Dangerous Posts #1 ~Ohrwurms

We're probably all familiar with the phenomenon wherein a song, and usually a totally annoying one at that, gets stuck in your head, playing over and over forcing rational thought, sleep and eventually everything else from your brain (see the scene in Touching The Void for an example; a mountain climber- close to death, with, to add insult to actual injury, Brown Girl In The Ring blaring inside his head driving him crazy). I was intrigued to learn that there's an actual coined expression for this phenomenon, a loan translation these are called, where there exists in one country's language an expressions for these abstract occurrences. For example- and I can't remember the actual terms here- there's the French one, translated as The Spirit of The Staircase where what you should have said in a given situation occurs to you much later when it's too late to be of any use. Or the German expression, which translates to "Spiteful Glee", describing the pleasure to be had by someone else's ill fortune. I learned fairly recently that this annoying phenomenon of getting a song stuck in your head is actually called an Ohrwurm in German, translated to English as Ear Worm. I also found out that it can be a fairly common occurrence, particularly for the elderly, where the song actually stays there and just doesn't go away. It's so common, apparently, that there's an Actual Top Ten of these Ear Worms that people (pensioners mostly) have playing in their heads 24/7! (Yup, a Top Ten, with, wait for it, Yes, We Have No Bananas at the top spot!) I've also a friend who's Gran has the theme from Dad's Army in constant rotation on her internal jukebox.

I'm guessing that the dread Earworm didn't exist until possibly the advent of mass media, or at least radio- when before this time would you have had the chance to repeatedly hear the same old dross over and over ad nauseam?
And lets not even get started here on another abhorrent modern malaise, the "Amusing Ringtone"- one of my favourite oxymorons. But we'll save Crazy Frog and his satanic ilk for later, shall we?
Good.

Of course, dear reader, the main reason that this can be labelled a Dangerous Post is that I've found out from enquiring of this phenomenon that you can open a Pandora's box by even mentioning Ohrwurms. It's a kind of Trojan Horse wherein even the very act of discussing this wormy beast can bring on an attack. All I do know for sure is that I'm experiencing this annoying event a hell of a lot more than I ever used to. Last night, for example, it was the Ramones I Wanna Be Sedated; strangely fitting, but luckily fairly bearable for once.

Which brings me happily to a more positive thought, and it is this- Maybe having a constant Ohrwurm wouldn't be that bad (hear me out here) - I mean if you really had to have one song/riff playing constantly in your head for the rest of your life over and over and over and over again as an infernal internal sound-track.
Okay, off the top of my head, the best I could hope for would maybe be the keyboard/bass run in Light My Fire that Manzarek used to play for what felt like hours on end when The Doors were doing one of their "pregnant pause" bits, you know- just before Morrison did that scream of his. Or maybe just the bass line to Stagger Lee by Nick cave & The Bad Seeds would be endurable. I've got the feeling that these riffs in particular would conceivably make you feel a bit more cock-sure, assured- give you a much needed swagger possibly missing from your otherwise hum-drum life if you had them as a perpetual inner sound-track.
And it would certainly save on all those AAA's for your IPod!

Notes:
The term earworm is the literal English translation of the German word ohrwurm (see the earliest citation, below, for more). An earworm is also sometimes called a sticky tune or a cognitive itch. In Portuguese they callit chiclete de ouvido, or ear chewing gum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm
earworm (EER.wurm) n. A song or tune that repeats over and over inside aperson's head. Also: ear-worm, ear worm.

Earliest citation:
"If a meme is a cluster of semantic symbols that propagates through a human population in a social manner - similar to the way a gene is a combination of biochemical symbols that propagates through a human population in agenetic manner - a sudden, wildly popular, new addition to "the hit parade" can be seen as a kind of meme. When the medium of radio and the recording industry that grew up alongside it created a system for propagating musical themes through a population, a new phenomenon became possible - the"overnight hit." The idea of a "hit" isn't untranslatable, since most cultures have a word for the winner of a competition. But the idea of a tune, a melody, a combination of musical sounds that seems to be on everybody's lips at the same time, that spreads through a society as rapidly as a respiratory infection, and seems to invasively seize and occupy space in peoples minds until they finally succeed in forgetting it, merits a word of its own...
(This) experience reflects a phenomenon shared by the vast majority of people, according to an on going study at the University of Cincinnati. Nearly everybody has been mentally tortured at one point in their lives by an"earworm" - a tune that keeps repeating itself over and over in their heads.The research also indicates that people who get the most earworms tend to listen to music frequently and have neurotic habits, such as biting pencils or tapping fingers."
-Hieu Tran Phan, "'Sticky tune' hits a chord with many," The Press-Enterprise, March 4, 2003

" The Germans use the word Ohrwurm (rhymes with "door worm," where the "w" is pronounced like a "v") to denote these cognitively infectious musical agents. Whenever somebody complains to you that he just can't keep the latest pop tune from running through his head, tell him he can dispel it by calling it by name and by thinking about the original German meaning, which captures some of the mnemonicalli parasitical connotations of the word, for Ohrwurm literally means "ear worm" and is also used to refer to a kind of worm that can crawl into the ear."
-Howard Rheingold, "Untranslatable words," The Whole Earth Review, December22, 1987

 

The Stranglers ~ Rattus Norvegicus Song By Song

Sometimes

First track, first album, and my first real introduction to the Stranglers. Even now, many years later, I can still remember sitting in darkened rooms and Sometimes heralding the start of the whole night; the sound-track to it. It still transports me right back there every time I hear it start Rattus.
The whole band kick in together from the start. Jet is pounding the beat along at a steady rigid pace. Dave's runs up and down the keyboards at the breaks, JJ's relentless, incessant bass line, Hugh's erratic, spidery guitar solo leading into the instrumental middle- it's all the classic Stranglers trademarked Sound. The way the song returns from the instrumental break with the line, "You're way past your station...", the keyboards firing all over the shop, is perfect.
"Morbid fascination" what a great line, delivered perfectly.
It's got false stops and even a quick roll on the skins.
You could play Sometimes to nearly anyone with ears and the hook would be in.

Goodbye Toulouse

For a long time, I thought Goodbye Toulouse was a love song. Twisted and dark yes, (and, lets be honest here, exactly what I expected from the Stranglers at this stage) but a love song none the less. It was only years later when I finally read the proper lyrics and then later still read Song By Song that I realised it wasn't a love song to some chick dumped or left behind at all.
I don't think the mention of Paula in the song helped my confusion.
I think I thought that, unlike Hugh's Cadiz from his later solo album Beyond Elysian Fields, for example, where the apparent story of a girl actualy represents a love of a city, Goodbye Toulouse was a love song to a girl symbolised by a city.
I was wrong, of course, it's a song about Nostradamus and calamity and the apocalypse- hence the "farting Dalek" sound effects at the end.
It's got guitar strings squeaking honestly, it's got slightly flat backing vocals that only make them sound more genuine. Fuck, it's got more atmosphere and menace in the first 20 seconds than any of your manufactured Green Day-a-likes could ever hope to dilute to fill their next album. It's got a classic opening- each instrument building one after another an incessant pounding beat- first the spooky keyboards then the drums then JJ's relentless basslines and then the stuttering guitar. Hell, it's even got a great Row Row Row Yer Boat guitar solo in the middle.
In short, it's got baws.
What the fuck more do you want from a song?

London Lady

 

Boy Builds "Mental Defence" Against Dead Carry On Star.

"Aye, it's pure mental alright," confirmed Tam Bowery, 16, from Springburn, Glasgow, "it's aw broken Buckfast bottles an' that aw along the top, wi' aw fucked up shopping trolleys an' shit like that at the bottom. Bricks.Traffic cones an' that." he added proudly.
The huge structure, that can been seen for miles around, and confirmed by http://www.google.earth/ as the largest of it's kind in the area, took truanting schoolboy Bowery one whole tonic-wine fuelled night to construct. And all, astonishingly, from locally obtained debris.
It's necessity became obvious, Bowery says, after he received a spooky message from beyond the grave.
"Aye," Bowery shivered when interviewed on the subject yesterday, "the wee cunt sent me a message aw right," the schoolboy suddenly lost it and raged at this reporter,"an' av goat wan fur him too - fuck right aff Hawtrey ya wee deid cunt!"
Bowery soon calmed down after a couple of deep swallows of his medication, an ever present can of Super Lager, and feels able to now elucidate.
"Ah wiz oot ma tits wan night oan the bevy an' that, might huv hud some jellies too an' aw. Who knows?" he adds somewhat enigmatically."Ah hud watched that Carry On Cowboy the night before," another uncontrollable shiver shakes Bowery's body as he slowly retells what happened, "Fucked it was. Ah mean, Ah thought it was funny at the time, but who knew it would lead to this?" Tam swept his hand in emphasis towards the monstrous structure that loomed behind him.
"Well, it wiz that night when Ah wiz just drapping aff in ma scratcher that Ah first heard that voice." The boy had squeezed his eyes tightly shut at the memory and lobbed his now drained can towards the top of the towering barrier.
"It wiz like nothing Ah hud ever heard before, like, fuck knows...." Tam looks confused, lost for just the right words, takes a quick gulp from the newly opened can of super strength medication then finds inspiration, "some kinda fucked up specy space poof mad cripple skeleton in an old tramp's pissy suit that wanted to... you know, " Tam looks somewhat sheepish and then adds in a whisper, "bum me an' that."
According to Bowery the apparition mocked him throughout the remainder of the night, but he is unable even a day later to recount the full extent of the terrible promises the ghost of dead Carry On star Charles "Ooh Hello!" Hawtrey promised.
"He went on and on and on, Ah just couldn't stop him" was all Bowery would add. But one thing the boy now realised; he needed a defence.
And only a fucked up barricade would do.
"It's fucked up for sure." A local police source confirmed this morning, whilst at the same time the massive installation was drawing attention from somewhat different quarters.
"We love it and think it has a real chance of winning," confirmed George Frederick Joffre Hartree, of the Turner Prize committee who, along with several of his colleagues inspected the "art work" earlier today.
"Nothing else we have seen so far this year truly symbolises the pent up frustration inherent in modern society quite like Mr.Bowery's artwork does." Mr.Hartree gushed.
"And you know how much we lap that shit up." Added a colleague with a saucy wink and a chain smokers chortle.
"Aye well," the artist shivered once more, "just as long as it keeps that wee ghostly cunt away fae me."