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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Bands like Yemen Blues and Debo Band will perform.

Adding its sounds to the mix will be M.A.K.U Sound System, a young band out of the thriving Colombian music scene across New York’s East River in Queens.

Bruce Wallace talked to band members Juan Ospina, Liliana Conde and Camilo Rodriguez.

Naga Pedale by M.A.K.U Sound System

Colombian Roots Rock in Queens

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It also once went by the name Byzantium.

In the 6th century it was a hub of culture, commerce and diplomacy and bridged two continents.

The city got its modern name in 1453 AD.

So, can you come up with the city’s once and current name?

They both appear in a popular children song.

Constantinople and Istanbul are the answers to the Geo Quiz.

And about 2,000 years of musical history is collected in a new 2-CD set called “A Story of The City: Constantinople Istanbul.”

Mehmet Ali Sanlikol put together this collection.

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Great Books For The Holidays

This year’s recommendations come from writers and journalists including Granta editor John Freeman and writer Yiyun Li.
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What are you reading this holiday season? Share your recommendations with us here.

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What are your favorite music picks of 2011? Share them with us here.

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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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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That started to change slowly, at first, after the death in 1976 of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong.

Today, China has a thriving rock scene.

Canadian musician and author Jonathan Campbell moved to China a decade ago.

He immersed himself in the music scene there and soon became interested in the history of rock and roll in China.

Campbell speaks with anchor Lisa Mullins about his new book called “Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll.”

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An iPod can also help you share the music you download with others. You can travel the world and bring your music library.

The World’s Alex Gallafent is on a reporting trip in Swaziland and yes, he has his iPod.

Just the other day he played some of his favorite music to a Swazi youth organizer he was traveling with. Gallafent tells anchor Marco Werman some of the tunes he played on his iPod.

Check out a Spotify playlist featuring some of the songs in Alex’s iPod

• Evangelizing in Swaziland

More of our coverage following the death of Steve Jobs:

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Alex Gallafent is reporting from Swaziland with assistance from the International Reporting Project (IRP).

Do you have an ‘old scratchy vinyl’ record suggestion? Share it with Captain Planet in the comments below.

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Freak Le Boom Boom

Like its politics, the country’s music scene is also split. Take a recent announcement by the Brussels Metro system. Officials announced that the piped-in playlist would no longer include French language music, because they had received complaints from Dutch-speaking riders, who complained that there were too many songs in French, and too few in Dutch.

That means huge, nationwide hits like “Alors on danse,” by Brussels-based hip-hop artist Stromae (an anagram for “maestro”). In fact, you cannot go many places in Belgium, or Europe for that matter, where that track does not get extensive airplay.

Instead, the Brussels Metro decided that from now on, only hit songs in Spanish, Italian and English will be played.
“Lady Gaga is all over the Metro, and that is suddenly not a problem,” joked Brussels author and blogger Marcel Sel. “To me, that’s the big problem. I mean, I don’t even like Lady Gaga.”

Sel noted that now, neither of Belgium’s two main musical languages will be celebrated in the capital’s Metro system. But he said, it is also more than just language that divides.

“Old fashioned pop that is produced in Flanders doesn’t really match the French taste, which is more or less la chanson francaise,” Sel said.

Jacques Brel, for one, did manage to be a musical hero for both Dutch and French speakers. And more recently, Sel said, a band called Clouseau has been popular nationwide.

Despite the name, Clouseau sings in Dutch, with a bit of French thrown in now and then. One popular track is called “Leve België,” or Long Live Belgium.

Bob Driege, who runs the Vynilla record shop in Dutch-speaking Ghent, said bands that sing in Dutch, like Clouseau, generally do not do so well in French-speaking Wallonia.

“It’s strange; it’s like another country. It’s language, and it’s historical, I think. It’s also the bookers, the people who book the bands into clubs. The Flemish bookers work in Flanders and the Wallonian bookers work in their territory.”

Driege said he has tried to sell French-language bands in his shop over the years, with only limited success.

Etienne Bours, who is based just outside of French-speaking Liege, has tried to feature Flemish artists on his radio music program.

“There’s a very good young singer called Milow that I played on my show recently,” Bours said. “He’s important right now in Belgium because he sings what many people don’t even dare to say.”

In one of Milow’s tracks, called “The Kingdom,” he sings: “Where I’m from we are divided between the north and the south.” In another part of the song, Milow says: “Where I’m from there’s a lack of heroes, both in politics and in song.”

Not surprisingly, he has taken some heat from some of his more separatist Flemish fans for tracks like “The Kingdom.”

Ironically, said author Marcel Sel, Milow’s song at least has a shot at getting played on the Metro in Brussels, because it’s in English.

“The politicians are quarreling about myths and symbols,” he said.

“If instead they were promoting both languages in the Metro, and saying, ‘This week will be promoting this Dutch song, or this French song,’ then I think that would be interesting. That’s the kind of investment we should do, especially in Brussels.”

Sel said he suggests starting such a project with Arno, who is known as the Belgian Tom Waits.

After all, Arno is from Flanders, sings songs in French, and lives in Brussels, which makes him, well, really Belgian.