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Two Drink Minimum: Earworms
No, not a pest that attacks corn, tomatoes or cotton. The songs that get stuck in your head and play over and over and over. They’re a curse that drives you nuts when they get played on a radio, or at a grocery store, or at the nightmarish Chuck E Cheese ripoff you’ve been dragged to for your nephew’s birthday. Or that a love one sings next to you in a car. The sort of song that makes you want to pick up a baseball bat and register your opposition. This phenomenon is so irritating there’s been a TED talk about it, because that’s the only thing that could make them worse:
There are some terrible songs that qualify:
Terrifying songs too:
And some that are irresistibly catchy songs that make you into a vodka-swilling commie:
What earworm drives you nuts that you want to inflict on the rest of the Ricochetti, and what are you drinking to forget the one you hear now?
Published in Humor
Scattered PIC …. tures ……………..
Had this in my head for weeks recently…
My 70 year old husband learned a song at boy scout camp called as best as I can verbalize, “Ukachukachukaukachugiay”. This is the only word in the song, and it has a kind of Hawaiian-like tune. Any time he wants to drive me batty he sings it, my own personal earworm. When we went to Hawaii guess what he sang incessantly.
Truth be told, I didn’t read the whole thing and did not limit my submissions to bad songs. Just those that stick in your head.
One that comes to me occasionally, especially if I hear it somewhere, is That’s Amore. A song I have never purposely listened to in my life, but is played enough in things for it to get stuck in my head.
My coworker inflicted this on me just today. When we were discussing how we wish we could have naptime at work, he used the phrase “Siesta forever” in a silly pseudo-African accident.
The phrase did its job:
It’s up to my old friend, Mr. Jameson to take the edge off.
That’s a Moray!
The fact that this was promoted by an editor to the Main Feed is proof that the editors are evil.
For those of you who are not currently members, the Ear Worm Cure is on the Member Feed, so sign up today and get those songs out of your head.
Maybe “fiestas”? Although siestas are wonderful, too… :-).
I notice that in times where I get a lot of sleep then I don’t suffer from ear worms. Now when I get them, I take that as a sign that I need more sleep. It works.
Fry and Laurie wrote deliberately awful songs that were quite catchy – also topical, if you lose lids as much as I do:
Also, have you ever cut something the wrong size?:
Drinking my second Pepsi this afternoon.
Main feed? What is this world coming to?
I am impressed. Now you are going to go all Main Feedy on us. Swimming Pools, Contributor Stars….
Earworms don’t particularly bother me – songs playing in my head drown out those voices… And;
Nah. He was punning on the line.
I still remember my mom’s surprised laughter at hearing that in a commercial in the 90s. She probably hadn’t heard it since the 60s. I had never heard of it, or to this day ever seen the show.
Okey-dokey and alrighty, then…Better slow down on my caipirinha, I s’pose… :-D
Leonard Bernstein
The Overture to Candide
And now it is on a loop in my head.
The chorus from this has been playing on my internal tape all week. That’s what I get for listening to Parcel of Steeleye Span while working.
How do You rid Yerself of this earworm?
.
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiBYM6g8Tck
.
Make sure the barrel is snug against Yer concha and squeeze the trigger.
This has been pestering me for about two weeks. Finally listening to it now.
Drinking coffee over here. It’s ten in the morning.
This is a beautiful rendition of “Oh What a Beautiful Morning.” Patrick Wilson sang it on Broadway, literally on the street, to open the 2002 Broadway on Broadway program (I don’t know what it was for). I was curious about Patrick Wilson because of the television show he starred in The Gifted, which was a great show that lasted only one year. He is a tremendous actor. He also has a magnificent singing voice and belongs more on stage than on television. So I listened to this, and it got stuck in my head for a week. It woke me up at night. Listen at your own peril:
And this one my daughter had played at her wedding for one of the interludes, and it also got stuck in my head for weeks and I cannot listen to it ever again, although I love it. “Time to Say Good-bye,” Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman:
Now that’s low-down.
We all used to sing this to my son all the time when he was little. It just captured his personality so perfectly. He grew up to be a percussionist. It does get stuck in your head:
This is the first I’ve heard that there are particular songs which tend to be earworms not just for me but for everyone. In particular, I was stunned to see a perennial of mine, “Yellow Submarine”, shown as number one. It was as though someone had read my mind, but it isn’t really just my mind after all!
To hear “Green Acres” listed was even more of a shock to me. It isn’t just a recurring one for me, but it has been a very present one recently and until today.
There is more to the mystery then, than WHY they occur. What make some of them especially virulent?
I will finish by complying with the [pandering] poll question. My wife has been complaining of an ear worm for the past several days, and just mentioned it now to our family, without knowing that I was sitting here reading about earworms. (Coinkydink? I think not!)
Her affliction has been a [particularly morbid] lyrical fragment from a somewhat later-era Simon and Garfunkel tune , or maybe just Simon: It is…
Wait, though!
Maybe I will test the theory. Is this depressing song a common ear worm? Name the tune that is tormenting her!
The first one to identify it gets to hear my worst earworm of the last two years in his head for the next two years. I will confidently give the lyrics of the song exclusively to the winner (namely, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree; After three long years, Do you Still Want Me….and I can’t believe I See! A hundred Yellow Ribbons round the old (round the o-o-ld) Oak Tree!)
Congrats in advance to the losers. You gave it you best, even though you don’t get to hear the mystery lyrics over and over (especially, you don’t get to hear “I’m comin’ home, I’ve Done My Time…” which is the most malevolent, the most metastatic segment of all the words in the song.)
Bwa-ha-ha-ha!
Seawriter
The Boxer?