I just spent three days in Disney World. I’m wondering how many days it will take before “It’s A Small World’ is no longer playing in my head.
It’s a funny thing about that song. All I had to do was walk past the ride – not even get on it – and the song immediately embedded itself in my head. It’s like an insidious little computer worm, the kind that gets in to your system and replicates itself, overriding every file you have. So every good song that as in my head was replaced by “It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears…” on a constant loop. I was hoping some other Disney song would eventually take over, but not even “Zippity-Doo-Dah” or whatever Miley Cyrus song they were playing during the parade would do it, nor would the Star Wars cantina song that seemed to be on a constant loop in the Disney Hollywood park. I – along with everyone else in the park, I suppose – was doomed.
When I got on the plane home yesterday, I hoped two hours alone time with my iPod would help dispel the song. But the first tune that came up on shuffle was Failure’s “Stuck on You” which is a song about a song that gets stuck in your head. Yea, some people will say “No, that song looks like it’s a song about a song that gets stuck in your head, but it’s really a metaphor for love. Or heroin.” To which I say, every song can be a metaphor for love or heroin if you want it to be. Really. Try it with even something like “Michael Row The Boat Ashore” – see, Michael is going across the river for more heroin. Or to meet a girl. You don’t even want to know what sister helps him trim the sails means.
Anyhow. Failure’s song is about a phenomenon people have taken to calling earworms – songs or parts of songs that get stuck in your head. There has been a lot of research done on this subject (no, really) and among the songs most frequently cited as being earworms is, you guessed it, “It’s A Small Word.” Now, they say the best way to get rid of an earworm is to actually listen to the entire song. How this works, I don’t know, but I tried to fix the musical bug in my head by going on the ride. As we were midway through the boat ride through hell, my boyfriend turned and said “Imagine if the turned all the lights off and this ride was just you traveling in a boat, in total darkness with this song playing over and over.” So not only did I have this stupid song stuck in my head, but it had taken on a creepy factor that wasn’t there before.
You want to know hell? Hell is walking around Disney World on a hot, humid day while kids are screaming, parents are yelling, grown men and women are walking around dressed like Luke Skywalker and Yoda, you’ve got sunburn on your arms and a bad case of swamp ass, there’s a line for the bathroom and a slowed down, evil version of “It’s A Small World” is looping through your head like the soundtrack to Armageddon. That, my friends, is hell. And that is when we ditched my family and made a run for Germany in Epcot, with the hopes that an authentic German meal and an authentic German oompa band would put me out of my misery. But, no. The band – after playing the chicken dance and a bizarre rendition of “Party in the U.S.A.” broke out into a fifteen minute, foot stomping, hand clapping version of “It’s A Small World.” I would have screamed if not for the bratwurst stuffing in my mouth (insert filthy joke here).
I have spent a good three days trying anything to get that song out of my head. I’ve listened to the entire Pixies catalog. I watched Cannibal Corpse videos. I sang a litany of product jingles (I want my baby back ribs…) and even went so far as to listen to Ke$ha’s “Tick Tock”, thinking that as awful as that song is, it has great earworm potention and had to be better than Disney eating my brain but waking in the morning feeling like P Diddy just made my head say it’s a really small world, like itty bitty and I that’s when I knew. There’s no antidote to this. You just have to ride it out and hope that it eventually dies on its own or something else replaces it.
I did, in my research for this post, find quite a few lists of earworms. The songs most frequently mentioned (in addition “It’s A Small World”):
Baha Men – Who Let the Dogs Out
Billy Ray Cyrus – Achy Breaky Heart
The Jeopardy Theme
The Chicken Dance
Europe – The Final Countdown
Nelly – Hot in Here
Starship – We Built This City
The Barney Song
Tag Team – Whoomp There It Is
Most of the songs have some kind of refrain that get stuck. You don’t even get the whole song. You just Whoomp, there it is like a broken record between your ears all freaking day.
I wrote this in the hopes of maybe purging the song from my head and, I’ll admit it, an evil little part of me thought that I could get the “It’s A Small World” stuck in your head, too. You know, misery loves company and all. But there’s a price to pay for such acts of evil. And so, for the rest of the day, the words who let the dogs out will haunt me to the point where I’ll be wishing for some Disney song to replace it.
Anyone have a better earworm to replace this with? Please?
