Friday's Lazy Slow News Day Pop Music Post: John Kerry could endorse Mel Gibson's deicide fetish flick today and I couldn't blog about it. Dear god, do we really have to spend eight months with these two insufferable hacks, Bush and Kerry?

Having always been an unabashed fan of pop music, I have a soft spot for that particular category of awful song: the weekend song. You know the drill. Knucklehead millionaire musician tries to connect with you working stiffs by singing about his "job," his "boss," etc. On Friday afternoons of my youth, DJs across the country lined up these evil gems like missiles in a Moscow May Day parade. (They may still, for all I know.) Some of them are memorable just for being bad. Others are serious biscuits.

The most calculatingly fake-a-loo populist of the lot was artiste-cum-producer-to-the-stars Todd Rundgren's "Bang on My Drum." (Todd redeemed himself, though, by recording the self-deprecatingly hilarious "Emperor of the Highway.") The most common was likely Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend." I hope those guys invested heavily and well in pharmaceuticals (and I mean Pfizer and Merck, not reds) and are now living comfortable lives with no thoughts of a comeback. The enduring lesson of pop music is: Yeah, it was cool for a while, but please go away now. (Meatloaf. The prosecution rests.)

The Easybeats are exceptional for hitting this category twice (three times, in a way; read on). "Friday on My Mind" is a staple of Friday radio, and "Good Times" rides the same rail. And "Good Times" made a return twenty years later, covered by INXS with Aussie mad-dog screamer Jimmy Barnes. (That their locomotive-pace reading of the song channels a bit of AC/DC is fair enough. AC/DC producer George Young [Angus and Mal's big brother] was an Easybeat.)

You'd likely have to wait until Sunday night to hear it on Vin Scelza's show, but Tom Waits's "Heart of Saturday Night" is worth mentioning, since it hits all the thematic elements established by Sam Cooke 40 years ago with "Another Saturday Night": pocket full of money, cruising the streets, looking for a little, er, companionship.

Who would've thought that the Cure could produce one of the best of the genre? Might as well wait for Morrissey to sing about a sexually and emotionally fulfilling relationship. But "Friday I'm in Love" makes you think that perhaps there's one day on which Robert Smith isn't brooding in his bedroom.

And how much flack would I get for this one (if anyone read this blog, that is)? "Saturday Night," by the Bay City Rollers, was a fine, fun song, though you won't hear it on the radio. It's a fickle medium, and it's surely a point of pride now to trash such twee puff. But Joey Ramone famously loved it, taking it as inspiration for "Blitzkrieg Bop."