Your favorite song would be 'My Way'

"My Way"-which you've probably heard at funerals and Italian restaurants and in late-night infomercials for Frank Sinatra compilation albums—is an execrable, inescapable song that nests in your brain like a virus. The tune, which alternates between monotonous plodding and totally unearned bombast, was borrowed from a French song about a pathetic, failing marriage. Every single rhyme in Paul Anka's English-language rewrite for Sinatra is trite and cloying: the main refrain, "my way," is rhymed with "highway," "byway", and "shy way" before the song mercifully ends. And that ending doesn't come nearly soon enough, because the whole thing rambles on for nearly five minutes. But all of those musical crimes have nothing on the substance of the song's lyrics, which pay tribute to a deeply obnoxious philosophy: the idea that the purest way for a man to live his life is to constantly push forward without ever questioning his own methods or allowing any criticism, right or wrong, to penetrate his thick skull. The song is mired in false profundity. "My Way" is a song that celebrates individuality in such a thuddingly generic, white-bread manner that any self-important fathead can take it on as a personal anthem. It is a song designed to appeal to egomaniacs like the former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who was reported to have listened to "My Way" on repeat while he was sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. It is a song that celebrates being a douchebag. When the topic of "least favorite songs" came up at a party last year, a stranger interrupted to complain that we shouldn't speak ill of "My Way" because it was his grandpa's song. No shit, dude. "My Way" is everybody's grandpa's song. It's a tribute to a very specific and old-fashioned definition of masculinity: the kind of man who's so smugly confident in his own unflagging rightness that he has no interest in considering anybody else. The song caught on because pompous assholes related to it, and it endures because pompous assholes continue to relate to it. Just look at the big climax: For what is a man, what has he got? / If not himself, then he has naught / To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels / The record shows I took the blows and did it my way It's worth remembering that it is possible to use this terrible song for some good. When "My Way" turned up as the score for Don and Peggy's impromptu office dance near the end of Mad Men, it was poignant—but only because the series had already successfully obliterated the idea that Don Draper could credibly make any similar boasts about his own life. On The Sopranos, Vito Spatafore celebrated his newfound freedom by driving drunk to the strains of "My Way"—and promptly crashed into a parked car. And when Sid Vicious' cover of "My Way" popped up at the end of Goodfellas, as Henry Hill settles into his bland new life in the Witness Protection Program, it carried an implicit sneer—this is what happens to assholes who think this is the best way to live their lives. What do all of those examples have in common? They're engineered for maximum irony, mocking the lie at the heart of "My Way"—the idea that a man should reach the end of his life with the arrogant, unjustified conviction that he did it all himself.