Make it go awaaaayyy...

AKMA suggested in the comments on my last post that it might be useful to be able to give a song one did not care for negative play time; sort of a mental rewind, so that the end result was a brain wipe of that memory space, just as if one had never heard the song in the first place.

It got me to thinking. . . wouldn't it be cool if you could indeed rewind some songs? How would it be to arrange never to have heard some of the overplayed, syrupy claptrap to which we've all been subjected from time to time? What would it be worth to eliminate that pesky, awful lyric in your head that plays over, and over, and over, like some demented psycho feedback loop that will not stop?

In The Best of All Possible Worlds, I would arrange it so that the latter problem could be handled with a temporary fix. After all, even music I like gets stuck in that annoying way, once in a while; and I wouldn't want never to have heard a good song, just because it had gotten wedged in place in my brain.

However, some music-- and this applies to commercial jingles, as well as actual songs of whatever genre-- I would be just as happy to erase from the memory chip entirely. Yes, Ref-- Horse with No Name could fall here, as could Elton John's Your Song-- some of the lamest lyrics in the history of songwriting.

Then there are a select few that, if I were Queen of the Universe, might cheerfully be wiped from the general population entirely. Shari Lewis singing The Song that Doesn't End fell into this category. There was a time I'd have forked over some serious coin to delete that from my daughter's brain cells. Oh, and the theme song from "Barney". . . ugh. 'I love you, you love me', sung in that dreadfully unctuous, saccharine voice, still makes me twitch.

So, how about you? If it were possible, what song(s) would you give negative play time? What's on your "Better Dead" playlist?