Mijin, you really should have placed a warning on that link for annoying catchy ads…you failed to mention HOW catchy. Now that will live on forever in my memory.
I’ve had the opposite issue. I heard a song over 25 years ago that really struck me. I tried contacting the radio station, but couldn’t get through. By the time I got through to find out the name and singer, the people at the studio didn’t know what I was talking about.
For years, all I could remember was little snippets of the song that occasionally buzzed in my head. This was even more frustrating than a normal earworm because I really didn’t know the song.
One day, it suddenly occurred to me that I could Google the few bits of lyrics I remembered, and maybe find the song. Got it! It was White Collar Holler sung by Stan Rogers. (Audio only. Starts on the 20 seconds mark).
Right now, I have:
Graham Norton will pay for this. He shall pay most dearly.
Being obsessed with details as well as an avid fan of Vivaldi and Una Persson, I had to find out which concerto Cecil was referring to. I was pleasantly surprised when Google returned a post where Una named the earworm as Vivaldi - Concerto in C Major, RV 558.
After reading the FAQ, I came to the conclusion that linking to material under copyright is acceptable, so you can find all three parts in a single “video” on youtube.
It was a darned pervasive earworm, I mean 26 or 27 years (I think it was more likely 27; that’s what I told Cecil was most likely) and I don’t know a lot of people IRL that I can hum or whistle a classical music piece to and have them say “Oh! RV 558, duh.” I picked up the earworm from a very primitive program on either my VIC-20 or Commodore 64, where is was used as a very early example of MIDI music. I thought I heard it once on a television program years later, as incidental music, but this was before the Net and it wasn’t so easy to discover ephemeral trivia like that. Finally, while searching around for old C64 emulator programs (so I could play “M.U.L.E.” again…anyone remember that?), one thing led to another and I came across a message board where some folks were talking about an early program on their Commodores which played MIDI music, and someone mentioned a “catchy classical piece,” followed by someone else giving the title. A quick trip to the Amazon MP3 store to hear a preview, and there is was. Behold the power of the Internet.
And yes, it is now earworming me this morning, although it is fighting with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by The Propellorheads and Get Over You by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.