An online poll conducted in the ’90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people’s least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners.

It stretches the boundaries of what I would call a “song”, being 20 minutes long and the individual parts often have no musical relationship. It reminds me of one of those Halloween sound effects CDs but with accordion, opera rap and tuba.

The individual parts isolated often aren’t that bad, but as a whole it’s definitely a drag to listen to.

Which I always took to mean “if your song isn’t any good, no amount of production or recording wizardy will make it good”.

So episode 19 of season 6 of the Mythbusters is awesome: they polished some animal shit. Which may forever alter my songwriting process. Kudos.

So when you’re a young adult and your mind really opens up to the musical experience, you get to hear all these things in different combinations for the first time. You might never learn intellectually what a chord progression or a key change or syncopation are, or various other bits of music theory and song-construction, but your mind is absorbing them and learning about them intuitively. So when you hit your thirties you don’t have the vocabulary to describe exactly why a new single the kids love doesn’t excite you (e.g. “Oh, that’s a I-IV-I-V chord progression and a key change one whole tone higher for the last chorus”). But subconsciously your brain recognizes that it’s heard that combination of building blocks several times before, only with someone else singing and different effects on the guitars.

I assume the phenomenon has to do with new experiences + hormones + independence.