Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Or how ’bout this:
.
I love that song. But, I will see you patrick Wilson, and raise you Gordon MacRae ( or I would if I could figure out how to embed it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LdIL5WCso8
It worked!
The ear worm in action in Love Me Tonight:
Infectious. To use once LA Times music critic and editor Robert Hilburn’s goto adjective*. This sucker always enters my poor brain with a vivid image of Chevalier. I’m not complaining.
*in alternation with “tasty” and generally modifying the noun “licks.”
This got into my head in the shower just now.
Rah rah Rasputin –
– Boney M is a rich dietary source of earworms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ybv4DOj-N0
But this might be my favorite – Star Wars Trumpet:
I’m going to assume that the backup tape was simply played at the wrong speed for her solo. Eat your heart out, Charley Ives!
If I may quote @whiskeysam, “What fresh hell is this?”
So like every other TED video?
The two worst I can think of that have afflicted me are:
and:
After a very short time they make me want to reenact that scene from “Ichi the Killer” where the assassin puts knitting needles in both ears and pushes.
I have never come across The Shaggs before. That was bizarre. Is that something you remember when it was new?
As for the Limp Bizkit, it is something I tried to avoid, having been of the age of their fans at the time. A contender for worst band to ever achieve mainstream success.
Though if you were aware of LB you were probably not old enough to remember the Shaggs.
Google Shagg’s, and you can read their unfortunate story, and of their following. No surprise Frank Zappa praised them. http://dangerousminds.net/comments/unbelievable_holy_grail_footage_of_the_shaggs_from_1972_found
I don’t remember exactly how I came to hear about The Shaggs, but it was around 15 years ago. I was trying to find something worse than Throbbing Gristle’s “Subhuman” to “win” a stereo battle of the most irritating songs. You inferred correctly that I would’ve been a bit young to have discovered them when they were active as a band. Also, I have a very smart co-worker who claims he likes them unironically, but I don’t believe him.
Yes, the revelations about The Shaggs are heartbreaking, but hadn’t emerged when I discovered them. Those poor kids.
My guess about Zappa’s comments is that he was either being facetious/ironic, and/or making a proto-punk point about just getting in there and making music without getting hung up on technical proficiency. Or maybe he liked the innocent and guileless nature of their music. Talk about your outsider art.
Ahh, Throbbing Gristle… Genesis P. Orridge was on an episode or 2 of “Oddities” a show about a shop in NY that sold weird items. I think he was a customer of theirs. He introduced the shop owners to his wife, who inhabits a tattoo on his arm since her death.
Sorry to interrupt Shagg-Talk, but I posted this great song by The Dickies in @curiousjohn‘s clown thread and it’s been stuck in my head ever since.
Note: The song doesn’t really kick in till about 40 seconds
For the last couple of days it’s been this: https://youtu.be/ZGbva-0zmb8
I was just thinking about them yesterday. Admission: at church. Having only been a little kid in the 80s this was the first of their songs I ever heard. I later got into them in ’99/’00. Mirage was my favorite album of theirs. Nothing after this album was particularly interesting.
Well, church might have been appropriate, as I’d imagine the Kirkwoods took enough acid to see God at least once.
I saw them with fIREHOSE and Sonic Youth at a festival show in Mesa, AZ around ’91, I think. They were by far the best of the three bands, which surprised me, because I’d never paid much attention to them, and I’d come to see fIREHOSE. Too bad I didn’t pay more attention to them earlier in high school when they played all-ages shows in Phoenix, but I wasn’t savvy enough to realize how good “Meat Puppets II” was until many years later.
(BTW, I have no idea why sometimes my posts show the Youtube preview and sometimes they don’t.)
It’s the dot in ‘youtu,be’. Only those addresses with the standard ‘youtube,com’ will format.
I dislike both STP and this song, but that damn opening riff won’t leave me alone: