There’s a difference between an unmemorable bad song, and a bad song that’s also catchy. Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music, Part 2” (or “Part 1,” and “Part 3,” and…) falls into the former category, for instance, because it’s unlistenable, while “Who Let the Dogs Out?” by Baha Men applies to the latter. Your brain is probably barking the chorus right now, which, my bad.
There was a time when I thought “Closing Time” by Semisonic was a good song, and if I didn’t hear it for another 10 years, I’d probably feel that way again. But the band’s 1998 hit is so culturally ubiquitous, so overplayed in every bar and supermarket, so damn catchy that I can’t help but hate it. Semisonic created the perfect late ’90s earworm, and we’re paying for it.
“Closing Time” is tearing us apart. Take what happened in Oregon, where a woman called the cops on a man because he wouldn’t stop “obnoxiously” whistling the song. ” A verbal altercation occurred after a woman allegedly told a man to ‘shut up’ after he obnoxiously whistled the song ‘Closing Time’ by the band Semisonic near her driveway,” the police log reads. The “man” in question — who the woman referred to as a “jackass guy” — told Time that “it’s not clear if the caller would have been more or less upset if it was a different genre or whether it was just the talent lacking in the whistling.”
According to Time:
While the whistler had moved on by the time police arrived, cops still located him and, according to [Captain Mike Herb of the Forest Grove PD], he was still whistling “Closing Time.” Police officers spoke to the man who said he was upset that he had been told to shut up. Cops sent him on his way, and according to the notes left by the officer in the police log, “he whistled his way back home.”
It’s a good thing the guy wasn’t humming “You Get What You Give” by New Radicals — that’s a 10-year prison sentence, minimum.
