'Earworm' infestation temporarily disables music lovers

Earworm - now they have a name for it.

You could flip through the Bruce Springsteen songbook and find some of the most memorable music of the past 30 years.
These are modern anthems, really: passion-fueled songs like ‘Born to Run,’ ‘Jungleland’ and ‘Born in the USA’; a solemn mourning of passing time in ‘Independence Day’ and ‘The River;’ the gifted prose that weaves through ‘Thunder Road;’ and the call of resurrection that inspires ‘Badlands,’ ‘No Surrender’ and the most recent issue, ‘The Rising.’

Despite the glory and portrayal of human emotion however, the most nagging and incessant delivery from The Boss’ creative arsenal comes from an otherwise forgettable tune called ‘Cadillac Ranch.’ ‘Cadillac, Cadillac,’ sings The Boss, ‘long and dark, shiny and black.’

The song has haunted me for years. I have no idea why.
It could, I suppose, be worse.

Now that the haunting phenomenon has a name - ‘earworm,’ as it has been labeled by professor James Kellaris, who has been studying it for the past three years - the appalling stories from the afflicted are beginning to see the light of day.

What person hasn’t found himself with a tune ringing obsessively in his or her head, only to find - quite horrifically - upon closer inspection that the catchy strains of the melodic intruder are the product of Abba’s schmaltzy ‘Dancing Queen’; the droning whine of Mac Davis’s ‘Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me’; or the faux funk folly of the theme song from ‘Barney Miller’?

At 8 a.m. most weekday mornings, 3-year-old Zoe Mies is seated in the back of her mom’s purple Toyota as it zooms up the Northway en route to a Clifton Park day care center. Even as Zoe’s mom, Deanna, is submerged in thoughts of recent concerts she has attended featuring head-banging favorites Queensryche and those glam-rocking noisemaking members of Kiss - she is consumed, instead, by the catchy rhythms of those four grown men in her daughter’s favorite band: The Wiggles. As Amore makes her way to the offices of this newspaper where she works, the Kiss fan is particularly smitten with a Wiggles’ tune called ‘Fruit Salad.’ As in ‘Fruit salad. Yummy, yummy.’

‘It’s a catchy tune,’ Amore insists.

Fellow co-worker Julie Joly says she notices an equally mystifying batch of tunes playing in the heavy rotation list of her mind.

‘I get Frank Sinatra songs stuck in my head all the time,’ the Bon Jovi fan admits, perplexed by the notion.
‘It’s not like I’m even a Sinatra fan. They just get stuck in my head, and I can’t get them out.’
A quick study of the newsroom reveals that pretty much no one is spared the invasion of these unwanted tunes that somehow get lodged in the subconscious.

Society columnist Jeannette Jordan confesses to a long-running duel with Andy Williams’ rendition of ‘Moon River.’
‘The only way I can get rid of it,’ Jordan says, ‘is by going to bed.’

Assistant copy editor Anne Orgren ‘fesses up to a lifelong infestation by the theme song from the ‘Odd Couple’ TV show. The song’s sticking power, she says, is approached only by tunes from the movie ‘Chicago,’ which jazzed up her life for two consecutive weeks after she watched the DVD.

Award-winning staff photographer Ed Burke, normally on the quiet side, becomes quite animated when relating the two-song soundtrack of his private hauntings.
‘One is the song ‘Midnight at the Oasis,’’ Burke says, before launching into the verse of the second tune: ‘Her name is Lola / She was a show girl.’

Intern Rachel Arnheiter admits to her own hopelessness with Chingy’s tune ‘Right Thurr’ and Black-Eyed Peas’ ‘Where is the Love.’ She has attempted ridding herself of the offending verses with a novel approach: by sharing them with friends. So far, however, the results have not been good.
‘They get real angry at me,’ she says, after she puts the tunes in her friends’ heads. ‘Sometimes, they even hate me for it.’ Two desks over, Amore thinks some retribution is in order and shares some hideously infectious tunes of her own.
Innocent bystanders quickly plug their ears and cringe in terror as she rains down with a chorus from the obnoxious television jingle ‘Mama’s got the magic of Clorox bleach.’ Perhaps the cruelest thing about the tunes that inexplicably inhabit the inner spittle of a person’s brain is that in most cases the songs are unwelcome.

Imagine people raised in the 1970s on the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Garageland’ by The Clash having to suddenly, and quite horrifically, be forced to endure songs like ‘Turn the Beat Around’ and ‘Do The Hustle’ inside their Day-Glo streaked and spiky domes.
One tune is bad enough, but stereo images provide their own little slice of hell. A particularly frightening occurrence, one yet to undergo study, is what happens when two songs occur simultaneously. All that musical sampling in the last 15 years has to have had some repercussions.

It begs the question: What do you do if Rick James’ ‘Superfreak’ suddenly segues with MC Hammer’s ‘U Can’t Touch This’?
Even more perplexing is what to make of the catchy backward looping phrases of Missy Elliott’s ‘Work It,’ where the chorus is literally ‘Ti esrever dna ti pilf nwod gniht eht tup I,’ (‘I put the thing down flip it and reverse it,’ in reverse, y’all).

Needing someone to set the record straight, I paid a visit to Walt Wallen, manager of Last Vestige music shop on Broadway. I have known Walt for nearly a decade, and can vouch for the fact that he has been blessed by an entire planet of music that has passed through his ears, from some obscure indie garage band that you just gotta hear, to aboriginal didgeridoo-playing funk-bluegrass mix in the dunes of Australia.

‘What kind of music gets stuck in your head?’ this musical man of the world was asked.
And I swear to you, he stood up tall, spread his denim-clad arms and bellowed: ‘Aye-Aye-Aye / I’m hooked on a feeling/ I’m high on believing ...’
I left him standing in front of a vintage Rolling Stones in London 1965 poster, and headed out to the cold Broadway drizzle, from which he could still be heard way across the street launching into a medley of earworm anthems, the last of which went ‘867-5309.’ So it was onto Caroline Street, and into Matt McCabe’s guitar palace, where McCabe said he is not particularly haunted by unfavorable tunes.

‘Maybe it’s because I look at music from the creative point of view of a musician,’ he said, surrounded by guitars hanging from above.
The staff does engage in some verbal play that has to do with the old Paul Simon song ‘50 Ways to leave your Lover’ and an employee named Leigh.
‘I’ll say something like ‘Pick up the key, Leigh, set yourself free,’ and then we’ll play around with those lyrics,’ McCabe says.
Next thing anybody knows, those catchy little phrase turners from Rhymin’ Simon are being flung around: ‘Hop on the bus, Gus/Slip out the back, Jack/Make a new plan, Stan ...’ While McCabe claims he is unaffected, he’ll go home humming the tune, much to the chagrin of his wife, who will unknowingly pick it up.
‘It will stick with her for days,’ he says. ‘And boy, does she get made at me.’ Just as everything finally seemed to come to a silent calm, McCabe unexpectedly busted out his best Frankie Valli falsetto: ‘’Who loves you pretty baby/Who’s gonna get you through the night.’

Now there’s a catchy tune,’ he said, his voice filling all of Caroline Street even as it mixed with the cool wind, the sweet rain and the gruff harmonies pouring from Broadway where Walt was on either the eighth or ninth chorus of ‘867-5309.’ A car roared around the corner, opened its engines and tore up the street.

It was a Cadillac, long and tall, shiny and black.

by Thomas Dimopoulos
The Saratogian