Music / The People's Choice Music

(aka: The Most Unwanted Song)

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The People's Choice Music is an album by painters Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, and Dave Soldier, an experimental musician who's also a neurology professor at Columbia University. Komar and Melamid had been making "The Most Wanted/Unwanted Paintings" for a while, based on what people in a certain country liked and didn't like in a painting. They were approached by Soldier to help translate this idea into music, and the result was two songs: "The Most Wanted Song" and "The Most Unwanted Song", with artist Nina Mankin writing lyrics for both pieces. By far, the latter is the more famous of the two, for obvious reasons.

"The Most Unwanted Song" was debuted live in 1997, while the album was released in 2001. 2023 live performances of "The Most Unwanted Song" and "The Most Wanted Song" (the former featuring Soldier on banjo and Komar on bass drum) were posted to Soldier's YouTube channel.

Tropes applying to both

• Golden Mean Fallacy: The entire project (and its preceding "Most Wanted/Unwanted Paintings" series) is meant to be a satirization of the concept, inspired by the use of polling data to dictate political consensus. The hypothetical impetus can be summarized as "If politicians use opinion polls to assess democracy and entrepreneurs use consumer polls to assess the market, why can't artists use polls to assess art?", and the end result should explain why.
• The Something Song: The Most Wanted and Unwanted, respectively.
• Technician Versus Performer: "The Most Wanted Song" is carefully crafted with the most popular musical tropes (at the time) in the most aurally-pleasing way possible. Meanwhile, "The Most Unwanted Music" is a highly experimental piece that uses the least popular musical trope, in ways that range from working in surprising unison to being an absolute mess. The general consensus is that the former is insipid and generic, while the latter is impressive and at the very least entertaining.
• Tropes Are Tools: The defining theme of these two songs, meaning that no matter how "unwanted" a trope is, it's ultimately how it's used that determines whether it works. An example is how synthesisers are used on both the Most Wanted and Unwanted songs, given that they ranked both high and low on levels of enjoyment in the surveys used. "Intellectual Stimulation" was also in both Most Wanted and Unwanted, leading to references to Ludwig Wittgenstein in both. In the former, the male singer just casually wonders if his love interest is reading Wittgenstein, but in the latter, the rapping cowgirl ham-fistedly summarizes some of the philosopher's theories.

As she fills the list of tropes... (The Most Wanted Song)

• Award-Bait Song: The song practically uses the listed cliches as a checklist.
• Lives in a Van: The singers tout "Simple livin' in our own RV" as some kind of romantic ideal.
• Munchkin: How this trope manifests in music theory, by arranging the most "wanted" musical tropes in the most effective ways possible.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The song that resulted from the survey suggests that most people in the time period wanted a duet between Whitney Houston and Bruce Springsteen, since the singers do their vocals In the Style of them. The song's lyricist Nina Mankin even said she wrote the words based on the kinds of songs that Houston and Springsteen might do.
• Silly Love Song: A straightforward song about love, with little depth.
• Song Style Shift: The verses sung by the woman are a straightforward first-person love ballad ("Baby, let me be your girl"). The ones sung by the man suddenly turn it into a third-person story song ("Joey was a travelin' man, long and lean with a face like a baby").
• Soprano and Gravel: The woman's vocals are very smooth and bright, while the male vocals are a gravelly, raspy Bruce Springsteen impression.
• Truck Driver's Gear Change: There's a key change going a step up near the end, just before the fade-out.
• A Wild Rapper Appears!: The 2023 live performance throws this into the mix.

Do all your troping... at Walmart! (The Most Unwanted Song)

• All There in the Script: Dave Soldier's written score for the piece gives detailed descriptions of each section and shows that, despite sounding like pure chaos, it was all meticulously planned out. It's also full of amusing instructions for the players.
  Piccolo way up front, everyone else plays obnoxious drones on conductor cues.
  Tuba plays bagpipe tune, everyone else slams very quietly.
  Accordion solo improvising over elevator theme, interrupted by slams cued by conductor that interfere with the soloist.
  Extremely and PAINFUL: slow Cowboy theme.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: "Easter time! Easter time! Love, forgiveness, and the bunnies!"
• Artistic License – Religion: The children's chorus exuberantly urges us to celebrate Yom Kippur and Ramadan, both somber observances involving fasting and reflection, by shopping at Walmart.
• Audience Participation: In the 2023 performance, during the final Country Music segment, the conductor and the sloganeer prompt the audience to clap along.
• Bowdlerise: As originally written, the kids describe Veterans Day as "something to do with war and carnage", but apparently worried that line might stir up controversy, the creators changed it to "big parades and guns and soldiers" for the recording. The 2023 live version restored it.
• Country Rap: Sung by an operatic soprano, no less!
  I say: yo! Yo! I'm a cowboy now!
• Christmas Songs: Combined with an advertisement for Walmart.
• Genre Mashup: Mashes up Country Music, Hip-Hop, yodeling, opera, holiday music, and experimental music.
• Gratuitous German: Part of the second Country Rap verse is in German, for some reason.
• Gratuitous Russian: In the 2023 performance's "protest rant" portion, a couple of the kid's lines are in Russian.
• Epic Rocking: Clocks in at over 21 minutes (because the survey showed that people hate really long songs).
• Everything's Louder with Bagpipes: Bagpipes are featured quite a lot in this song.
• Evolving Music: The live performance released in 2023 changed most of the "political rant" portion's lyrics to include topics relevant to 2023. The "Veterans Day! Veterans Day!" jingle also changed "Big parade with guns and soldiers" to "something to do with war and carnage" (which had been the original lyrics as written).
• Jingle: A series of songs themed around Christmas, Easter, Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving, Ramadaan, Labor Day, and Veterans' Day that tell the listener to shop at Walmart.
• Kids Rock: An enthusiastic children's chorus sings all the holiday songs and some other interludes. In the 2023 live performance, one of the kids also joins in on the megaphone ranting toward the end.
• Mundane Made Awesome: One of the holiday verses is about answering a phone call from a family member. An occasion comparable to celebrating Thanksgiving that requires supplies from Wal-Mart.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: There's a section sung in German about how language is nonsense, accompanied by scary organ music. Followed immediately by one of the holiday-themed verses, this time about Yom Kippur.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: The Soprano Cowboy at one point raps about fighting an "Injun Band" to take their land and turn it into grocery stores.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: "THREE! THOUSAND! YEARS! OF! OOOOO!PPRESSIOOOOON!" "WHO? MURDERED? ALL? THE? INNOCENT? CHILDREN?"
• Sensory Abuse: There are numerous shifts in tone, tempo, and volume, with some segments that are painful to listen to, especially when they incorporate bagpipes.
• Slogan-Yelling Megaphone Guy: Implied in the last few minutes with a segment that sounds like it was recorded through a megaphone that consists of a woman shouting various random, politically-charged phrases.
  Coming together out of a desire to obtain political power! Vice Presidential Candidate! Twenty-seven electoral votes! Central policy issues! Two-party system! Struggle!
• Song Style Shift: Possibly more than any song on Earth, with a total of 23 different sections repeated over and over again.
• Soprano and Gravel: A variation on the idea, since the vocals alternate between an actual soprano (doing operatic rap and warbling) and a chorus of shrill children.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The political megaphone speech takes place over salon music with accordion and harp (designated in the official score as "elevator music").
• Strictly Formula: While there are couple of slight variations, almost all the holiday-themed sections use the same melody and lyric structure: <holiday> repeated twice^note with "<holiday>-time" used if the holiday is less than three syllables. + flippant line describing the holiday + <holiday> again + inane rhyme of <holiday> + "do all your shopping...at Walmart!".
• Stylistic Suck: It deliberately combines all the musical elements average American listeners were found to hate most: Opera, Rap, children singing, atonality, bagpipe, harp, accordion, tuba, banjo, drum machines, lyrics about holidays and cowboys, advertising jingles, political themes, extreme length and wild fluctuations in tempo and volume, in the least appealing ways possible.
• Unbuilt Trope: The lyrics of the Country Rap sections could be taken for a parody of "Old Town Road", except for the fact that they predate it by a couple of decades.
• You Bastard!: Most people don't want to be accused of atrocities, so the song does exactly that.
  Who enslaved people of color?
  Who invaded the Caribbean?
  Who murdered all the innocent children?!
  YOU DID! YOU! YOU! YOU!