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Have you ever been in an incredibly mundane situation, say, waiting at the doctors, only to have the same line from a song you heard on the weekend running over and over in your head?
Chances are, you have been infected by an earworm. But don’t worry, unlike other types of worms (tape, ring, and so on), they’re not harmful, at least not in a physical sense. But those little sound bites that seemingly won’t get out of our heads can be mighty annoying.
Chances are if you see Hamilton or listen to the soundtrack, it will stick in your head.Credit:Daniel Boud
I got thinking about earworms around the same time I started listening to the soundtrack to the Broadway musical Hamilton, which just opened in Sydney. After familiarising myself with the soundtrack and its catchy songs, I noticed bits of the show, which at that point I hadn’t seen, creeping into my everyday life. There it was, in conversations with my partner (“Talk less, smile more”), or in the coffee queue (“Wait for it”).
The clincher came in my Saturday morning yoga class, where I couldn’t complete a sun salutation without Hamilton destroying my zen. My teacher would say, “Rise on up to stand,” and I’d suddenly hear the tune, “Rise up, rise up! Rise up, rise up!” on repeat. Namaste, Alexander.
It seems I am not alone in experiencing (suffering?) Hamilton’s infectious qualities. Leigh Sales, host of ABC’s 730, and political journalist Annabel Crabb have discussed the “stickiness” of Hamilton extensively on their podcast, Chat 10 Looks 3.
Crabb even admitted to humming headlines about the 2019-20 summer bushfires to the tune of Hamilton to herself. (I’d tell you, but you’ll never get them out of your head. Trust me, they have haunted me for two nights while writing this piece.)
“It’s strange how deep it burrows into your head.”
Leigh Sales
“As soon as I started listening to [Hamilton] intensively, I found every single morning, I would wake up with a different refrain in my head – it was just bizarre,” Crabb says over Zoom.
Sales, who saw the production in London, says she shared Crabb’s sense of having the music “accompany me every second of my day”. In political interviews, her inner monologue would chant, “You don’t have the votes”, or, while interviewing an MP: “Why do you assume you’re the smartest in the room?”