Things I Hate About The 21st Century, No. 7

3 February, 2004 at 11:08 pm (music)

Things I Hate About The Twenty-First Century, #7:

  • Ringtones that get stuck in my head.

Getting a song stuck in my head is annoying, but it is a phenomenon that I have come to accept. Songs are written to be catchy and memorable and they are overplayed in order to force you into commercial submission. This is the backbone of the record industry, and while I don’t respect the practice, I at least acknowledge that it’s been going on for long since before I was born.

Ringtones, however, are things with which I am contemporary. Therefore their increase and evil nature are something that I possibly could have prevented, and this makes them that much more abhorrent. Particularly when a six-second electronic, sub-MIDI snippet of sound gets stuck in my head. It’s not even music! I don’t get my alarm clock buzzer stuck in my head, and that’s an equally annoying and equally repetitious electronic tone. And yet, I don’t find myself walking to my car absently chanting, “BWAAAAP! BWAAAAP! BWAAAAP! BWAAAAP!”

I did, however, find myself murmuring, “Dee di doo de, dee di dooo de, dee di doooo doo deeee…” to myself over and over again while I was working today. My employer’s cel phone rang three times and that was sufficiently repetitive to have the [snark] melody [/snark] stuck in my head.

Ah, crap, just typing it out is going to be enough to have it gain clawlike purchase upon my psyche again, I just know it.

EDIT: Ahhh! It’s based on “actual” music.  It’s corporate identification synergy, but still an excerpt from a composed segment of a larger piece of music.  I feel somehow vindicated.

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