This weekend’s travels included the child being stunned that ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are The Champions’, which she only knows as separate songs, tend to be played together on terrestrial radio, because it’s nigh-impossible for a DJ to separate them. For my part, I relearned the lesson that both songs are among the worst earworm injectors ever, right up there with ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’ and that Carly Rae Jepsen song from a few years ago. As someone who is very susceptible to earworms (I once had a song from a musical, and no I’m not telling you which one, stuck in my head for over a year), I try hard to avoid such songs, but I will take my chances in the service of today’s atonal query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) has to be very careful about listening to ‘Royals’, too, which is about the only thing that could keep me watching a movie with Jennifer Lopez and Lizzo as strippers, asking: What’s the most pernicious, worst earworm of them all?
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The most pernicious in fiction is “Tenser, Said the Tensor” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demolished_Man) Anything that can keep a telepath from picking up your murderous plans has to be pretty persistent.
Real world, there’s lots of them. Almost too many to pick a worst, really, though “Mambo No. 5” pretty vicious, and “The Boxer” by Simon & Garfunkel can get wedged in there for days.
For me, the worst are ones where I really only know a snippet of the lyrics, which small little bit keeps circling the synapses looking for a resolution that will never come because I don’t know it well enough.
1.
877.
Kars.
4.
Kids.
i’m sorry.
My present one is BANG! by AJR , for some reason it keeps popping back into my head every few days.
They say the best way to get rid of an earworm is to find and listen to the song until it goes away. But sometimes that is easier said than done.
Me