A dubious award given to a deserving culprit

Dave and I drove home from practice on Monday, having spent a good twenty minutes coming home, listening to radio that was the auditory equivalent of waterboarding. Or the Catherine Wheel (the torture device, not the reverb-y rock band). Or eating a kitchen sponge soaked in Ipecac. Point is: Unpleasant stuff. On the Modern Rock station? Playing some trash where a guy sings “Love, love, love, love, love” in the span of half a second and suddenly, my ears are bleeding. On the Classic Rock station? Well, it sounded like Foreigner but it wasn’t Foreigner so I couldn’t even enjoy hating something I recognized. How about NPR? The world is melting, the country is imploding, and apparently I am to blame.

Of course, we could’ve just turned it off. But then, you know, we would have had to make clever conversation and after playing music in a once-frigid then finally way-too-hot studio (like architectural menopause, essentially), my brain usually shuts down on the drive home. Monosyllabic grumbling: my forte.

Eventually we parked and walked home and, with some hateful ditty stuck in our heads, we tried discussing the most annoying song ever. The Gold Standard, if you will. (The Brown Standard, if you prefer). Contenders included Muskrat Love (too funny to be really annoying), Rockin’ Robin (this is actually the happiest, bubble-gummiest song I’ve ever heard, which makes it kind of annoying, sure, but nowhere near a contender), the entire Alvin & the Chipmunks oeuvre (disqualified on a technicality). Parenthetically, all the contenders above are about animals or sung by lunatics pretending to be animals. Perhaps this is something we all need to avoid in the future.

But we settled on a certain song by the time we reached our house. And, honestly, I hope you don’t remember who I’m talking about. But, in that exhaustively researched three minute pow-wow, Crazy Town won the highest honor, the Nobel Prize for Suicide-Inducing Annoyance, if you will, for that song “Butterfly” oh so long ago. If you must torture yourself, you can listen to a snipet on Amazon. I don’t recommend it, of course, except for scientific purposes. What do you think here? I defy you to name anything more annoying, musically. You can try and claim that Celine Dion “Titanic” song if you want, but at least she has crazy neck veins and I find that funny. So, I veto that. Preemptively.