Why Ocho-Ocho has been in your head since 2005
Montalban as Khan in Star Trek.
The Straight Dope explains why some songs get stuck in your head and play over and over and over until you want to run screaming into traffic. It’s often called Last Song Syndrome. The Straight Dope calls it Earworm, from the German Ohrwurm, because the Germans have a word for everything, and everything just sounds more serious in German.
Earworm may be a mild musical hallucination, even if it sounds like something Ricardo Montalban tortured Ensign Chekhov with in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.
I’m glad someone has attempted to explain this phenomenon, because “Let The Good Times Roll” by The Cars has been playing in my head for 20 hours and I’m not even a big fan.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
October 19th, 2009 at 01:24
The term earworm has been in pop culture usage for years already. I even heard that on MTV.
October 19th, 2009 at 04:12
The Germans are amazing. They even have a word for “pleasure taken in somebody else’s misfortune”—schadenfreude. So I guess they’re amazing AND sadistic.
Do you know if the Germans have a stronger word for “livid” though? If they do, that would describe how I feel now because of that song about how being in love with a homosexual is better than with a biological female. I do not know the lyrics to it but the tune of the chorus has been playing in my head since I woke up. No matter how you evade local FM radio to prevent earworms like that you still manage to get them anyway. This is like a plague.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:01
Let’s post songs that have been playing in our head and for how long! (in the hope that others catch it too. It’s a bitch suffering alone.)
Mine: “Your Love” by The Outfield since Saturday night.
Josie’s on a vacation far away…
October 19th, 2009 at 18:57
My sister and I have used LSS since college and we thought it was a term coined by some Psychologist. Now I know earworm.
I usually catch an earworm when I ride the first jeepney to work
and today it is Nobody by those girls who all looked alike. Apparently you can hear it in every place with a speaker.
October 21st, 2009 at 17:41
What is the etymology of Last Song Syndrome anyway? I’ve heard it since the early 1990s, when I was in college, but it seems to be in popular use only in the Philippines and in Filipino communities around the world; earworm appears to be more widespread in the English-speaking world.