About a year ago, the movie Bridesmaids opened in the U.S. and was the subject of a rather unusual awareness campaign.

Female movie fans, largely independently of the film's producers, compelled women to go see the film in its opening weekend and defy common Hollywood wisdom that non-rom-com movies aimed at ladies were box-office laggards. To many cultural critics, it was a dubious effort: a Judd Apatow-produced flick that was still, after all, about a wedding—and with one notorious scene riddled with bodily humiliations—this was a feminist cause célèbre?

The thing is, it kinda worked. Bridesmaids opened very well for a "chick flick," with $26 million in ticket sales, and went on to gross just shy of $170 million domestically, soundly beating such summer tentpoles as Green Lantern and X-Men: First Class. The fact that the star-free, Kristin Wiig-led movie was actually good suggests it would've found its audience under any circumstances. We'll never know, but given Hollywood's ever-increasing promotional emphasis on opening weekends, it's totally defensible that the impassioned grass-roots launch was critical to the movie's ultimate success. It also sent a consumer-driven message ("This half of the population shouldn't be ignored or pandered to") that should've been screamingly obvious in 2011 but somehow wasn't.

One year later, I'd like to invite you to get behind another consumerist message that, in 2012, should be equally uncontroversial: Being openly gay shouldn't prevent you from having a No. 1 album in the United States.

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Today is Groundhog Day, and while rodents on the East Coast are split on whether or not 2012 will actually see something resembling winter around these parts, one thing's for sure: People will probably watch the 1993 Harold Ramis-directed Bill Murray vehicle Groundhog Day, in which the comedian plays a weatherman resigned to relive February 2 over and over and over again until he learns how to be less of a jerk, and, by extension, more OK with himself and the people around him. (It's airing on CMT tonight, in case you were wondering.) In the film, the February 2 that Murray's Phil Connors is stuck inside opens with Sonny and Cher's 1965 chart-topper "I Got You, Babe," which hits its sweetly sappy chorus just as Connor's clock radio flips from 5:59 a.m. to 6:00. This got me thinking: If I was trapped in an existential purgatory that made me have to relive one day until I got a valuable life lesson about myself and the world around me through my thick skull, what song would I be OK with as far as a day-opening jam, albeit one that reminded me of being utterly trapped? Six candidates below. Feel free to nominate yours in the comments!

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Right off the bat I should tell you that "Everything She Wants" by Wham! has been one of my favorite songs since I first heard it as an impressionable nine-year-old, even though its themes of love being washed away by consumerism and economic pressures were far beyond my years; its gentle shimmy and dollop of funk on already-existing synthpop tropes—and, of course, the bravura vocal by the pre-Faith George Michael (particularly on the breakdown)—made me drop the needle on it again and again. This morning I was alerted to a cover of the track by the musician-producer Zo! and Phonte (late of Little Brother, now of the Foreign Exchange), and oh is it good; it slows the track down just enough to wring the longing out of it in a completely different way, with sputtering synths and a nice, juicy bassline. And there's even a shout-out to Michael Jackson near the end, although I won't spoil its exact nature. Embed below.

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