DailyDirt: Catchy Music Breakdown

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Jan 26th 2015 5:00pm — Michael Ho

It can be annoying when you can't get a song out of your head, but there are some strategies for doing so. Apparently, working on some puzzles can help by engaging your working memory and shutting out the "Shake It Off" lyrics. These earworms have a tendency to come back (and even invade our visual memes), but if you recognize that these songs are all constructed in a similar way, maybe you can fend them off. Here are just some examples.

Maybe you've heard that joke "What do you get when you play country music backwards?" A bunch of country music songs are about the same topics, but they also sound a lot alike. [url]
Before anyone posts this Youtube link in the comments, yes, there are a lot of pop songs that rely on just 4 chords. Axis of Awesome demonstrates this brilliantly. [url]
Chilly Gonzales explains why Taylor Swift's songs are so catchy. Perhaps you need to take some Swiftamine to deal with these earworms. [url]

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Filed Under: axis of awesome, country music, earworms, memes, music, swiftamine, taylor swift

6 Comments

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Rekrul, 26 Jan 2015 @ 5:57pm

RE: "What do you get when you play country music backwards?"
I used to joke that you could make any song into a country music song by slowing it down about 25-30%. :)
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Jan 2015 @ 7:54pm

If you play country music backward, will you hear the same kind of dangerous Satanic messages that 1960s-era music was infected with?

Many people made a career out warning the nation about those trojan horses that were secretly re-programming young people's minds. One of the problems with modern-day digital music is that the bonfires and record-burning celebrations in church parking lots are now history.
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Rabbit80 (profile), 27 Jan 2015 @ 1:28am

Axis of awesome link doesn't work :(
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Rikuo (profile), 27 Jan 2015 @ 1:40am

Re:
Plus, not all the songs they mention use 4 chords.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Axis_of_Awesome#.22Four_Chords.22
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Baron von Robber, 27 Jan 2015 @ 9:30am

Re: Re:
Ha! The Ramones had that beat with just 3 chords. ;)
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Michael Ho (profile), 27 Jan 2015 @ 3:07pm

Re:
hmm. fixed that link.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

Not sure how that link got messed up, but thanks for pointing it out.
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