Songs We Can't Forget

I wonder how David Gray felt when it was revealed that the jailers in Abu Ghraib had used a looped version of his song ‘Babylon’ as a form of aural torture on their inmates. Saddened that his music was being used to inflict pain? Quietly delighted that the warders had picked up on its undeniable earworm quality? Maybe a little of both?

                Perhaps it was chosen for its combination of the cheerful (the merry acoustic guitar riff, the optimistic piano chords of the rolling chorus) and the grating (the way he sounds like a wounded sheep when he sings ‘Baaaa-bylon’). It’s easy to picture people trying to pull their ears off after being subjected to it for hours on end at a mercilessly high volume and I suppose any piece of music on repeat would eventually be unbearable. But some songs do get the skin crawling faster than others. So which other songs could be best used to extract secrets from prisoners in a high security prison? 

                 The first one I would nominate is Crystal Waters’ ‘Gypsy Woman’, a house hit forerunner to Eiffel 65’s maddening ‘Blue’.  Once heard, ‘Gypsy Woman’’s queasily looping ‘La-da-dee-La-dee-dah’ chorus (which the eponymous transient apparently ‘stands there, singing for money’) can never be forgotten. Nearly thirty years later, I only need to see or hear anything related to a woman who is a gypsy to set it off in my head.  If ‘Gypsy Woman’ weren’t available, they could use one of its cousins: They Might Be Giants’ nightmare vortex ‘Birdhouse in your Soul’, Los Del Rio’s Latin Hokey-Cokey ‘Macarena’, Chumbawumba’s exhausting ‘Tubthumping’.     

                As infuriating as the above numbers are, the unbearableness of a song is often related to its unforgettably rubbish words rather than a repeated phrase or chorus.  Desree’s ‘Life’ is usually trundled out as a good example of witless lyrics that lodge themselves in your brain (‘I don’t want to see a ghost / It’s the sight I fear the most/ I’d rather have a piece of toast / Watch the evening news’). But this is a minor offence compared with Joan Osborne sombrely wondering ‘What if God was one of us / Just a slob like one us / Just a stranger on the bus / Just trying to find his way home / Back up to Heaven on his own/ Nobody callin’ on the phone / ‘Cept for the Pope maybe in Rome / While pulling hair out of a comb.’ (I added the last line but I like to think it improves the original.)  

                Of course, defenders of Osborne will say the tune of ‘One Of Us’ is attractive, and it is, but the singing is high in the mix and the ‘thought-provoking’ lyrics, unavoidable – all inmates with a good understanding of English would be spilling their guts in no time.

                Is there a song that combines a melody as unshifteable as ‘Gyspy Woman’’s with lyrics as toe-curling as those of ‘One of Us’?  No doubt in some laboratory deep in the bowels of the earth, some of the world’s top minds are working on the development of such a potentially devastating combination.

                (Apologies to anyone reading who now has any of the above-mentioned songs lodged in their heads.)