A Can of Earworms

[steepholm]

In a post today gair was mentioning a recent earworm of hers, which got me wondering - because, after all, it's a matter of international moment - what worms the rest of my flist find their ears afflicted by? I think we should divide them into two categories. Recent (i.e. your latest earworm) and chronic (any earworm you may have had - perhaps with lulls and recrudescences - over a matter of years).

My own most recent earworm is Yiruma's "River Flows in You", which has the classic earworm property of looping, so that there's no reason why it should ever stop.

My ancient earworms are all classical for some reason: Beethoven quartets, Haydn's London symphony, and some tunes from the Jeremy Barlow and the Broadside Band. (The latter I tend to feed by playing them on the recorder in idle moments, so I've only myself to blame.)

Over to you...

ETA: I should never have started wondering. Mining too far into the twisted Moria of my cerebral cortex has awakened a very Balrog of an earworm. Few dare speak its name. It is: "Video Killed the Radio Star". There. I've said it.

By the way, the proper name for a looping earworm is Auroboros.

Comments

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

At the moment, I keep singing endless variations on "Where are my little pussy cats/Who is a funny Tabby cat/I love a little Rosie cat" to the tune of Ilkley Moor baht 'at.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I think the problem may lie in your icon...

A Trip Through My Bizarre Mind

[aryky.livejournal.com]

At the exact moment of reading this, when I checked what was running through my head at the moment (I have things nearly constantly running through my head, so that I'm often not consciously aware of them), it turned out to be "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" (Smiths). But that's actually also a chronic earworm - it's one of those songs that inevitably gets stuck in my head in a certain context (in this case, perhaps unsurprisingly, if I'm in a somewhat bad mood).

Another contextual chronic earworm is "Heimdelsgate Like a Promethean Curse" (of Montreal), which is a more recent addition to my bad mood repertoire and has somewhat taken over from another Smiths' song, "Girlfriend in a Coma." I used to mentally sing "Aryk's in a panic, I know, I know, it's really serious. Aryk's in a panic, I know, I know it's always serious," to make fun of myself whenever I was frantically upset about something, but these days I always seem to mentally sing, far more straightforwardly, "I'm in a crisis. I need help. Come on mood shift, shift back to good again." And then the other main one recently is, rather bizarrely, "Sur le Pont d'Avignon." Somehow, my brain seems to have gotten it into my head that the lyrics ought to be "Sur le pont / d'evidemment," which means that whenever anything is very obvious, my brain immediately starts singing "Sur le pont, d'evidemment" at me. And if something is very obviously not true, it goes, "Sur le pont / d'evidemment pas."

As for ones that aren't so contextual. . . I think my first ever chronic earworm was "Tired of Waiting for You" (Kinks) - I had it stuck in my head for all of middle school. Last year, for an inexplicably long time, I couldn't stop hearing "I Only Want to Be with You" (Dusty Springfield), a song I quite possibly hadn't actually heard since middle school itself. And I think that "Take Me to the River" (Talking Heads), a song I like well enough but almost never listen to, has been inexplicably stuck in my head since high school.

Re: A Trip Through My Bizarre Mind

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Interesting - I don't think my earworms are mood-related in that way, although some are triggered by assocations with places, events, objects, etc.

Re: A Trip Through My Bizarre Mind

[aryky.livejournal.com]

I think being in a certain mood leads me to have certain thoughts - for example, when I'm in a bad mood, I often think that I'm wasting my time, and having that thought inevitably leads to "in my life, why do I waste valuable time?" It helps that I'm a primarily verbal and secondarily auditory thinker - so I tend to think in words rather than pictures and then follow up on them with the sounds I associate with them.

But really I'm just using this context as an excuse to mention that I was reminded of another chronic earworm that's been bothering me for a few years now - "Faith" (George Michael). I have no idea whatsoever why this song is constantly going through my head. None.

Re: A Trip Through My Bizarre Mind

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I seem to suffer from quotation-based earworms as well as musical ones, now I think of it. Whenever I feel I'm wasting time, for example, I find the line "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me" going through my head.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

"Video Killed the Radio Star"

Graarrgh! Curse you! At least you didn't say "Karma Chameleon".

Oh bugger.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to deploy my ouroboros icon, though.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Very nice it looks too. It's tasting rather than swallowing its own tail, I notice, and is altogether highly refined. For a worm.

[sovay]

I've been alternating recently between Morrissey's "The Last of the Famous International Playboys" and Bellowhead's "Fakenham Fair." I don't think it's caused brain damage.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

So long as you're alternating rather than playing them simultaneously, you're probably safe!

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I tend to get songs put into my head by certain things that I see or do. I spent months wondering why I had "What shall we do with the drunken sailor?" in my head every morning, before I realised that some mornings, when feeding the cats, I would sing "What shall we do with the starving kittens?" so now the mere act of feeding cats puts that tune in my head for the next few hours. Every. Single. Day.

Walking past the Roman section in the library puts Rawhide in my head for a while. ("Romans, Romans, Romans!") The nursery rhyme section, including a book called "The nursery rhymes of England" puts "The hard times of Old England" in my head. Now I don't even need to consciously notice the books in questions. Just walking past the right area puts the song in my head.

Today, though, a mixture of The Leaving of Liverpool (prompted by my habit of singing it whenever I've lost something - "Oh where oh whe-ere has the cornflour gone? O-oh whe-ere can i-it be?"), Cholera in Camp, and While Shepherds Watched (tune of Ilkely Moor.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Interesting - you share the habit of singing Ilkley Moor to different lyrics with kalypso_v. I wonder how widespread that is?

I just tried singing the words of Ilkley Moor to the tune of While Shepherds Watched, to see if it would work that way round. It was really rather beautiful.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

The tune of Ilkley Moor was actually originally composed as a setting for While Shepherds Watched, and only later got applied to the familiar Ilkley Moor words. On that, at least, I have tradition on my side.

However, my Morris side is also fond of singing the words of House of the Rising Sun to the tune of Ilkley Moor (and vice versa) which is probably less defensible. Another favourite is singing the words of The Wild Rover to the tune of The Banana Boat Song. ("Nay-oh! Nay-oh! Never will play the Wild Rover no more.") (I think we stole this from another Morris side and can't claim credit.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

*wishes Humphrey Lyttleton were living at this hour*

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

Ilkley Moor is one fo the many songs to which I apply my own lyrics- I think the "folk" ones work well, as they're already used to being butchered and having the words stretched to fill the tune anyway!

Earworms for me tend to be ones I've heard, or partly heard, recently (especially if I don't know all the words, then the tune just goes round and round with different bits of words stuck in)- today it's "Exemplum, exemplum, example from one's own life; example from one's own life, exemplum!", from the Mark Watson radio show which I've been listening to, and various bits of xmassy songs that have been floating out of shops. I can usually get rid of them by listening to the whole song, or if not, then with a whole bunch of songs of varying moods and tempoes and the brain picks something new to cling to.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Not to mention singing filks to felines.