stuck in a loop

So I’ve already written more than once about getting a song stuck in my head. Happens to everybody, but I’m pretty sure my brain takes it to an extreme most other people don’t experience. I could be wrong. This belief is not supported by even the tiniest shred of evidence. But it feels absolutely true.

More to the point: I’ve had three Aretha Franklin songs stuck in my head for the past two weeks: “Ain’t No Doubt About It,” “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” and “Respect.” My brain’s been stuck on the first one more than the other two, but all three get air time on Radio Dave. Things could be worse, right? Those are three pretty great songs to have stuck in your head, right?

I guess. It’s just that, after two weeks of hearing those three songs on a loop, I have to say that even a fan of Aretha Franklin might get a little burned out. And I like to think of myself as a fan. But as much as I enjoy listening to those songs, I have to admit I’m getting … tired.

I think the songs that get stuck in my head may have a bit to do with how infrequently I listen to my favorite music these days. I used to have a huge collection of record albums close at hand (it’s in storage in the basement now) and listened to them almost all the time. Even if I wasn’t actively listening, I had an album I liked playing in the background. As a result of that, I had a huge loop of songs in my memory. I still occasionally fell into the single-song loop trap, but not for long. And certainly not for two weeks, ever.

I have to admit, though, that I will sometimes go whole days without listening to much of anything anymore, and even then I’ll turn the radio on only to have music in the background. But modern pop music hardly ever gets stuck in my head because I’m not familiar with it. It’s literally just background noise to me. In that respect, pop music is very safe to listen to.

But when I indulge a craving, as I did about two weeks ago, to listen to favorite album (like the Best Of Aretha Franklin I dug out of the archives), I think my brain eagerly latches on to those familiar sounds and obsesses over the details it enjoys or perhaps hadn’t even noticed until just now. “Hey! We haven’t heard this in a while! Oh I love these musical phrases! Wow these lyrics are the best!” And it goes into a seemingly endless loop of re-listening to the bits it loves every waking minute of the day.

Eventually I have to seek therapy by listening to some other old favorite of mine in the hopes that it will bump the previous album out of my phonological loop. Trouble with that is, the relief is temporary. I’ve just replaced one loop with another, so I’ve got, at best, a week of relief, maybe two, before I get really tired of the new loop. So I have to choose carefully. Which album have I not listened to for the longest time? How long can I stand to have it stuck in my head? What if I totally burn out on it and this is the absolute last time I can listen to it? These questions must be carefully considered before I return to the archive to dig up the next album or two.

osmosis

The song stuck in my head this morning was Abba’s “Take A Chance On Me,” a song I’m not particularly fond of but nevertheless know all the words to. I know all the words to a lot of Abba songs, which is kind of odd because I never turned the radio up when I heard one, I never bought any of their albums, and I don’t even like Abba very much. I think probably I soaked up all the words just because their songs used to be on the radio so often. I mean, like, constantly. Also, it didn’t hurt that I could actually understand them when they sang. I liked Elton John’s music quite a lot but I didn’t know until recently that “Bennie and the Jets” even had words because I couldn’t understand a thing Elton John said, and when I say “understand” I mean it in the sense that he sang like he had a mouthful of marbles, and in the sense that the lyrics to a lot of his songs were nonsensical. The opening lines of “Bennie and the Jets,” for instance, are: “Hey, kids, shake it loose together, the spotlight’s hitting something that’s been known to change the weather, we’ll kill the fatted calf tonight.” Abba, on the other hand, enunciated the words of their songs so clearly, and the words made some kind of sense. “If you change your mind, I’m the first in line, honey I’m still free, take a chance on me” is an opening line that meant something to a lot of teenagers.

musical

The Freddie Fender ballad “Before The Next Teardrop Falls” has been playing on a fucking loop in my head for the past 48 hours. I loathe this song in capital letters: LOATHE. I can’t say why; it’s one of those gut reactions that makes me instantly change the radio station. I think I can say with a high degree of confidence that I have loathed this song since it was released in 1975. I would’ve been fifteen years old then, growing up in a tiny rural town that was smack in the middle of Wisconsin. The local radio station played just about anything, but music by the likes of Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Johnny Cash were featured prominently. I remember hearing “Before The Next Teardrop Falls” and “Wasted Days And Wasted Nights” what seemed like every fucking day, although I’m sure now that’s an exaggeration. Although maybe not.

I have just learned that Freddie Fender was born with the name Baldemar Garza Huerta. That’s about the coolest name I’ve heard in my life. I can’t imagine why he wanted to change it. I want to have a son right now just so I can name him Baldemar. Also, Fender was in a band called Los Super Seven, another very cool name, and another band named Texas Tornados, which is a cool name but not as cool as Los Super Seven.

“Before The Next Teardrop Falls” is stuck in my head because I watched a documentary film about a guy with Aspberger’s who sang through his nose in that atonal way just about all of us do when we want to sing but there are a lot of people around so we try to make it look like we’re not singing by not moving our lips and by looking out the window pretending to be interested in the clouds. This guy wasn’t pretending not to sing, though. That’s just the way he sang. He knew all the words to “Before The Next Teardrop Falls,” even the ones in Spanish, and he sang them with such deep, emotional feeling that I couldn’t help but be touched by it.

I still hate that song, though.

That’s not the only song that’s been stuck in my head this weekend. Another is “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France, and it’s because of another film I saw this week (I was at the Wisconsin Film Fest with My Darling B last week, so I saw a lot of films; bear with me) called “Frantz,” about a young French soldier who travels to Germany to meet the family of the German soldier he killed during The Great War. It was “great” in the sense that it was really big, not in the sense that everybody thought it was a lot of fun and we should have another one again as soon as possible, even though we ended up doing just that. This is why choosing the right name is so important. “Baldemar” — good choice. “The Great War” — not such a good choice.

Back to the film: One of the principal characters of the film, a young German woman who was engaged to the German soldier who was shot by the French soldier I mentioned earlier, travels to Paris to find the French soldier because … it’s complicated. Anyway, she’s in a cafe in Paris when a couple of French soldiers come in for coffee and everyone stands up and sings “La Marseillaise” because what else would you do, right?

If you’ve seen “Casablanca,” you saw almost the same scene: Victor Laslo leads the customers of Rick’s Cafe in a rousing verse of “La Marseillaise” to flip the bird at the Germans who are after him. What they didn’t do in “Casablanca” was subtitle the words to the song, I guess because they figured everybody knew what it meant back then. I didn’t, and I never looked it up, either, thinking it was the usual stuff of national anthems: “We’re the best, you guys suck, our country is better than your country.”

But the version of “Frantz” we saw was subtitled, and they went on subtitling the words to the anthem during the cafe scene, so this is the first time I’ve heard it and known what they were singing about:

Arise, children of the fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived!
Against us, tyranny’s bloody banner is raised,
Do you hear, in the countryside,
The roar of those ferocious soldiers?
They’re coming right into your arms
To cut the throats of your sons, your women!

To arms, citizens!
Form your battalions!
Let’s march, let’s march!
Let an impure blood soak our fields!

The camera kept flitting from the puffed-up French people singing their yoo-rah-rah song to the uncomfortable face of the German woman, who spoke fluent French and knew just what they were saying. And there were a few disgusted-looking women in the crowd who did not stand up and did not sing; I assumed they were mothers of French soldiers who didn’t go for all that yoo-rah-rah crap.

“Kind of a different effect when you know the words to the song, don’t you think?” I whispered to B, who agreed.

While I’m on the musical theme, the last song I want to tell you about isn’t a song at all. It’s a kind of music: jazz, sort of. One of the duds we saw at the film fest was a musical review called “The King Of Jazz,” featuring the Paul Whiteman band. The final number was how they imagined jazz was created: a whole bunch of white people from Russia, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, and every other northern European country sang ethnic theme music (“Every laddie has his lassie” for the Irish people, that sort of thing) as they descended into a melting pot. Paul Whiteman gave the pot a stir, the sides of the pot swung open, and for one terrifying moment I thought the musicians and dancers were all going to come out in blackface singing “Mammie”! Instead, they sang what I guessed was supposed to be a jazz number, which was about as jazzy as any song can be when there isn’t a single African-American involved.

skyrockets in flight

I have the pop song Afternoon Delight stuck in my head. It ought to be Muskrat Love, the song I was reading about when one of the commenters to the online article noted that it was one of those schmaltzy pop songs they couldn’t help but love, like Afternoon Delight. For some reason, my brain decided to obsess on the latter instead of the former.

I, too, am one of those people who have to shamefacedly admit I love schmaltzy pop songs like Muskrat Love and Afternoon Delight. Even though earworms like these will eventually drive me to sing The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island in self-defense, I am right now tapping my toes and humming along as Afternoon Delight is echoing over and over deep within my cortex.

Footnote: I did not know that Muskrat Love, specifically the version I know by the Captain and Tennille, was a cover of a song called Muskrat Candlelight by Willis Alan Ramsey.

earworm

The song stuck in my head this morning is the Bobby Goldsboro version of “Watching Scotty Grow.” I loved this song when I was a kid and would crank up the volume whenever I was lucky enough to catch it on the radio. They just didn’t play it often enough for me back then.

As for now, the song is so insipidly sweet that it makes me want to piss granulated sugar. I’ll have to rinse my ears out with the theme song from Gilligan’s Island from now until sundown to start feeling normal again.

Manic Monday

The song stuck in my head all last week was The Bangles’ Manic Monday. Pick just about any one of their songs and I’ll tap my feet or sing along with it, so ordinarily I wouldn’t be bothered if one was stuck in my head for days on end, but Manic Monday is arguably the worst song The Bangles ever recorded. And I will argue the point right here and now. To death. You’re welcome.

What the hell is it about Manic Monday that made it so goddamn popular? The tune’s not especially catchy. Try whistling it. If you’re not bored after the first two lines, you will be by the time you get through the three-note bridge of the song. I’m not saying that every pop song has to be as intricately complex as a Beethoven minuet, but I’d like something a little more imaginative than a tune a chicken could peck out on a toy piano.

Then there are the lyrics. Even in a pop song, they’re supposed to be, well, lyrical.

Six o’clock already, I was just in the middle of a dream

Yeah, I hate it when that happens. Okay, I’m listening. What happened next?

I was kissing Valentino by a crystal blue Italian stream

I’m not going to question how you knew it was an Italian stream. In dreams, sometimes you just know you’re in Italy, or the dog you’re talking to is actually your mom, or something really weird. But Valentino? Who dreams about Valentino? How many people these days even know who Valentino is? And Valentino was in movies before they were in color. Well, never mind. Bring on the next line.

But I can’t be late ’cause then I guess I just won’t get paid

What the hell was that? Did you write that on a napkin that was too wet to let you cross it out? That line’s as clunky as a 98 Ford Escort on its last legs! Fifteen-year-olds composing their first poems in the margins of their algebra workbooks write lines that scan better than that!

You guess you just won’t get paid? Why are you guessing? I think it’s a law that they have to pay you. Maybe a couple dollars less, and maybe your boss is going to yell at you, but all the places I’ve worked at had to pay me even when I was late.

And why just? Why won’t you just get paid? That doesn’t make sense. Don’t use “just” when it doesn’t make sense. There’s a special ring in songwriting hell for people who pad lyrics with junk syllables.

These are the days when you wish your bed was already made

I don’t make my bed unless I’ve got lots of extra time. First I shower, then I make my coffee, then I drink my coffee while I’m catching up on Facebook or watching cat videos, then I get dressed, and so on down the checklist of things I do every morning. Making my bed is the last thing on the list. If I don’t get to it, no biggie.

Anyway, you tell us later in the song that your boyfriend’s not working. Tell that shiftless bastard to make the bed. It’s the least he can do while he’s mooching off you.

Just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
Cause that’s my fun day
My I don’t have to run day
Just another manic Monday

I’m still not getting why it’s manic, other than it’s Monday and you’re making the shift from the weekend to the working week. Elvis Costello did it a lot better, by the way. You’ve got to do it, so you’d better get to it.

Have to catch an early train, got to be to work by nine, and if I had an aeroplane I still couldn’t make it on time

Okay, you’re not making sense again. You woke up at six o’clock. Most people don’t wake up that early unless an alarm goes off. You set an alarm for six, right? This is what you do every day, right? If so, how did you not have enough time to catch the early train? How early does that train have to be? How far away do you live from work that you couldn’t get there in time even if you flew, for shit’s sake?

And “aeroplane?” Are you kidding me? Who says “aeroplane” anymore? You’re padding again. Knock it off.

‘Cause it takes so long just to figure out what I’m going to wear.
Blame it on the train ’cause the boss is already there.

Oh. I’m starting to see now. You’re an employee with a record of attendance issues, aren’t you? “Sorry, boss, I missed the train.” “For the third time this month? Sure you did.”

Just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
Cause that’s my fun day
My I don’t have to run day
Just another manic Monday

Buy some work clothes. Black slacks, white shirts. Wear those every day. Stop thinking about what you’re going to wear and you won’t have to run for the early train any more.

Out of all nights, why did my lover have to pick last night to get down?
Doesn’t it matter that I have to feed the both of us, employment’s down?
He tells me in his bedroom voice, “Come on honey, let’s go make some noise.”

Wait a sec, why does he get to pick? You’re the working girl, you pay the rent, you bring home the bacon. This guy’s got it made! He’s getting all of that and you’re staying up late for him when he wants nookie! Even when he uses a laugh-out-loud line like “let’s go make some noise.” Does a line like that really work? I can’t believe that works.

Just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
Cause that’s my fun day
My I don’t have to run day
Just another manic Monday

Those have got to be the worst rhymes for Monday ever.

Kill Me Now

The song stuck in my head this morning is the saccharin-sweet teen ballad Loving You by Debbie Gibson Minnie Riperton. It’s been playing on a loop for hours. I want to die.

Next-day edit: I eventually got this song out of my head without killing myself, but it came back the next day. Not only that, I had the nagging feeling that I couldn’t blame this song on Debbie Gibson. That bugged me so much I had to ask the Google who sang it. Turns out to be the hit song that crowned the career of Minnie Riperton, a 28-year-old singer who had lapsed into semi-retirement until she was re-discovered by a recording studio that signed her on to record this and other songs for the record Perfect Angel. So the song that made her a star is the one that makes me want to hang myself. Kinda makes me feel like a grinch.

Wait, it gets grinchier. Three years after she hit it big with that song, she was dead of cancer. And as if that wasn’t enough to make me feel guilty about hating this crappy, crappy song, it’s based on a lullaby she made up to sing her daughter to sleep. There. My total shittiness is now complete.

earworm

song stuck in my head“I got a song stuck in my head,” My Darling B said the other day.

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.”

She chuckled at that. “Really?”

“It’ll be okay,” I assured her. “Mine is one you like.”

“Okay,” she said, sounding rather unsure, “if you say so,” and then she started humming Oh, What A Night, arguably the worst pop song ever conceived by the English-speaking people.

“That’s pretty awful,” I said, once she’d unloaded that particularly ugly bit of mental baggage. “Here’s mine, then – ” I started to sing Think Of Me from “Phantom Of The Opera.” She joined in at about the third or fourth word and we howled the rest of it together.

Earworms: Sometimes you just gotta dig them out and strangle the shit out of them or they’ll ruin your whole day.

craptaculous

The song stuck in my head this morning is Oh What A Night.

I have never liked this song. Never. I loathed it the first time I heard it. Loathed. “Hate” is too weak a word to describe my feelings toward this song. Only loathed comes close.

It’s not that there’s nothing redeeming about the song. The tune is really very catchy, and I rather like the vocals. It’s the words I can’t stand. If Elton John had sung it instead of The Four Seasons so I couldn’t understand any of the words no matter how much I wanted to, my feelings toward it would be a lot different. I’d probably like it, maybe even try to sing along. That will never happen, though, because I can hear all of the words. Every. Single. One.

Tim liked the song until I told him what the words were. That night I not only ruined a song for him, I planted in him the same revulsion that I feel for it. He probably even wants to blow his brains out with a bazooka, just like I do, when it gets stuck on a loop in his head.

Oh, what a night! Late December, back in sixty-three
Got a girl to give it up for me
Boinked her brains out, what a night

You know I didn’t even know her name
Who knew the best sex is anonymous?
Pegged her legless, what a night

I felt a rush and a rolling ball of thunder
This part about his orgasm makes me want to chunder
What a night!

When I read that the musical Jersey Boys was coming to Madison this fall, I was going to talk My Darling B into taking me until I heard an advertisement for it on the radio that featured Oh What A Night. Thinking about it now, I don’t know how I expected they wouldn’t include that craptaculous song. I guess I was just hopeful. Too bad. There’s a show I’ll never see.