WELSCH: Top 5 songs to off yourself to

Fellow A&E writer and columnist and my friend Michael Todd gave me a strange and depressing topic to cover in this week's Top 5. He asked me what my Top 5 songs to play on a radio I was about to drop into the bathtub would be.

It's a hard thing, trying to think of songs that could track my own elected demise. First of all, I'm no fan of suicide. I've never tried it, and it doesn't sound appealing to me. Second of all, I'm the type of person who has to listen to a whole song. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I'm driving in a car with Noah Ballard, and he constantly changes the songs on my iPod when they're only half done.

It seems to me that dropping the radio halfway through a song would leave me dead and unsatisfied. Although I guess if I was going to end it all there would be more pressing and depressing thoughts on my mind. So, with that in mind, I present my most depressing list of all time.

Casey's Top 5 songs to have playing on the radio when he drops it into the bathtub (even though that will never happen… I hope)

1. "Tyrants" by Black Mountain from the album "In The Future" — Most songs expressively about suicide are tacky, overly emotional, self-indulgent examples of crybaby emo garbage, so I'm going to start the list off with a song that is just the opposite.

I'm a great big fan of the book and film "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," and one of the pivotal scenes in each has to be when Dr. Gonzo enlists Raoul Duke to kill him by dropping a tape player blasting "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane into the bathtub. It has to be at the right moment, as Gonzo needs "the rising sound" to mentally prepare him.

I could have used the same song (though I am much more partial to the Damned's cover of it), but that would be a bit contrived in my mind. So, as an alternative, there are few better songs with that sort of rising sound than "Tyrants." If you look up the musical definition for the word "epic," this song is the definition. It's all the rising sound I would ever need.

2. "Freedom Death Dance" by Eugene McDaniels from the album "Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse" — McDaniels is possibly the single greatest musician to ever come from the city of Omaha. His songwriting landed several artists No. 1 hits in the 1960s, and when he struck out on his own, he produced some of the greatest avant garde soul music of all time.

This song is an eerily prophetic warning to all the hippies who thought that their music would end all the world's troubles.

Key lyric: "There's no amount of dancing we can do that will ban the bomb, feed the starving children, bring justice and equality to you and me."

Now, I don't believe that music can solve all the world's problems, but it certainly solves most of mine. If it ever got to a point when music couldn't do that anymore, I'd probably want to kill myself, and I'd prove this song right by letting it do the job.

3. "Veni Vidi Vici" by the Black Lips from the album "Good Bad Not Evil" — Of the very few viable reasons I could ever see myself committing suicide, one would be if I had done it all. If I ever get to a point where I had done everything I ever set out to do, and I knew that there was no way I could be any greater, I would contemplate ending it all.

This song, like Caesar's quote, is about how one man came, saw and conquered all, all y'all. I don't expect to ever get to that point with my life, but if I did, there wouldn't be much of a purpose in doing any more, so I would want to go out listening to a song about how it couldn't get any better.

4. "Rowboat" by Beck from the album "Stereopathetic Soulmanure" — I seem to lack what most normal people call "emotions." They are difficult for me to wrap my head around.