I was gonna preach about my all time favorite song, but looking over my four crates of vinyl records and 11 mini-crates of CD’s and my iPod playlist, I realized there’s no way I could narrow it down to just one song, or even 100.  But that’s fine, because great songs for me are a litmus test: if you can’t stand what I love, our friendship will have to be terminated.  

And some things are best left untested – I might have to ditch about half my friends over Smog’s “Cold Blooded Old Times” alone.

So instead, I’d like to celebrate the utter uselessness of music.  There’s no good reason for it.  Why bother arranging sounds in particular patterns?   Play a song and it’s gone.  It won’t feed you, put a roof over your head, or bring peace to the mid-east.  This is one of the great glorious things about our species.  We do a handful of things – create music, paint, dance, watch “The Biggest Loser” – that are not “productive” or “useful.”  They’re the things we do out of sheer joy or fear or boredom. 

This is super duper important.  If you’ll indulge me a moment of soap box oratory, “the useless” is a bulwark against letting ourselves become automatons, factory cogs. 

In college I remember having to reimburse my German lit professors for photocopies.  My friends majoring in physics and computer science did not have this problem.  This is a horrible!  This is cultural anemia! 

I surely haven’t read nearly enough Shakespeare, but man, what if the old dead white guy isn’t taught by the time my kids are in college for lack of photocopy funding?  And why should they, I suppose?  What “practical application” is there for basking in art?

Only the elevation of our species over the beasts in the field!  Only a celebration of what it means to be human!

If I had to guess, the desire to create music came out of an attempt to recreate our mother’s heartbeat.   So one might argue that the “utility” of music is that it comforts us with an aural binkie, but this is just my crackpot theory, not even wikipedia-tested. 

So as far as I’m concerned, songs still pass the useless test.

And off the top of my head, if you don’t want to be friends with me, in addition to “Cold Blooded Old Times,” make sure not to like…

“Los Angeles,” by X

“I Get Along,” by the Libertines

“Making Time,” by The Creation

“Bold Soul Sister,” by Ike and Tina Turner

“Bonnie and Clyde,” by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot

“Heroes,” by David Bowie

“21st Century Boy,” by T. Rex

“Bust A Move,” by Young MC

Have a great, useless weekend!