Of earworms and Teflon tunes

Our word for the day is earworm. And the following definition is from the charming animation “Jazz that nobody asked for.”

“Sometimes a song can get stuck in your mind. Become a little piece of unwanted music, that keeps looping for the rest of your day.

Neurologists claim that stuck songs are like thoughts we’re trying to suppress. The harder we try not to think about them, the more we can’t help it. The phenomenon is also known as earworms, and the ongoing ‘dim di da da dum’ causes a kind of brain itch you can’t scratch.”

I once acquired the equivalent of that little red Pandora’s box in the animation. Back at the beginning of time, when I still lived in Montreal, I bought Live/Evil (Miles Davis), and I used to come home at about 4am sometimes full of beer, and listen to Miles’ 21-minute version of  “What I Say”  two or three times in a row while I chain-smoked in the dark. The ladies who shared my flat finally asked me whether I couldn’t listen more quietly, or possibly in some other city, since they had to go to work in the morning. (I was a student.)

Then, decades later here in Bangkok, I’ve come across this album again and, what do you know? I still find this cut compulsively listenable. Which suggests that my musical tastes never really matured.

Sara snickers. “Unlike the rest of you?” she says.

Whatever. It may be my old Montreal flatmates had somebody put a curse on me, because now I wake up in the middle of the night with this thing in my head, and it won’t go away.

That’s right. So go ahead and listen to it at your own peril.

A note on Teflon tunes.

Bill the Mathematician, who is second only to Al the Alien as a mentor, says nobody else is old enough to remember Miles Davis, and I’ll provoke more traffic to this site if, as he puts it, “You dis Phish and praise Nickelback. Miles Davis is in that in-between stage where he’s too long gone to be well known to the online masses, but not so long gone that it can be cool to be really into him. On the other hand, everyone loves the forgettable Phish and loves to hate the even more forgettable Nickelback, and wants to tell the world about both those things.”

So I’ve gone and had a look on YouTube. And both groups sort of give me a pain in the neck. I don’t think they’d ever infect me with earworms, because my delicate sensibilities erase all trace of them bar by bar even as I try to listen.

There, now I’ve dissed them both. I await the outrage, maybe even an extra visitor to my site.