I gotta say, as dumb as this sounds, there is almost nothing more satisfying than having an unidentified song stuck in your head and then after hours/days/years figuring out what it is.
Vivid memory from when I was in middle school (before internet search was common) having a song tune stuck in my head for years that I couldn’t identify. Finally years later I heard it on the radio randomly and it was like scratching the best itch of all time.
For those wondering it was Primitive Radio Gods - Standing Outside a Broken Telephone Booth With Money in My Hand. I don’t even love the song that much but to figure out what it was… whew, few feelings like it.
What's actually crazy is how relatively non-"lost" it really was. Once you know what it's called you can go find it on Amazon, and there's reviews from 2000 still just sitting there; it's probably been on sale this whole time. Someone put it up on YouTube in 2010.
It's funny how something can be so available and yet inaccessible at the same time. Reminds me a little of Borges' Library of Babel: what you want is there, but what does it matter if you can't find it?
There's a jingle completely missing from the Internet or any record I can find. It's the "Sport Chalet" jingle common on Southern California radios in the late 80's and early 90's. It goes "Sport Chalet!" in this heroic way, then "we take you to the limit!". It's very distinctive, and I've found people singing it on YouTube, but no recording of the original. It probably exists on someone's random cassette tape of radio from those days, and nowhere else. Remarkable!
Not music, but in the late 90s or maybe early 2000s there was an anti-smoking PSA involving an old man encouraging a baby to take its first steps. After much encouragement, the baby starts walking, walks over to the old man, and passes right through him as he fades into partial transparency.
The message then rolls that you shouldn't smoke because your early death will deprive you of important moments like this one.
This PSA made far more of an impression than most do -- for example, it's mentioned on Friends -- and I think about it often as an example of how the same basic argument can be made in weak or strong terms. It may have been too strong for its own good; I once asked a friend for help finding a video of it and the response was "Oh, I know exactly the commercial you're talking about. I won't help you look for it; I hate that commercial and I don't want to see it again."
Wow! The last time I looked was more than 2 years ago, so this video was uploaded since then. Thanks for posting. I don't recall the vocal being a choral group, but rather a very masculine solo voice, but it's definitely the same jingle.
That song, which is such a great/weird one-hit wonder, has flummoxed so many people! I worked at a record store in high school in the early 2000s and people would come in all the time humming or attempting to sing various songs. I got freakishly good at identifying even the hardest/weirdest tracks. I used to keep a playlist on my iPod of the weirdest tracks, which sadly has been lost to time.
Over the last 20 years, that skill has ebbed some, but I still get friends sending me their attempts to express the earworm stuck in their ear. I have an 80% success rate and enough OCD to usually track it down unless someone just gets stuff straight wrong.
I had a similar experience. Song stuck in my head for years. Finally found it. I honestly felt a little sad when I finally found out what it was. I think I'd somehow grown attached to the mystery of it.
> ... there is almost nothing more satisfying than having an unidentified song stuck in your head and then after hours/days/years figuring out what it is
I had a song in my head and I'd whistle it at parties / dinners etc. for years before someone was able to tell me what it was.
The person couldn't tell me the name but told me something like: "It's a very old folkloric song but I don't know it's name". And with that description and, well, the nascent Youtube I've been able to find its name (not even sure that was even Google back then).
But what's funny: everybody knew it when I'd whistle it. Everybody had heard it, but nobody could tell me what it was.
Turns out it was "Greensleeves" which is really famous. Wikipedia link which has a link to the tune:
Hah, I had Greensleeves in my head since I was a kid with a digital watch that could play that song and some others. I had the feeling that I had heard it before that somehow. Many years later I suddenly hear that one somewhere and since then it's properly stuck in my head. Now I use it to get other songs un-stuck. Works wonders :-)
I think what's more weird is that none of their other music sounds anything like that song. It's rather unique. And the lyrics seems to make no sense anyways. Everything about that song is an enigma to me.
When I was younger (basically when the transition to Web 2.0 happened), I had the melody of „The kids aren’t alright“ from The Offspring stuck in my head for months. I was so relieved when I found it.
I can totally see why that song in particular scratched that itch. It definitely has a nostalgic vibe to it (independently of my having grown up with it, I feel).
Vivid memory from when I was in middle school (before internet search was common) having a song tune stuck in my head for years that I couldn’t identify. Finally years later I heard it on the radio randomly and it was like scratching the best itch of all time.
For those wondering it was Primitive Radio Gods - Standing Outside a Broken Telephone Booth With Money in My Hand. I don’t even love the song that much but to figure out what it was… whew, few feelings like it.