FTV: Earworms

     Back in my college days, I had a first draft of a term paper handed back to me with the comment, “Using the definition of a term for your introduction is not a good way to start a paper.  Try it again.”  With that lesson learned, I never repeated that mistake.  Fifty years later, I am sure this professor would make the same comment about this column, but he is no longer with us (may he rest in peace).  None-the-less, the starting point of this FTV is going to be the definition of the word ‘earworm’.  According to our friends at Wiki, an earworm “is a catchy, memorable melody or snippet of music that continuously plays on an involuntary, repetitive loop in your head, even after the song has stopped.  Derived from the German word ‘ohrwurm’, it is a completely normal cognitive phenomenon experienced by almost everyone.  It is also sometimes referred to as ‘stuck song syndrome’.”

     Wiki didn’t stop there and went on to describe something they called ‘Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI)’:  Neurologically, scientists define earworms as a form of unprompted auditory imagery, where the brain’s primary auditory cortex (the area responsible for hearing) is activated simply by memory.”  Boston University adds another term ‘Cognitive Itch’ to the equation:  “Psychologists describe earworms as a ‘cognitive itch.  The brain automatically replays the sound, and trying to forcibly suppress the tune often creates a mental loop that worsens it.”  Let me beat the drum one more time by telling you that the Cleveland Clinic refines the definition with:  “Song Triggers – Earworms are usually triggered by memories, emotions, or hearing a similar melody.  They typically consist of the catchiest 15 to 30 seconds of a song, such as the ‘hook’.”

     So why am I making my former professor roll over in his grave by offering not just the definition of a term, but an exceptionally long definition of ‘earworm’ in this FTV?  You may have already guessed where this is going, but I want readers to confront the kind of things that get stuck in our heads.  I have always said,  “The best way to rid yourself of an earworm is to give it to someone else,” so here is your opportunity to unload yours.  It would give me a great deal of pleasure if readers would share their ‘favorite’ (if that is the proper term – perhaps ‘least favorite’ would be better) earworms with me at kraisanen@oasd.k12.mi.us .  Thank you in advance if you are worried about dumping them on me but I assure everyone that I always have music running in my brain.  Adding a few more hooks to my collection will do me no harm or neurological damage.  Maybe my whistling persistent tunes acts as a kind of cranial safety valve much the same way the valve on a pressure cooker or tea pot keeps them from exploding.

     Let me get the ball rolling by sharing the one that I am quite sure annoyed enough people over time that I should probably feel guilty.  It became one of those things that I unconsciously whistled all the time in my classroom or other workplace environments.  The tune in question is the one heard on all of the Looney Tunes shorts.  You know the one – can you hear it?  I hadn’t thought of it or whistled it in years but it popped into my head while cooking for Vacation Bible School at the end of June.  I didn’t even realize it until my wife gave me ‘the look’ and said, “Would you please stop that!”  I have no idea what triggered the return of the Looney Tunes tune, but, mercifully, it went away on its own.

     Not all earworms are accidental.  When I worked as a summer dishwasher during my college years, the repetitiveness of the job at times demanded something to amuse myself.  I had Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King stuck in my head one day.  As with the Looney Tunes song, I kept trying to escape it by whistling the main theme.  After a while, I noticed others around me humming or whistling the same musical phrase.  My Psychology 101 class took over and I began asking people, ‘Hey, what is that you are humming?’ or “What is that song?”  Most couldn’t put a name on it and to the last in person, they all said, “Gee, I don’t know – it just  popped into my head.”  At times I would tell them the title but never told anybody why it had suddenly ‘popped into their head’.  I worked in the kitchen at the Huron Mountain Club for three summers and began a little ritual of implanting In The Hall of the Mountain King to each new summer crew.  It is too bad that I never took another Psychology class because I had amassed enough first hand material to write a decent paper on the phenomenon.

     The In the Hall of the Mountain King earworm planting stopped when I began teaching.  There are some jobs associated with working in a classroom that can be repetitive, but occupying one’s mind while creating new lessons and experiments does not leave a lot of room for mental tomfoolery.  The last time I remember unconsciously planting the Mountain King earworm was at least two decades ago.  A sheriff’s deputy was standing at the end of the long counter in the school office waiting to talk to the principal.  I was at the other end of the counter collating and stapling a multiple page assignment pack (the grades I taught still numbered in the fifties or sixties in those days).  In the midst of my stacking and stapling, the deputy looked over at me and inquired the name of the melody I apparently had been mindlessly whistling.  Realizing what had crept up on me, I told him my Hall of the Mountain King earworm story.  He said, “I  recognized it but couldn’t put a name on it.”  When he left the principal’s office and waved goodbye to the secretary a short time later, he exited the office and turned down the hall.  Just before he got out of earshot, you can guess what he started to whistle.

     When one’s wife is a church organist, Sundays are always filled with music.  She has been on the bench for 56 years and has been the head (and oftentimes the only member of) the committee that picks hymns.  When someone comments how well the selected hymns went along with the service, she smiles and says ‘thank you’ fully knowing that the lessons matching the theme in the hymns wasn’t accidental.  Pastors appreciate when the organist’s selections underscore the messages for the day.  My memory of the Sunday morning lessons are carried forward when the hymn (or hymns) get stuck in my head.  On the occasional Sunday that my wife can not be at a service, I am usually the one who plays the digital recordings she has made for the service.  While my job is to point and press the right buttons at the appropriate times during the service, I like to double dose the flock with the final hymn.  As they depart the service, I replay the last hymn.  As I will find myself humming the final hymn for the rest of the day, maybe it will stick with them for a while as well.  I am pretty sure God doesn’t mind this kind of earworm planting.

     Sporting events have become great purveyors of earworms.  Let me give a couple of examples to see if you, too, have noticed how they are planted via constant playback.  Where have you heard Todd Rundgren’s lyric ‘I don’t want to work / I want to bang on the drum all day’?  Look no farther than the Green Bay Packers who blast the song whenever the green and gold score.  ‘We will, we will, rock you!’ – This of course is Queen’s arena rocking anthem that has been appropriated by numerous sports teams.  Remember the band Steam?  ‘Na na / na na 

na na / hey hey, goodbye’?  This one seems to lend itself well to baseballs exiting the stadium and one can not even count the number of teams that use it.  Even the National Hockey League got into the action during the 2025-26 season when they adopted Triumph’s 1990’s hit Lay It On the Line as a backdrop to their playoffs.  It was so effective that it managed to get this Canadian band to regroup and tour in 2026 after everybody knew they would never tour again.

     It seems rock bands have had a hand in creating earworms for decades.  There is no better way to get people to run out and buy a record than to get a song stuck in the public’s collective minds.  The catchier the soundbyte, the more likely it is to rock a stadium full of concert fans and to spur record sales.  If a song really has staying power, it may even circle back years after it first became a hit.  Noddy Holder and the band Slade are prime examples of what I am talking about.  Two of their songs designed to elicit audience response (Mamma Weer All Crazee Now (1972) and Run Runaway (2009)) planted a lot of earworms when they were first released.  Over the years, these two songs were covered 11 and 9 times, respectively, thus keeping the earworm potential active for much longer than a typical single release.

     The grand-daddy of all Slade earworm inducing hits was Cum On Feel The Noize which charted in the top ten in many countries in 1973 (it only reached No 98 in the United States).

An American heavy metal band was pushed into covering the song in 1983 but they really didn’t want to do a cover.  Quiet Riot purposely made a sloppy recording that the suits decided to put on their album anyway.  Not only did it hit gold, it propelled their Mental Health album to the top of the charts (a first for a heavy metal album).  Slade were somewhat bitter about Quiet Riot having a great deal of success with their song, and as a result shunned invitations to see the band when they performed at Royal Albert Hall.  As drummer Frankie Banali recalled, “The record gave us a lot of success and it made Slade a lot of money, so it was all good.”  Cum On Feel the Noize is another song often piped into sports arenas around the world.  Not a bad track record – there aren’t that many songs that can plant a lot of earworms twice..

     Just for fun, I ran down Reddit’s Top 100 Earworms as posted by Sean Lambert.  Considering that some of these are ‘generational’ (as in stuck in the minds of people of certain ages), I decided to only pick out the ones with melodies or lyrics that popped into my head as soon as I read the title.  If some of these listed here sound like I am stuck in the past, then it validates the ‘generational’ comment above.  Here we go (and these were listed in no particular order on Reddit):  What’s Up? (4 Non Blonds), Take On Me (a-ha), Hallelujah (Rufus Wainwright and a host of other artists who have covered it), Don’t Stop Me Now (Queen), All Star (Smash Mouth), Never Gonna Give You Up (Rick Astley), Escape (The Pina Colada Song) (Rupert Holmes), Safety Dance (Men Without Hats), Sk8er Boi (Avril Lavigne), The Joker (Steve Miller Band), War Pigs (Black Sabbath), Rainbow Connection (The Muppets).  Okay, that is a dozen in and we are no where close to done – hope your brain hasn’t gone into overdrive with overlapping e-worms.  I found it odd that Don’t Worry, Be Happy (Bobby McFerrin) didn’t pop up anywhere.

     For some reason, the next one also brings with it a visual eye-worm as it played endlessly on MTV back in the day:  Rock Me Amadeus (Falco), The Lion Sleeps Tonight (The Tokens), Sweet Child O’ Mine (Guns’N’ Roses), Mickey (Toni Basils, and this gets the same eye-worm warning as Rock Me Amadeus), Carry On Wayward Son (Kansas), 18 And Life (Skid Row), Drops of Jupiter (Train), Theme from Jurassic Park (John Williams), Space Oddity (David Bowie), I Believe in a Thing Called Love (The Darkness), Jump (Van Halen), The Times They Are A Changing (Bob Dylan).

     That is two dozen down.  Lets squeeze in a dozen more and call it good:  Up On Cripple Creek (The Band), I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) (The Proclaimers – which just happens to be living rent free in my head right now as I just heard it on the radio while running errands this morning), Blue (Da Ba Dee) (Eiffel 65), Black Betty (Ram Jam), Hakuna Matata (from The Lion King soundtrack), Will the Circle Be Unbroken (The Carter Family and any group sing-a-long done closing shows in Nashville), Karma Chameleon (Culture Club), Dude (Looks Like a Lady) (Aerosmith), The Final Countdown (Europe), Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen) with a nod to Bicycle, another Queen song that hangs around for days after I hear it), Roar (Kary Perry), and finally, Hooked On a Feeling (Blue Swede gets the nod over BJ Thomas’s version).  Queen’s hat-trick appearance on this list elevates the late Freddy Mercury into the earworm hall of fame.

     Perhaps I should have put an asterisk after the ‘finally’ in the last batch because, as we have seen over the years, no decade can pass without adding more earworms to the list.  Some are definitely more annoying than others but they usually fade away.  Fading away is fine, but then someone mentions, say, The Macarena (Los Del Rio), and the whole earworm (and in this case, another MTV eye-worm) cycle begins again.  Don’t blame Los Del Rio for this one – theirs was a dance remix of a version first released in Spain by Fangoria and later copied by Los del Mar in Canada before the rest of us heard it and it infected the world. Unlike COVID, there isn’t any vaccine that will stave off an earworm pandemic.  Everybody sing together now, ‘Hey, Macaranea, ay!’

Top Piece Video:  This wasn’t on the REDDIT list, but it could have been as it planets both ear and eye- worms!