The best sound art project ever. Ever. Cheeky visual art duo Komar and Melamid team up with musician Dave Soldier (Soldier String Quartet, Thai Elephant Orchestra) to produce two pieces of music - the most wanted piece of music ever, and the least wanted, according to the results of a survey conducted by NYC's DIA Center for the Arts. Respondents were asked their preferences about instrumentation, vocal styles, ensemble size, lyrical content, song length, and mood, and our boys crunched the numbers and came up with 1, a song which "will be unavoidably and uncontrollably 'liked' by 72 +/- 12% of listeners," and 2, a piece which will be enjoyed by "fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population."
The joke, of course, is that the "most wanted" song is teeth-gratingly mediocre, easy to imagine on some cut-rate commercial "lite hits" radio station, while the "least wanted" song is pure distilled sonic fucking genius.

1. 5:00 of limp R & B with sax and guitar (played by Vernon Reid, no less). A sultry-voiced woman and a smooth-voiced man sing a hackneyed love song, made slightly surreal by the mention of Wittgenstein and the sudden lyrical shift midway from R & B baby-baby to small-town slice-of-life ("Joey was a travelin man, and she worked the night shift") a la Bruce Springsteen or John Cougar Mellencamp.
2. 21:59 of wild tempo and volume swings, an operatic soprano rapping about cowboys, a children's choir singing about holidays ("Ramadan! Ramadan! lots of praying with no breakfast!"), vague patriotism, gratuitous commercial messages, bagpipes and harps and chimes and accordions and tubas and a woman yelling through a bullhorn - "twenty-seven electoral votes! Imelda Marcos! Pork barrels! Lumber! Who murdered all the innocent children? You did! You did! " Waaaa ha ha! Oh man, I'm gonna pee my pants....

Read the statistical methods explanation in the booklet. Play song two. Read the lyrics in the booklet. Play song two. Dig more of Komar and Melamid's stuff - http://www.diacenter.org/km/ (the Most Wanted and Most Unwanted Paintings project is pretty funny too - the US's most wanted painting is a pastoral landscape featuring cute deer and George Washington). Play song two. Play song two. Play song two.