How To: Get That Damned Tune Out Of Your Head
18 Comments Published by Alex February 12th, 2007 in Survival. Share This
The absolute worst pet peeve of mine is when I get some goddamned awful pop tune stuck in my head. It’s hard to avoid, you basically have to stay home and not watch television or listen to the radio. In our day to day lives we are inundated constantly by the same bad music. While shopping for shoes or shaving cream, it’s piped at us from above; it throbs at us from passing vehicles; it imbeds itself into our brains, unwelcome, while dining out at T.G.I.F.’s and the like. Bad music is inescapable.
Thank God for MP3 players. I’m rarely without mine and it goes a long way toward baffling the sonic assault of the environments I expose myself to regularly. Nevertheless, it still happens that I’ll be cooking or cleaning or puttering about, maybe riding my bike, whatever, and for perhaps no reason whatsoever, I’ll get some horrible song on repeat in my noggin. The worst is when it’s jut the same refrain over and over, like some snippet from a Bryan Adams number, or some chorus to a lamentable latter-day Elton John hit from a bad movie you were dragged to see. God help you if it’s the theme from Titanic.
Being my biggest pet peeve, others have heard me complain about it quite often. I’m occasionally rude in actually sharing the tune with others, which is tantamount to yawning at someone on purpose. Misery loves company and it invariably works, but that’s a jerky thing to do. However, one time I was kvetching on the matter, a kindly fellow passed on a remarkable cure, which I’ve found it terribly useful. Thus, like grandma’s sure-fire hiccup remedy, I pass this on to you…
The next time “Sister Christian” is on an endless cycle in your brain, start humming Antonio Carlos Jobim’s timeless classic, “Girl From Ipanema”. Trust me. All you need to go is get all the way through it once, should take about a minute or two. It’s a soothing tune, cool and clean, like a Tom Collins. But this song also has the magical property of not only eradicating any song that was previously stuck in your head but it also leaves without a trace. It evaporates from the surface, it’s musical Windex. Give it a shot.
18 Responses to “How To: Get That Damned Tune Out Of Your Head”
- 1 Pingback on Mar 4th, 2007 at 3:28 am
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AND CAN YOU FEEL THE LOVE TONIGHT…
/me crosses her fingers
The best way to kill a song stuck in your head is to yell the theme to National Geographic at the top of your lungs…
I’ve found that going through the words to “Balloon Man” by Robyn Hitchcock in my head does the trick as well.
My buddy Miracle Ed calls this the “Cleaner Song” (cleaner, as in Jean Reno in La Femme Nikita). I’ve generally considered it replacing one earworm with another that you don’t mind as much, but whatever.
His choice, oddly, is “Material Girl”.
I like “Girl from Ipanema” better.
I’m afraid I have to leave a counterexample; I once had The Girl From Ipanema stuck in my head for most of a week. I’ll concede that, of the unkillable-brain-music episodes I’ve suffered in my day, it was one of the nicest.
If you do ever happen to need a quick fix of the song, head on over to:
http://www.nicolelislab.net
It’s the homepage of a neurology lab at the Duke University medical center, operated by Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, who (as you may have read in the NYT or heard on NPR) occupies himself by installing electrodes in monkeys’ brains and teaches them to use an external robotic arm as if it were their own limb.
On the lab’s main page, you can listen to a blended Portugese/English live track of Garota De Ipanema as performed by Joao and Astrud Gilberto, watch a restive sidescrolling newsfeed of upcoming neuroscience conferences and Brazilian soccer matches, and stare at a nice picture of microscopic electrical leads penetrating brain tissue.
No, I’m not joking.
This weekend I had the pleasure of pissing off everyone around me after watching my Schoolhouse Rock DVD collection. It wasn’t “Conjunction Junction” or “I’m Just a Bill”, but the rather underrated “Verb!”
“I get my thiiiinnnnnnng in action…Verb! That’s what’s happening!”
My gods, is that song catchy.
I love that song, and strong, groovy black heroes in general. It all started with with Easy Reader. Talk about your catchy songs!
Are you actually implying that I don’t want Sister Christian in my head? That’s just Blasphemy.
Motorinnnnnn!
i *so* look forward to when sister christian comes up on my ipod!
You womenfolk is evil.
An evil friend at work used to wander down the halls whistling “Somewhere over the rainbow”. I would be working on a machine and barely hear it. Freakin’ song would be with me all day. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
Well I made the mistake of mentioning this to him one day and being the evil person that he is, he would then do it just for fun. He would stand just at the edge of ear shot and whistle his dastardly tune. If I heard it and looked, he would just smile and walk away.
Never, I repeat NEVER, let anyone see a weakness.
just sayin…
Easy Reader!
Alex, I haven’t seen that clip in 20 years – great find. Are there any children shows today that rival the Holy Trinity of kids’ programming that is Sesame Street, the Electric Company, and 3-2-1 Contact?
i find that the best way to get it out is to sing the whole song completely.
it just goes away after i finish
I work in a call center, and occasionally I intentionally infect other people with music whilst they work. The best ones are when it hits them mid-call and they don’t know why they’re thinking about it, despite me sitting next to them humming it out loud.
The best are:
The theme to Black Beauty
Wannabe – The Spice Girls
Star Wars and Superman combined (They can be very similar in humming, and people confuse the two easily. Brilliant!)
Verb from Schoolhouse Rock totally owns!
I can take a noun and bend it,
Give me a noun -
Make it a verb and really send it!
(Show me how)
Oh, I don’t know my own power. (Verb!)
I get my thing in action (Verb!)
In being, (Verb!) In doing, (Verb!) In saying
To echo a previous post… my method of purging an earworm involves playing the tune to the end and adding a “big ending” as if it were the live version of the song. Nothing says, “finale” the a 70’s arena rock ending. Think, “Do You Feel Like We Do” off Frampton Comes Alive.