I’ve never met a woman who liked pina coladas and getting caught in the rain. There may be a few in my inner circle who aren’t into health food and like the taste of champagne. But if any like making love at midnight in the dunes of the cape, I’d be the last to know. Perhaps they could come away with me and escape.
Songs have a nasty habit of getting stuck in your head, especially if they’re not particularly “good”. Now, taste is relative, but show me someone who wants, who really really wants, a Spice Girls song stuck in their head all day, and I’ll show you someone whose iPod doesn't have at least one Journey song on it. Yeah, I didn’t think so either.
Thanks to Wikipedia, I know now what such songs are called: “earworms”. Much like the old urban legend about a bug dropped into your ear that can eat out your brain, these songs are catchy enough that you’d seriously consider sitting next to someone operating a pneumatic drill just to drown out the sounds in your head. But just when you’re sure that the storm has passed, you wonder if Aerosmith is the poor man’s Rolling Stones and suddenly “Dream On” cues up on your internal jukebox. Thoughts are bad; we should just ban them and stuff.
I don’t know if it’s just the fact that I went from working at a grocery store (where music is piped in constantly, much of it bad) to a library (where silence is golden, but my eyes can’t see…argh), but my mental iPod has experienced a healthy life this past summer, with no signs of letting up. Have you ever had the “Macarena” song stuck in your head, a full ten years after the craze rode into the sunset? It’s hell. Forget torturing suspected terrorists at secret military installations in Europe, just force them to sit through a Celine Dion concert in Las Vegas. They’ll tell you that Bin Laden was behind the Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, and Wham.
Of course, sometimes a song that seems really, really bad is actually, well, okay after a few thousand times on repeat. Or you can at least laugh about it, like I do with Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You”. There’s a line in that where the singer is telling the woman to take her clothes off, then reassures her that he’s “gonna take my clothes off too.” Gee, how else were you going to make love to her…never mind.
So the next time that you find yourself considering a magic carpet ride to Funky Town (population 3,200 and climbing), just be glad that they have cures for “earworms”. They’re called “radios”, “compact discs”, and “iPods”. And they’re ready to fill your head with more pleasing songs, or at least a variety of crappy ones. I hope that eases your pain the next time that “Mandy” finds its way to your subconscious.
