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Monday’s suck.
Despite what many would assume, the innate terribleness of Monday is not an idea that was first artistically broached in the early golden age period of Jim Davis’ epic depiction of feline ennui, Garfield. Everyone’s favourite overweight orange comic strip cat (except mine–HEATHCLIFF 4EVA MOFOS!) may be the most famous hater of Mondays, but he was hardly the first or last to turn the sentiment into art.
It’s a subject that has been successfully depicted in song several times throughout the decades and this Monday seems as good a time as any to rate their effectiveness. Here’s my own list of what I think are the top three.
1) “Monday, Monday” by The Mamas and the Papas
At first blush it might seem like this is a pro-Monday song, as Denny Doherty sings “Monday Monday, so good to me,” but it totally turns out he’s being sarcastic when he reveals “Monday Monday, can’t trust that day” and how whenever Monday comes “You can find me cryin’ all of the time.”
As written by John Phillips, one of pop music’s more legendary skuzzbuckets, it’s a song whose cheerful melody overcomes the melancholy of its lyrics, which never really explain why Monday has the effect on the song’s protagonist that it does. Reportedly the other members of the band thought it was a really stupid song until it became their first #1 Billboard single (which made it more successful at the time than their most famous song “California Dreaming”, which didn’t get above #4 on that same list) and they realized they liked it after all.
2) “I Don’t Like Mondays” by The Boomtown Rats
The band that brought Bob Geldolf to international prominence was never very successful in the United States. In his autobiography he mentions how strange it was to go across the Canadian border and discover that the distance separating rock stardom and obscurity could be as little as a few miles. The closest they came to a hit stateside was a song inspired by an early example of what would unfortunately become one of the worst of all American traditions–a school shooting.
What made this one extraordinary was that the shooter, Brenda Spencer, was a young woman who famously told a reporter that the reason she committed her terrible crime was, “I don’t like Mondays.” (Spencer would later insist she had no memory of making that statement.) Geldolf wrote the song as he watched news of the shooting (which killed two people and injured eight).
The result is a deceptively catchy song that also manages to evoke the horror of Spencer’s apparent nihilism. “Tell us why!” the world asks the woman responsible for all this violence and all she can do is shrug and say, “I don’t like Mondays.” It’s a terrible, meaningless reason, but this only serves to remind us that any other answer–in the face of such an atrocity–would be just as absurd.
3. “Manic Monday” by The Bangles
Famously written by Prince, who chose to share it with The Bangles when he become briefly (and justifiably) infatuated with Susanna Hoffs, “Manic Monday” is definitely the most successful of these three songs in explaining why the day is so reviled by most of us. It’s the end of our respite from the rat race–killer of the weekend. The first day of the week where we have to turn our alarm clock on and go to a job we very likely hate, but can’t duck out of because the rent has to be paid.
For this reason I have to judge it my choice for best song about how much Monday’s suck, because its universality cannot be ignored. I have no idea what’s bugging The Mamas and the Papas and I don’t WANT to know what’s in the head of the young woman in The Boomtown Rats song, so I gotta go with Ms. Hoffs and crew as they put it out there and explain it all with, “I wish it were Sunday, because that’s my fun day. My ‘I don’t have to run’ day.”
The post The Three Best Songs About Hating Mondays appeared first on The Good Men Project.