Photo courtesy Shutterstock
"OMG FML."
When your snoring, hungover ass is finally jolted awake on Jan. 1, 2018, chances are you're going to drill back down under the covers and try to outsleep the pain. But you really tied it on the night before, and no amount of tossing and turning is going to help you avoid paying the price. For several hours, your stomach will be doing gymnastics and your fragile eardrums will be unable to take the thunderous noise of your cat tiptoeing across the floor.
The last thing you need right now is music, even if it were only a spa mix or soothing ocean sounds. And yet, chances are disturbingly likely that you will encounter annoying music at high volume when you least desire it. Here are some of the songs you should not be hearing this morning.
Frankly, any song with a big, big beat should be ruled out immediately. And we're not just talking Katrina & the Waves here. But yes, let's bring them right in. You only need to hear the first few measures, including the little yelp, to know this is wrong as heck.
It's hard enough to take this little burst of "Sunshine," but what about the stuttering throb of "My Sharona"? It's vaguely suggestive of blood knocking around in a hangover-damaged brain, enough to make you want to scream not "My Sharona!" but "IBUPROFEN!"
Another song with a crazy, insistent beat and vocal repetition that will drive hangover victims deep under all available covers would be this big-beat cheerleader chanter featuring Toni Basil.
One of our co-workers said she had a problem with songs that basically bark out orders at you. "I'm not a huge fan of anything that asks me to, like, 'shake it' or 'drop it' or anything like that, especially not during a hangover." And when it comes to songs that blare out noise and issue a stream of screamed demands, nothing can top this number, which should probably be avoided all New Year's Day as well.
A more recent contender trading in repetition and bass line would be this number from the decade known as the 19-shaka-lacka-90s. It seems like it would only take this song about a minute to transform your vein-bulging headache into a full-on Scanners-style head explosion.
Even more recent — and ever more insistent — is this ditty from Eiffel 65.
Another type of song you do not want to hear is the song that is about a perfect morning. Anybody caught trying to sneak this hippie-dippie number from the musical Hair into somebody's New Year's Day hangover deserves the pistols-at-dawn treatment — without the 10 paces.
Actually, even worse would be an intense rock song called "New Year's Day"
sung by Bono. You'd rather listen to a toilet flushing over and over, and probably will be soon anyway.
Then there are probably some songs that should never, ever be listened to, but especially not during the throes of a New Year's Day hangover. Does anybody recall Komar & Melamid's effort to create the most unlistenable song ever? The 22-minute anthem is loaded with what hundreds of people found objectionable, including advertising jingles, a children's chorus, bagpipes, cowboy music, operatic rap, and holiday themes. Anybody playing this song in any private home, at any time, deserves to be badly beaten.
Actually, Komar and Melamid needn't have gone through so much trouble to create a song any reasonable person would object to. Last year, some Czech kid named Misha seemed to do it all by himself.
