"The Most Unwanted Song" is an avant-garde novelty song created by artists Komar and Melamid and composer Dave Soldier in 1997. The song was written to incorporate lyrical and musical elements that were disliked by most respondents to a poll, including bagpipes, cowboy music, an opera singer rapping, and a children's choir that urged listeners to "do all [their] shopping at Walmart!"
Along with its counterpart "The Most Wanted Song", it was released on the CD The People's Choice: Music in 1997, which was sold at the Dia Art Foundation bookstore and later through Soldier's Mulatta Records. In 2019, The People's Choice: Music was remastered and reissued on vinyl, CD, and cassette by Needlejuice Records.
Background
Beginning in 1994, Russian-American graphic artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid created a series of "most wanted" and "least wanted" paintings ("Выбор народа"), based on visual aspects found to be most "wanted" and "unwanted" by the public according to professional opinion polls. These paintings were published in the book Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art in 1997.
Asked by an art gallery owner to make a CD for him, Komar and Melamid approached American neuroscientist and musician David Sulzer (known in his musical career as Dave Soldier), with whom they were working on the opera Naked Revolution for The Kitchen in Manhattan. Soldier suggested adapting the concept of The People's Choice painting series to music, to be titled The People's Choice: Music. This project again used the opinions of the public, as measured by polling surveys, to determine which elements of the medium were "most" or "least wanted". The polls were written by Soldier and taken via the Dia Art Foundation in the spring of 1996.
The online survey of approximately 500 Dia visitors and participators revealed that the themes, instruments and other musical and lyrical aspects that people least wanted to hear included cowboy music, bagpipes, accordions, opera, rapping, children's voices, tubas, drum machines, and advertising jingles. The artists then incorporated all of these elements into "The Most Unwanted Song", which lasts almost twenty-two minutes as recorded.
Soldier wrote "The Most Unwanted Song" and its companion "The Most Wanted Song" with lyricist Nina Mankin. They debuted the songs at a 1997 performance in New York with soprano Dina Emerson, a large ensemble conducted by Norman Yamada, and a children's choir; Soldier played banjo, while Komar and Melamid jointly played a bass drum.
"The Most Unwanted Song" and "The Most Wanted Song" were performed live for the first time since 1997 at a concert to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Manhattan arts venue (Le) Poisson Rouge in June 2023, alongside other works by Soldier.
Lyrics and music
Lead vocals on "The Most Unwanted Song" are provided by Emerson, whose high-pitched, operatic rapping is largely Western-themed (though one verse describes reading Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, followed by an interlude where she sings a brief excerpt from it over pipe organ). A children's choir sings verses about holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Yom Kippur, Ramadan and Labor Day, each ending with a call to "do all your shopping at Walmart!" Near the end of the song, Mankin shouts various non-sequitur political phrases through a bullhorn–culminating in blaming the audience for slavery, imperialism, and genocide–followed by a "folk song" refrain sung in unison by her, Emerson, the choir, and "with luck, [the] audience".
Musically, "The Most Unwanted Song" veers suddenly and frequently between drum machine and tuba-driven hip hop, atonal harp and organ interludes, bagpipes, "elevator music", polka, and country, interspersed or simultaneously with numerous segments of dissonant free improvisation which Soldier terms "slams".