Can't get it out of my head
Posted by JohnW on 8 May 2008 - 12:32pm.
You must know the situation, you've just been in a shop that was playing a James Blunt/Coldplay/Phil Collins record and you don't want it swirling round your head for the next half hour. Do you have a standby song that you can always recall to sing to yourself that will effectively erase the awfulness of what you've just heard?
For years I've found that Jan & Dean's "Surf City" has served me well - not my favourite ever but instantly hummable and catchy enough to stick.
Am I the only one?! No, I can't be! Anyone else care to share theirs?
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Terry and June theme tune.
Once it's there you're not getting rid of it.
you utter utter
bastard...
How does it go?
I've forgotten.
Mwahaahhhahhaahhhah
Noooooo......!
De De Deeedle dee dee dee do dee, do dee DUM Dum Dum.........
Terry and June theme is on You Tube...
...go on, I dare you.
Aha, you mean the anti - mmmbop
I hate mmm-bop more than any other song in the history of music. Once it's in there that tune is holding on for dear life.
What you need is a tune equally catchy - very difficult to achieve - or something that actually sounds similar but is more acceptable to your own particular tastes. ABC by the Jackson 5 sounds very similar in this instance, but is a much better song!
Failing that I play the intro to Pretty Vacant in my head. That works a treat!
I tend to think of the Tindersticks
in such Mmm-bop situation. Specifically "My Sister" which just about hangs onto a nice little brass riff. But that's not the reason for chosing the song. It takes me to a very, very dark and damp place where catchy relates purely to cholera and Brian Glover is still a secondary school PE teacher.
"She burned down the house when she was ten.
I was away camping with the scouts.
The fireman said she'd been smoking in bed -
the old story, I thought.
The cat and our mum died in the flames,
so Dad took us to stay with our Aunt in the country.
He went back to London to find us a new house.
We never saw him again."
Failing that, Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle Of The Road works a treat and the wife doesn't find me so weird.
I fear
the treatment may be both extensive and expensive.
Dealing with the earworm*
*See Wikepedia
I had exactly this conversation with a colleague earlier this week. He swore by the theme from the 60's childrens series of Robinson Crusoe, which horrifically I instantly remembered and it has now become my earworm......the only thing that seems to be working temporarily is "Do it again" Steely Dan.
Old folky dirges do it for me
Either Hanged I will be/Albion Country Band,
Gresford Disaster/Albion Band or
Oakham Poachers/John Kirkpatrick.
Can't beat a mournful tune and a grisly end to clear the ear of vapid pop fripperies!!
Mine would be
Ryan Adams cover of Wonderwall. That will stick in your head, but its well worth it.
This is the catchiest song of all time - fact!
The Zahir
The Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges, defined the Zahir as an everyday object that inspires obsession in all who perceive it, to the eventual exclusion of everything else. In his short story, the Zahir was a twenty-centavo coin scratched with the letters N & T.
My version of the Zahir was a snatch of what appeared to be a barroom sing-along - "la-la-la-la-la, la-la, la-la-la-la". For years it drove me mad. Not the music itself, but the fact that, in spite of its familiarity, I couldn't place it.
One day I put on Barafundle by Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - an album that I hadn't listened to since the late 1990s. There it was, halfway through Heywood Lane. The mystery solved, I no longer obsess over it.