Beware: earworm ahead
Read this at your peril. It’s a list of the ten most supposedly earworm-inducing rock songs.
Luckily I’m so out of touch that I don’t know most of them.
I was thinking of listing my ten most earworm inducing songs, but then I thought better of it. Why spread the pain?
Fortunately I don’t know those songs. Unfortunately I am occasionally plagued by an earworm version of “Have an Eggroll Mr. Goldstone”. Horrible.
Hah, whoever wrote that list is probably the same age I am- not only do I KNOW all of those, I HAVE most of them.
Stop looking at me like that. For me the only way to purge the damn things is to play them.
I knew all of them, though they did come a bit after my “time” in music (the 80’s for me).
About the only one I ever kinda sorta got stuck un my head was the “MMMBOP” song, but I never could recall the exact string of nonsense they said so it was different pretty much each time I sung it.
But then I rarely get songs stuck in my head like that anyway. Or, at the least, in a way I even notice. I’ll do strange things while I am concentrating on work (I’m a software engineer) and realease I have sung – in their entirety – 10 or 15 songs from front to back, or the same one over and over 15 times, yet I do not even really recall doing it. That’s not uncommon. I’m more apt to sing something that is reflecting my currents thoughts and then I’m more likely to sing long parts of it instead getting a small part over and over.
Unfortunately if you *asked* me to do it (either “memorize this song” or “sing this whole song you know) I couldn’t, but the ones I recall I do almost flawlessly while repeating them absentmindedly. Not much use in that – indeed more often than not since when I do it it is more or less subconscious it tends to tell others what I am thinking more than I would like to be generally known.
In 1969 when I was a mere slip of a lad, I rode a motorcyle through Europe. God help me, I got Johnny Horton’s North To Alaska running through my head. It lasted for days, it actually painful. I finally replaced it with some Beatles song that after a few hours wasn’t much better.
I thankfully can say I don’t know the Beyonce song and I can’t place the Hanson one. I’m trying to think of songs I used to get stuck in my head. The Jenny 8675309 yeah–usually it is songs I hate or commercial jingles–for 2 weeks I had some jingle from Two and Half Men running through my head–around election time it was “the cult of personality” though I can’t imagine why. It might not be good that I now have a name to call the phenomenon.
These aren’t really songs — more like chants. Simple, repetitive, limited range, strong rhythmic elements, little or no melody or variation. What makes them so appealing to many people is that they are very easy to mimic. Nothing really interesting. I have no trouble forgetting them.
Beyonce’s dancing, though, that is something to behold and it will be a long time before that fades in my memory.
Dare I mention, the Oscars? I’m totally out of it.
Best earworm ever: One Tree Hill, U2
Worst earworm ever: There is only one song just saying the name of which will get people throwing things at you: That Disney song.
Good earworms displace bad earworms, God be thanked.