That’s a line from a song by rapper Tone Loc. I’m told it was a hit in the 1990s, but I’d never heard it until the night before. I was at a karaoke bar. My friend Jay Beezley sang it.

When the song reappeared in my head the next day, I could hear Jay singing the chorus again and again and again.

I was stuck with the song for nearly a day and a half before it finally went away, but it left behind a nagging question: Why do we get songs stuck in our heads in the first place? I figured someone must be trying to find an answer.

Victoria Williamson is a psychologist at Goldsmiths College in London. A few years ago, she became fascinated by tunes that stick in our heads.

“I personally couldn’t believe how little there was in terms of research on this phenomenon,” she says. “It seemed to happen to me very frequently.”

She found that scientists used a range of terms to describe the experience. Stuck-song syndrome. Sticky music. Cognitive itch. The most common term was this: earworm.

A few years ago, Williamson collaborated with a BBC radio program in the UK and asked listeners to e-mail and text their experiences with earworms.

Here are some responses she received:

“My bloody earworm is that bloody George Harrison song you played yesterday. Woke up at 4.30 this morning with it going around me head.”

“I’ve got ‘ch-ch-ch-changes’ by David Bowie as a repetitive ear worm, because it was the last song I heard before the battery on my iPod ran out.”

“My earworm is still ‘Alive’ by Pearl Jam and has been for days.”

Williamson collected more stories through an international online survey. Then she looked for patterns to understand what causes these tunes to automatically pop into our heads and stay there.

She found several triggers.

“The first one is music exposure, which means the person has heard the music recently,” she says.

No surprise there. That explains why I was stuck with Funky Cold Medina.

Another unsurprising finding was that if you hear a song repeatedly, you’re more likely to get stuck with it.

But sometimes songs pop into our heads even when we haven’t heard them for a long time. In this case, something in our current environment may trigger the memory of a song.

Williamson experienced this herself recently, when she was in her office and noticed an old shoebox.

“It’s from a shop called Faith,” she says. “And just by reading the word faith, my mind went down a line of dominoes and eventually reached the song Faith by George Michael. And then he was in my head for the rest of the afternoon.”

Williamson says she found another trigger: stress.

One woman in Williamson’s survey said a song first got stuck in her head when she was sixteen and taking a big exam. The song was Nathan Jones by Bananarama.

“She now gets that song in every single moment of stress in her life,” says Williamson. “Wedding, childbirth, everything.”

But why is it that music gets stuck in our heads? Why not lines from movies or TV shows or books?

I asked Daniel Levitin, of McGill University in Montreal. He’s an expert on the neuroscience of music, and he’s been thinking about the phenomenon.

Levitin thinks there may be an evolutionary explanation for why music sticks in our brains.

He notes that modern humans have been around for some 200 thousand years, but he says written language may have been invented only five thousand years ago.

“So for a very long period of time, we needed to remember information, information like where the well is, or what foods are poisonous and which aren’t, and how to care for wounds so they won’t become infected.”

Levitin thinks for most of human history, people memorized this kind of information through songs. That practice continues today in cultures with strong oral traditions. He says the combination of rhythm, rhyme, and melody provides reinforcing cues that make songs easier to remember than words alone.

“So it may be the case that brains and music in effect selected each other through Darwinian natural selection and co-evolved in such a way that songs were intended to get stuck in our heads, and that’s why we still have them,” he says. “It’s a vestige of that.”

That’s just a hunch, of course. But he says the main question people ask him about the phenomenon of stuck songs is this: How do we turn it off?

Levitin doesn’t know, but he offers a piece of advice.

“You just think of another song and hope that that’ll push out the first one.”

But then, of course, you might just end up with a new song stuck in your head.

Earworms at The World Newsroom

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The Malian band Tinariwen performed, but this year’s festival was in need of companions and friends.

This was the 11th edition of the festival and almost did not happen.

The US State Department and other foreign ministries in Western Europe advised against traveling to the north of Mali where the festival takes place.

The agencies were worried about a spate of kidnappings of western tourists and aid workers by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb

Military aircraft patrolled the skied this weekend over the concert venue near the historic city of Timbuktu.

Only about 300 fans showed up for this year’s festival, almost half of last year’s attendance.

For die-hard fans and musicians however, the festival is not about numbers.

It is about being in a place known for end-of-world remoteness and stark beauty.

And out of that, creating for a few days, a sense of community with people from all over the world.

Indian-Canadian singer Kiran Ahluwalia is one them. She performed this weekend, for the first time at the Festival in the Desert.

On her most recent album “Aam Zameen,” Ahluwalia created that global sense of community.

She covered one of the big hits by legendary Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; one of them a song called “Mustt Mustt,” which she performed with Tinariwen at the festival.

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Vidal, 23, is part-French, part-Japanese-American and makes music as diverse as her background.

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Follow @gallafent

Also see Marco Werman and April Peavey’s Music Picks of 2011

It is almost the end of the year and so a perfect time to ask our guest DJs around the globe for their favorite music picks of 2011.

DJ Mannasseh Phiri of JOY-FM in Lusaka, Zambia, Tom Schnabel of KCRW in Santa Monica, CA and Marius Asp of NRK in Oslo, Norway share their top picks.

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It sits just off the coast of Venezuela. It’s original inhabitants are thought to have called it the “Land of the Humming Bird.”

That was before Columbus renamed it.

Later, when French settlers and slaves came to this island, they introduced carnival and it was during these celebrations that calypso music was born.

The man nicknamed the “King of Calypso” comes from there.

Anchor Marco Werman says one of the best archival releases of the year is “Sparrowmania!” The album is a compilation from the Mighty Sparrow, the best-known of Trinidad’s legendary calypso singers and composers.

And Trinidad is also the island we were looking for in the Geo Quiz.

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Tinariwen’s North American Tour Dates

Elisapie (Photo: Valerie Jodoin Keaton)

ISAAC: “Which nobody wanted in the village. Everybody took, you know, cashier at the co-op, stuff like that, working at the school, and the only thing that nobody applied to is the TV and radio station and I was like, are you guys crazy?”

She began working as a radio and TV host. Elisapie says it was a turning point for her.

ISAAC: “I realized that I may be shy, but in front of the camera, I think I sort of transformed into another person, maybe the artist that I wanted to become. So slowly going towards music.”

Elisapie Isaac: “Moi, Elsie”

Elisapie Isaac: “Inuk”

Elisapie Isaac’s documentary film on the Inuit: “If the Weather Permits”:

Today, Elisapie lives in Montreal, where she’s recorded two albums. For her latest CD called “There will be Stars,” Elisapie asked Quebecois folk singer, filmmaker and activist Richard Desjardins to write a song for her. The song, “Moi, Elsie”, tells the story of a white man who works in a northern village and then leaves. And it’s told from the perspective of young Inuit women.

ISAAC: So I thought it would be nice to sing a song from these girls to this man who’s taking the plane at the end of the month, and to tell all their dreams and their hopes and despair maybe also.

Elisapie also writes her own songs, in English and her native language, Inuktitut. She says back in the 1980s, many Inuit feared the loss of their native language.
Not in her village though.

ISAAC: Where I’m from, it’s still very very strong. Because we’re so isolated probably, also. But we’re still very Inuit-speaking. Young people, they become trilingual at one point. We’re still very very strong with our language. So it really depends where you’re from, I think. I think we’re so proud of that, I think it’s our identity.”

Elisapie Isaac is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker. But she’s put that work on hold for now to focus on music.

Simon Lynge
Another singer-songwriter with Inuit roots is Simon Lynge. This is from his debut album titled “The Future”. Simon Lynge grew up in a little village on the southern tip of Greenland.

Simon Lynge: “Infinitely You”

LYNGE: “It was very simple, I helped out with the sheep a lot when I was a kid, there was lots of shepherds, so I helped out the neighboring shepherds starting when I was about five years old. There were no stores there, no electricity, no running water. Beautiful place. Four generations of my family were born there and grew up there.”

In his late teens, Lynge moved with his parents to the Danish capital, Copenhagen, where he began to pursue a music career. He says music runs deep in the family. His grandfather is a musician, his father plays the accordion. So Lynge picked up the guitar and began writing soulful, deeply melodic songs, like this, “The Promised Land”.

Simon Lynge – A short documentary in his village in Greenland

LYNGE: “We’ve had problems in my country with alcoholism…”

Lynge says he wrote this song, in English and Inuit, after meeting a guy who was from a town near his village in Greenland. Lynge says the man’s story is part of a bigger, difficult reality.

LYNGE: “So a lot of young people from Greenland go to Denmark to get an education but it’s a very different country, it’s a very different culture and often, we from Greenland, people get lost in Denmark, ’cause they don’t feel like they know how to live in that kind of society and often people turn to the bottle and this man had done that. But when I started talking to him, he was so intelligent, he was so lucid and told such great stories of where he came from.”

Simon Lynge now lives in Washington State. He mostly writes and sings in English but he says he continues to be inspired by his Greenlandic heritage.

For The World, I’m Betto Arcos.

It’s a funky blend of cumbia, Afrobeat, hip-hop and electronica.

The duo’s debut album is called Welcome to the Ritmo Machine.

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Her latest album is “It All Starts With One,” whose title was inspired by the Arab Spring protests from earlier this year.

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The World’s Alex Gallafent profiles Zahara in her new home, Johannesburg, as she reflects on a meteoric rise that has taken everyone by surprise, not least herself.

And she tells the story of how she recently performed a private concert for one of her heroes: Nelson Mandela.

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A crowd of well-dressed men and women lines up to get into GI Disco, a popular club night held at a posh bar in Berlin. But before they can dance, clubbers have to get past the guy at the door, former U.S. military policeman Smiley Baldwin.
Baldwin said when he’s manning the door, he often doesn’t let the younger people in. “It’s not because I don’t like them. The fact is they wouldn’t get it.”

What they wouldn’t “get” is the music history that GI Disco documents.

Baldwin served in Germany during the 1980s and 90s, when there were hundreds of thousands of American soldiers stationed there. He got together with two Berlin deejays to start this monthly club night.

GI Disco celebrates the music that American soldiers brought to Germany in the ’80s and ’90s, like hip hop, disco boogie and new jack swing.

“The dance music was being brought by the black guys,” Baldwin said. “These guys were partying and just rocking the house. When I got to Berlin, I was going out from Sunday to Sunday.”

American soldiers had the edgiest music in Germany because they brought all of their records with them from the U.S., said Daniel Best, one of the deejays at GI Disco. Best is an American who grew up near a base in Stuttgart. He said spent a lot of his teenage years at the GI clubs.

“It was German women, American soldiers, and us,” he said, laughing. “The music aficionados, you know, the music nerds were there.”

Best said the GI clubs brought local Germans into contact with a mix of music — and people. Many locals attracted to the GI club scene were looking for a dance floor where they felt accepted.

“The children of the people who came here to work –Turkish, Greek, Yugoslavian, Italian, Portuguese people — also went to these clubs,” Best said. “Children of mixed-race parents were looking culturally for a home and they would go there as well.”

Kalle Kuts also spent a lot of time hanging around these clubs in the ’80s. Now Kuts is a popular Berlin deejay. He spins records with Daniel Best at the GI Disco night. Kuts and Best came up with the idea for GI Disco while they were playing a club together. They both started pulling out some of their old-time hip-hop favorites, like “Paid in Full.”

“I can remember hearing it for the first time at a GI club in Berlin where the deejay was making a 10 or 15 minute version out of it, scratching it, cutting it, with the instrumental even rapping on top, and I knew this is really new music and this is a really new style of deejaying.”

Baldwin takes a break from the door to check out the scene. Baldwin said seeing all of these people together, Germans, Americans, the children of Germans and Americans, is the positive outcome of a troubled time. Before the wall came down in 1989, Berlin was a divided city, but a lot of people did come together on the dance floor.

“That’s a part of history that probably won’t end up in a book,” Baldwin said. “Nobody’s going to write about that.”
Maybe not yet, but they’ll definitely dance to it.

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So in that northerly spirit, we want you to name the northern-most country in Central America. It has a mix of Afro-Caribbean and Central American cultures. You can hear Creole and Spanish here, though English is the official language.

Which country is that?

The answer is Belize where after 30 years of independence the national anthem has finally been translated into the lingua franca of the people: English Creole. Reporter Amy Bracken caught up with the translator, Leela Vernon, in the diva’s hometown of Punta Gorda:

If you go down a path behind a tool and parts shop in Punta Gorda, you’ll likely find Leela Vernon sitting in her garden. Leela Vernon is a household name in Belize.

She’s known as the Queen of Brukdown – a popular rural Belizean dance music. She’s won awards from the government of Belize and the Queen of England, promoting her culture at home and abroad. She’s also known for her protest songs.

Leela Vernon (Photo: Amy Bracken)

Vernon is 60 now and likes to talk about her hobbies: organic gardening and canning, but she hasn’t given up writing songs. In fact, she’s been tinkering with the national anthem.

Belize’s national anthem is called Land of the Free. Its lyrics were written by a Belizean soldier, Samuel Alfred Haynes, in 1963. Haynes fought for the British in World War I, but soon after led a riot protesting racism at home. When Belize gained its independence in 1981, his song became the new country’s anthem.

But the song is in a formal English, so a few years back, Vernon decided to translate Haynes’ words into Creole. “I’m doing this for my ethnic people here in Belize, mainly,” she says. “So they can understand what is going on, what went on, why we celebrating.”

Belizean Creole is a mix of English and African languages. And the Creole here transcends ethnicity. It’s spoken by the Garifuna, three Mayan tribes, Mestizos, Mennonites, East Indians, Chinese, as well as ethnic Creoles.

“When you come to Belize, the first thing you need to understand that the Creole language binds all the ethnic people together here,” says Vernon. “And they have to talk Creole to communicate, so that makes the whole think unique, very unique.”

Vernon says after independence, school children sang ‘Land of the Free’ just as they had sung ‘God Save the Queen’ under British rule – with little thought or understanding. “I personally used to sing the anthem, but I didn’t pay much attention to the words, you know, until after translating it to Creole. I said, ‘This is a very serious protest song.’”

The final verse of the song says, ‘freedom will come tomorrow afternoon.’ “Meaning we are not free yet. That got to my brain, and I say, oooh, when will we be free then?… until tomorrow afternoon, that mean we are still under the whip!”

I ask her if the Belizean people are free now. She says Yes, but they also live in poverty, and she blames the legacy of British colonial rule for that. “I think the rippling effect of slavery is still taking a serious toll on the black community in Belize,” she says.

She’s referring to a recent rise in violence in Belize City. She says her country needs economic opportunities, but she also believes in the power of embracing ones culture.

Her Creole national anthem is slated to air on Belizean radio today for the first time.

Belize Anthem in Creole

O, Lan a di free bai di Kyaribeeyan See
Wi korij wi plej fi kip yu free
Unu tairant kyaahn stay ya; unu despots hafu goh
Fahn disya plays a demokrasi.
Wi ansesta blod don bles disya grong
Dats wai wi wahn free; nohmoh slayv wi wahn bee.

Koaros:
Git op – aal weh kohn fahn di Baymen klan
Put aan unu aama; difen disya lan
Jraiv bak di enimi; unu enimi hafu goh fahn ya!
Fahn wi lan a di free bai di Kyaribeeyan See.

Naycha don bles – mek yu rich rich rich
Oava mongtin ahn vali weh graas ron gud
Wi ansestaz, di Baymen, schrang ahn brayv
Jraiv bak di enimi; kip dehn weh fahn ya.
Fahn prowd Rio Hondo tu oal Saastoon
Chroo koaral reef, oava bloo lagoon
Kip wach wid di dehn aynjel, di staarz ahn moon
Kaa freedom wahn kohn sotay tumaaro noon.

(Ripeet Koaros)

Belize Anthem in English

O, Land of the free by the Carib Sea,
Our manhood we pledge to thy liberty
No tyrants here linger, despot must flee
This tranquil haven of democracy
The blood of our sires which hollows the sod,
Brought freedom from slavery oppression’s rod
By the might of truth and the grace of God.
No longer shall we be hewers of wood.

Chorus:
Arise! Ye sons of the Baymen’s clan,
Put on your armours, clear the land!
Drive back the tyrants let despots flee-
Land of the free by the Carib Sea!

Nature has blessed thee with wealth untold,
O’er mountains and valleys where prairies roll;
Our fathers, the Baymen, valiant and bold
Drove back the invaders; this heritage hold
From proud Rio Hondo to old Sarstoon,
Through coral isle,over blue lagoon;
Keep watch with the angels, the stars and moon;
For freedom comes to-morrow’s noon.

Chorus

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That happened to Yang’s father, who ended up working in a coal mine.

He thought his daughter might escape that fate if he taught her to play an instrument-well enough to enter an elite music academy.

And so she learned to play the traditional two-string erhu. She studied under her father’s tutelage for several hours a day. Because the family’s apartment was so small, and the walls so thin, she would practice the erhu in the park.

The hard work paid off. Yang won a national competition playing a famous piece of music called River of Tears.

Her success led to a place at a music conservatory in Beijing. From there she became a soloist with the Chinese National Song and Dance Ensemble. She performed for countless foreign dignitaries on their visits to China, including American presidents.

“I played for Ford, Carter and for Nixon,” Yang says. “I remember three. I probably performed for more.”

More important to Yang though, were her tours of China, where she learned about the country’s regional differences, the music and the dialects. The many dialects of Chinese “really had an effect on the music.”

But while Yang was being exposed to new sounds, she still had to perform the same old stuff.

As an erhu soloist with a renowned national ensemble, “you probably only play two, three, four repertoires your whole life.” Yang says it tired her out. “And I really wanted to do something new.”

It was the late 1980s. China was opening up. Yang started going to rock concerts put on by the US Embassy. Clubs were opening, bands were forming. She taught herself the bass guitar. She said it was like learning a new language.

Yang founded Cobra, China’s first-ever all female rock band. She knew that she was breaking several taboos at once, and that many people would disapprove.

Yang says her father was “not very happy.” And other classical musicians, “thought I was crazy.”

Yang tried to infuse some of Cobra’s songs with traditional elements. She even re-imagined a traditional folk song as a rock anthem.

That spirit of anything-goes fusion ultimately moved Yang in another direction. She emigrated to the United States, and began studying jazz. She recognized common elements between jazz and Chinese folk music. Both rely on improvisation, and make the instrument sound “as if it’s singing, like the human voice.”

She started playing the erhu with an American jazz group.

Today, that has brought her back to China, where she and her group are performing at the Beijing Nine Gates Jazz Festival.

Yang Ying photos

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