Repetition 2

There are some songs that are just plain catchy. I'm sure a lot of thought goes into making these songs so there's some science to it, but I don't know what that science looks like. From my perspective, some music just randomly gets stuck in people's heads. They're just ... easy to listen to over and over again. I don't just mean the ones that get stuck in my head, but they seem to catch the collective consciousness and make a home there.

A good example of this was that "Let It Go" song from the movie Frozen. It was well done, and I can fully understand why it was as popular as it was. Even so, look at the number of views on that video. There are over 500 million views, so it was more than just a catchy song. Lots and lots of people were watching that, and I guarantee you that some of them were watching it repeatedly.

In fact, I know for a fact that some people were watching that video on a loop, because I have friends and coworkers who told me their kids did that. Their kids just flat out loved that song, so they heard it a bajillion times a day. In fact, they would sometimes bemoan their fates. I mean, even if you like something the first time, it's going to get old by the fiftieth time, right?

One of my other favorite stories along these lines was that the Mild Wife has a friend whose family speaks Arabic. They were visiting family a few years ago, during the height of the "Despacito" craze. 

Now, this is another one where the numbers speak for themselves; there are over seven billion views on that video. Billion. With a "b," not with an "m." That's not that far off from the entire population of the entire planet, so it's no exaggeration to say that it was massively popular. That song was everywhere for a while.

So, as this friend was visiting her family, her young kids were hearing it there, too. And since they were kids and they didn't really know what language the singers were singing in, they assumed it was spoken in the local dialect. That's right, her kids sort of assumed that "Despacito," which is a song in Spanish, must be Arabic because they heard it alongside a lot of Arabic. I can't exactly fault the little kids for this assumption, but it's hilarious.

All of that, however, is background for the punchline in this particular story. My sister has young children, and she occasionally plays the radio for them. As a result, the little kids recently discovered a song that you may very well remember yourself: "Who Let the Dogs Out" by the Baha Men. Again, this is a piece of music that caught fire and was everywhere for a little bit. It has since faded out of cultural memory as a nostalgic moment, but to two little kids, it is every bit as fresh and exciting when they first hear it.

As you can imagine, my sister has been hearing a lot of munchkin interpretations of that song recently. I wish her luck.