The door guy was doing Bowie.<\/p>\n
\u201cHeeeere am I sitting in my tin can…\u201d he sang. Then he stopped and fiddled with the door\u2019s dog door, muttering a bit, then taking back the song. \u201cGround control to Major Tom, your circuit\u2019s dead…\u201d<\/p>\n
I was home, trapped in the Barn with my dogs. Like everyone who comes to the house, the door guy wondered if my dogs bite. And, as always, I assured him that, yes, they do. It\u2019s a lie. My dogs cower in fear, but they like the killer rep. They would get face tattoos if I\u2019d let them.<\/p>\n
\u201cTell my wife I love her very much….\u201d\u00a0sang the door guy as he nail-gunned the left jamb into place.<\/p>\n
He sang snippets of the song in no particular order (\u201cand the papers want to know whose shirts you wear….\u201d) for 90 minutes. And, of course, by now the song was stuck in my head as well. I petted Annie while softly singing, \u201cThough I\u2019ve passed one hundred thousand miles…\u201d<\/p>\n
Suddenly, after an hour and a half, the door guy switched to singing, \u201cOh, please, say to me, you\u2019ll let me be your man…\u201d<\/p>\n
No. I was not going to let that song get stuck in my head. If I\u2019m going to get a Beatles song stuck in my head it\u2019s bigod going to be \u201cYellow Submarine.\u201d I stuck to singing Bowie and the door guy was hammering both the door and me with the Beatles song. Happily, he was almost finished with the job. I asked him about Bowie.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the last song I heard in my truck,\u201d he explained. He had no reason for \u201cI Want to Hold Your Hand,\u201d other than he must have heard it recently.<\/p>\n
A few days later the door guy came back to install another door (I\u2019m a sucker for new doors) and he was singing Kenny Loggins\u2019 \u201cDanger Zone\u201d from the soundtrack to \u201cTop Gun.\u201d He was the singingest guy I\u2019ve ever hired, and his case of earworm was as bad as anyone\u2019s I\u2019ve ever encountered.<\/p>\n
Earworms, or, for those few who don\u2019t like the idea of slithery creature crawling into their brains, stuck-song syndrome, afflicts almost everyone to different degrees. It can be embarrassing. A few years ago when a certain commercial was airing overly frequently, I found myself singing \u201cViva Viagra\u201d to the tune of \u201cViva Las Vegas\u201d in the drug aisle at my local grocery store. Advertisers have won when they can get people singing their jingle in public.<\/p>\n
Song psychologists (I missed my calling; nobody told me that was a thing) have been studying stuck-song syndrome for years, and they have a lot of data. One song-psych in London has compiled a list of more than 2,000 songs, but she\u2019s also noted that there\u2019s no noticeable consensus over the most common ditties that get lodged in people\u2019s brains to spin out a constant loop.<\/p>\n
Why do certain songs morph into earworms? Nobody knows, but it helps for the song to be catchy. What makes a song catchy? No one knows.<\/p>\n
Different people have different triggers. There was a time in the distant past when I had Philip Glass\u2019 \u201cKoyaanisqatsi\u201d droning through the dark recesses of my mind for extended periods. I\u2019m not sure why. Surely I didn\u2019t hear it on KIIS-FM.<\/p>\n
While, regrettably, I\u2019m no song psychologist, I know earworm trouble when I hear it, and if you\u2019ve ever heard just about any Lady Gaga song, though mostly \u201cBad Romance,\u201d you, too, \u00a0know what catchy is. After you blunder into the song you\u2019ll likely want to slam a plumber\u2019s helper into the side of your head (where one of your ears is). Ditto, or even more so, Kylie Minogue\u2019s not-ironically-titled \u201cCan\u2019t Get You Out of My Head,\u201d which combines easy-to-remember lyrics (\u201cla la la la la la la\u201d) with a bouncy synth beat that pile-drives the song right into your brain, where you have to lure it out with repeated playings of Tag Team\u2019s \u201cWhoomp! (There It Is)\u201d or Disney\u2019s \u201cIt\u2019s a Small World.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally, another earworm trigger is just stumbling onto a certain tune\u2019s title in print, as you\u2019ve just done if you\u2019re the rare reader who sticks with a story to its end. Song titles like Queen\u2019s \u201cWe Are the Champions\u201d or \u201cBohemian Rhapsody,\u201d or Journey\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Stop Believin\u2019,\u201d or the Tokens\u2019 \u201cThe Lion Sleeps Tonight,\u201d or Disney\u2019s \u201cYo Ho (A Pirate\u2019s Life for Me).\u201d<\/p>\n
Drop me a line sometime and tell me which one you got stuck with after reading this. But wait until you\u2019re less angry with me for causing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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