30 Day Song Challenge Day 2: A Bad Idea Wrapped in a Bad Song

Day 2: Your Least Favorite Song

Ugh, another category based on picking one song out of many equally deserving candidates. There are a few difficulties particular to choosing a song for least favorite song. First and foremost it’s a choice that, by definition, should be hard to think of. Most songs that I find to be truly bad are songs that I won’t listen to enough times to stick in my memory. And what does “bad” mean, anyway? Terrible execution? Horrible song writing? Overuse of cliché? General douchitude?


When I was regularly reviewing music I believed that it was better to be spectacularly incompetent than forgettably boring. Practice can make you a better player, but true creativity can’t be learned. By this definition all of the worst songs I’ve ever heard are buried in the waste bin of music history, forgotten and unrecoverable.

But we’re not necessarily talking about “bad” songs when we talk about least favorite, are we? Something can be a least favorite without necessarily being the worst. Like a completely mediocre song that becomes mystifyingly popular to the point where it’s overplayed everywhere. Such force-feeding of an otherwise inoffensive song could certainly drive it into the realm of least-favoritism.

But what about a song that's boring, cliche, overplayed, douchey AND sports a general ideology that's completely irresponsible bordering on dangerous? What about a song that epitomizes a mindset that's as poisonous as it is cathartic and has led to ten years of disastrous decisions? Is that worth least-favorite status?

Why yes, Toby Keith, it is.

It's said that Keith wrote "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" in 20 minutes, in late 2001, in reaction to both his father's death in March of that year and 9/11. It's certainly very emotional, and very personal to him and while the feelings he puts into it are understandable to a degree they are so, so misguided (at best.)

Though I graduated from high school in June 2001 I'd actually turned 18 too late to vote in the 2000 election. At that point I didn't have strong feelings politically, nor was I terribly informed about politics in general but after the World Trade Center attacks I got informed very fast. I wanted to find some kind of reason something so devastating could happen, some sign the kinds of changes it would bring going forward. Most places I turned for information in those early days, however, contained either shock or anger. Worse were the talk radio hosts who, in their hurt, proclaimed things like, "We need to bomb somebody for this. It doesn't matter who we bomb, we need to bomb somebody." Nobody knew how to deal with these events, nobody knew what to do in the face of the feelings of powerlessness that radiated from downtown Manhattan and the Pentagon.

And so we tracked the Taliban to Afghanistan and started bombing them wherever we found them. Still stunned, the pacifist in me felt our reaction was too fast, too knee-jerk and so I joined protests against the war. Months later I watched news footage of missile strikes in Baghdad. Nine years later we're still there. Thousands of American lives later. Millions of Iraqis and Afghanis later. Because we allowed our panic and our rage to lead us into action before we knew what we were doing, before we formulated a way to get ourselves out. We started bombing a lot of somebodies and the bombs are still falling.

Myriad Toby Keiths across the country wrapped themselves in words like freedom and images of the Statue of Liberty, bald eagles and Uncle Sam because they couldn't face the uncertainty of a world in which America was not invulnerable. And in their insecurity they shouted, "You'll be sorry you messed with the U. S. of A./ We'll put a boot in your ass it's the American way." And sharing those fears (and fearing for their jobs) a majority of Congress shouted it too. And America changed from the measured, compassionate, open society I'd grown up perceiving it as into a place that was divided, scared, irrational and dangerously aggressive.

Is any of this Toby Keith's fault? Of course not. He's not the source of all of the close-minded animus and fear-mongering that's gripped this country for a decade. His song is just a really good example of it.