30 Songs in 30 days: day 02 – your least favorite song

Yeah, it turns out this one’s harder to figure out than my favorite song. With that one, the hard part was picking one out of the myriad songs I really really (really) love to call a “favorite.” The problem with this one is that I don’t really listen to songs I don’t like – certainly not enough to decide if one is worse than another. And unlike some people, I don’t have a massively negative period in my past I can look back on and associate with a song. (Now if it were “least favorite soup,” I’d be all over that, because in 2003 I suffered a medical crisis that, while not directly soup-related, is forever inextricably linked in my mind to gazpacho, which is too bad because I really used to like gazpacho, and now it’s time to put the brakes on this digression before it gets out of control.)

Anyway. Where was I?

Right. Least favorite song. I could say that this one’s my (current) least favorite because of the vapidity of the “party party” mentality that it espouses; because of the pop blandness that renders it virtually indistinguishable from any of a hundred other songs that have wafted through the air and airwaves over the past couple of years; because it epitomizes the rampant hypersexualization of teen girls that I, as the father of a preteen girl, find disturbing (and at times, terrifying); because its success derives entirely from the cult of celebrity surrounding Miley Cyrus, not from any actual musical virtue … but really, this one made the cut for one simple reason: my kids keep singing it. All. The. Time. Sometimes they just hum it. Sometimes they make up their own words. But it’s still the same freakin’ song. So you can thank my children for my inflicting this on you.

(OK, full disclosure. My kids don’t actually sing this one very often any more – it’s a couple months out of date. I think they’ve moved on to “The Lazy Song” from Bruno Mars. But they aren’t nearly as incessant as they were with “Party in the USA.”)