Ear Words

One summer during college, I DJ'd a weekly (early) AM radio show. My roommate, Brett, had a job that summer that required him to get up each morning at 6:50. The night before each radio show, I'd sneak into Brett's room, set his clock radio to my station, and turn up the volume. The next morning, at 6:50 on the nose, I'd be playing the poppiest, most insipid, incessant song I could find. The Ramones, They Might Be Giants, maybe the Hemingway 7" by an odd little band called Blue Clocks Green — which may still be the catchiest thing I've ever heard (and through the magic of "the internets" you can hear it too). In any case, I considered the day's show a success if my earworm song was indeed embedded in Brett's head that night.

I imagine the phenomenon of a song that is stuck in one's head has been around as long as songs themselves. Now, thanks to the Germans, who also gave us obscure international hockey player Petr Draisaitl, we call this an "earworm" — from their word ohrwurm — which, translated literally, means "lyrics to Rappers Delight."

My wife, AKL, is an easy mark for earworms. She will freely admit that her internal life soundtrack is one of the most stunted one could ever hear. It sounds like a compilation K-Tel and John Hughes might have released in the mid-'80s. I'm not quite so troubled by these traditional earworms, but they roll around my brain enough that when AKL says, "Guess what song I have in my head," I generally cover my ears, jabber loudly, and run to the bathroom.

No, my true sleep-killer is not the classic earworm song per se, but rather earworm language. I get words and phrases in my head, phonetic constructions, odd syntax, and, worse still, names of obscure and long-forgotten hockey players. My sleep has been disturbed many a night by the odd sound or syllabic stress of bygone hockey names like Steve Konowalchuk, Jim Peplinski, Simon Nolet, Wilf Paiement, and Reijo Ruotsalainen.

Foreign spellings and pronunciations linger in my craw like stubborn phlegm, with their seemingly misplaced or extra letters. Former Soviet and Russian players: Kharlamov, Zelepukin, Mogilny, Afinogenov, Afanasenkov. And then there is the daddy of them all: German national team member Petr Draisaitl. I have no recollection whatsoever of any details about this guy other than his name. He was nothing near an outstanding player. But his name haunts me still, those bevel-edged consonants occasionally clanging together in my otherwise empty head at 3 a.m. like some complex math problem.

Some of my earworms are much simpler. Friends and I noted a few years back that Brits often pronounce "tuna" as "chuna." That one kept me awake a while, just repeating the sound of it in my mind. Place names, too, can be problematic: Monongahela, Nesowadnehunk, Coxsackie. Fuggedaboutit.

And it's not just language. I can get caught up on conceptual earworms too — the latest being the seemingly crucial thought that somehow the entire universe hinges on a simple combination of Murphy's Law and Occam's Razor. That is to say something along the lines of "the thing most likely to go wrong will go wrong."

Sometimes large chunks of text get stuck in my brain: the middle section of the Jewish mourner's Kaddish; a Henry V monologue I learned once for acting; much of the repetition in Tim O'Brien's great The Things They Carried. Sometimes, I can read something only once or twice and bits will stay with me forever. (Admittedly, the bits that don't much matter, but still.)

The construction and language of poet Michael S. Harper's For Bud (Powell) is that way:

For Bud

Could it be, Bud
that in slow galvanized
fingers beauty seeped
into bop like Bird
weed and Diz clowned—
Sugar waltzing
back into dynamite,
sweetest left hook you
ever dug, baby;
could it violate violence
Bud, like Leadbelly's
chaingang chuckle,
the candied yam
twelve string clutch
of all blues:
there's no rain
anywhere, soft
enough for you.

Man, I fall hard for that thing every time, like I do for Mary Stuart Masterson in that awful guilty-pleasure Some Kind of Wonderful, or for Juliette Binoche in, well, anything. Some things are just goddamn Shakespeare to my ears, or eyes, as it were.

I don't know if anyone else out there has my affliction, aside from maybe my brother, who shares some of the same obsessive-compulsive hockey knowledge. If you do, please send me the cure. Is there some form of substitution I could be doing, a la "Maim That Tune"?

I eagerly await your comments and answers. Until then, I'll remain thankful each day this haole doesn't live in Hawai'i (god love you for that apostrophe). I might not sleep again, with all those polysyllabic words in which every other letter is a vowel. Even looking at the following words as I type them, hits me like a brace of Blue Hawaiians: MELE KALIKIMAKA!

 

Comments

[JK]

Petr Draisaitl!?! Are you serious! You watched highlights from a Germany game in the Nagano olympics 10 YEARS AGO and THIS guy's name stuck in your craw? That's a load of Krupp!