The tireless left-leaning reporters over at The Huffington Post picked up a story from the Associated Press wire listing songs played at Guantanamo Bay to help wear down detainees. While acknowledging the power of pop music, the article is also terrifying for revealing the sordid ends that power can be applied towards.

While the AP list features some favorite classics (”Hell’s Bells” by AC/DC, “Babylon” by David Gray and “I Love You” from Barney and Friends, for instance), they leave out some obvious candidates. As we’ve all been victims of some kind of pop culture torture of even the mildest intensity, it seems that painful pop is all around us. Here, then, is Listicles’ take on the Top 12 Painfully Pro-American Pop Songs.

• 1. Kid Rock, “American Bad Ass”

An orgy of the best things America has to offer (bikers, nearly-nude women, kegs, etc.), if you can make it through the first minute of this song you’re stronger than most.

• 2. Aaron Tippin, “Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly”

One of those 9/11-tapping cross-over hits (the first of several on this list), this one could just be re-titled “The Patriot Act Anthem” and nobody would notice.

• 3. Toby Keith, “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”

Check out the official video (linked above), which doubles seamlessly as a U.S. Army recruitment commercial.

• 4. Metallica, “Don’t Tread on Me”

A precursor to Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass” except it has much better music, but the same chest-thumping and intimidation tactics lurking behind the flag-waving.

• 5. Neil Diamond, “America“

Ostensibly a song about America’s quilt of immigrants, it starts to look and sound an awful lot like a hymn to the lowest-common-denominator.

• 6. Marilyn Monroe, “Happy Birthday Mr. President”

If there was ever a musical moment that encapsulated and elevated the archetype of the privileged playboy, America’s top model in the sky produces it here.

• 7. Johnny Cash, “Old Ragged Flag”

The message of taking the good with the bad in a nation founded on compromise is in here somewhere, but it gets lost in ragged flag-waving.

• 8. Elton John, “Philadelphia Freedom”

Aren’t we great, guys? Even this classy British fellow on his piano backed by a full orchestra wants to sing us our praises. Wow. Go us!

• 9. Bon Jovi, “Undivided”

Another trauma-tapping post-9/11 hit, this one reconciling feverish Heartland patriotism with Eastern metropolis liberalism in an elegant tableau of flag-gazing.

• 10. Lenny Kravitz, “American Woman”

Seems like Lenny missed the cynicism of the original, opting instead for a more stylish version of Kid Rock’s list-topper: roaring cars, bikini-clad babes, macho stage-posturing, all plastered with Stars and Stripes.

• 11. The P. Diddy All-Stars, “What’s Going On”

A good idea gone wrong, or just a bad idea? At any rate, Diddy and his posse took a Marvin Gaye classic and turned it into a zeitgeist-tapping multi-superstar-vehicle. If nothing else, it brought the Backstreet Boys out of retirement (they were retired at this point, right?).

• 12. Alan Jackson, “Where Were You”

A terrible song and the purest expression of the disaster-to-dollars impulse following 9/11, Jackson made pop music’s emotional manipulations in favor of patriotism such an undeniable phenomenon that they’ve become fodder for parody. Here’s “Alan Jackson” on South Park, God bless