So, with a guilty conscience, I’m thinking of getting rid of my exclusively-lyric-headlines gimmick. Only read further if you’re into gazing at navels.

I started doing this shit two and a half years ago on a whim. It seemed fun and challenging at the time. Now it’s exhausting — wasting 15 minutes finding a lyric halfway appropriate to the subject (I rarely succeed); lose the opportunity to make a joke even by tweaking the lyrics, as the rules that I’ve created for no reason prevent that; confuse most people. It makes me resent my own blog — this fucking self-imposed millstone again Jesus think think think what’s a lyric I haven’t overused — for a marginal benefit, at best. If I wanted to flatter myself, I’d say I’ve subverted the idea that a headline should be descriptive of a post. But not only is that dishonest, why is that idea worth subverting? On top of everything else, the Google bots don’t know what to do with these heds, so I sacrifice readership. That’s why the FDL mods write a new hed when they bump one of these to the frontpage. (And therefore I create work for them. Aren’t I a peach.)

And so I feel like I fail a test I’ve created for myself if I change course. It’s a challenge, right? Can I give up now? Ten, fifteen times a day? Then I feel stupid and OCD for even bothering to care about this shit. 

So here’s what I’d like to do. Use the lyrics-as-headlines when there’s a need for a reference, but otherwise, free up the hed-space for whatever else I’d like, including using lyrics as a jump-off point for a hed. The freedom I get at the Streak or at the IFA is hard to abandon. But if you feel strongly one way or the other, please let me know in comments. I mooted the question on my Twitter feed and right now it’s running about 60-40 in favor of letting me off the hook to not have every post contain a lyric headline.