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Here's your Election Day playlist, from the 'Animaniacs' to Wilco

By Patrick Varine

Here's your Election Day playlist, from the 'Animaniacs' to Wilco

Election signs line Dorseyville Road near Mission Lane as we draw closer to Election Day.

It's Election Day, and if there's one thing we can all agree on -- an increasingly difficult concept these days -- it's a collective sense of relief that, no matter the result, it's going to be over soon.

But not yet -- which is why we've compiled this list of presidential-themed tunes to help you head-bop your way through this headache of a day.

We're going to start in maybe the most obvious place, with a song by The Presidents of The United States of America. Their classic, "Lump," made it to No. 1 on Billboard's modern rock charts, as singer Chris Ballew combines lyrics about a benign tumor he once had in his head with a vision he had of a woman in a swamp, where the video is set.

Bluegrass legend Jimmy Martin had his own ideas about who should occupy the White House, and on 1965's "Sunny Side of the Mountain" album, he encouraged Washington, D.C. to take up music with "Guitar Picking President," owing to the rising popularity of country and bluegrass: "If it keeps a-gettin' bigger/The way I got it figured/We just might have a guitar-pickin' president next year."

British songwriter Billy Bragg doesn't confine his hopes for better, more-positive politics to the U.S. on his "Waiting for the Great Leap Forward."

Hold on a second. One thing we don't have on this list yet is an extremely cringe primer on the importance of voting by a group that looks like Digital Underground if you ordered them from some sort of patriotic version of Temu.

Well, look no farther than the "Vote Song" by kids' education company GoNoodle. I'm struggling to imagine the middle-schooler who's going to recognize the main singer's semi-resemblance to Digital Underground's Shock G.

That being said, it lays out why voting is a crucial tool of democracy in a pretty concise two-and-a-half minutes.

Let's not forget musicals. Technically, the "Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies" show on Paramount was a series, not a musical, but that isn't stopping them from a great number laying out just how exhausting the election cycle can be.

OK, so "White House Blues" isn't strictly about the election. Truth be told, it's more about the dangers of elected office, chronicling the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley in Buffalo, N.Y.

And it just so happens to be played by some of the best bluegrass pickers on the planet at the time, a group including mandolinist Sam Bush an acoustic guitar legend Tony Rice.

History is important. The past informs the present. This is not the introduction I was expecting to write for this clip from the Warner Bros. classic '90s cartoon, "Animaniacs." But if you're looking for presidential facts set to the "William Tell Overture," look no further.

You may not know that many American presidential candidates back in the day commissioned their own campaign songs. In later campaigns, politicians took to adopting pop songs as their campaign anthems. Here are the campaign songs of nearly everyone elected president, with a few exceptions.

I think you can see that this whole list is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Let's leave no doubt about it with this final entry, which is just an edit of all 45 U.S. presidents lip-syncing the chorus from "Macarena."

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