is answered by a deep-voiced Ronnie Gent, sounding a little like Meat Loaf. After a couple of minutes, Vernon Reid of Living Color steps in firmly on electric guitar, as Gent muses, "Maybe she likes reading Wittgenstein/Fancy dinners drinking good red wine." This odd intrusion of the Austrian philosopher is presumably because 21% of the survey said they want intellectual stimulation when they listen to music.

The song gets even funnier as it climaxes, with guitar and saxophone (Andy Snitzer) both contributing solos that subtly parody the clichés of the genre.

As you might imagine, "The Most Unwanted Song" is a real crackup. Even though those surveyed hate opera and hip-hop, wild volume variations, the subjects of cowboys or holidays, accordions and bagpipes (not to mention the vocal stylings of children), this squeezebox-backed rap of screaming kids with an over-the-top soprano singing home-for-the-holidays-on-the-range lyrics is a hilarious mess. Survey says politics and religion are to be avoided as well, which explains why the soprano's soliloquies about saddling up the fellas and Wittgenstein are interrupted by a kids chorus yelling, "Yom Kippur! Yom Kippur! Self-reflection and atonement!"