As a teenager, I discovered I had an unusual talent. I could, without even trying, play the exact right music to get rid of a crowd. I was an anti-DJ.

In 2003, I took over Manhattan’s SubMercer as DJMullet and blasted Blue Oyster Cult so loud that a model walked over to my booth and asked me to play Prince’s “Erotic City.” And I didn’t.

I knew one day society would call upon my unique talent. It finally happened last week.

New Zealand officials unsuccessfully tried to disperse anti-mask protesters outside parliament by blasting all the wrong songs: “Macarena,” James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful,” and “Let It Go” from Frozen. That’s not a playlist for getting people to run away from each other. That’s a playlist for getting people to dance at a club, go home and have sex, and then raise children.

For a group whose defense of their Covid restrictions was science, they didn’t use any to create their playlist. Trevor Mallard, the Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives, went on Twitter to take requests. Which is how, when James Blunt tweeted his services to the New Zealand police, they played “You’re Beautiful.” This is an insane way to determine martial tactics. Sure, Blunt served as a captain in the British Army in the Kosovo War, but he apparently has no self-awareness about the soothing beauty of his falsetto.

To build the perfect crowd dispersal playlist, I enlisted the world’s greatest neuroscientist specializing in music, and the only one who lives within walking distance from me, Daniel Levitin. The author of the best sellers This is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, Levitin is so famous he played himself on The Big Bang Theory. He’s also a musician who has played saxophone for Sting and engineered Grateful Dead albums. He was the second-best writer at The Stanford Daily when I worked there. A far distant second, but still, second.

Levitin told me that the three principles in pissing people off with music is that it be unfamiliar, repetitive, or insipid, hereafter referred to as URI because it sounds more scientific. “You can find songs so far and deep within the culture that they are insipid. If they played the Barney & Friends theme song or SpongeBob SquarePants on an infinite loop you would give up state secrets even if you didn’t know any,” he said.

But authorities rely too heavily on repetitive and insipid, as they did in New Zealand, blaring “Macarena” and “Baby Shark,” But the real power in the URI is the unfamiliar. Which requires a little more work.

As with all warfare, you must know your enemy. 7-Eleven franchise owners chase young people out of their parking lots with classical music.

We could certainly do the same thing with anti-maskers. But we could find music more unfamiliar to them than Mahler. “I can get rid of any group of Americans by playing Chinese operas or Indian ragas or Persian music or the music of the Cameroon pygmies,” Levitin said. “ It’s like trying to read Russian. The characters look slightly familiar but we can’t make sense of it.”

We wanted music that unsettles people with new information their brains can’t adjust to, much like mask mandates.

I suggested that we also throw in some Arthur Schoenberg, the composer who invented the 12-tone technique, his revolutionary method of finding the 12 most annoying tones. “It would be effective, but if you were trying to disperse people and they were near you, you wouldn’t want music that might make you commit harakiri with a broken Snapple bottle,” he said.

I got off the phone, got on my computer, and began revolutionizing the science of crowd dispersal. I wanted music that would be particularly awful to anti-maskers in Western countries. It was not easy. I had to find songs that would annoy people who take cruises just to hear someone scream, “Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy shake the boogie said, ‘Up jump the boogie.’”

It took me many, many minutes. But I did it. My Spotify List, Crowd Dispersal, is designed for people protesting Covid mandates anywhere from Ottawa to New Zealand. It’s a mix of Chinese opera, Pygmy songs, Indian ragas, Tuvan throat music, Schoenberg, hyperpop, Yoko Ono, the music from the soundtrack of Uncut Gems, and a song from the Caretaker’s six-and-half-hour Everywhere at the End of Time, in which he takes ballroom songs from the 1930s and disintegrates their quality to mimic the experience of dementia. It’s the music of globalism. The music of the oppressed. The music of the cosmopolitan avant garde. It’s really, really bad.

And, even though I like the song very much, I included a track off of Levitin’s new album, sex and math. “I imagine anyone under 40 would be dispersed by my album,” he insisted. When I hesitated to put it on the playlist, Levitin plugged its inclusion by saying, “Stewart Copeland from The Police told me it sounded like J.J. Cale crossed with Steely Dan.”

The Levitin song I chose is called “Darwin Song #2,” and includes the lyrics “It all comes down to this/ We’re descended from fish./ Now lots of people think this doesn’t make sense,’ but they don’t let facts disturb their ignorance.” The protesters will be gone before Levitin gets to the bridge.

Joel Stein is the senior distinguished visiting fellow at the Joel Stein Institute. A former columnist for Time, the L.A. Times and Entertainment Weekly, he is, amazingly, also the author of In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book and Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. Follow him on Twitter,Facebook, Instagram, Friendster, or Google+.