Monday. For many, the most dreaded day of the week, as evidenced by a plethora of sites (such as this one) that have compiled quotes -- many negative and often funny -- about the first day after the weekend. Here are a few personal favorite quotes pertaining to the first day of the standard work week:

"Step aside Monday, this is a job for coffee."
Unknown author

"It takes twice as long for me to not get anything done on Monday as it does the rest of the week." Unknown author

"Sometimes it pays to stay in bed in Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code."
Dan Salomon

"If each day was a gift, I would like to know where to return Monday."
Unknown author

"It's awful knowing that one seventh of our life will be wasted on Mondays."
Unknown author

Having posted an earlier music video essay on songs about Sunday, I decided to take a look at how Monday, as well as the other days of the week, were treated in my Billboard collection of year-end Top Ten songs (1951-2015). The figure below shows the results:

Fig. 1: Days of the week mentioned in Billboard year-end Top 10 songs (1951-2015) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As illustrated, the name for every day of the week appears in the corpus, even Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which are mentioned only once apiece, due to each day of the week being listed in a single line in The Black Eyed Peas "I Gotta Feeling" (2009). Clearly, however, pop music would generally prefer to focus on the weekend, as evidenced by the relatively high number of songs with lyrics that include Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

And, yet, Monday has the distinction of being the most commonly used day in the collection, primarily due to a single song in which the word is used 37 times (in addition to its one use by The Black Eyed Peas):

"Monday Monday" by the Mamas and the Papas (1966), which appears at #7 on the Billboard year-end Top 100 chart for 1966

Perhaps you too can make this a Monday worth singing about. I sincerely hope that you do.

*Thanks to Clayton Darwin and BRDi Tools for making this post possible.

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