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Friday, December 9, 2011

Beware The Ear-Worm

I have but one request of Him, Her or It:

With death, deliver silence.

By which I mean, no more popular songs.

I'd like some peace and quiet. And by peace and quiet I mean, freedom from "the ear worm."

You who are under 45, and who go around with those idiot "pods" stuck in your ears all the time,
You're gonna get it, too.

I know.

We know. We old folks. All of us over 50, who grew up listening to the radio, are already getting it. And we didn't even have pods in our ears.


This is what we had, not ear pods. But when
it comes to getting a tune stuck in your head,
they were just as effective.


During the 1960s, the "transistor radio" was how many of us heard the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and...well,  Sopwith Camel and other third-rate acts.

Salvador Dali painted a picture in 1931 entitled The Persistence of Memory. Dali is not my favorite artist, but go look at this picture. You can Google it.


Every time the ear-worm gets into my head, I think of that painting.

And it doesn't take much, for anyone of my generation who has any memory at all, to fall victim to the ear-worm.

What is the ear-worm? It is a popular tune, or an advertising jingle, or anything else you heard a billion times many years ago, which comes back to haunt you. It gets stuck in your head, like a piece of what used to be called audiotape "in loop," and it plays, in your head, over and over and over and over and over until you're ready to scream.

Let me just tell you a little story, since I'm so full of stories (not to mention other things.)

This is just an example. I could tell you a thousand stories like this one. But this one relates to Tbilisi, where I am living at the moment, teaching English to Georgian children.

Last Tuesday one of my students, a precious little girl named Nino ("Nino" is a common name for girls in Georgia) handed me a tangerine. My kids are always handing me, and my fellow-teachers, candy, nuts, fruit and other small goodies. The kids here don't get a formal "lunch period;" they just kind of eat between classes, and they always seem to have snacks in their pockets.

Nino is one of my favorite people, and absolutely one of my worst students. She's phenomenally scatter-brained. Can't remember to do anything, including her homework.

Nino reminds me of Eva Gabor's character, Lisa Douglas, on the old TV show Green Acres. She's that ditsy. She knows, for example, the English words "cat" and "dog" perfectly well, but she will stare at a picture of a cat or a dog for ten minutes without being able to tell me what it is. Sometimes the switch just goes to the "off" position and she's temporarily dead from the neck up.

But Nino also has rosy cheeks and big blue eyes, and therefore I am as much her prisoner as I am the old guy who tut-tuts at her for not doing her homework.

Anyhow, Nino handed me a tangerine. They grow them here in Georgia. In fact Georgia produces a lot of fresh fruit, which somewhat surprises me because, although Georgia is nowhere near as cold as Russia, this is mountainous country and it does snow here. I'm from California, and tend to associate fresh fruit with warmer climates than Georgia's.

The tangerine Nino handed me was more green than orange, underripe and more tart than sweet. But I ate it, because I hadn't had any fresh fruit that day.

But the tangerine's ripeness and/or taste are not the reason I'm writing this. The reason I'm writing this is because of what the tangerine did to my head. (Never mind Nino; she messes with my head during every class.)

The persistence of memory. Key words will trigger things. I'm awful this way, maybe worse than most of my generation. But a key word, with me, is like punching a button. And then that tape starts to play. And won't shut up.

In this case it involved a perfectly awful, long-ago-forgotten popular song. The problem is, when I was a child in the 1960s, American AM radio had a format called Top 40, which meant they played the same 40 records over and over and over and over and over. Like my classmates (when I was Nino's age) I listened to Top 40 radio. Bad decision for later life. Because when you've heard a song (or for that matter, a commercial) 10,000 times in your childhood, there ain't no getting rid of it.




\The 1960s making fun of the 1930s. It was so hip.

Hence, when Nino handed me this tangerine, my stupid brain began playing Hello, Hello.

This was a dumb, campy record, recorded in 1966 by a group called Sopwith Camel.

Poking fun at the 1920s and 1930s was popular in the 1960s, when the 20's and 30's were considered hopelessly hokey by the twentysomethings of 1966 whose male members anyway were being drafted for, and didn't want to go to, Vietnam.

As part of their rebellion against their parents' generation, which as they saw it was sending them to Vietnam, the twentysomethings of that era considered their parents' music good mainly for laughs (laughter being the best form of defiance.)

In this spirit, Sopwith Camel (which never had another hit record than I knew of) recorded Hello, Hello.

The actual, original Sopwith Camel, by the way, was an airplane, as the above paper wrapper from a 1967 45-rpm pressing of this dumb song shows. It was a biplane, a two-winger, used by the British Royal Air Force as a fighter plane during World War I, the first war in which airplanes were used for military purposes.

For the LSD-and-pot crowd of 1966-67, World War I (or actually, anything prior to that crowd's own childhood) was the campy "olden days."

With tinny instrumental accompaniment and an equally tinny leading voice intended to imply the sound of the 78-rpm records of the 1920's, the song went like this:

Hello, hello,

I like your smile.

Hello, hello,

Shall we talk a while?

Would you like some of my tangerines?

I know I'd never treat you mean.



Cute, huh? Stupid is the word. But everyone was on drugs in those days, and it was a smash hit. When I was 11 years old, I heard this song maybe 34,756 times on Top 40 radio. Just goes to show you, it wasn't all Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane in those days. There was a lot of garbage too. Anybody remember the 1910 Fruitgum Company? They were to pop music what cotton candy is to protein.

And after Nino handed me that underripe tangerine last Tuesday, this damned song, Hello, Hello was stuck in my head for the rest of the afternoon. 45 years after it hit the airwaves. All because it had the word "tangerines" in it.

Memory is a devil. Against it, I have a mental device of which I make use regularly. I call it "The Block." "The Block" is an old jingle for Juicy Fruit chewing gum, dating from the 1970s. It's a round, you know, like Row, row, row your boat: "Let's pick a pack/Of Juicy Fruit gum,/Let's pick a pack/From the Juicy Fruit tree,/'Cause the flavor's so good/Ya gotta have some;/ Just pick a pack and you'll see... "Pick a pack! What a happy flavor! Juicy Fruit! What a happy feeling!" Then it starts again. I make use of The Block when I have something else that's driving me crazy, usually late at night when I'm trying to sleep.

In other words, I swap ear-worm for ear-worm, kind of like taking a shot of methadone instead of heroin.

The Juicy Fruit gum jingle is so old and familiar to me (it kept me awake itself in the 1970s) that I can invoke it to drive away another persistent tune, and then it just sort of goes away by itself. I need The Block because there are so many tunes that have bad mental associations for me, they will keep me awake for that reason alone. The Block is harmless. A chewing gum ad? How many bad memories can that invoke?

The thing about ear-worms is, you never know what's going to trigger one. It doesn't necessarily have to be the tune involved. Remember, last Tuesday I got stuck with Hello, Hello for an hour or two because one of my students had given me a tangerine.

A word, or a combination of words, can activate an ear-worm. For example, on a cold day someone might make a passing reference to lighting a fire, and the next thing you know, I'm hearing the Doors doing Light My Fire for the next couple of hours. Or I might overhear a woman (or a man) addressing her (or his) significant other as "babe," and for the next couple of hours I'm stuck with Sonny & Cher singing I Got You, Babe.

The film Ground Hog Day, starring Bill Murray, was a veritable metaphor for that one. The film's central joke is that his character is stuck in a sort of Twlight Zone, repeating the same day over and over until he can quit making the same stupid moral mistakes. This "day" always begins with his clock-radio extolling I Got You, Babe. The film was as funny as hell, but the joke drove me nuts because I could so readily relate to it.


And...it doesn't even have to be a song, or a word. It can be a bodily rhythm. My own breath, as I climb a flight of stairs, can invoke something like, say, the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. "DA-da-da-DA-DA, DA-da-da-DA, DA, DA, da-da-DA-DA, DA, da-da-DA...and the next thing you know, for 90 minutes I'm hearing the slow movement of Beethoven's 7th. Or the rhythm of my feet climbing those same stairs might bring to my head Paul McCartney singing "One-Two-Three-Four, can I have a little more..." Then I'm stuck with that for a while.

If this happens during daylight hours, when I have things like teaching, shopping and worrying to occupy my mind, I can usually just live with the ear-worm until some random thought or occupation drives it away.

But if it happens after lights-out, if one of these tunes from the previous 16 hours of wakefulness comes back to haunt me, and rob me of sleep, well, that's when I invoke The Block: "Let's pick a pack/Of Juicy Fruit Gum..."

That'll drive Beethoven, Sonny & Cher or even the Beatles away.

For me, it works better than Nam-yo-ho-ren-ge-kyo for making my mind a complete, numbed blank.

Well, there you go. The Buddhists have their traditional chants; I have a chewing gum ad.

Summus quod summus. We are who we are.

And we hear what we hear. Walt Whitman heard America singing, or so he said.

I'm surprised it didn't drive him nuts. It would have me. In fact, listening to America's damned singing, especially on the radio, very nearly has driven me nuts.


But I have my Juicy Fruit gum jingle. I wonder what Walt used?

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