Songs That Are Stuck in My Head: A Project Overview

Sometimes, I get songs stuck in my head. This is not remarkable; in fact, I have only ever spoken to one human being who claimed that he did not get songs stuck in his head, and he is a pastor who is way into Judas Priest (though he cannot remember how their songs go). Metal-loving pastors aside, the human mind has a tendency to wrap itself around particular pieces of music like a motherly, protective octopus. It's pretty universal.

However, having acknowledged that I am not a unique little flower, I do believe the tenacity with which the musical part of my mind grabs onto songs or parts of songs is a bit out of the ordinary. Sometimes, a song will revolve around my brain in loops for weeks, as if my cerebral cortex is a malfunctioning tape-echo unit. The song will recede when my mind is otherwise occupied with my Very Important Day-to-Day activities (Starship Troopers isn't gonna watch itself, pal), but as soon as my mind becomes empty, there it is again, forcing me to air drum wildly in the kitchen of my empty hosue at one in the morning.

Sometimes, this is awesome, like when I got ZZ Top's "Just Got Paid" stuck in my head for two full weeks.

Go ahead. Try and listen to that song for two weeks without getting into a bar fight, winning, then throwing your arm around the guy whose ass you just kicked. It's impossible.

It's less awesome when weird or disturbing songs get their hooks in me.  I had the part from the Velvet Underground song "Venus in Furs" where Lou Reed sings "Shiny shiny....shiny boots of leather" like he's some kind of Brooklyn sex shaman stuck in my head for three days. During this period of time, I very nearly purchased a leather jacket and almost began smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Having Lou Reed's voice in your head can do that to you.

My point is, I really don't know why songs get stuck in my head. There doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to the whole deal. The catchiness of the song seems ot have nothing to do with it--sometimes it's Miley Cyrus, sometimes it's Lou Reed intoning a bunch of stuff about sex while John Cale plays creepy drones on his viola. Sometimes, I even outright hate the song. For instance, that one Mumford & Sons song where the guys in vests all go "WHOOAAAH-OHHHHHHH" in harmony at the key climactic point (oh wait, that's all of them OH SNAP SHOTS FIRED) worms its way in there sometimes, and I dislike Mumford and his offspring as much as I dislike widespread social inequality.

I am curious about this whole phenomenon. Thus, I have decided to embark upon a highly scientific quest to find the answer to this question: why do songs get stuck in our heads? My methodology is simple: whenever I get a song stuck in my head, I'm going to analyze it here. Why? Because, throughout history, untold millions of people have labored and suffered, innovated and invented, fought and died to create a modern world where it is possible for some jerk-off twenty-two year-old to sit down at a computational device that uses incredibly small integrated circuits to perform millions of complex computations every second to connect to a worldwide network of other like devices and write a blog about his opinions about stuff, and if I don't do it their sacrifices will be for nothing. 

(Just trying to situate myself within a greater historical context here, folks).

Maybe, in the process, I'll discover something important about the way music works within the human brain--the way we process it, internalize it, and come to love or hate it. Maybe, in analyzing something so closely tied to our shared humanity, I'll discover something important about the human condition.

Either that, or this whole project is a ruse designed to get the songs that are stuck in my head stuck in your head, too. Yeah, probably the second one.