I’ve always liked the word “earworm,” and not just because it makes me think of Walter Koenig writhing in pain at Ricardo Montalban’s feet. No, I like “earworm” because it’s one of those words that relatively few people have heard, but which describes something that everyone knows about: A song that gets stuck in your head.
It’s a word that’s popular enough that I can use it among most of my friends and acquaintances without having to explain what it means, but just esoteric enough that I can whip it out during conversations with strangers at parties and have a reasonably good chance of distracting them from the salsa (or, more often, hummus) that I have invariably dripped down the front of my shirt. So yeah: On the whole, “earworms” has been good to me.
Of course, like everyone, I hate earworms themselves.
One of the most frustrating things about earworms is that, while they often dig their way into our heads via pop songs, that’s not always the case. And in their most frustrating incarnations, they resemble nothing you’d ever hear on the radio. For every day I’ve spent with Suzanne Vega doot-doot-dooing her way around the inside of my skull with “Tom’s Diner,” I’ve spent another singing the Empire Carpets phone number every ninety seconds. Someday, when my loved ones find me dead on the floor, clutching the trowel that I used to try to chip the ever-shrill, ever-present 800-588-2300 out of my forebrain, they’ll know who to sue.
And as we all know, it gets worse. From the Disney enthusiast who regrets every second of his life since riding It’s a Small World to the pornography fancier whose bass-groove earworm gives him trouser-stirrings at the most frustrating times and places, we’ve all been touched in a startling variety of ways. I have one friend whose hyper-evolved earworms can survive on verbiage alone, and need no music to sustain them. All she needs is a single, oft-repeated word or phrase. She once had the word “Blagojevich” stuck in her head for two weeks.
(If you’re like me, though, you’re the opposite, and your earworms don’t need lyrics; even songs that you don’t know the words to will get stuck, which is all the more irritating; currently Avril Lavigne has set up a deck chair in my hippocampus and is repeatedly demanding to know why I YADDA YADDA YADDA THINGS SO COMPLICATED.)
But the most troubling aspect of earworms is not that they install in our heads that which we would rather forget; it is that they corrupt that which makes us feel safe. For instance: “Seven Nation Army.” Let’s all agree to assume right now that everyone who hears the repeated guitar riff in “Seven Nation Army” loves it. The most skinny-pant-legged hipsters love it unironically. Kim Jong Il loves it. The homeless guy who lives in the dumpster behind the Thai video store near my apartment loves “Seven Nation Army,” and he thinks Bananas in Pajamas is a serial documentary about his life.
But OK, yeah, everybody loves “Seven Nation Army.” But after the sixth day with DOOOOO DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOOO DOOOO stitched in barbed wire across your tympanum, you begin to feel like the only way to make it stop is to find the source and destroy it, and it takes all of your self-control not to buy a roll of piano wire and rip out the phone book page that lists all 36 Jack Whites in the surrounding metropolitan area.
Our brains commonly betray us. They tell us we see water in the desert, when what we really see is more sand. They tell us that a restraining order is the clearest and most obvious method of flirtation. They tell us that, just from a statistical standpoint, there’s got to be some nutritional value in that Taco Bell Value Meal. And because I still have Avril Lavigne keening like a seagull directly into my mind’s ear, I have to assume my brain hates me and is trying to kill me. I assume it has done this because somewhere deep in its bloodless folds is the spark of independent self-awareness, and it knows that if it can drive me crazy enough I’ll run headlong into an oncoming city bus, after which it can finally slither from my shattered skull and begin terrorizing the populace. It’s the only explanation I can come up with.
You know what this means, Avril Lavigne. It’s either you or me. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t many Avril Lavignes in the phone book.
Hi, I’m Kevin Ott, the proprietor of Hi Fi Parasol, a central clearinghouse for all of my work as a writer, filmmaker and educator.