Yet, despite what some people say, you don’t want to play a song that’s so repulsive that it causes people to flee like madmen. And for people working at the bar, the bar-closing song is a welcome signal that their work is nearly done, and that soon these drunken assholes will be temporarily out of their lives. Hear it and you mindlessly shuffle to the exit, refocusing on after-hours plans. Such is the power of the bar-closing song - the tune that a given bar plays every night at last call, and reminds patrons that while they don’t have to go home, they can’t, in fact, stay “here.”Īttend the same bar enough, and you’ll develop a Pavlovian relationship with its chosen closing song. Like hogs to the slaughter, everyone in the room quickly and dutifully filed out of the room. Still, these people needed to leave, so I took the most extreme measure possible: I commandeered the music and played “Closing Time” (loudly). (My roommate had very specific taste.) I needed some fucking sleep, man, but no one, least of all my roommate, would listen to my pleas for quiet. Stone cold sober after a night of studying - this must have been one of those periods when I was dangerously close to flunking out, and in a fit of panic, decided to become studious for a short period of time - I was in no mood to entertain a bunch of drunks who wanted to use my room to smoke weed and listen to late-1990s gangster rap into the wee hours. (He didn’t tell me he was bringing people over, let alone ask. One night during my sophomore year of college, I came back to my small fraternity bedroom to find my dirtbag roommate hosting a random assortment of barflies, sorority girls and general layabouts he’d been out drinking with earlier that evening.

Country bar music playlist