In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re picking our favorite songs with whistling.
Among the list of press release words that immediately telegraph that I probably won’t like a certain piece of music, “whistling” ranks right up there with “infectious,” “sunny,” and “Nashville.” (Sorry, Nashville.) Whistling, by its very nature, conveys a whimsy that is the general opposite of everything I look for in a song. Generally speaking, if your song has whistling, you may as well slap a ukulele on there and make it the background for a commercial where a Zooey Deschanel stand-in gets the most out of her debit card. In short, I wasn’t sure I had anything for this week. But then I remembered “Set The House Ablaze.” A barnstormer in the middle of The Jam’s 1980 album Sound Affects, it’s one of the mod-punk band’s most menacing tunes—and surprisingly, a lot of that has to do with the whistling.