Where’s Nico?

I am a truly atrocious singer.  But I do really love music – almost all kinds of music.  I’m also struck by how some songs just stick in your head and are hard to shake.  Some of those songs are great, and some leave you ready to self-lobotomize to try to end the pain.  Anyway, here are six songs that I have the hardest time shaking out of my skull.  So consider yourself forewarned – you may want to skip this post if you’re afraid of getting one of these on an eternal playback loop in your head.  As always, I’d love to hear what songs get stuck in your head too, so please post a comment or email me with any thoughts!

1. Captain & Tennille “Muskrat Love” – I had to list this one first, in hopes that the next five will wash this song out of all of our heads.  I consider this to be the worst song that has ever been recorded, and not by a narrow margin.  If you’ve never heard it, please please please don’t let this sound so intriguing to you that you seek it out on YouTube – just consider yourself lucky, and don’t do as I have done.  You cannot unhear it once it has been heard.  These are some of the actual lyrics:  “Muskrat Susie, Muskrat Sam/Do the jitterbug/Out in the muskrat land/And they shimmy/Sam is so skinny”  According to Wikipedia, Captain & Tennille took this song to #4 on the pop charts in 1976.  1976 must have really sucked.

2. The Sound of Music “Edelweiss” – I won’t lie… I totally love this song.  But you listen to it, and it’s definitely drilling into your noggin for the next several hours.  However, if you currently have “Muskrat Love” in your head, that may be a huge favor.  This was the lull-a-bye song from “The Sound of Music”, written by Rodgers and Hammerstein.  I vaguely remember a story on NPR where Rogers talked about it – they wrote this song for the play, but old folks from Austria would come up to them all the time and thank them for including this song that their parents used to sing to them, despite the fact that the song wouldn’t be written until decades later.  I think it’s because this song is such an earworm that it drove its way into these people’s brains so deeply that it created false memories.

3. Don Ho “Tiny Bubbles” – how could I make the list without at least one song about getting drunk?  This song made Don Ho’s career – you could really put his greatest hits album on 45, and leave the B side blank – and he rode this song for the rest of his life.  The wiki page on this song was kind of interesting – the song was actually written for Lawrence Welk to use, but he passed at first (though he played it several times after Ho made a hit out of it).  But the part on the wiki I liked best was: “During one performance, after nearly thousands, Ho reportedly quipped ‘God, I hate that song’.” I can imagine – if it was an ear worm for everyone else, imagine being the guy who had to sing this every night.

4. Europe ”The Final Countdown” – first off, check out that hair in the picture above!  Hey, I was in high school in the 80’s so I had to include something from that era.  I considered “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves or “Come On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners, but this song is just so much funnier.  I love the ridiculous earnestness of the lead singer, and the lyrics are beyond cheesy.  This band was from Sweden, and their lack of comfort with English shows through.  Check out the butchered tenses in this phrase: “We’re headin’ for Venus/And still we stand tall/’Cause maybe they’ve seen us/And welcome us all, yeah”.  But man, all you need to hear is the first nine notes of the synthesizer solo at the start of this song and the worm has set up camp in your head.

5. The Lion King “Hakuna Matata” – My kids are now in their twenties, but any parent will remember at least one song that their kids could seemingly never listen to enough times.  There were plenty of songs that fell into that category in our household – Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Jungle Book all had quite a few tunes that could qualify here – but nothing seemed quite as catchy and hard to shake as a warthog and a meerkat philosophizing to a lion cub whose dad was just trampled to death.  I love the confessional part that the warthog includes: “I’m a sensitive soul, though I seem thick-skinned… and it hurt that my friends never stood downwind!”

6. Getz & Gilberto “The Girl From Ipanema” – I’m finishing this list off with another song that I really love.  I feel like almost any time you get a scene of people standing quietly in an elevator in a movie, they’re playing a Muzak version of this song, which gives it a real cheesiness.  But the song itself really has a nice mellow groove to it – I use it as the wake up alarm on my phone.  This actually won a Record of the Year Grammy in 1965.  The first part of the song is sung by Joao Gilberto, but when the lyrics switch from Portuguese to English, his wife at the time, Astrud Gilberto, takes over – they did it that way simply because she was the one who knew English, but I love her voice.  Here’s an odd factoid about this song – the lyricist wrote this song about an actual lady who would walk in front of this café  he spent a lot of time at.  This lady, Helo Pinheiro, ended up building an entire career out of being the Girl from Ipanema.  She even ended up many decades later appearing on Amazing Race and America’s Next Top Model and even owned a boutique in Brazil that was called “Girl from Ipanema”.  She made out a lot better on the deal than Astrud Gilberto, who was reportedly paid the standard session fee of $120 for her work on the song.

And I know I said I’d just list out six but…

YOU JUST GOT RICKROLLED!

– Ken 4/4/2024