Societal Earworm
They drove me mad. Completely bonkers. Over and over and over and over…
And over…
And over.
And they never changed. Oh, they pretended to, but they never really did.
From what I could tell, they might not have even been trying.
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I had been at that age where suddenly the lyrics of popular music started to get that little bit clearer. I was already past the awkward, embarrassed blushing bit, but that didn’t make it less annoying. It had been a slow realization at first. Some innocent line I could have listened to over and over again a few years back suddenly became a bit darker; that extra little edge of sinister that made me twitch and shiver on the inside, and then flinch to stop me thinking about it for too great a length.
I was not purposefully poetic. My friends said I could spout any amount of “corporate excrement” at any point in time, but it had never occurred to me to put it to any real use, other than impressing my English teachers in essays, or sometimes thinking of clever jokes to benefit friends. Nevertheless, I had started noticing a pattern in the songs on the radio, in clips of noise sent from unidentifiable mouths while passing in the hallway. It was that more and more I could not recognize a line simply by its words. For instance, I could hear someone singing “but I’m now over you”, and I would be confused because there were at least four songs with exactly the same phrase and exactly the same tone of voice. This may have been because of my sister’s all consuming passion to become a DJ when she grew up, driving the entire family crazy trying out what seemed like every single combination of sounds there ever was. However, it seemed troubling to me the amount of times I heard, for instance, the phrase “Nothing can stop us now”, or “till the sunrise”, or “can’t seem to forget you”, or “had enough of your [not important]”. At first it wasn’t that something I worried about too often or paid much attention to. When I asked my friends at lunch, they didn’t seem to notice much about music. They said that I probably listened too much to the lyrics, and that I shouldn’t let it bother me. But it did bother me, because in general what I expected in music was creativity and new ideas. Of course, there had to be some original music in the world, but I couldn’t find it, so there must have not been enough.
It was during a particularly stressful week, with lots of homework, that I finally thought of what was bothering me. I was banging my head against the brick wall called “Algebra 2”, and my sister, already dome with her own homework, was playing a particularly annoying song fairly loudly from her bedroom upstairs. Frustrated, I threw down my pencil, yelled at my sister to turn it down, and flicked on the radio. I sat in a vegetative state for a few songs until I couldn’t take it anymore and turned it off again. That’s when I had an idea: I would write down a list of all of the song types and phrases used in the ones that repeated.
I worked on it pretty hard, considering I was “exhausted” from doing homework.
When I finished, I looked it over. There were repeats. I took them out. Then I decided that a lot of them could be put into just one category. I thinned it down more. Then some more. Then still more. Eventually, I got this as the categories for songs: Partying (including alcohol, drugs, and little details of “the night”), Love (“This is beautiful / real/true”, or “can’t pull away”, or “I can’t believe this is happening to me”), and the Absence of Love (“Without you”, “I’m glad it’s over”, “[not important] you!”)
The next morning I proudly walked up to my friends and showed them the sheet of paper upon which I had written the holy grail, the bible of music writing, the work to shame all so-called musicians who attempt to bamboozle us with their pitiful tones and even worse lyrics.
My friends still didn’t care. Well, let them! They don’t understand what real music should be! So there! At least, that’s what I would have thought had not Paul, my friend, said “Give those musicians a break. I mean, it isn’t as if you could do better…” which shut me up pretty much for the rest of the day.
That night I lay in my bed, somewhat upset at Paul’s comment, not only for the insult but also for the truth behind it. In all of my categorizing and re-categorizing of our popular songs it had not occurred to me that maybe it was because the song writers actually had to work hard to create what they already did.
So started my quest. I decided that night that I would make a song, if only to prove that it was possible to desert conventional subjects and still make a song worth listening to. I grabbed onto every idea I had that could possibly have worked in a song, then discarded them because they was too similar in idea to love, or they was too obscure to be recognized by anybody but myself.
Then, one weekend, the light shone through for the second time. It had been happening slowly, the realization, like a fog that stretches unwillingly away to reveal a hidden valley. I had wanted to write songs about something that had a real presence in our lives, yet that nobody seemed to care about. And when my mom shouted at the scales when she believed they were lying, and my dad yelled at the GPS when we got lost, and I woke up to my alarm clock that I had forgotten to turn off, I realized that we treat so many household appliances as people and things that have the ability to make our lives better or worse. So, I reasoned, what would happen if we learned that they could talk?
One year later I would present my work at the talent show at a sleep-away camp I go to, and it would be stuck in everyone’s heads for the rest of the camp.